Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in NASA, Space Development, Space Policy on May 18th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in NASA, Politics, Snark, Space Policy on Apr 16th, 2010
I know I shouldn’t take anything Mark Whittington writes seriously, but I want to write about a stupid meme that smarter people than Mark have also been bandying about–that somehow Obama’s budget proposal would surrender our leadership in space to the Russians and Chinese. I’m going to dignify this silliness with an attempt at a [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, COTS, ESAS, International Space Collaboration, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, NEOs, Politics, Space Development, Space Policy on Dec 14th, 2009
Amid all the recent discussion of the Augustine Committee’s results, Mark Whittington asks a question that a lot of people in Congress seem to be asking: “Why not just pay for the current program since any new program is going to cost more money anyway?” To elaborate, the line of reasoning goes that if the [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, COTS, ESAS, International Space Collaboration, International Space Competition, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Policy, Space Transportation, Technology on Jul 30th, 2009
Or at least that’s how Stephen Flemming put it on Twitter regarding Jeff Greason’s presentation at the Augustine Committee meeting today in Florida. To be fair, the rest of the subgroup also did an amazing job, especially Chris Chyba’s wrapup near the the end, where he made the case forcefully that becoming a spacefaring civilization [...]
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 ESAS, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, Space Policy on Apr 11th, 2009
Several recent news items paint an interesting budgetary picture for the future of NASA’s preferred approach for spending tens of billions of dollars to send a few government employees to visit the Moon sometime supposedly starting in 2020. The three big pieces of new information (in addition to NASA not getting the large budget increases [...]
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 Commercial Space, NASA, Space Policy on Jan 13th, 2009
I’m busy on a writing project, but Ferris Valyn and I submitted two papers to the Obama transition team over the past week, and Ferris just posted the first one on his DailyKos site. The change.gov site seems to be fairly backed up at the moment, so I don’t know how soon it will show [...]
Posted in NASA, Politics, Space Policy on Jan 3rd, 2009
There was an interesting piece about foreign policy linked to by one of the blogs I read on a regular basis (can’t remember who now). The piece was talking about the delay between when changes to the global order happen, and when elites finally start recognizing that something has changed: Now… it seems to me [...]