Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Commercial Space, International Space Collaboration, Space Development, Technology on Nov 24th, 2009
One of the more interesting modules that was originally going to be part of ISS was the Japanese-built Centrifuge Accomodations Module (CAM). The CAM was designed to provide the facilities for testing the impact of reduced and hypergravity–over a range of 1 milligee up to 2 gees of acceleration–on various biological specimens. Tests on these [...]
Posted in NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Development, Space Policy, Space Transportation on Jun 4th, 2009
[Ed: I'm pretty sure I've used this argument before, but didn't see it on the blog, so I figured I'd put it down in writing even if it ends up being repetitive.] One of the most common criticisms I hear of propellant depots is that we can’t “put unproven technology on the critical path to [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, COTS, ESAS, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, NASA, Space Development, Space Policy, Space Transportation on May 26th, 2009
I’ve been busy a lot lately (between this, this, this, and having friends in from out of town for the holiday), so I hadn’t had a chance until now to reply to Mark Whittington’s correspondence with me (found here). A majority of his reply was arguing against stuff that I had never said, or making [...]
Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, Commercial Space, COTS, NASA, Space Development, Space Policy, SpaceX on Feb 25th, 2009
I think most in the commercial space industry would agree that COTS is one of the best things the government has done to help promote commercial space in a long time. While I think that overall this program has been run pretty well by government standards, some recent discussions on a few threads at NASASpaceflight.com [...]
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 lot farther [...]
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 Commercial Space, COTS, 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 few months [...]
Posted in Business, Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, RLV Markets, Space Development, Space Transportation on Oct 9th, 2008
Now that I’ve wrapped up my Orbital Access Methodologies series, I wanted to share some thoughts about the business and market development side of reusable space transportation. Some of this may be old-hat for many of you, but I figured there are probably some who will find this useful and interesting. I was originally going [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, Space Development on Sep 29th, 2008
I try not to read news or surf the net on Sundays (that whole keeping the Sabbath Day holy thing, you know), so I missed being able to watch SpaceX’s fourth launch live. But, as everyone reading this already knows, they nailed it this time. I had the chance last December to meet a lot [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, Space Development, Space Policy on Sep 24th, 2008
A few days ago, I mentioned that some of my friends at ULA had passed me copies of some papers they were going to present at the Space 2008 conference a few weeks ago. The paper I want to discuss in this blog article, which can be found in Word Document form here, revolves around [...]