Selenian Boondocks

guest blogger john hare
One good thing about the current congress/senate/president funding mess is that we won’t have to listen to as many cranks start their rocket development plan with, “First we convince the president.”

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guest blogger john hare
There have been many comments over the years on many sites about cost plus being used when nobody has any idea of the costs of a project or how to bid it. This morning on Clark’s site spacetransportnews.com he linked to an article claiming that getting bids was so uncertain that contractors would bid [...]

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guest blogger john hare
Many of us have complained from time to time about the lack of true progress from NASA even while agreeing that there are a lot of very smart motivated people in the agency. It would be useful if some way could be found to use the capabilities of those skilled  people without the [...]

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guest blogger john hare
There is a fairly constant murmur that commercial space will not go beyond LEO and more mumbling that there must be a specific destination with a specific timeline.
The second mumbling assumes that there is some top down command structure that will make one thing happen regardless of obstacles or opportunities along the way. Goals for [...]

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guest blogger john hare
What if games can be quite entertaining even if not practical. This particular one is what if Griffen had dictated an RS-68 for the Ares? It is existing and has considerably more thrust than the J2S, which would seem to imply a more capable second stage with considerably more payload to orbit.
Second [...]

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I told the story of how I had gotten involved with the JSC study of an artificial-gravity/nuclear-electric propulsion (AG-NEP) Mars vehicle study. I came into the study near the end (January 2003) and right before the Columbia disaster.
As near as I could tell, after Columbia happened, nobody kept working on the AG-NEP design, or [...]

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In several posts now, I have criticized the use of nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) engines. In the case of Earth departure stages, I have shown through mathematical analysis that they either do not have a performance improvement over chemical engines (for the overall system) or that the performance improvement is insufficient to merit the [...]

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A few months ago, I spent some time describing some calculations of payload fraction that I derived to assist in the design of rocket vehicles. My motivation for getting into this type of work came about from my work on the X-33 rocket when I was an intern at the Skunk Works. I [...]

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guest blogger john hare
The increasing tempo of VTVL development flights and the recent success of the Falcon 9 lead to possibilities for a different type of cooperative venture. Two companies have VTVLs testing  that are pretty much gas-n-go while SpaceX has vehicles that are quite difficult to get back. Using gas-n-go boosters to improve an [...]

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guest blogger john hare
SpaceX nailed the Falcon 9 on the first try. There is enough crow being eaten around the country now that somebody should put out a cookbook. My serving comes from the expressed belief that the opening of space will come through the incremental development with RLVs starting from suborbital through small orbital and [...]

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