Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in NASA, Space Policy, Technology on Nov 28th, 2008
When I was a teenager, my dad had me read a small book called “The Richest Man in Babylon”. It was a good and simple read about personal financial management, set in a fictional background of ancient Babylon. I think the concepts in the book are just as timely today as when it was first [...]
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, Politics, Space Policy on Nov 6th, 2008
It’s been interesting watching the space corner of the blogosphere during the last several months. Many of my friends in the space advocacy community tend to support the Republican side of things, and it was sad to see how many of them started nearing the boarder of tinfoilhatdom during the course of the Presidential campaign. [...]
Posted in Space Policy, Uncategorized on Oct 25th, 2008
guest blogger john hare [Saturday afternoon post change. Argh. While replying to Marcus, I realized that this post could be considered Monday Morning Quarterbacking at its' worst considering the loss just experienced by Armadillos' team. I respect that team and consider the members I have met as friends. This post is bad timing that I put [...]
Posted in Politics, Space Policy on Sep 25th, 2008
Immigration is one of those topics that I don’t like to think about, because the current mess we have in this country tends to just get me depressed. Earlier today, I saw a flowchart from Reason’s October 2008 issue showing how complicated and screwed-up our immigration process is. The basic takeaway is that barring a [...]
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 [...]
Posted in Air Force, Commercial Space, NASA, Space Policy on May 31st, 2008
I just had a crazy thought this morning, that while probably unworkable–we’d probably all be better-off if 99% of government policy proposals were sent directly to the paper-shredder–might be a way to start extricating NASA from it’s current manned spaceflight morass. The following ideas were what led me to this thought: With the way our [...]
Posted in NASA, Space Development, Space Policy on Apr 19th, 2008
Over on Jeff’s SpacePolitics site, there is a discussion going on right now about a recent poll on the relevance of space. While much of the discussion was interesting as usual, I particularly liked the point made by a fellow 20-something by the name of James: Those who support the current lunar program often forget [...]
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 I [...]
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 [...]