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 [...]
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Posted in Commercial Space, COTS, ESAS, International Space Collaboration, Launch Vehicles, Lunar Commerce, MSS, NASA, Propellant Depots, Space Development, Space Transportation, Technology on Nov 6th, 2008
Here’s one other interesting paper, which was presented at the SPACE 2008 conference a few months ago. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was given a copy of a few of the ULA papers before the conference, but decided to wait until after the conference to write about it. The past few months [...]
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Someone was digging around the ULA publications section, and stumbled on a very interesting paper I hadn’t heard about yet discussing a shuttle alternative for resupplying the space station. While I don’t agree with everything in it, it’s worth a good read. One of the main ideas presented in the paper is a “Payload Bay [...]
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Now that I’ve wrapped up my Orbital Access Methodologies series, I wanted to share some thoughts about the business and market development side of reusable space transportation. Some of this may be old-hat for many of you, but I figured there are probably some who will find this useful and interesting. I was originally going [...]
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Clark Lindsey has already commented on this paper, but I figured it was worth a little further discussion here, since I’ve already written a few articles about air-launched RLV ideas. Air launch is definitely an idea I am warming up to. The paper covers a lot of ground we’ve discussed here in previous posts. Of [...]
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Ok, I asked people to put up suggestions on my Skribit account, and I figured it was about time to actually start responding to some of the suggestions. One of the topics someone asked about was if the Saturn S-IVB could be turned into an SSTO launch vehicle. While looking at the mass ratio, it [...]
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Back when I first gave the guest-lecture at the University of North Dakota that kicked off this series, I had only introduced four actual technological approaches to making RLVs work. The balance of the time I spent talking about the economics of reusable orbital transportation (and the development process for getting from here to there). [...]
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I’ve got a couple of other posts I want to write about soon, and I’m about 75% finished with my final Orbital Access Methodologies post. But unfortunately, for the next week I’m not going to have much of any free-time at home or at work, so light blogging is going to continue for a while. [...]
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I don’t have time to go into detail at the moment, but I wanted to relay an interesting paper that Keith Cowing reported on NASAWatch today. Now, if I were someone at the ESA, I’d probably be taking NASA’s grand plans about Constellation with an appropriate sized grain of salt right about now. But there [...]
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While I have the topic fresh in my mind, I decided to jump into the next part of my continuing series. Though it wasn’t a conscious choice on my part, I notice that the order I went with for this series actually follows a consistent pattern. In each part of this series, we discuss methods [...]
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