New installment in my "Why Not Mars?" series, "The Shape of a Mars Mission" idlewords.com/2025/02/the_sh…

Key points: 1) There is totally room to add Trump to Mt. Rushmore 2) It looks like a fifth president already got added and then erased

"Right now the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (the entity responsible for manned space flight) couldn’t build a toaster for less than a billion dollars." My rant about America's dangerous, rudderless, and incoherent moon program idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lun…

Dear Lazyweb, The earliest description I've found of a modern Mars mission (rocket trip on a conjunction-class trajectory) is this 1928 Scientific American article by JR Randolph. I know Goddard at least was thinking about this earlier, but is there any published prior art?

You can instantly tell if a spacecraft design uses nuclear thermal propulsion by looking for the "crew cabin on a stick" motif. Differential diagnosis with nuclear electric propulsion is easy, check for the presence of huge radiators. (Diagram from doi.org/10.1115/1.3664413)

Fun and useful snippet on fuel density from a NASA paper: "supercritical Xe is about as dense as a brick (comparatively, cryogenic hydrogen is about a dense as Styrofoam, cryogenic methane is about as dense as oak wood, and cryogenic oxygen is slightly denser than water"

Mom: we have sunset at home

Put this tweet on my tombstone