Ozan Bellik's Blog

 I've been trying to avoid rant posts, but this speech from a widely respected source (former NASA Admin Michael Griffin) is so full of bad takes that I've given in to the urge to address it. --- Griffin starts by saying we're further from returning to the Moon now than in 2007. Let that sink in for a moment. In 2007, we had two new LVs to develop, a crew vehicle to develop and a lander to develop, and nowhere near enough budget to do all that at projected spending levels. And even the most optimistic plans put a landing 13 years out, with an OSTP review just 2 years later finding it would likely take a decade longer than planned. In 2023, SLS and Orion have flown, we have multiple landers contracted and under development, with a crewed landing notionally 2-3 years / realistically probably 5-6 years from now. In other words, not only are we much closer than we were then, we haven't even really lost the time in between! We're still tracking towards a late 20s return

 A lot of people brought up specific advantages of the ISS and limitations of Mir in this response to this tweet  by @deltaIV9250  questioning ISS architectural choices and wondering about a more Mir-like station. But a modular space station does not have to look like Mir or have the same limitations as Mir. Imagine for a second a 8.4m long x 4.2m diameter module (~Destiny-sized). Its barrel section will have a surface area of ~110m2. Say it has a 100m2[1] solar panel wrapped most of the way around it and deployed in orbit off to one side. At a modest 15% panel efficiency it'd have a peak power of >20kW, and even w/ single-axis tracking[2] and factoring in degradation over time and losses from battery roundtrip, it could average >5kW. [1]This is slightly less than the solar panel area of a single Starlink mini v2 satellite, btw -- it's not going to be super heavy -- less than half a ton. [2]One option is vehicle roll w/ panels showing slim profile in flight direction; ano

On the Prospect of Falcon 9 Doing SLS's Job... Recently I pointed out that Falcon 9 has flown more lunar missions than SLS, and that this is likely to remain true through the end of the decade, based on contracted and expected launches. Some rightfully pushed back on this being an apples and oranges comparison, since the Falcon 9 doesn't have nearly the capabilities of SLS, and the spacecraft it is sending towards the Moon are relatively small uncrewed ones. Now it hadn't been my intention to say they were the same or that the Falcon 9 could do SLS's job. I was just making a tongue-in-cheek jab at "Mega Moon Rocket" launching fewer lunar payloads for the foreseeable future than not-a-Moon-rocket, as well as reminding people that two-stage kerolox rockets like Falcon 9 can in fact competitively launch useful payloads towards the Moon, contrary to popular wisdom until not that long ago. On the other hand, I do like to remind people that Artemis-like missions ca

Image Credit: Amazon Ten days ago Amazon announced they had made a deal to  purchase a huge amount of launch capacity to launch their Kuiper constellation. Not including the 9 previously bought Atlas V launches, we're looking at roughly 2000 tons of VLEO launch capacity with 38 Vulcan-Centaur 6, 18 Ariane 64, and 12 New Glenn launches (with an option for 15 more). I recently claimed that this would be enough to launch multiple crewed Mars landing missions using storable hypergolic propellants, and I was asked to show my work.  So here it is: The Goal I will choose a relatively small but generally acceptable crew size of 4 and try to fit three long-stay conjunction class missions within a ~2 kiloton upmass budget. The first mission would be an uncrewed demo in 2033 that would include landing components of a Mars base.  It would be followed by two crewed missions, in 2035 and 2037, that would also bring more cargo. The crew would travel to Mars in a modular Mars Transit Vehicle (MTV