Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Space

Don’t Know Much About Launch Technology

8 Comments

Jonathan Coopersmith says that both Romney and Gingrich get it wrong on space policy. But he’s a little confused himself:

Rockets cost so much because most of their weight is fuel. Usually 1 percent or less of launch weight is the actual payload. Nor are rockets fully reliable. To launch a communications satellite into geosynchronous orbit demands an insurance premium of 10 percent or more for a single one-way trip! Contrast that to the premium for your car insurance.

Yet rockets have launched every satellite and space probe since Sputnik in 1957. The entire space infrastructure, governmental and private, has grown around building and launching rockets. What rockets have not and cannot do is make the cost of reaching orbit low enough that Gingrich’s lunar base could pass Romney’s financial test.

To truly encourage private enterprise in space a radical reduction of the cost to reach orbit must become a national priority. Several promising technologies, such as beamed energy propulsion and space elevators, could reduce the cost of entering space from $10,000 to as low as $100 a pound, radically changing the economics of spaceflight.

Ummmm…no. Rockets don’t cost so much because most of their weight is fuel. As Elon notes, the propellant costs for a Falcon 9 are less than half a percent of the total flight costs, and he expects to be able to get to a hundred dollars a pound of payload with the Falcon Heavy if he can get the flight rate up.

Coopersmith is right that we need to get launch costs down, and it’s probably worth spending some R&D on advanced technologies, but we don’t need them to get to a hundred dollars a pound. All we need are reusable vehicles operating at high flight rates.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Who Killed The Jobs?

18 Comments

Here’s a telling comment:

The drop in employment is unsurprising to those of us in the small business sector where 90% of jobs are created. In 2004 I helped start a company with two partners. We invested $500K of risk capital, put a traditional company infrastructure in place and eventually hired over a dozen people. Why? Because sentiment was positive, HSA plans were inexpensive, and growth a reality. After four years of solid growth, we sold our company to a public company, where we continued to work. In all that time, my proudest moments came from giving young people a career start in life. Many have gone on to work for places such as Symantec, Facebook and Wells Fargo. Today, my partners and I are independent, making good livings — solo. It makes ZERO economic sense for us to start a company again and employ people. The health plan we had is no longer available and coverage is twice as costly. The regulatory burdens are overwhelming and getting worse. We can see only risk on the horizon and little reward to justify that risk. So a dozen bright, talented 20somethings will likely never get the same chance to enter the private workforce.

Here are the two charts that say it all.

[Update a while later]

Some people aren’t seeing the comments at the Powerline post. I see them, but perhaps one has to be logged into Facebook to do so. A good reason not to use FB for comments. Anyway, at least that first comment is available for viewing here.