Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in NASA, Snark, Space Policy, Space Transportation on Jul 15th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, MSS, NASA, Space Transportation on May 25th, 2010
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 lander [...]
Posted in Lunar Commerce, MHD Aerobraking and TPS, Space Transportation, Technology on Feb 21st, 2010
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 of the [...]
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tether (tether mass/tip mass) was first done (to the best of my knowledge) by Hans Moravec in an appendix to his unpublished 1978 paper, “Non-Synchronous Orbital Skyhooks for the Moon and Mars with Conventional Materials.”
The expression uses the Gaussian error function, erf(x), which is not typically available in [...]
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, [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, Lunar Exploration and Development, MHD Aerobraking and TPS, Space Transportation, Technology on Feb 10th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, NASA, Space Transportation, Thrust Augmented Nozzles on Feb 8th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, Commercial Space, International Space Collaboration, International Space Competition, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, Space Development, Space Transportation on Jan 21st, 2010
The more I think about the Lunar One-Way-to-Stay concept, the more intriguing it is. Fundamentally, it’s one of the only ways with existing transportation systems to get the cost of early lunar experimentation anywhere near low-enough to be useful and interesting. Ultimately, for thriving two-way cislunar commerce, you need tugs, and depots, and [...]
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. [...]