Author Archives: Chris Stelter

News broke recently of rumors of a space company looking to buy up like a couple hundred square miles of land in Louisiana, possibly to set up a launch site. Why Louisiana? Two reasons: 1. Launch site advantagesLouisiana is one … Continue reading →

Almost 9 years ago, I blogged about orbital data centers for bitcoin mining. https://selenianboondocks.com/2016/12/space-based-bitcoin-mining/I wrote: At 4 year replacement cycles (probably the power and thermal system would last a lot longer, but hardware would need to be updated), that’s about … Continue reading →

Anytime the topic of electric aircraft comes up, the immediate response by the middle-brow (and some high-brow) is that it’s obviously impractical due to the mass-sensitivity of flight and the obvious energy density (or they usually intend “specific energy”) advantage … Continue reading →

Orbital rockets do not *seem* efficient. They take off in what amounts to a mushroom cloud, using extravagant amounts of propellant to rise even the first 100 meters into the air to clear the tower. Yet, their efficiency rivals that … Continue reading →

In January, Elon Musk mused that the design goal for Starship was 3 flights per day, for about 1000 flights per year per Starship (assuming for the sake of simplicity he’s talking about a whole stack) with a payload of … Continue reading →

Mars has only the ancient remnants of a magnetic field. What little chunks of field it does have (imprinted into magnetic rocks) are regional in scale and do nothing at all for radiation shielding (I once calculated this). Additionally, over … Continue reading →

After thinking a while about why self-replicating robots do not exist (thanks, Casey: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/09/02/self-replicating-robots-do-not-exist/ ), we’re reminded that living things do this regularly. I’m tempted to write “a human is a von Neumann probe,” but that wouldn’t be accurate. A … Continue reading →

So, given that the CDC recently confirmed the first possible instance of community transmission of COVID-19 (Novel Coronavirus) in the US, I thought I’d guesstimate roughly when the peak of the epidemic would occur in the US with some (extremely) … Continue reading →

With the death of Mars One, there are no high-profile companies looking to settle Mars besides SpaceX. Mars settlement future is currently single-string. Reliant on a single company. What can we do to change that? Am I missing someone? On … Continue reading →

In 2016 when Elon Musk unveiled ITS, everyone thought it was ridiculous and huge. It dwarfed the Saturn V. People were scratching their heads as to how it could possibly launch from LC-39A as pictured, since the 42 Raptors were … Continue reading →