Category Archives: Business

The Golden Spike Architecture

Here is a technical description. I’m reading through it now, so perhaps comments later.

[Update a while later]

Sorry, link is fixed now.

[Update late morning]

OK, I skimmed it. As one would expect, there’s a trade off between development costs and ops cost with regard to lander reusability. Ultimately, to get to low marginal costs, we have to not throw hardware away. I also wonder how much it would take to make the Centaur reusable over a period of months or years. They’ve got a start on it with the refueling scenario. Eventually, if one is getting propellant from the moon, that would make sense. I would have liked to see a trade between LLO and EML-1 or EML-2, though. It looks to me like they settled on LLO early on.

I’m amused that they have to defend their costs as being “too low.” They look high to me (a hundred million for training?), but I have vastly different expectations about these things.

The Entitlement State

…has begun to eat its own:

The biggest federally funded program (Medicaid) is competing directly with the next-biggest set of programs (education). State politicians are now squeezed between the two most voracious (and unionized) constituencies in American politics: the education blob, and the health care/AARP/provider complex. They will want a way out; otherwise, they’re toast. And the only way out is interposition to Obamacare.

When something can’t go on, at some point, it doesn’t.

Golden Spike

It’s a half hour until the press conference. They’ve put up this promotional video:

Here‘s the Twitter feed.

[Update a few minutes before the conference is due to begin]

Charlie Martin has a scoop interview with Alan Stern.

[Update at 2 PM EST]

Adam Mann has more over at Wired.

[Via Brian Doherty]

[Update a couple minutes later]

Joel Achenbach has the story at the WaPo as well.

[Update a few minutes in]

Jeff Foust is tweeting from the press conference. So is Alan Boyle.

[Update a while later]

Looks like the company web site has finally gone live.

[Update a while later]

OK, party seems to be over, with a lot of questions remaining. Impressive board, technical architecture described, potential customer interest, but they need to raise billions of dollars.

I personally know almost everyone on the board, FWIW.