Category Archives: Business

Solar Geoengineering

A quick and easy way to stop global warming?

It would certainly be cheaper than carbon reduction, but it’s not clear if it would work, or what the other side effects might be. And of course, if it’s even necessary.

But if it really is a problem, schemes like this, or space-based ones, make a lot more sense than screwing up the global economy.

The Space Review

Happy tenth anniversary to Jeff, who is asking the big space policy questions for the next ten years.

[Update a few minutes later]

I have to comment on this:

“NASA needs to have more than one half of one percent of the federal budget,” Bingham said at the FAA conference last week, emphasizing he was speaking only for himself. That call has been echoed by others in recent years who have sought to at least double NASA’s share of the federal budget to one percent.

There is no magic “correct” percentage of the federal budget that NASA should get. Traditionally, it used to be about one percent, but the budget hasn’t actually declined that much. It’s now half a percent because of the monstrous budget growth in other areas over the past several years, and NASA didn’t keep up. NASA should get as much budget as it needs to accomplish its assigned tasks, regardless of the budget percentage. Of course, since some of its assigned tasks are wasteful and useless, like Jeff Bingham’s Senate Launch System, it could actually be doing a lot more with the money that it’s being given, if Congress wouldn’t force the agency to waste so much.

Commercial Space Transportation Regulation

In my book, here’s one of my recommendations in the conclusion:

The Office of Commercial Space Transportation (OCST), currently located within FAA and often referred to by its internal code designation as FAA-AST, should be taken from under the FAA administrator and reconstituted as a separate agency of the DOT, reporting directly to the Secretary of Transportation as do normal DOT agencies. The OCST was originally constituted as a special office within the Office of the Secretary of Transportation as an interim measure under President Reagan’s executive order of 1983, codified by subsequent legislation in 1984. It was moved under the FAA early in the Clinton administration as a result of Vice President Gore’s “streamlining government” initiative. Giving it independent status would both elevate the national importance of space transportation, and remove it from the routine-transportation, common-carrier-oriented safety environment of the FAA, which (as previously mentioned) lost its role in the promotion of the aviation industry in the wake of the ValuJet crash in the late nineties. Additionally, consideration should be given to relocating to such an agency various routine space-transportation-related infrastructure and operational responsibilities located in other agencies where they are peripheral to those agencies’ main purpose and function and often suffer from inattention and low priorities.

Dana Rohrabacher has read a draft, and I suspect that’s partially what’s behind this:

Rohrabacher said that it remained vital that FAA recognize that commercial spaceflight is still an emerging industry and not over-regulate it. He noted that the Office of Commercial Space Transportation was originally placed directly under the Secretary of Transportation, and only later moved to the FAA. “The culture of the FAA is based on a mandate to protect passenger safety,” he said, but argued that commercial spaceflight, being far less mature than aviation, requires a different regulatory philosophy. “That’s a very different mandate and a very different approach, but it’s necessary for us to recognize that if we are to be successful in moving the industry forward.”

Rohrabacher said that FAA was, for the time being, doing a good job treating aviation and spaceflight differently, but warned he would seek action to move the office out of the FAA should the situation change. “Ultimately, if that proves too difficult for the FAA to reconcile, we may end up having to move this whole job back to the office of the Secretary of Transportation.”

Sounds good to me.

As a side note, the congressman has provided me with a book blurb:

Mr. Simberg makes the compelling case that great deeds and great rewards require great risks, but NASA and my colleagues in Congress have become so risk averse in the arena of human spaceflight that we are incapable of accomplishing great deeds. America must have the stomach to let explorers and settlers willfully take on the kinds of risk necessary for opening the frontier of space to settlement under the rule of law. If we continue to overvalue that risk, or prohibit those who would willfully undertake it, then other nations, with no respect for human life, will be more than happy to fill that void. Left unchecked, the well-meaning, but misguided, group that promotes “safety at all cost” will continue to establish hard ceilings that we can’t break through, require the expense of immense amounts of time and money, and will ultimately cost us our preeminence in space. We must not cede the high ground of space to those who do not believe in freedom. And we must respect the freedom of those individuals who are willing to put it all on the line to head over that next hill – even when that hill is in space. Mr. Simberg’s book Safe Is Not An Option handles this sensitive issue with skill, grace, and tremendous insight.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher
Vice Chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology; and former Chairman of the Space Subcommittee

I have several others as well, which I’ll put up at the book’s web site, perhaps this week.

The Union Of Confused Scientists

…is apparently unacquainted with the difference between revenues and profits.

[Update a few minutes later]

And then there’s this:

The economic illiteracy continues, both at UCS and at Wired. “Fuel efficiency is really what’s going to put more money back in your pocket and put more money back in our communities,” Goldman tells Wired, and Newcomb worries that “very little of the remaining cash goes into the local economy.” Can we please lay aside the primitive superstition that in the developed world in the 21st century there is such a thing as the “local economy”? Let’s say we took the Brooklyn farm coop approach to gas, and a quaint little store on my corner had a oil well in the back, a DIY-refinery in the garage, and a hand-lettered chalkboard outside advertising its artisanal gas. The bearded hipster inside runs the whole thing. Local economy, right? But I assume he lives in a house or an apartment, which is bound to be made of concrete and steel not locally sourced. He probably has a cell phone and a computer and may even shop at Trader Joe’s or Whole Food or — angels and ministers of grace defend us! — Walmart, thus sending the money I spend at his shop far and wide. You know who has a “local economy”? North Koreans and hunter-gatherers. Autarky is no way to live. Somebody should explain comparative advantage and gains from trade to these gentlemen.

Idiots.