I’m writing a paper that contains the following sentence: “Current reusable suborbital providers, such as XCOR Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, or Armadillo Aerospace, are likely to expand their performance envelopes into orbit over the next 10 to 15 years, driving prices down much closer to the marginal cost of propellant, which means potential prices of less than $100 per pound of payload to LEO.”
Can anyone find me a citation to substantiate this statement? I don’t really want to show my work in this document.
[Late evening update]
Ummmmm…folks in comments?
This is all fun, but I don’t need the argument — I know the argument. I need a citation of someone at least semi-credible who has made it, somewhere else.
Newt’s (and Rick Perry’s) attacks on Romney and Bain Capital are undermining the argument for limited government. They’re also giving ammunition to Obama in the fall if Romney is the nominee.
Does anyone from Boeing know the sequence of events of the formation of USA? At the time it was created, was it known that the company was going to purchase Rockwell’s space divisions, and were the legacy Rockwell people part of the new contract? USA was formed in September of 1996, I think, but the purchase didn’t occur until late in the year. I’m assuming that, since Rockwell wasn’t one of the initial parents, this must have been part of the purchase negotiations, but am curious to know how it all worked.
“So far this century, this is the biggest innovation in energy, in terms of scale and impact,” according to U.S. analyst Daniel Yergin, author of a classic history of the oil industry, “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power”, who emphasised that one-third of all the gas produced in the United States is already extracted from shale gas reserves.
…In Ramírez’s view, “the abundance and new distribution of reserves of shale gas and other non-conventional fossil fuels will affect predictions about the relationship between energy and the economy, and will have major geopolitical effects.
“An initial effect is that the largest and best discoveries are outside the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),” which will see its influence on the global energy market diminish in the long run, the expert said.
At the same time, Ramírez said, Russia will embark on the race to consolidate its position as a major global actor on the basis of its energy resources; Canada will emerge as a world oil power; and the United States, its supply secure, could feel freer from the vagaries of Middle East conflicts.
I’m not shilling for Amazon or any other successful online retailer here. My point is much more basic. Amazon neither invented nor appropriated its basic strategies from Best Buy or anyone else. It simply does what consumers want. Best Buy does what would be most convenient for the company for consumers to want but don’t, then crosses its fingers and prays. That’s not a strategy –- or not a winning strategy, in any case, now that retail consumers aren’t stuck with the store closest to home.
I’ve never liked Best Buy. It was a shame that they lost competition when Circuit City went under. My only real brick and mortar alternative now is Fry’s, which has its own problems.