Category Archives: Business

A Tale Of Two Rockets

Stewart Money has some thoughts on SpaceX’s recent announcement:

The initial success of the Falcon 9 and the introduction of the Falcon Heavy are revolutionary enough. If over the coming years, however, SpaceX is able to successfully transition the Falcon to a fully reusable launch vehicle, then the stage on which the entire arena of space exploration is cast would be radically redrawn. Simply put, with the advent of a fully reusable Falcon series of rockets, a heretofore unforeseen level of space exploration becomes not simply more affordable, but in all likelihood, unavoidable. Once a permanent human presence on Mars is within practical reach, failure to pursue it, many will argue, becomes a moral transgression against humanity itself. To be sure, Musk’s vision of thousands of émigrés to a new world will have to wait on new, even larger rockets, but his company has a plan for that as well, beginning with a large staged combustion engine it wants to begin building next year.

While “within reach” does not mean “within grasp”, it certainly bears serious consideration from a space establishment about to consume the better part of a decade and plow, at an absolute minimum, the equivalent cost of 144 Falcon Heavy flights at 53 tons each into a single 70-ton launch by 2017. With a projected launch rate of no more than once per year, and the 130-ton super-heavy version of the SLS expected no earlier than 2032 and sporting a price tag almost certain to exceed $40 billion, it is not a stretch to believe that SpaceX has a better chance of achieving reusability with the Falcon than the Senate has of achieving orbit with the heavy version of its “monster” rocket.

Of course, they could both fail (it’s likely in the Senate’s case), but as he points out, even without reusability, SpaceX will be commercially dominant.

“The Other Man In My Marriage”

…was Steve Jobs.

I remember that Popular Electronics cover well. I was a subscriber, and I wanted one to play with, but couldn’t justify the money for it at the time (I had just been laid off from my job as a VW mechanic in the 1973 recession, and had decided to go back to school). I remember wondering what I would actually do with something that could only be programmed by toggle switches from a front panel in assemblermachine language.

Ashamed To Be From Michigan

Trust me, this doofus is not really representative of my home state. I love the way he points to his hand to show where Saginaw is.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sorting out the “extremists.”

“Extreme” is a funny word these days. It’s often used by mainstream news outlets to describe the tea parties and the tea-party-friendly caucus in the GOP.

For instance, when those hotheads in tricorn hats were trying to get the government to borrow slightly less than 40 cents for every dollar Washington spends, the conventional wisdom among enlightened liberals, the Obama administration, and the other usual suspects was that they were “extremists.”

Senate majority leader Harry Reid blasted said extremists as “heartless” for daring to suggest that the exploding federal debt might require cutting subsidies for “cowboy poets.”

Meanwhile, the sock-headed spokesman for the protesters wants to “overthrow the government.”

And yet, if you peruse LexisNexis, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone calling him or his more radical confreres “extremists.”

You also won’t hear them being called racists, even though the Occupy Wall Street movement is mostly white. Personally, I don’t think the racial composition of the “99 percenters” is relevant, but the fact that the tea partiers are mostly white has been cited time and again as evidence of nascent racism. After all, what other explanation could there be for a mass movement opposed to the first black president’s policies? (Never mind that the most popular tea-party politician these days is Herman Cain, who, in case you hadn’t noticed, is black.)

[Update later morning]

Protesters freak out when questioned by reporters.

It’s all about the narrative.