Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen
Posted in Launch Vehicles, Propellant Depots, Technology on Nov 16th, 2011
Since I’m not yet ready to talk about some of the neat ideas we have in the hopper at Altius, I figured it might be fun to do some blog posts on some of the cool-but-not-very-well-known space technologies that are being worked on these days, particularly ones being developed by other companies here in the [...]
Posted in Commercial Space, Launch Vehicles, Technology on Mar 21st, 2011
I’ve been too busy to do much blogging lately, but I just saw this on twitter a bit over an hour ago: XCOR and ULA Demonstrate Revolutionary Rocket Engine Nozzle Technology, and wanted to make some comments. First off, I wanted to congratulate my friends at XCOR and ULA. This engine work that ULA and [...]
Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, Lunar Exploration and Development, NASA, Space Development, Technology on Nov 5th, 2010
For those of you who aren’t reading our ASM Blog, I participated in a panel at the SSI Conference last week in San Jose. Dallas Bienhoff presented the paper we are working on coauthoring, Gary Hudson talked about earth-to-orbit transportation, and Joe Carroll talked about several other interesting technologies including: mid-air capture (which I’ve talked [...]
Posted in Technology on Apr 1st, 2010
I read an interesting article yesterday on Valterri Maja’s blog (Gravity Loss) about a new class of hydrogen-based materials being researched out at the University of Es sen and a few other locations. Apparently they found a method for lining up the electron spin of the hydrogen atoms in a way that allows the magnetic [...]
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 [...]
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tether (tether mass/tip mass) was first done (to the best of my knowledge) by Hans Moravec in an appendix to his unpublished 1978 paper, “Non-Synchronous Orbital Skyhooks for the Moon and Mars with Conventional Materials.”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 [...]
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, slowly [...]
Posted in Launch Vehicles, MHD Aerobraking and TPS, Technology on Feb 14th, 2010
In this installment, I want to dig a lot deeper into the mechanics of how one might maximize the utility of MHD effects for orbital reentry. But first, I wanted to spend a few seconds discussing what is important for an RLV TPS system. RLV Thermal Protection Systems Protection from the harsh heating environment caused [...]
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 rarefied [...]