…is falling apart.
Category Archives: Business
Commercial Crew Budgets
The current state of play. This is disturbing:
Bolden has acknowledged in congressional testimony, most recently in an April 25 hearing of the Senate Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee, that without a fully funded Commercial Crew Program, the agency may have to pick only one aspiring provider to fund.
That could happen as soon as next summer, when NASA plans to award the next round of Commercial Crew funding.
They make it sound like he’s issuing a threat when that’s exactly what Congress wants them to do. If I were Bolden (or rather, if I were administrator — obviously if I were Bolden I’d do what Bolden would do), I’d be figuring out a way to avoid the down select with a smaller budget. But if I were administrator, a lot of things would be done differently.
Black Carbon
Is it a problem for suborbital spaceflight? The article says “space tourism,” but there will be a lot more applications than that.
The problem is that, like most “climate science,” we don’t really know. But if it is an issue, I suspect that it’s a worse one for Virgin than for XCOR, at least based on pictures of the plumes of both, and the solution to it would be LOX/hydrogen.
ObamaCare And Job Growth
It’s slowing it.
Shocking, I know.
Dream Chaser
There’s an article on Sierra Nevada’s upcoming drop tests at Dryden, in which Yours Truly is cited, at the Denver Post.
Interview With Elon
By Michelle Fields, at NextGen TV.
The IRS Scandal
The real one, not the ones being promulgated by leftist journalists ignorant of the law:
The real scandal is that all these complicated tax rules exist. If we would just eliminate the corporate income tax, then people could organize groups, or not, just as they please. And the IRS would not be in the position of deciding what counts as excessive political activity.
Yes. The corporate income tax is an abomination, on many levels, and one of the causes of slowed economic growth.
Swarthmore
This war on fossil fuels is economically insane.
ObamaCare
I suspect that as the administration’s credibility continues to unravel from all of the scandals, its signature achievement will be viewed even more skeptically, and be more amenable to simply being repealed, along with the rest of its misbegotten “achievements.”
Wayne Hale
…is looking for input on his upcoming Congressional testimony. Here’s my suggestion: Tell them that they worry too much about mission safety, and too little about actually opening up and developing space.