Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, Commercial Space, ESAS, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, Lunar Exploration and Development, MSS, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Transportation, SpaceX on Jun 28th, 2009
Ok, two weeks ago, I mentioned that the “pre-depot” dual EELV launch concept my friend had passed to me could be adapted to do manned lunar missions. Lunar missions are a lot easier to close if you assume a depot in LEO (and even easier if there’s also a small depot at L2). But it [...]
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Posted in ESAS, NASA, Space Transportation on Jun 27th, 2009
A few years ago, I asked the question of “how many crew do you really need for a lunar program?“ The conclusion was that if you could reduce the crew requirements (at least initially), it might allow for a much more capable, affordable, and flexible architecture. And you’d eventually be back up to 4 or [...]
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I noticed during the DIRECT presentation at today’s HSF public meeting, that they were asked why they would need an HLV if they had depots. Now, I didn’t hear the exact question, since I had a phone call come in just a few minutes earlier (ironically enough from one of my friends in the depot [...]
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[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 [...]
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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 [...]
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[Editor's Note: It's been too long since I wrote the first article in this series, and I wanted to write some more on this topic. My tendency to try to cram everything into one ginormous ominbus post has been almost completely preventing me from publishing anything original about space lately, so I'm going to try [...]
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[Update 2/10/09 11pm: I'm actually pretty sure I made a mistake here, and my entire idea may be more or less worthless. Basically, the problem is that for any elliptical trajectory, you have a "line of apsides", which basically is a line connecting the apogee and perigee. In order to have a good lunar transfer, [...]
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A while ago, on aRocket, several people were discussing the concept of the launch loop. Read the articles here and here to get caught up to speed on the details. The idea is a non-rocket way of launching payloads to orbit. The launch loop has a “stator” tube with an internal “rotor” comprised of ferromagnetic [...]
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As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I wanted to paint the overall picture first, and then flesh out the details as time and interest permits. For this post, I want to discuss an interesting lander concept that could work well with the mission model I discussed in Part I. I may [...]
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I don’t know for sure what it is, but I just don’t have a lot of mental bandwidth anymore these days. I’ve realized that I don’t have as much time or energy to pour over all the details of an idea before posting. Especially when a lot of these ideas may be a lot farther [...]
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