Category Archives: Space

Now That’s Marketing

Now these are what I call hot rockets. Question is, which are the rocket geeks going to pay more attention to, the rockets, or Sheri?

It reminds me of the old engineer joke. An engineering student sees one of his buddies, a fellow engineering student, riding a bike toward him.

“Hey,” he says. “When did you get the bike?”

“It’s a weird story,” he replies. “I was just walking on the quad, and this girl rides up to me, gets off, drops the bike, takes off all her clothes and lies there, saying ‘take what you want.'”

“Good choice,” says his friend. “The clothes probably wouldn’t have fit.”

Now That’s Marketing

Now these are what I call hot rockets. Question is, which are the rocket geeks going to pay more attention to, the rockets, or Sheri?

It reminds me of the old engineer joke. An engineering student sees one of his buddies, a fellow engineering student, riding a bike toward him.

“Hey,” he says. “When did you get the bike?”

“It’s a weird story,” he replies. “I was just walking on the quad, and this girl rides up to me, gets off, drops the bike, takes off all her clothes and lies there, saying ‘take what you want.'”

“Good choice,” says his friend. “The clothes probably wouldn’t have fit.”

Now That’s Marketing

Now these are what I call hot rockets. Question is, which are the rocket geeks going to pay more attention to, the rockets, or Sheri?

It reminds me of the old engineer joke. An engineering student sees one of his buddies, a fellow engineering student, riding a bike toward him.

“Hey,” he says. “When did you get the bike?”

“It’s a weird story,” he replies. “I was just walking on the quad, and this girl rides up to me, gets off, drops the bike, takes off all her clothes and lies there, saying ‘take what you want.'”

“Good choice,” says his friend. “The clothes probably wouldn’t have fit.”

More From Houston

Keith Cowing continues to live blog the Exploration conference today:

Cooke is going through a standard recitation of why we explore, why go back to the Moon, etc. It is fine for NASA folks do this once or twice at a meeting of the faithful (such as this), but I have to wonder why NASA folks feel compelled to spend so much time on this with an audience that is already convinced – except, perhaps, to serve as cheerleaders, I suppose. This is the fourth time the VSE story has been told here.

…Tony Lavoie is speaking now. He opened by making sure everyone knew that these architectural depictions in the fancy graphics were “notional” (NASA’s favorite word to make sure they can wiggle out of something later), “points of departure”, “Point in the sand” a “Point at which to engage” etc. This is one of NASA’s odd habits – on one hand they wave this new architecture around so as to demonstrate to the external world that they have done something and that they can make decisions – and then they turn around and warn people that what they see on the screen (to illustrate the very same architecture) is not what they may get. Hardly what you do to inspire confidence among external observers.

Crunching The Numbers

Jonah Goldberg has been discussing the probability of a catastrophic asteroid impact with the earth, based on this post by Ron Bailey. He has an email from one of his very confused readers:

You probably have a lot of others e-mailing as well to point this out, but while that 0.3% seems like a small probability it is wholly implausible. Just as a point of comparison given what I

The New Congress And Space

Mark Whittington has a largely reasonable assessment of the implications of the Democrat takeover for space activities. I’d just add (though it’s not really associated with the takeover per se) that one other interesting potential change in the new Congress would be the return of Jim Sensenbrenner to the House Science Committee, as ranking member (he would have presumably gone for the chairmanship if the Republicans had retained control). As noted in comments at the link, he will be much more skeptical of NASA, and welcoming of commercial activities, than many of his predecessors.

One Other Propellant Depot Thought

In this post, Jay Manifold comments:

…my (possibly incorrect) understanding is that LH2 can only be stored for a few hours.

It is incorrect. There’s no intrinsic limit on how long you can store LH2. It’s just a matter of how much weight and power you’re willing to devote to insulation and/or refrigeration systems.

In fact, the concept I have for a cis-lunar infrastructure is a series of combination depots/tankers. You’d have at least four of them (probably five, for backup purposes). One would be sitting in LEO, being filled up. One would be sitting at L1 to provide propellant for returning and lunar-bound vehicles. There would always be (at least) two in transit, one heading toward LEO, and the other heading toward L1. When one arrived, the one already there would depart to the other destination.

I’m envisioning them with plenty of power, both to run high-Isp thrusters, and to keep propellants continuously chilled. You might be able to do it with solar (though the panels would take repeated beatings going through the Van Allen belts). The obvious technical solution would be nuclear, but that’s probably still politically unacceptable, despite its reasonableness.

[One further evening thought]

If they were powered with nukes, there’d be plenty of power to not only keep the hydrogen chilled, but to actually crack it from water. The marginal cost of doing so, given the initial investment of the nuclear tankers, would be pretty low, and it could dramatically affect the cost of delivering the propellants to orbit, since they could be delivered in a more dense form that doesn’t require cryogenic tankage, and is much safer. Of course, the vehicles would either have to operate at a stoichiometric ratio of 8:1 oxygen/hydrogen (which is suboptimal in terms of specific impulse–ideal is 6:1)) or throw away or find other uses for the excess O2.