Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Humor, Propellant Depots, Space Tethers, Space Transportation on Aug 14th, 2012
And ironically, it’s XKCD What-if that is wrong. Well, not wrong by commission, but wrong by omission. First off, I’m a huge fan of both XKCD (well the 98% of their comic strips that are SFJ) and XKCD-What If. If I was 1/20th as funny as Randall Munroe, I’d probably be writing witty webcomics instead [...]
Posted in Space Tethers on Jun 19th, 2010
In previous posts I’ve mentioned that when I first got to NASA I worked in the Propulsion Research Center, which was a fun place to work because you got to think about and try just about anything you wanted to so long as you could get funding, and there was this sugar-daddy at NASA named [...]
Posted in Space Tethers, Space Transportation, Technology on Feb 18th, 2010
Computing the mass ratio for a tapered tether (tether mass/tip mass) was first done (to the best of my knowledge) by Hans Moravec in an appendix to his unpublished 1978 paper, “Non-Synchronous Orbital Skyhooks for the Moon and Mars with Conventional Materials.” (1) The expression uses the Gaussian error function, erf(x), which is not [...]
Posted in Space Tethers, Space Transportation, Technology on Feb 17th, 2010
The history of momentum-exchange tethers goes back many, many years but is bound by a common thread that, until recently, limited the realization of this technology. That common thread is the need for high specific tensile strength. The first idea of concept of a tether dates back to the imagination of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian [...]
Posted in Space Tethers, Space Transportation, Technology on Feb 16th, 2010
Rotating momentum-exchange tethers are a very exciting technology, but one of my first thoughts after being exposed to the technology was the tricky rendezvous. The space industry has spent all kinds of money and time on satellite rendezvous, and these are typically slow, long, drawn-out affairs with two satellites in almost precisely identical orbits, slowly [...]
Posted in Space Tethers, Space Transportation, Technology on Dec 10th, 2009
So I’ve started out telling you that momentum-exchange tethers are great. Why? you might ask. Well, because a spinning momentum-exchange tether is capable of transferring a fair fraction of the orbital energy and angular momentum in its orbit to a payload in just a few minutes. That’s a pretty impressive trick. It gets even better [...]
Posted in Space Tethers, Space Transportation, Technology on Dec 3rd, 2009
Anyone who’s interested in going to the Moon ought to take a serious look at the technology of momentum-exchange tethers. My own interest began back in 1998, when as a summer intern on the X-33 program at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, I spent time after work trying to come up with a new lunar exploration [...]