Patience

I'm glad to see that my first "orbital access methodologies" post has received as much attention as it has already. As I mentioned in my original post last month, I intend to talk about a few other promising approaches that I discussed for that guest lecture at UND in November. The rest of these approaches are TSTO approaches, including the "pop-up" VTVL approach favored by Armadillo (and discussed in the excellent book, "The Rocket Company"), the "glideback" approach that I think is the most likely approach someone like XCOR would take, and the "boostback" approach, which is similar to what Kistler ended up pursuing in the end.

I've ended up fleshing these out to a lot more detail than what I went over in my presentation at UND (going from two 3x5 cards worth of notes to 12 pages worth of text), so it's been taking me a lot more time to write these than I had originally intended. I thought at first that I'd be able to bang these out, one per evening, when in reality it's a lot closer to a full week worth of evenings.

In addition, I have at least one Jonny/Jimmy blogging post, one politics post, one family update, a follow-on to the Thrust Augmented Nozzles post, and a post about reusable lunar landers in the queue....

I wanted to give you all a heads up on what I'm working on, but also to ask for patience. This stuff takes me a while. Thank you all though for the kind words and support!