Having spent a year or so, including the entirety of our youngest child’s life, in COVID-related lockdown, my wife Christine and I wanted to get out of town for a bit while we exhausted the remainder of our parental leave. Read on to discover how this simple objective morphed into a 7700 mile coast to coast (to coast to coast) road trip towing a classic 1960s travel trailer behind a modified Tesla Model 3 family sedan. Complete public photo album. Christine’s grandmother was having a 95th birthday celebration in Ohio, and we wanted to introduce her to her ~40th great … Continue reading Summer 2021 road trip

In previous blogs I’ve talked about how Lunar Starship can save the Artemis program to build a sustainable Lunar base. I’ve discussed how a Lunar Starship can deliver roughly 210 T to the Lunar surface if traveling one way. And … Continue reading Starship Moon Base Design Principles

Or, basic surface infrastructure for the Moon and Mars. I’ve written a few blogs about space stuff over the last couple of years but I’m not yet out of ideas. The usual disclaimers apply. As of May 2021, it looks like SpaceX has a reasonably solid lead in launch. This isn’t preordained to last forever, especially as copying a finalized Starship will be much easier for competitors, liberally salted with former SpaceX employees, than getting the design right in the first place. In the mean time, however, there are plenty of other worthy problems now that deep space transport seems, … Continue reading New Opportunities for Space Companies

I’ve written more than a few blogs about energy before. Why would I write another? I can’t think of a single reason. More seriously, I recently reviewed a personal whitepaper I wrote in January 2019 about battery economics and feel it is now time for it to see the light of day. The reasons for my reticence about publishing at the time should be obvious enough by the end of the post! No, I Will Not Shut Up About Solar And Batteries But first, a quick review. Slices of insights have made it into other, intervening posts. Most recently, I … Continue reading The Unstoppable Battery Onslaught

NASA’s selection of SpaceX’s Starship within the Human Lander System (HLS) program was both surprising and exciting for space nerds all over. Previously I have written about how Starship’s ambitious approach could transform the Artemis Program, particularly since Starship’s excessive cargo payload capacity creates a lot of opportunities that were previously curtailed by the harsh reality of razor thin Lunar mass budgets. As a rough rule of thumb, conventional approaches to Lunar transportation put cargo costs at upwards of $100m/T, while Starship should be able to get as low as $1m/T without any miracles, and perhaps as low as $100k/T … Continue reading Powering the Lunar Base

“The Martian” by Andy Weir, and its film adaptation directed by Ridley Scott, remain some of my all time favorite science fiction works. Way back in the day I wrote a technical commentary. I last read the book in 2015 (until 2 weeks ago) and watched the film in 2018. More recently I’ve been exploring in detail how Starship changes the game with Lunar exploration and began to wonder what “The Martian” would look like with a Starship-based architecture, rather than the rather more expensive and complex architecture used in the book. If you haven’t read the book, do so … Continue reading “The Martian” + Starship

This blog addresses the question of how SpaceX’s Starship could be used to ferry people and cargo to and from the Moon under a variety of different situations. It follows on from previous posts on Starship and Artemis, and Starship as a mechanism for space transport post scarcity. Broadly speaking, by the end of this post the reader should have a good idea of the variables and cost/benefit for various Starship-enabled transport systems. It’s worth stating at the outset that Starship is in a league of its own in the current field of lunar landers. Within the HLS program, the … Continue reading Lunar Starship and unnecessary operational complexity

It is no secret that SpaceX intends Starlink to revolutionize internet access, thereby generating enormous economic value and profit that can be directed towards the goal of building a city on Mars. As of March 2021, SpaceX has 1261 satellites … Continue reading Artemis can succeed using Starship

This is a short, weird blog describing an experiment in travel story telling. During my misspent youth I did a lot of backpacking and hitchhiking. Here’s an index of trips, accounts, photos. I was largely inspired by the accounts of Vladimir Dinets, an accomplished zoologist who later became a friend and mentor. I’ve always been a map nerd and, largely stuck at home through most of 2020, I decided to revisit ideas I’d long been exploring about combining geographically relevant text-based narrative accounts with the wild data capacities of Google Earth. While cataloging my travel diaries I realized one was … Continue reading Geodiaries