Selenian Boondocks

guest blogger john hare With the information from Bob Steinke, I was able to prove to myself that the retro station concept wouldn’t work for Mars return even with two Lunar passes and one Earth pass. It may still be of interest to some NEO return missions that are really tight on the mass budget. [...]

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guest blogger john hare My methods of getting a quick check on feasibility of of a concept generally consist of finding something simple enough for me to figure quickly. Sometimes without even a calculator. Since it never occurred to me that you couldn’t turn 180 degrees with a gravity turn at high velocity until Doug [...]

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guest blogger john hare In my last couple of posts involving gravity turns, there seems to be some legitimate doubt whether useful maneuvers can be done with Lunar gravity turns. My numbers are quite different from those obtained by others and my methods are probably unacceptable for serious further debate. I believe there are some [...]

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guest blogger john hare When posting about capturing an asteroid using a Lunar gravity turn, I realized that there is a very useful orbit there that I had not heard of. A station in retrograde orbit at altitudes similar to the moon but just different enough not to impact has a number of very attractive [...]

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guest blogger john hare Some time ago I learned that I could go to work for any Newspace company I wished, and work on any project I wanted to fund. So any contribution I make to this field before getting rich*, is probably going to be based on my ability to think of things that [...]

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guest blogger john hare Many of my schemes bring to mind an old Far Side cartoon. Two filthy, scrawny convicts are hanging from their chains halfway up the dungeon wall. One of them says, “Now here’s my plan”. This post is another of the plans for the future that requires multiple steps before serious consideration. [...]

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guest blogger john hare During the discussions on the TAN concept, it turns out that the original invention requires some seriously difficult injection into the supersonic stream to avoid shock losses and other difficulties. Jon confirmed that there were problems, just not the ones I was thinking of. There does seem to be a simple [...]

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guest blogger john hare I briefly got into another discussion about moving asteroids recently. It involved parking an eleven ton spacecraft next to the asteroid and letting the gravitational attraction between the two shift the asteroids orbit. Then when the spacecraft gets too close, use the thrusters to open the gap again. When I said that [...]

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guest blogger john hare The potential problems I see with developing the original TAN concept could be quite wrong. If I am, I owe several people apologies upon proof. Whether I am or not though, the concept itself is obviously valuable. I am not dismissing the people that disagree with my take, just throwing more [...]

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My gmail account was compromised this afternoon. I changed the password, but am not sure if that did the trick. If people keep getting spam email from my gmail account, let me know.

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