The following two tabs change content below.
Jonathan Goff
Director of Advanced Concepts at Gravitics, Inc.
Jonathan Goff is a space technologist, inventor, and serial space entrepreneur who created the Selenian Boondocks blog. Jon was a co-founder of Masten Space Systems, and the founder and CEO of Altius Space Machines, a space robotics startup that he sold to Voyager Space in 2019. Jonathan is currently the Director of Advanced Concepts for the space station startup Gravitics. His family includes his wife, Tiffany, and five boys: Jarom (deceased), Jonathan, James, Peter, and Andrew.
Jon has a BS in Manufacturing Engineering (1999) and an MS in Mechanical Engineering (2007) from Brigham Young University, and served an LDS proselytizing mission in Olongapo, Philippines from 2000-2002.
Latest posts by Jonathan Goff (see all)
- RLV Markets VII: Four Models for Commercializing Reusable Launch - July 25, 2026
- Happenings Elsewhere In the Goffosphere - June 6, 2026
- Starliner Reponendum Est? (Part II): Why Boeing’s Troubled Capsule Still Needs to be Replaced - March 4, 2026
That’s just beautiful! Your baby is growing up. Haircuts for everyone!
“”””Your baby is growing up”””””
How appropriate, what with new fatherhood going on as well.
Congrats!
Haircuts for everyone… except Dave. Though we can hope…
Congrats!
My gosh that’s beautiful. (and loud too, I would imagine 😉
Daniel,
Unfortunately I was playing roadblock, so I was about a quarter mile away. Still was cool from there, but it looks like we have more dust abatement work to do.
~Jon
Congratulations!
Dust abatement? This is required by some local regulation, I take it?
BTW, A housekeeping heads-up: The URL for Unqualified Offerings is “highclearing-dot-com”, not org.
Happiness.
Chris,
Dust abatement just so we can see the thing on a long flight.
And thanks for the link correction, I’ll fix that.
~Jon
“Dust Abatement” = Big Friggin’ Fan?
Question on the landing struts:
I noticed that both Your (Masten’s) and Armadillo’s landing struts aren’t that widely placed, but kind of a narrow base. That was true with DC-X (I was a graphic designer working for the Pentagon portion of the DC-X team). Instinctively, I woud have the struts splayed out more, but, apparently that’s not considered necessary.
Rod,
It’s a tradeoff. Wider spacing tends to weigh more, and make the loadpaths on the landing gear less favorable. But wider spacing does making tipping less likely. I didn’t do the latest vehicle’s landing gear, but I did do the ones for 0.2, and they’re probably too long. We’re still at an early stage on the landing gear development, we may yet end up with something splayed a bit longer for the final system. We’ll see–this is an iterative development process.
~Jon
Thanks for the feedback, Jon.
I suspect that, a decade down the road, carbon nanotube technology will be mature enough (and affordable enough) to allow for truly robust landing gear with less weight penalty.
Different question, if I may:
I notice that you and Armadillo have no aeroshells on your vehicles. Is this merely a function of this testing phase, or is the intent to not have aeroshells at all for your suborbital vehicles?
Roderick,
The lack of aeroshells in our case is just for these early vehicles. Post 0.2, everything will have an aeroshell. Armadillo is also planning on aeroshells for later vehicles (and they had some on earlier ones as well).
~Jon