Selenian Boondocks

I gave a talk at the Calgary session of TEDx on April 1, 2011 and lunar exploration formed an aspect of my talk, I hope you enjoy it.

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occasional blogger john hare I have listened to some doomsday energy crap (gas $5.00 gallon and more forever, Japanese nuclear devastation, etc) in the last few weeks that started me thinking of alternatives again. It may be possible that one of the solar thermal generating concepts could find funding for terrestrial applications in the current mood. [...]

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I hope Jon doesn’t get too mad at me for “cross-posting” like this, but I published something at “Energy from Thorium” that may be of interest to this blog community as well: Google TechTalk Slides: “Save the Uranium-233″ Please direct comments over there.

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If some investigation is done that supports the use of a high rpm/small diameter module to promote health, then the question of cost and schedule becomes important. I think an early economical method might be to reuse an expendable upper stage that would otherwise burn up on reentry. Depending on what upper stages are available to a [...]

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One of the sticking point of long duration missions to other planets is the bone and muscle loss during extended periods in free fall. Using very small centrifuges to simulate gravity has the problem of causing motion sickness with 3 rpms being the accepted limit for selected humans. 10 rpms is considered  impossible for anyone to adjust to [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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