Monthly Archives: November 2013

Venusian Rocket Floaties

Posted on November 20, 2013 by Jonathan Goff

While doing research previous in preparation for the Venus ISRU series, one of the questions that I knew needed a good answer was “how do you actually send vehicles to/from a floating cloud colony?” Unlike the any other near-term manned … Continue reading →

Posted in Launch Vehicles, Space Transportation, Venus | 31 Comments

Venus ISRU: What Do We Have to Work With?

Posted on November 20, 2013 by Jonathan Goff

In the last mini blog-post, we talked about some of the benefits of atmospheric-feedstock ISRU. But that leads to the question, what materials are there in the Venusian atmosphere, particularly in and around the 50km zone? While chemical engineering may … Continue reading →

Posted in ISRU, Space Development, Space Settlement, Venus | 54 Comments

Venus ISRU: Benefits of Atmospheric Feedstocks

Posted on November 19, 2013 by Jonathan Goff

The concept of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) has long been an important one for space settlement. The more one can “live-off-the-land”, the less one has to bring with them, the more affordable settlement becomes. If one can lower the cost … Continue reading →

Posted in ISRU, Space Development, Space Settlement, Venus | Leave a comment

Venus ISRU: Introduction

Posted on November 19, 2013 by Jonathan Goff

While the Moon still has my “heart” when it comes to offworld destinations, I’ve long been interested in the idea of Venus Cloud Colonies (some references here and here and this article from earlier today). As several others have pointed … Continue reading →

Posted in ISRU, Space Development, Space Settlement, Venus | 16 Comments

A Modest Proposal: the COTS Approach to SLS/Orion

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Jonathan Goff

I came up with an interesting new idea based on the recent press conferences about the successful completion of NASA’s COTS program, Bigelow’s report on the study they did on commercial lunar development, and the SLS/Orion developers discussion of “Removing … Continue reading →

Posted in Commercial Crew, COTS, Launch Vehicles, NASA, Politics, Space Exploration, Space Policy, Space Transportation, Technology | 22 Comments

Random Thoughts: Integral Payload Fairing Habitats As a Potential Alternative/Competitor to Inflatables?

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Jonathan Goff

2009 was a busy year for me. Around the same time that we were slogging away at getting Xombie and Xoie prepped for the Lunar Lander Challenge at Masten, and around the time that the Augustine Committee was trying to … Continue reading →

Posted in Bigelow Aerospace, Technology | 16 Comments

Random Thoughts: A little Competition is Sometimes a Good Thing

Posted on November 9, 2013 by Jonathan Goff

One of the counter-intuitive concepts I’ve picked up over the last two cycles of coaching for the NewSpace Business Plan competition is the idea that a little competition is actually a good thing. For a given business plan, the statement … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Entrepreneurship | 2 Comments