Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Propellant Depots

35 Comments

Over at Aviation Week, Frank Morring says the NASA studies continue:

Michael Gazarik, NASA’s space technology program director, says that CPST and the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket currently under development are complementary technologies. “To explore deep space we need a heavy-lift vehicle — SLS — and we need this technology. We need to be able to demonstrate how to handle cryogenic fluids in space.”

He has to say that. It’s literally politically incorrect to say anything else, and will be until SLS dies. But the reality is that propellant storage on orbit is essential to spacefaring. Heavy lift is not.

[Update a while later]

And…the empire strikes back. A piece defending SLS/BMR by Mike Griffin and Scott Pace, over at Space News. Will I have a response? You bet. Stay tuned.

[Update a while later]

Here is one point (though there are others) that I will really pound on:

The challenge for fuel depots is simply that the marginal specific cost of payload to orbit is generally lower for larger launch vehicles. There may be exceptions, but the trend is clear.

There are at least two avenues of attack. What mine will be is left as an exercise to the students. Oh, and initial link fixed. Sorry.

[Late evening update]

Clark Lindsey has started to rebut, and it’s a good start. But there are a lot more fish in that barrel…

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Few Words For #OWS

7 Comments

…from Bill Whittle.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Left’s war on self reliance (not a permalink).

[Update a couple minutes later]

They are the one percent:

Many “Occupy Wall Street” protesters arrested in New York City reside in more luxurious homes than some of their rhetoric might suggest, a Daily Caller investigation has found.

And what did the arrest records of all those Tea Party members reveal? Oh, wait! There aren’t any.

The Tea Party is a political movement. #OWS is a crime wave.

[Update late morning]

Lifestyles of the rich and arrested — a slideshow of homes of the “99%.”

[Bumped]

Hey, remember how Queen Nancy told us that the Tea Party was just astroturf, not a real grass-roots movement? Well, ACORN has been busted:

…an activist named Channing, who has been at the Occupy Wall Street protests from the beginning, volunteers the information that the former ACORN organization–through its new front group, New York Communities for Change–is paying $10 per hour and $100 per day to homeless people to attend the demonstrations.

It’s such a popular protest among the disaffected, they have to be paid to attend. And I wonder where ACORN is getting the money? From the 53%?

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Latest Warm-Monger Scam

2 Comments

Some thoughts:

Here’s what interest me: why do the journalists and professors so fervently believe in things they cannot possibly verify on their own?

Well, they believe in the “scientists.” But why? Are all scientists always right? Of course not; the definition of science is that new information and ideas are constantly refining or overturning old verities. The definition of science is that scientists are sometimes wrong, or will be at some point.

What if it’s a class thing? Instapundit has a link to an essay class warfare within the New Class. “OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.”

This seems to me to be the same thing. Journalists who are not scientists, or professors who are not climate scientists, identify with the Knowledge Class: the technologists and researchers.

The phrase “the science is settled” is the very antithesis of science. But these people don’t really understand science.