Selenian Boondocks

When I was an undergrad, I spent two summers interning on the X-33 program at the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California. It was a fantastic experience and I got to meet with and work with some wonderful people on a very exciting program. Plus I got to live in the Mojave for two [...]

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guest blogger john hare Anytime a mission, manned or robotic, is proposed to destinations beyond Mars, travel times of years to decades are involved. Efforts to reduce trip times depend on some propulsion system well beyond the capabilities of chemical propulsion. The problem with most proposed systems is either the Isp is still not good [...]

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guest blogger john hare We have another year of hope ahead of us, let us do what we can to fulfill that hope and further our dreams for a prosperous new year. For a very long time many of us said that our new years resolution was to be less skilled at crisis management through [...]

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guest blogger john hare A variant on the compound tether is the electrodynamic tether with rotovator. In this one a long electrodynamic tether has solar panels and other counterweights high enough to get the center of mass to a 135 minute  orbit with the bottom end at LEO altitudes. With the bottom end at 2,500 m/s below [...]

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guest blogger john hare Ramjets come up just about every time someone takes a fresh look at space launch. It seems such an obvious approach that very few of us have skipped looking into them. The trade studies that have been done repeatedly show that there is no benefit to their use in acceleration missions, [...]

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guest blogger john hare This is not part of Kirk’s series on tethers.  Unlike his professional tether work that just needs  funding and hardware development, this is a concept that may have serious flaws that make it yet another hare brained scheme. If Kirk sees a flaw in this post, that  is probably good enough to take for [...]

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guest blogger john hare There is an increasing discussion of launch escape systems in the last few months. Most of them seem to focus on developing some sort of high acceleration tower to yank the capsule free in event of booster malfunction. The financial numbers involved get quite entertaining, with the added dangers of a [...]

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guest blogger john hare I received a disturbing email today. John Bossard at http://plasmawind.typepad.com critiqued my cagejet idea at my request. I have been down for various reasons for the past month or so and mentioned that the criticism had disturbed me until a few unrelated issues resolved. He apologised for torpedoing my idea. That’s disturbing, bad [...]

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Reading about the financial meltdown in Dubai prompted me to do some reading on the construction of the famous artificial islands in Dubai that have so greatly increased its shoreline: Wikipedia: Palm Jumeirah Wikipedia: Palm Islands The first of these, the Palm Jumeirah, consists of a trunk, a crown with 16 fronds, and a surrounding [...]

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guest blogger john hare One of the big attractions many advocates see in space development is energy. SPS is the green unlimited power of the future, Lunar helium 3 will power fusion here on the ground, and Lunar platinum is the basis for the fuel cell technology of the future. Technically, any or all of [...]

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