Ambivalent Engineer

A nice read about orbital mechanics.

Solar Energy is a grim business. Usually, folks who decide to buy a solar system make some sort of projection about their fuel or electrici...

My anonymous commentor is getting at a very interesting point. Why does SpaceX do their own engines when clearly better engines are availab...

I had been expecting that LOX-LH2 would be less expensive than LOX-kerosene for a LEO-out boost. At some goading by "anonymous",...

Jon Goff has posted the idea of launching a LEO-to-wherever booster into LEO, and then fuelling it with subsequent flights. This makes me w...

It's said that people never publish negative results. Well, in response to a comment on the previous post, here's mine. Most every ...

You don't have to be an Evangelical Christian to be fed up with the way science is taught in the primary and high school classroom these...

I read the Washington Post editorial . They don't like the costs and lack of results from putting people in space. I think they don...

Jon Goff has an absolutely fantastic post here at LH2: Love it or hate it? LH2 seems most clearly stupid for a first stage fuel. Hydrogen e...

I just read a fantastic article in The New Republic. In it, Husain Haqqani & Daniel Kimmage comment on a series of 430 short biographi...

The SpaceX annoucement is fluffy. Their big engine is late, and they're going to try to push their Merlin 1 based product a bit past it...

Since I think B ush's Vision for Space Exploration is screwed up, I thought I'd offer my own. Unmanned exploration I would initiate ...

SpaceX has just announced a new, bigger launch vehicle. It has a number of configurations, some of which are roughly the size of some of t...

Yesterday on KQED's Forum program Michael Krasny hosted a panel talking about Graffiti in San Francisco. I thought a lot of these folk...

I used to think this was part of the Hydrogen Economy scam. Now I think it might be a good idea, but it appears to be justified to the publ...

Nuclear disarmament is a good thing. Reducing the weapons stockpiles in the U.S. and Russia has left both countries with large stockpiles o...

Re: Is an EELV safe enough to launch people without "man-rating" it first? In a May 2003 hearing (before he was head of NASA), Gri...

The Set America Free folks have the right idea. Their proposal is a series of legislative steps that we can take now that will have the e...

NASA is mulling two vehicles to replace the Shuttle. Both are based on Shuttle components. This post is really about three things: one, why ...

James Zogby is talking on the commonwealth club right now on KQED . He made two claims: One, that although alternate supplies of energy are ...