Ten other space companies to watch this year.
I’m pretty sure that XCOR’s hangar isn’t over ten thousand feet long. I also think he overstates the difficulties with getting a payload on the ISS. Nanoracks has made that pretty painless. I wonder why he didn’t mention VG, which is rolling out the new SS2 next month?
Over at The Space Review, Jeff Foust has the story of Spacex’s return to flight before Christmas, and Sam Dinkin looks into the economics of reusability.
Are apparently morons:
When asked at what date climate change will have a net negative impact on the global economy, the median survey response was 2025. In the recent past, climate change likely had a net positive impact on the global economy, due primarily to the effect of carbon fertilization on crops and other plant life. However, even contrarian economists agree, when accounting for the vulnerability of poorer countries to climate impacts, global warming has been hurting the global economy since about 1980.
The NYU survey asked when the economic benefits we experienced up to 1980 would be completely wiped out; 41% of respondents said that’s already happened. Another 25% answered that it would happen within a decade, and 26% said we’d see net negative economic impacts by 2050. If we continue with business-as-usual pollution and warming, on average the experts predicted a GDP loss of about 10% by the end of the century, and that there would be a 20% chance of a “catastrophic” loss of one-quarter of global GDP.
There is no scientific evidence to believe any of this.
Thanks to technology, we’re not going to run out of it.
Nope. “Peak oil” was always a myth. We’ll replace it with something else long before we run out, just as we did with whale oil.
The public thinks it’s 36% on average. This kind of ignorance and innumeracy is why they think we can solve our fiscal problems by “taxing the rich.”
…but no one does anything about it.
Well, OK, hardly anyone talks about it, either.
We’re still not there.
But we are (finally, no thanks to Congress) getting closer.
Bob Zimmerman has some thoughts:
Overall, Rogozin’s comments suggest that there is a great deal of confusion within Putin’s government on what to do in space. On one hand he says they want to do it cheaper. On the other he says they want to build a very expensive rocket. Then with his third hand he adds that they still plan to go to the Moon, but also took out his fourth hand to note that their goal is not the Moon or Mars, but doing things cheaper.
I’m encouraged that they want to copy us in our folly of building a giant rocket. It will hold them back just as it does us.
Judith Curry says we can’t understand climate without understanding the underlying natural cycle. And we don’t.
It’s insane to be making policy decisions on the basis of our current state of knowledge.
[Update a while later]
“Science journalists are not science advocates, and scientists are not science.”
Yes, scientists are not science. Corollary: There is no such thing as a "science denier." https://t.co/WCPG64bmNu
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) December 30, 2015
As long as we have prices, the government will have a budget. And reducing the interest rate on loans with a high delinquency rate compared to other loans means that we will have less money to do something else. Giving people free tuition will also mean that the government will have less money to do something else — a lot less money. Sanders tries to deal with this problem by conjuring hundreds of billions worth of imaginary tax revenue out of thin air, but alas, the actual president will have to find real money, taken from some other use. Is subsidizing the folks who are going to end up as the best-off members of society really what we would choose to use that money for?
He was told there would be no economics.
[Update a while later]
Bernie Sanders: The economics of a toddler, and the ethics of a thug.
In other words, a typical leftist.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Sort of related: A liberal professor has given up on academia.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Last link was broken, fixed now.