Thoughts from Brian Wang. Keith Henson has been pushing Skylon for this for some time. As noted in comments, for a project of that scale, it would probably make more sense to use lunar materials than to launch it all from earth.
Category Archives: Business
The Space Frontier Act
It’s nice to see bipartisan action on this useful bill, but I don’t see it as doing much about the frontier. And I’m glad that they’re finally taking OCST out of the FAA, something I’ve been advocating for a quarter of a century, ever since Gore buried it there.
The Latest NASA OIG Report
I haven’t read it yet, but I question the assumptions.
Coming Into Port
Pauline Acaline got some nice telephotos of JRTI and Mr. Steven coming into the port of Los Angeles after retrieving the latest Falcon 9 Block 5 and half of the fairing. It’s amazing how clean those rockets are coming back with the new design.
The Hollowing Out Of The American Dream
For generations, California’s racial minorities, like their Caucasian counterparts, embraced the notion of an American Dream that included owning a house. Unlike kids from wealthy families—primarily white—who can afford elite educations and can sometimes purchase houses with parental help, Latinos and blacks, usually without much in the way of family resources, are increasingly priced out of the market. In California, Hispanics and blacks face housing prices that are approximately twice the national average, relative to income. Unsurprisingly, African-American and Hispanic homeownership rates have dropped considerably more than those of Asians and whites—four times the rate in the rest of the country. California’s white homeownership rate remains above 62 percent, but just 42 percent of all Latino households, and only 33 percent of all black households, own their own homes.
In contrast, African-Americans do far better, in terms of income and homeownership, in places like Dallas-Fort Worth or greater Houston than in socially enlightened locales such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. Houston and Dallas boast black homeownership rates of 40 to 50 percent; in deep blue but much costlier Los Angeles and New York, the rate is about 10 percentage points lower.
Rather than achieving upward class mobility, many minorities in California have fallen down the class ladder. This can be seen in California’s overcrowding rate, the nation’s second-worst. Of the 331 zip codes making up the top 1 percent of overcrowded zip codes in the U.S., 134 are found in Southern California, primarily in greater Los Angeles and San Diego, mostly concentrated around heavily Latino areas such as Pico-Union, East Los Angeles, and Santa Ana, in Orange County.
The lack of affordable housing and the disappearance of upward mobility could create a toxic racial environment for California. By the 2030s, large swaths of the state, particularly along the coast, could evolve into a geriatric belt, with an affluent, older boomer population served by a largely minority service-worker class. As white and Asian boomers age, California increasingly will have to depend on children from mainly poorer families with fewer educational resources, living in crowded and even unsanitary conditions, often far from their place of employment, to work for low wages.
I would encourage Mike Schellenberger to work with the Cox campaign to oust Newsome and the entire corrupt “woke” CA establishment, by pointing out the insanity of the state’s energy policies, that hit minorities the hardest. A Cox win would be a political bombshell.
Happy Birthday To NASA
It’s sixty years old today.
I think it’s earned an early retirement.
[Via Gail Heriot, with the usual stupidity about “Muslim outreach” in the comments]
Regulating Space Activity
I oppose the Senate version of this bill.
I think that Commerce should be in charge, and I’ve said in the recent past, keep the FAA’s head in the clouds.
The First Block 5 Reuse
Take that, STS. When they demonstrate the one-day turn, that will be history making.
[Sunday-morning update]
Commenters are noting that the one-week turnaround was for the drone ship, not the booster.
Rejuvenating Brains
Why is that mice get all the fun? I guess they suffer a lot, too, though.
Congress Tells USAF To Consider Reusables
Eric Berger has the latest.
@SciGuySpace Part of that history was the idiotic policy in the early 90s of telling USAF to use expendables, and assigning reusables to NASA, which resulted in the disastrous X-33 and X-34 programs, which "proved" that reusables couldn't be done.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) July 27, 2018