It’s hard to believe that Doug Messier has been blogging for nine years. But in order for him to continue, he needs some help.
All posts by Rand Simberg
Vulcan And AR1
Boeing and Lockmart still seem on board with the new rocket development, despite Congressional idiocy. Of course, they know that the only way to survive against SpaceX is to build a new rocket.
Outer Space
The manifesto of the committee to abolish it.
To be honest, I had never previously realized how terrible outer space is.
Great Moments In Socialism
[Late-morning update]
Related: Five economic myths that will not die.
A lot of economics is counterintuitive to many.
Luxurious College Apartments
When people ask why college tuition is so high, defenders of the higher-education system point to things like “Baumol’s cost disease” (costs in industries without much productivity growth tend to rise, because they have to compete for labor with more productive industries) and declining state contributions to public colleges. No doubt these play a part. But this cannot explain the vast upgrades in college residential amenities that have taken place in the 20 years since I graduated from college, when a student union and some ivy on the walls was about the best you could expect.
But of course, our parents were paying for it, and they didn’t care whether we had a swimming pool. A certain Spartan element was supposed to be part of the ritual of college attendance, just as it had been when they were in college. What changed? I suspect the answer is that rising tuition, and the increasing reliance on student loans, has placed more of the financial responsibility into the hands of students. And the students shop for colleges based on … well, about what you’d expect when you give tens of thousands of dollars to 18-year-olds and ask where they’d like to spend the next four years.
This is policy insanity.
Blue Origin
Several journalists seem to have gotten a personal tour from Jeff Bezos yesterday. Here’s Jeff Foust’s story. Things seem (finally) to be ramping up. I’d say they’re now solidly in the lead in the suborbital race, but they’re also going to orbit.
[Update a couple minutes later]
And here’s Ken Chang’s story. I’m sure that Alan Boyle and Eric Berger will have their own takes. Wish I’d known about it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Chang’s take is more detailed. I found this amusing:
Currently, most rocket companies launch, at most, about a dozen times a year. “You never get really great at something you do 10, 12 times a year,” Mr. Bezos said. With a small fleet of reusable New Shepard rockets, Blue Origin could be launching dozens of times a year.
NASA proposes to launch SLS once every couple of years. Insane.
[Update a while later]
Here’s Eric Berger’s take. He has more detail about the BE-4 and its implications for the RD-180 issue.
OLEDs
I hadn’t realized that lifetime was a problem for organic LEDs, but if it was, this appears to be a big breakthrough.
The Space-Policy White Paper
Keith Cowing has some thoughts, with which I largely agree. This was clearly a compromise, in which the SLS/Orion supporters and Commercial Crew supporters agreed to come together to support each others’ programs, and present a united front. Unfortunately for the former, one program makes sense, and the other doesn’t. At some point, it will die, but not before billions more are wasted on it.
On The Radio
I did a show this morning with Jim Muncy and Paul Sutter at the NPR affiliate in Columbus, OH. I thought it went pretty well.
When Glaciers Are Sexist
I think we’ve come to the point at which academia is just one huge case of Poe’s Law.