I have an editorial up at Launch Space today. Unfortunately, there is no permalink. It’s at the top right now, but in the future, you’ll have to scroll down to the December 12th entry.
Category Archives: Economics
The Race Heats Up
…and Sir Richard moves on:
Dulles, Va.-based Orbital is teaming with Virgin Galactic of New Mexico on the Commercial Crew Development 2 (CCDev 2) project. Virgin Galactic will market commercial rides on the spacecraft, conduct drop tests of the orbital space vehicle using its WhiteKnightTwo aircraft and offer transport services for the space vehicle, industry sources said. Although Orbital expects to launch and land the spacecraft at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., in the event of an abort, WhiteKnightTwo would be used to ferry the spaceship between its landing location and the Cape.
Virgin is also expected to announce this week a separate CCDev 2 bid led by Sierra Nevada Corp., the big winner in NASA’s first round of Commercial Crew Development awards earlier this year. The Sparks, Nev.-based firm garnered $20 million in CCDev 1 funds to mature its Dream Chaser orbital spacecraft, a six-passenger lifting-body vehicle based on NASA’s HL-20 concept from the early 1990s that the company has been working on for several years.
I can’t reveal the source, but I am reliably informed that at Burt Rutan’s retirement dinner last week, Sir Richard phoned it in from Necker Island, with a video lamenting Burt’s abandoning the field (though Burt had always been on record as not knowing how to do orbit — at heart he was always an airplane guy, and one of the best ever). With the hybrid engine problems, I take this as a sign that, while he still hopes to make his mark in the suborbital world, his focus has shifted to a higher velocity game. It can’t be a result of SpaceX’s success last week, because both deals have to have been in work for months, but I suspect that the week of the Dragon had some influence as to when to make announcements.
The Congress will do what it does when it reassembles in January, but with Bigelow’s habitats beckoning, I doubt that anything they do will have much influence over our future in space, at this point. At worst, they will only be able to continue to waste the taxpayers’ money.
Health Care And Overreach
Twice now, while there were other factors in both cases, the Democrats have been severely punished in elections over their attempt to socialize medicine.
First, in 1994, they lost both houses of Congress because of HillaryCare, which fortunately didn’t pass.
They learned the wrong lesson from 1994, deluding themselves that they lost not because they attempted to take over a sixth of the nation’s economy, and one on which people depend for their very health and lives, but because they had failed to do so. So in 2010, they applied this false lesson to double down, deluding themselves this time that if they passed the latest unconstitutional monstrosity, it would be the key to electoral victory. Even Bill Clinton fantasized (or at least pretended to, perhaps as a way of sabotaging the Obama administration?) that it would magically become more popular once it was passed, and Queen Nancy assured us, holding her giant gavel, that we would find out what was in it then, and like it.
This time, they lost the House even more dramatically, and kept the Senate only because of a combination of safe Dem seats up that year and some flawed Republican candidates. The fact that the law remains on the books, with a president in the White House prepared to veto any repeal of it, his signature “victory” (ignoring the fact that it was rammed through the Congress in a partisan manner via undemocratic procedural gimmicks with very little White House guidance or input), will just make things that much worse in two years in the Senate, with many more vulnerable Democrats up for election, perhaps even providing the Republicans with a filibuster-proof majority.
So what false lesson will they take from this latest setback on their “progressive” road to serfdom? My prediction: the polls are all wrong — the bill was unpopular not because it passed, but because it wasn’t socialistic enough, lacking a “public option” (read “government option” or inevitable slide down the steep greased slope to single-payer). Because in their ideology, the “reality-based community” ise impervious to empirical data, or reason, or reality. It’s the thing that saves us from them, ultimately, in a country where the voice of the people is ultimately heard.
[Update a while later]
And here is Chris Gerrib in comments, right on cue, to validate my prediction.
A Blow To Lawlessness And Socialism
…and a victory for the Constitution:
A federal judge declared the Obama administration’s health care law unconstitutional Monday, siding with Virginia’s attorney general in a dispute that both sides agree will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
I would have been surprised (and dismayed) had it gone any other way. Let’s get it to appellate and the Supreme Court quickly, before Obama is able to stack it with more Elena Kagens who, as Jeff Sessions demonstrated, don’t seem to think that there are any limits whatsoever to the federal government’s reach into individuals’ personal decisions.
[Update a few minutes later]
Great minds…apparently Cuccinelli has requested a direct appeal to SCOTUS. This is unusual, but it may happen, given the magnitude of the decision and its impact.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More from Bryan Preston. I love this display of idiocy by Josh Marshall:
Josh Marshall, in a state of shock, says that “no one” took the constitutional argument against ObamaCare seriously. Obviously a majority of the voters did, a couple dozen state attorneys general did, and a federal judge has as well.
It’s one thing to argue that it’s constitutional. It’s another to be so willfully blind as to imagine that “no one” thought it wasn’t. This kind of delusion is one of the reasons they got “shellacked” last month.
