Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Commercial Space, Politics, Snark, SpaceX on Mar 2nd, 2010
I predict that regardless of the outcome of SpaceX’s inaugural Falcon 9 launch, nobody is going to change their opinion. If it’s successful, Ares-huggers will suddenly begin to understand the concept that a single successful flight doesn’t prove anything about a vehicle’s overall reliability (while most on the pro-commercial space guys will start sounding [...]
Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, COTS, Commercial Space, ESAS, Launch Vehicles, NASA, SpaceX on Dec 3rd, 2009
I didn’t have a chance to watch either of the House subcommittee hearings today, so I’m grateful that Clark linked to the testimonies of the various witnesses. I really enjoyed reading Brett’s testimony, and thought one of his points in particular is worth repeating.
To me one of the more interesting points is found at the [...]
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 [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, RLV Markets, Space Transportation, SpaceX, Technology on Apr 22nd, 2009
[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 [...]
Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, COTS, Commercial Space, NASA, Space Development, Space Policy, SpaceX on Feb 25th, 2009
I think most in the commercial space industry would agree that COTS is one of the best things the government has done to help promote commercial space in a long time. While I think that overall this program has been run pretty well by government standards, some recent discussions on a few threads at NASASpaceflight.com [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, SpaceX on Dec 6th, 2008
I just wanted to post a couple of short thoughts about the Falcon IX Upper Stage information that came out in the article I linked to in a blog post a few days ago. Specifically this picture from Figure 9 of the Asian Space Conference Paper (with my labels added) provides some interesting hints [...]
Posted in COTS, Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, SpaceX on Nov 29th, 2008
I just saw two interesting SpaceX documents linked to on NASASpaceflight.com. The first is a paper that was presented at the Fourth Asian Space Conference back in October, and the second is a presentation from the von Braun Symposium, also back in October They’re both fairly interesting, and provide some extra insight into [...]