As Rand has already blogged, I’m the new interim Washington Director of the SubOrbital Institute, since Pat Bahn is too busy actually running a company to take care of the nitty-gritty of running the Institute. This goes for many of the other Institute members, which is very good news. Unfortunately I’m paid exactly the same as I am for blogging here, but that’s not zero except in dollars. Let me clarify that statement a little: I realized a few years ago that I was thinking about the problem of space access all wrong. The problem is complex and has many conceivable solutions, but only a small set of practically implementable solutions. Which solutions are practical is not obvious except in retrospect, and since we don’t already have low cost space access, retrospection is not an option.
A Moore’s Law For Spaceflight?
Michael Turner has a piece in today’s The Space Review arguing that Moore’s Law won’t apply to space development. His argument fails, at least to me, because it rests on a false premise (and a common myth)–that the reason access to space is expensive is because we don’t have the “right” technology.
While I don’t literally believe in a Moore’s Law for space (in the sense that we can see seemingly never-ending halving of costs on some constant time period), I do expect to see dramatic reductions in cost in the next couple decades, but not because there are vast ranges for improvement in the technologies, but because there are is vast potential for improvement in the real problem–the heretofore lack of market.
Costs will come down dramatically when we start flying a lot more. It’s that simple. Once we reach a plateau, in which the costs of propellant start to become significant in the overall costs of flight, then we should look to some new technological breakthroughs, but we’re sufficiently far from that that some form of Moore’s Law, at least in the short term, is actually quite likely to hold.
A Moore’s Law For Spaceflight?
Michael Turner has a piece in today’s The Space Review arguing that Moore’s Law won’t apply to space development. His argument fails, at least to me, because it rests on a false premise (and a common myth)–that the reason access to space is expensive is because we don’t have the “right” technology.
While I don’t literally believe in a Moore’s Law for space (in the sense that we can see seemingly never-ending halving of costs on some constant time period), I do expect to see dramatic reductions in cost in the next couple decades, but not because there are vast ranges for improvement in the technologies, but because there are is vast potential for improvement in the real problem–the heretofore lack of market.
Costs will come down dramatically when we start flying a lot more. It’s that simple. Once we reach a plateau, in which the costs of propellant start to become significant in the overall costs of flight, then we should look to some new technological breakthroughs, but we’re sufficiently far from that that some form of Moore’s Law, at least in the short term, is actually quite likely to hold.
A Moore’s Law For Spaceflight?
Michael Turner has a piece in today’s The Space Review arguing that Moore’s Law won’t apply to space development. His argument fails, at least to me, because it rests on a false premise (and a common myth)–that the reason access to space is expensive is because we don’t have the “right” technology.
While I don’t literally believe in a Moore’s Law for space (in the sense that we can see seemingly never-ending halving of costs on some constant time period), I do expect to see dramatic reductions in cost in the next couple decades, but not because there are vast ranges for improvement in the technologies, but because there are is vast potential for improvement in the real problem–the heretofore lack of market.
Costs will come down dramatically when we start flying a lot more. It’s that simple. Once we reach a plateau, in which the costs of propellant start to become significant in the overall costs of flight, then we should look to some new technological breakthroughs, but we’re sufficiently far from that that some form of Moore’s Law, at least in the short term, is actually quite likely to hold.
Not His Father’s Space Initiative
It’s Monday, and that means a new issue of The Space Review. Dwayne Day leads off the week with an interesting comparison between the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative, and the new Vision for Space Exploration.
Editor Jeff Foust also makes an interesting analogy between planetary exploration and sports.
Not His Father’s Space Initiative
It’s Monday, and that means a new issue of The Space Review. Dwayne Day leads off the week with an interesting comparison between the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative, and the new Vision for Space Exploration.
Editor Jeff Foust also makes an interesting analogy between planetary exploration and sports.
Not His Father’s Space Initiative
It’s Monday, and that means a new issue of The Space Review. Dwayne Day leads off the week with an interesting comparison between the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative, and the new Vision for Space Exploration.
Editor Jeff Foust also makes an interesting analogy between planetary exploration and sports.
Congratulations
…on your new job, Andrew. I think.
It’s certainly a key position right now, with the legislation continuing to hang fire. Be sure to let us know what we can do to help on an ongoing basis.
Pants On Fire
Even while traveling, Glenn has a good roundup of links about the collapse of the credibility of Joe Wilson, and continuing pathetic efforts to defend him.
This is the kind of thing that (like all of the lying, spinning and prevarication, and unashamed defense of it, in defense of Bill Clinton in the nineties) make it impossible for me to even consider voting for a Democrat any more. As a one-time Democrat in my youth, I went through the eighties thinking that I simply had policy disagreements with them, but since the Clinton years, and particularly since 911, I now think that it’s simply too dangerous to put the fate of the nation back in the hands of such people. Joe Lieberman would have been the only possible candidate who could overwhelm my increasing distaste for the Donkeys, but they rejected him, and anyone like him, quite decisively.
Golda Meier once said that the Middle East situation would only be resolved when the Palestinians started to love their children more than they hated Jews. I’ll think that we’ll once again have a functional two-party system, in which I can vote for the candidate rather than the affiliation, when it starts to appear that the Democrats love truth and integrity more than they hate George Bush and Republicans in general. (Which is not to say that I’ll necessarily vote Republican–with the ridiculous things coming out of the Libertarian Party since September 11, right now, I have no party.)
[Update at noon Eastern]
Michael Ledeen has more.
On The Radio
Sorry for the short notice–it slipped my mind. I’m going to be live on The Space Show with David Livingston in about an hour. On the air in the Seattle area, and there’s an internet feed here.
[Update afterward]
The interview went well, but I found out it wasn’t broadcast live (thought it was on the internet). It was taped for a later broadcast. I also want to remind people that Bill Simon (transterrestrial webmaster) and I will be on the show next Tuesday. It’s the thirty-fifth anniversary of the first Apollo landing, and we’ll be talking about that, and the sedar-like ceremony that we developed to commemorate it.
If you’re really into the significance of that date, it would be a good time to gather with family and friends, and have a dinner to help remember the first liberation of our species (and earthly life itself) from its homeworld, just as the Jews celebrate their liberation from Egypt at Passover.
Despite all the saturation coverage of space in the past year and a half, it would seem that we need such tools to educate ourselves about this new frontier, as Jay Manifold sadly points out today.