[Update a few minutes later]
A link roundup at How Appealing.
[Update a while later]
It’s unconstitutional and unpopular. What’s not to like?
But of course, as Nancy said, we had to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. That’s the way it is with bills of thousands of pages that no one reads.
[Update a few minutes later]
Memo to Bob Gibbs, who has now gone all Orwellian on us, rebranding the “individual mandate” “individual responsibility.” Even granting for the sake of argument only that I have such a responsibility, the Constitution still doesn’t allow the federal government to compel me at gunpoint to be “responsible.” Sorry, no sale.
Time Warp
I just noticed that space historian Roger Launius has a blog, which I’ve added to the roll on the left. And last week, he had a very peculiar post.
It’s actually a generally not-bad history of NASA’s (and the nation’s) continued attempts to replace the Shuttle, but it contains these words:
Without a doubt, moving to a next generation human launcher will cost a significant amount of money. It always has.
…No doubt, building a new human-rated launcher will require a considerable investment. If the United States intends to fly humans into space as the twenty-first century proceeds it must be willing to foot the bill for doing so.
There are two striking omissions in the narrative. First is the complete lack of mention of commercial space or privately developed systems, even failed ones. They don’t exist at all. It might have made sense to write such a piece in the early eighties, maybe even the early nineties, when it was still unimaginable in the conventional wisdom that there would be multiple solutions to the Shuttle replacement problem, let alone private ones.
But this is 2010. And this blog post was written only two days after the successful flight of the Falcon 9 and Dragon. It’s as though it didn’t happen, and remains so unlikely to that it isn’t worthy of mention in the context of the discussion.
So what does he think is a “significant amount of money”? Or a “considerable investment”? Because any rational analysis, based on SpaceX’s costs to date, would indicate that they are less than a billion dollars away from having a “new human-rated launcher” (ignoring the archaic and useless notion of “human rating” a twenty-first-century launcher designed to the current state-of-the-art in reliability). But no, because “it always has,” it always will.
It’s amazing how myopic the conventionally wise can be.
[Update a while later]
Speaking of myopic space historians (or policy analysts or both, depending on what you think he is), I hadn’t previously seen this quote from John Logsdon cited by Jeff Foust at today’s issue of The Space Review:
Others question just how “commercial” such systems could really be. “I think one of the worst things that happened in managing this revolutionary proposal with respect to human spaceflight is to call the transportation service ‘commercial,’” John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said in a space policy forum earlier this month hosted by the Marshall Institute. “There is no obvious market” right now for crewed flights beyond NASA’s needs, he claimed, and allowing that question to dominate the policy debate “is one of the policy failures of the last year.”
Well, let’s see. Space Adventures has had several customers for the Soyuz flights, and has more who would like to fly, but the supply seems to be the choke point. Bob Bigelow has MOUs with several nations who would like to lease his facilities who clearly can afford it, but in order to use them, their “astronauts” (or whatever they want to call them) will need rides to and from. In addition, Bob has offered hundreds of millions of dollars of his own (existing) money for the capability to offer such rides. Maybe John doesn’t want to call that a market, “obvious” or otherwise, “beyond NASA’s needs,” but it sure looks like one to me.
The Last Action Hero Governor
Thoughts on the rise, and disastrous fall, of the Governator:
One man has the right to toast to a case of schadenfreude. California Congressman Tom McClintock, running against Schwarzenegger in the 2003 recall, warned voters before the election that Arnold was a liberal wolf in conservative sheep’s clothing. McClintock predicted that a Governor Schwarzenegger would be far and away from the second coming of Governor Ronald Reagan.
McClintock’s prophecy proved to be more true than even he most likely thought possible. To the shock and dismay of sensible government advocates around the state, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s leftist metamorphosis paved the way for California’s incredible decline. Like a script from the several horrible Terminator sequels, Governor Schwarzenegger started strong only to end up on DVD shortly thereafter.
And we get stuck with the residuals.
Truth In Advertising
This bubble’s got to pop soon.
“An Awkward Position?”
There’s a very strange article over at Wired on the Dragon flight:
…the “commercialization” of space puts the U.S. military — one of the biggest space customers and a close partner with NASA — in an awkward position, according to Eric Sterner, a space expert with the Marshall Institute. “Changes in the nature of the launch industry will present policymakers with new dilemmas when it comes to ensuring military access to space.”
I’m guessing that he talked to no one for this article other than Eric Sterner, who has his own axe to grind, continuing (as far as I know) to be a Constellation fan. Which makes the piece all the more strange. More on that in a minute.
The problem stretches back to the mid-1990s, when the Air Force began pouring billions into a new rocket for carrying military satellites into orbit. The plan was to license the same rocket to commercial launch firms. But that private market never really materialized, and the Pentagon ended up assuming the full, $100-million-per-launch cost for the resulting Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, today the military’s standard rocket.
