Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, and John Hare
Posted in Commercial Space, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Law, Space Polity on Dec 10th, 2008
I’ve written a lot about the technical and business implications of propellant depots, and I realized I ought to discuss some of my thoughts on the the public policy side of propellant depots.
On one hand, I think that propellant depots could probably be fielded eventually without any specific government assistance. On many levels I dislike [...]
Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, Commercial Space, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Transportation on Nov 29th, 2008
As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I wanted to paint the overall picture first, and then flesh out the details as time and interest permits. For this post, I want to discuss an interesting lander concept that could work well with the mission model I discussed in Part I. [...]
Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, Propellant Depots, Space Development, Space Transportation on Nov 25th, 2008
I don’t know for sure what it is, but I just don’t have a lot of mental bandwidth anymore these days. I’ve realized that I don’t have as much time or energy to pour over all the details of an idea before posting. Especially when a lot of these ideas may be a [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, International Space Collaboration, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Development, Space Policy, Space Transportation on Nov 20th, 2008
Space Journalist/Blogger Rob Coppinger wrote an article tonight attempting to debunk “The Fantasy of Propellant Depots“, which he makes out to be some sort of religious mantra in the New Space community. I will admit that depots are finally starting to get a tiny bit of the attention they deserve, but that has only been [...]
Posted in COTS, Commercial Space, ESAS, International Space Collaboration, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, MSS, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Development, Space Transportation, Technology on Nov 6th, 2008
Here’s one other interesting paper, which was presented at the SPACE 2008 conference a few months ago. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was given a copy of a few of the ULA papers before the conference, but decided to wait until after the conference to write about it. The past [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, Propellant Depots, Technology on Sep 11th, 2008
There were a few interesting papers being presented at the Space 2008 conference that some of my friends at ULA sent me. I’m going to wait until after the conference is over, so I don’t steal their thunder, but they are worth a quick review when I have the time. One of the regards the [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Development, Space Policy on Apr 4th, 2008
It’s been long enough since I put up the presentations from the panel, that I figured it would be worth starting a new post to mention some of my thoughts on what we discussed on the panel. Some of these ideas are thoughts that were briefly discussed during the panel, and others are ideas [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Policy on Mar 31st, 2008
I’ll update this after work with some commentary (and sometime in the next week or two, I’ll see if I can upload a video of the session as well). But for now here are the four presentations that were given.
I started out with an introduction to the concept of propellant depots, a short discussion [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Propellant Depots, Space Development on Mar 22nd, 2008
I’d like to solicit questions regarding the technical or business aspects of orbital propellant depots for the panel I’ll be chairing this coming Friday. I’ve got a great lineup of panelists (Rand Simberg of TransTerrestrial Musings, Dallas Bienhoff of Boeing, and Frank Zegler of ULA), so if you have any good questions about propellant [...]