A new, visionary video from ULA.
It’s great to see this kind of vision from a major player. Tory Bruno really seems to have shaken the place up. And compare this to the paltry offering from NASA. Also note: Look ma, no SLS!
Category Archives: Business
SpaceX
They had a successful static fire at Vandenberg, in preparation for the JASON 3 launch on Sunday, with the last existing version 1.1. We may go up to Lompoc this weekend to watch.
Meanwhile, they just released a new edit of the landing video from December.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here‘s the story on the static firing.
The Virgin Galactic Mess
It’s not at all clear to me that it’s in their interest to stir this pot of merde with a lawsuit. I have no trouble believing that they’ve been overhyping safety, because it’s always appeared to be the case to anyone who understands rocketry. For example:
Virgin also advertised the “simplicity and safety” of SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid motor, claiming that the nitrous oxide and rubber used in it were “both benign, stable as well as containing none of the toxins found in solid rocket motors.”
This is a straw man, since few, if any, have ever proposed solids for passenger vehicles (other than NASA).
Basically, Branson made some disastrous business and technical decisions a decade ago, and it’s coming back to haunt him on an ongoing basis.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related: An update on Spaceport America, who (along with the poor taxpayers of the two counties) was also sold a bill of goods by Branson.
Martian Concrete
They should be using nuclear for power, though, not solar.
Two Questions On Climate Change
Put me in the “Maybe/Yes” camp.
Beyond SpaceX
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?
A Spaceship Has Landed
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.
“Expert Climate Economists”
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.
Oil
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.
Corporate Profit Margins
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.”