Armchair engineering

NASA's current focus is exploration, and for exploration of anything, you will need some kind of infrastructure, whether the goal is the moon, asteroids, or Mars. NASA is currently working on two vehicles that are supposed to provide the foundation of all exploration architectures for the coming decades: the Space Launch System and the Orion crew vehicle. These two vehicles are very useful for building a deep-space architecture, but they aren't guaranteed a future, especially with sequestration and other political nonsense lately putting many big NASA projects in danger. And at $1 billion and $1.4 billion annual for Orion and SLS respectively, they are some of the biggest projects around. Therefore, it's always necessary to hold some backup plan around in case Congress goes nuclear on NASA's budget. Here I present an plan that might be part of such a backup plan, that could get humans to places in a more budget constrained environment.  Delta IV launch vehicle T...

Lunar exploration has always been a huge interest of mine. The moon is our closest neighbor and could teach us tremendous amounts about the history of our solar system and our planet. It could also function as a place to gather resources to explore further into the solar system. In short, there's plenty of reason to go there, but how? Many earlier plans to got there have yielded nothing but powerpoints and pretty animations. Getting there in a low-cost manner would be critical. (For info on the plan discussed, scroll to the bottom.) Constellation: How not to go there The Constellation program was initiated by NASA as part of Bush's Vision for Space Exploration policy in 2005. It had the goal to return Americans to the moon by 2020 and give America independent manned access to space by 2014 after the Shuttle's retirement in 2010. However, the way they wished to accomplish this was doomed to fail from the beginning.  The first fatal flaw of the program was the w...