Category Archives: Uncategorized

Regenerative cooled turbopump

This started as a short thought on nasaspaceflight and grew into something that resembled a blog post. So I copied and pasted it here. I screwed up the link but this is an ongoing thought from the turbine in chamber … Continue reading

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Second Guessing Starship

There seem to be two extremes when it comes to Elon Musk and SpaceX. There are those that believe everything Elon tries will work because–ELON. There are those that believe SpaceX has reached the end of its’ lucky tether because–ELON. … Continue reading

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Projectile Fusion

I ran across an article on a variation on impact fusion called projectile fusion. A relatively large (1cm) projectile is smashed into a target at 14,500 mph. The specific shape of the projectile and target temporarily create extreme pressures and … Continue reading

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L4 Opportunity

https://www.space.com/earth-extra-moon-trojan-asteroid-2020-xl5-discovery An Asteroid 1.2 km across has been discovered at the Earth Sun L4 region. This is the second asteroid discovered in one of the Lagrange volumes of the Earth Sun with the other one about a third of that … Continue reading

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Suborbital Balloot

Watched a bit of the two suborbital flights, not that much though, certainly not with the interest I would have had roughly a decade and a half ago. I had thought back then that the technical route to routine space … Continue reading

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Layover Lunar Lander

A lunar lander concept I haven’t seen elsewhere is a layover concept. A tall ship lands on its’ tail the way the several suborbital hoppers and the Falcon9 has been doing for several years now. After landing and checking the … Continue reading

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The last few years

john hare I noticed the other day that it had been over a year since I posted, and at least double that since posting on a space topic. I’ve had a bit going on for distraction, and haven’t had anything … Continue reading

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How much mass can we put in orbit before running into atmospheric constraints?

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

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Adding an Earth-sized magnetic field to Mars

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

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A human tribe is a Von Neumann probe

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

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