Ambivalent Engineer

John Goff has set off a round of "what if..." Now Mr. X is at it. The big problem with companies like Masten Space Systems, or ...

My first Google Video is up. I gave this tech talk at Google as part of Dick Lyon's Photo Tech series. If you've ever wanted to kn...

I finally found the video shot by the WB-57 chase plane of the ST-114 "Return to Flight" launch. It's fabulous. Keep watching,...

My daughter Anya is 4.5 years old. She likes to have me make line drawings of things and then paint them. Today she wanted a dinosaur. ...

Some of you may know that I've been carrying around a wacky hunch about the operation of the brain for several years. Here's the s...

I'm not a military guy, I don't know much about how they do things. But I have read Blackhawk Down, and I have some sense that a cas...

Engineering is mostly data plumbing. What matters is that the right people understand the right bits of the problem. All those meetings, a...

I noticed that ambivalentengineer.blogspot.com got messed up somehow, probably when Google moved to their Blogger in Beta infrastructure. S...

I'm now working at Google. Specifically, I'm working on Google Earth. The project is irresistably cool, I work with interesting an...

Listening to NPR yesterday, I heard a guy from the New Orleans Aquarium describing the mess they found after Katrina. The equipment there h...

There is a great discussion over at EnergyPulse . The article suggests renewables can replace nuclear. A number of good comments that follow...

I'm going to try to convince you [hi Jon!] that a three stage to orbit rocket might be significantly cheaper than a two stage to orbit s...

Now that a respectful period for SpaceX's loss has passed, it's time to begin the enthusiastic but uninformed Monday morning quarter...

Jon Goff notes that MIT has developed a new, more sensitive infrared receiver. The article mentions that data rates to space probes might...

There's been an uptick in talk of space elevators. Here's Rand Simberg going at it. I get annoyed when I read this stuff, and lat...

SpaceX does not need to design and qualify a third, much bigger, engine in order to become a profitable launch company, or to take over payl...

The Chair Force Engineer doesn't think much of a catapult start for rockets. His point is that if your catapult gets the rocket going ...

Delta IV has been canned in favor of Atlas V. I predicted it would go the other way, because the DoD has yet to launch on Atlas V. I had p...

I thought I'd learned a long time ago that if you're going to write in public, you need to start with a large backlog of already wri...

Every time I see a rocket vault off the pad, I wonder why the engineers didn't make the propellant tanks bigger. Adding propellant to a...