I don’t think this counts as my monthly blog post, mostly because I’m linking to and commenting on someone else’s blog post, but here goes. Michael Mealling (a fellow Masten Alumni gone entrepreneur) set out this year to do a blog post a day on his Rocketforge.org blog site. I really liked a post of [...]
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On the way home from the Space Access 2012 conference yesterday, we drove by Meteor Crater, Arizona. I’m not much of a photographer, but I take pictures anyway. Here’s a few of my favorites: While I was standing there looking at this pretty darned impressive hole in the ground, I started thinking about Larry Niven’s [...]
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Posted in Business, Commercial Space, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, NEOs, Space Development, Space Exploration, Space Law, Space Policy on Jun 10th, 2011
I finally got around to watching Jeff Greason’s ISDC talk last night (youtube link here), and it has got me thinking. In an effort to actually get some blog posts going again, I’m going to break this up into chunks to try and keep things short. Jeff made the point that you can look at [...]
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So, according to Rob Coppinger, USA has proposed to operate the Shuttle “commercially” as part of their CCDEV proposal. For a cool, $1.5B/yr over the next six years, they’ll provide two shuttle flights per year. Personally, I think this is mostly a terrible idea. While offering fixed-price services, and moving to FAA regs is nice, [...]
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I know all of you have been just dying to hear what I think about the Nautilus-X MMSEV vehicle that’s been discussed all over the blogosphere in recent days. Ok, probably not, but I figured I ought to get my opinions on record anyway. I’ll start with my positive impressions first. Most importantly, I like [...]
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For those of you who aren’t reading our ASM Blog, I participated in a panel at the SSI Conference last week in San Jose. Dallas Bienhoff presented the paper we are working on coauthoring, Gary Hudson talked about earth-to-orbit transportation, and Joe Carroll talked about several other interesting technologies including: mid-air capture (which I’ve talked [...]
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Posted in Space Development on Jul 31st, 2010
I saw a comment by Jim Davis over on NASASpaceflight.com that made me want to do a poll about real attitudes towards Mars colonization. Let me give some background thoughts, the questions, then some rules for comments. First off, Jim’s goal here was to ask people questions that really delve into how likely they actually [...]
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I saw on twitter that Alex MacDonald’s paper on comparing the private funding of astronomical observatories and space exploration is finally up. It’s a fascinating read. I met Alex at New Space conference last year, and he showed me some of his research. His hypothesis is that astronomical observatories were the “space exploration” of the [...]
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I was going to write another article about the administration’s new NASA plan, but while catching up on email and articles from while I was in Oregon, I see that “Rusty” Schweickart already said what I wanted to. And he put it better than I would’ve (emphasis mine): Our current situation is akin to being [...]
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The more I think about the Lunar One-Way-to-Stay concept, the more intriguing it is. Fundamentally, it’s one of the only ways with existing transportation systems to get the cost of early lunar experimentation anywhere near low-enough to be useful and interesting. Ultimately, for thriving two-way cislunar commerce, you need tugs, and depots, and high-flightrate RLVs. [...]
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