Almost all of this paragraph is wrong. It implies that there is a single EELV, which was developed by the Air Force, and then “licensed” to unspecified “commercial launch firms,” which never materialized, and that the Air Force is now operating it themselves. It also implies that it is the sole user, and that the Pentagon uses no other rockets.
Here’s the Planet Earth version of the history. The Air Force subsidized both McDonnell Douglas (which was absorbed by Boeing during this period) and Lockheed Martin to develop new, cheaper versions of the Delta and Atlas, respectively, but both companies put considerable amounts of their own money into them as well. There is little heritage of either vehicle to their ancestral namesakes other than the Centaur upper stage. Boeing and Lockmart operated their commercial vehicles, with the Air Force as primary customer. It is true that the market didn’t turn out to be as large as initially thought, and in the early aughts, Boeing actually wanted to get out of the business because it was operating at a loss. As a solution, to keep both lines available for resiliency, both companies ended up forming a new joint venture, similar to the one they formed to operate Shuttle and station, called United Launch Alliance (a commercial company), that has consolidated production and other functions to save money while still being able to offer both vehicles to the marketplace.
It goes on:
“Some would prefer NASA to meet its [Low-Earth Orbit] human spaceflight needs with modifications to the EELV, which theoretically would increase production runs and lower the [Air Force] marginal cost,” Sterner said. But after SpaceX’s success this week, NASA might decide to base its future vehicles on Falcon, leaving the cash-strapped Air Force to maintain the EELV all by itself.
Yes, some would indeed prefer that, and have been saying it for years, ever since ESAS, when NASA decided to spend billions building its own rockets, including the Ares I for crew transportation, and the Air Force went along with it. And it’s kind of amusing to read about the “cash-strapped Air Force,” considering the size of NASA’s budget in comparison. If NASA is smart, they’ll use both Falcon and EELVs for crew transport, so they have redundancy. What the Air Force really needs is a NASA to not develop a new Shuttle-derived vehicle, which it doesn’t need, and doesn’t have the budget for, but Congress is insisting that it build anyway, for no reason other than job preservation in Alabama, Utah, Mississippi and Florida. If NASA would commit to using existing vehicles, including both EELVs and Falcons, for exploration, there would be plenty of business for everyone, and it would also open the door to more DoD use of SpaceX hardware. Sterner sort of explains this:
The military might decided to regularly use Falcon alongside EELV. “In theory, that’d be a good thing, increasing competition and giving DoD greater access to space,” Sterner said. “In practice, it may not be as easy as all that. DoD poured a lot of money into the EELV and has much more control over it than SpaceX’s Falcon 9. It may be reluctant (for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons) to make greater use of Falcon since that would mean less use of EELV, which it’s still on the hook to maintain.”
The only sense in which the Air Force is “on the hook to maintain” EELVs (not EELV) is that if ULA (which, again, is not mentioned, allowing the reader to infer that it doesn’t exist) goes under, it would have no way to get a certain class of satellites into orbit. What that means, though, is that it has to provide ULA with enough business to ensure that this doesn’t happen, and if ULA can find other customers (e.g., Bigelow) the pressure on the Air Force to continue to keep the doors open diminishes or disappears. But if we had a Space Council, whose job was to ensure that we were actually accomplishing things in space, instead of keep factories going in selected states and congressional districts, an overhaul of policy would straighten this out (though over the screams of certain members of Congress), and there would be ample business for ULA and SpaceX, as well as the smaller players and upstarts.
And So It Begins
This is depressing. Kristi Noem hasn’t even taken office yet, and she’s already defending home-grown pork as “stimulus”:
Newly Elected Congresswoman Kristi Noem of South Dakota says that ethanol subsidies are important to her state and the nation.
Speaking on the Scott Hennen Show Noem says “Ethanol has been very good to South Dakota.” She said that this is not the time to repeal the subsidy “when you look at taking away that subsidy it is the wrong decision.”
She says that supporting the ethanol industry with subsidy promotes investment and continued hiring “In the long run it will get the economy back on track faster.”
Will someone please give this woman an economics lesson? And you can bet she’ll trade her vote for others’ votes to keep the subsidies coming. This is why both parties are the party of big government.
The Coming Economic Storm
The Democrats applied exactly the wrong medicine to this recession, poisoning the economy instead.
The only good news:
The next few years are going to be grim, and those in charge do not inspire confidence. Would you entrust your welfare to Jerry Brown, Andrew Cuomo, Pat Quinn, and Barack Obama? We have to hope, however, that these men wake up, swallow their preconceptions, and without delay move decisively in the direction of balancing the budgets of California, New York, Illinois, and the United States.
I myself very much doubt that they will do so. Unless these men – our President above all – demonstrate qualities that they have never before evidenced, we are in for a truly terrible ride. There is only one silver lining; and welcome though it might be in ordinary circumstances, it is hardly worth the cost. Politically, this means that Barack Obama is likely to be remembered for having done to the Democratic Party what Herbert Hoover did to the Republicans.
As he says, a good outcome, but not worth the cost.