Selenian Boondocks

guest blogger john hare
A few weeks ago I did a post on possible fantasies related to suborbital spaceflight. Some of the feedback applies to orbital flight. Some feedback I was really looking for though did not show up. One commenter in previous threads really hammered on the human spaceflight being a fantasy  detrimental to the [...]

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guest blogger john hare
I have not said much on the commercial take over of NASA orbital deliveries, so I thought I would lay out the timeline that I see happening.
Commercial space will start sending up astronauts to ISS in 2016 after $16B-$20B in development costs.
Commercial space will get a bit cocky by 2021 and mistakes [...]

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guest blogger john hare
Many of the potential spaceflight markets have been labeled fantasies along with any market that involves government money. This labeling is usually in a negative light as in, “Space tourism is a fantasy market”. The implication is that fantasies are always bad and we need to wake up and smell the coffee.
Some [...]

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guest blogger john hare
Most concepts for the opening of space seem to fall into a few scenarios, most of which invoke the major infusions of cash and risk from one source. Some seem to be so focused on one object, be it Mars, Moon, or SPS  that they are willing to risk everything (that somebody [...]

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While attending the Responsive Space Conference in Los Angeles, I had an opportunity along with many others to visit the SpaceX facility in Hawthorne on the evening of March 9th and I had a wonderful time.
We were given a brief tour of the facility by Brian Bjelde, who began by showing us a full-scale mockup [...]

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guest blogger john hare
I had an interesting conversation with Jon last month about the problems with air launching rocket ships. The various flavors of air launch involve some form of altitude and velocity loss as the rocket ship drops away from the mother ship before it can light it’s engines. In most cases, it also [...]

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“Program manager John Shannon said Tuesday it costs $200 million a month to keep the fleet flying.”
This is why President Bush and Sean O’Keefe knew that we would have to bring the shuttle program to an end in order to have any hope of going forward with NASA’s use of space. Michael Griffin knew [...]

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From NASA administrator Charlie Bolden:
“I find great comfort in knowing that President Obama has seen fit to put his faith in us to develop a game-changing strategy in our four mission areas, and that he has given us a $6 billion plus up on our FY10 budget as a show of support and trust. I [...]

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This is my last update to the payload fraction calculation, I promise.
When I was learning how to use mass-estimating relationships (MERs) at Georgia Tech, our focus was on reusable launch vehicles, and most of our MERs came from NASA Langley, where my professor had once worked. When it came to much of the reusability [...]

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Continuing with our story from last time…
The next day, your boss pokes his head in your office and asks:
“How’s those forty trans-Mars injection stages going?”
He notices that you’re checking out scuba-dive sites in the Caribbean for your upcoming vacation with your feet up on the desk, and comes into the room with the blood rising [...]

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