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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Last year NASA put out a solicitation for companies to perform exploration architecture tradestudies incorporating Heavy Lift vehicles and potential advanced propulsion and in-space technologies. This was in support of NASA’s internal studies on the topic. I put a proposal in for that solicitation shortly after leaving Masten, but didn’t have enough credibility as a [...]
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They misnamed the bill though. Should’ve been called “Found a Pork Program (un)Worthy of its Host Nation”. I find it amusing that so many of the opponents of Obama’s proposed space plan are so happy with this, when it doesn’t actually resolve most of the things they said were wrong with his policy. To whit: [...]
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I had to keep this under wraps until this morning, but it’s now formal: May 25th, 2010, Mojave, CA, USA: XCOR Aerospace and Masten Space Systems, two of the leaders in the New Space sector, have announced a strategic business and technology relationship to pursue jointly the anticipated NASA sponsored unmanned lander projects. These automated [...]
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While using electromagnetic effects for atmospheric reentry and thermal protection is interesting, it’s only one of several promising options that have been proposed over the years. There is another application though, where exploiting magnet-hydrodynamic effects could be a much bigger “game changer” — aerobraking and aerocapture for reusable in-space vehicles. Traditional Aerobraking and Aerocapture One [...]
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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tether (tether mass/tip mass) was first done (to the best of my knowledge) by Hans Moravec in an appendix to his unpublished 1978 paper, “Non-Synchronous Orbital Skyhooks for the Moon and Mars with Conventional Materials.” The expression uses the Gaussian error function, erf(x), which is not typically available [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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I’ve been meaning to write for a while about a rather fascinating, but not very well known, area of research that I think might have significant implications for several areas of space transportation. The research I am referring to is focused on exploiting Magneto-hydrodynamic forces to manipulate weakly-ionized plasmas caused by hypersonic flight in rarefied [...]
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One of the reasons I haven’t blogged much about my reactions to the President’s NASA budget proposal is because I’ve been doing a lot of commenting over at NASASpaceflight.com. I just realized that my latest post could actually serve pretty well as a blog post too, so I’m copying it over here for discussion. One [...]
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