Category Archives: Business

Business, Political Commentary, Space

Our Space Policy Chickens

3 Comments

…have come home to roost. I’ve started blogging at Open Market.

[Evening update]

Can I call them, or what?

I wrote:

It will be interesting to see how those in Congress who have been demanding that NASA build a heavy-lift vehicle for which there is no mission with insufficient funding, while starving Commercial Crew, will respond. Judging by history, it will be with non sequiturs, and bashing of American enterprise by supposed conservatives and Republicans, such as Senator Shelby of Alabama (the senator from NASA Marshall Space Flight Center), Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas (the senator from Johnson Space Center), and Orrin Hatch of Utah (the senator from ATK, manufacturer of the giant Shuttle solid boosters that the Congress insists be used in the new launcher), or Science Committee Chairman (from Johnson Space Center) Ralph Hall.

Emphases mine. And Senator Hutchison responds on cue:

This failure underscores the importance of successful development of our own National capabilities and at the same time demonstrates the risks with having limited options for ISS supply and crew rotation. As we have already seen with the multi-year delay with commercial providers of cargo to the space station, the country would greatly benefit from the timely implementation of the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 and development of the Space Launch System (SLS) as a back-up system.”

She also dispatches this from Planet Hutchison:

“Last Friday NASA received the independent cost assessment for the SLS that was requested by OMB. OMB is expected to be briefed on the results of this assessment tomorrow. This additional independent cost assessment confirms what NASA officials have known for months: The NASA approach to human space flight is sound, achievable, and can be initiated within our currently constrained fiscal limitations.

Let me translate: “The independent cost assessment confirms that NASA’s own estimates are overoptimistic, and there is no way in this fiscal universe that Congress is going to provide enough funds to sustain this over the long haul, regardless of its merit (which is feebly little), but I’ll be out of here next year, so what do I care?”

Business, Space

Russian Space Screwups

26 Comments

The Progress launch scheduled to deliver supplies and propellant to ISS has failed. This is the second failure of a Russian launcher in a week — a Proton put a comsat in the wrong orbit on Friday.

I don’t know how big a problem this is for ISS, or when the next mission is scheduled. I assume they have a contingency plan, but it sure would be nice if SpaceX and Orbital can get operational soon. I think there will be a press conference in half an hour to discuss the situation.

[Update after press conference]
summary
Suffredini is saying that there’s plenty of margin for supplies, even if the next flight is delayed. I wonder if this will affect Soyuz launches?

[Update a few minutes later]

A summary of the presser from Keith Cowing:

Shortly after third stage ignition the spacecraft shut the engine down. The third stage and Progress subsequently crashed. Soyuz-FG (crew) and Soyuz-U (cargo) have similar third stage designs so this will have impact on the planned 22 September crew launch. We can go several months without a resupply vehicle if that becomes necessary. We have a 40-50 days of contingency beyond normal crew stay time. Eventually the Soyuz vehicle on orbit will ‘time out’ and have to come home. If the anomaly is solved the Progress flight in October could fly sooner.

Doesn’t sound like a crisis, but it would still be nice to get some American systems going.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I’m wondering if this had happened on a crewed launch, that they could have safely aborted?

[Update a few minutes later]

A couple more tweets from Jeff Foust: “Suffredini: agreement to fly up to 800 kg on SpaceX COTS C2/C3 flight, but had not been planning on using much of it.”
“Suffredini: not desirable, but could go through all of 2012 without CRS flights; hopeful at least one vehicle enters service next year.”

[Update a few minutes later]

This is really another demonstration of the folly of our space policy for the last half decade, when Mike Griffin took over. With the retirement of the Shuttle, and now this, we now have no, repeat no way to get astronauts to ISS. The ones there aren’t stranded — they can come back on the Soyuz that’s up there, but we can’t replace them until we resolve the issue with the Soyuz launcher. For an investment like this we should have redundant means of accessing it, and right now we have none, and even after we get it fixed, there will be no backup. If we had a sane policy we’d be doing everything possible to accelerate commercial crew. Instead, Congress wants to cut the funding for it, so they can feed it to a jobs program that has no hope of solving this problem for years, if ever.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, that was a short era:

“From today, the era of the Soyuz has started in manned space flight, the era of reliability,” the Russian space agency Roskosmos said in a statement.

Roskosmos expressed its admiration for the shuttle programme, which it said had delivered payloads to space indispensable for construction of the ISS.

“Mankind acknowledges the role of American space ships in exploring the cosmos,” it added.

But Roskosmos also used the occasion to tout the virtues of the Soyuz (Union) spacecraft, which unlike the shuttle lands on Earth vertically with the aid of parachutes after leaving orbit.

It said that there was a simple answer to why the Soyuz was still flying after the shuttles retired — “reliability and not to mention cost efficiency.”

It lashed out at what it said were foreign media descriptions of the Soyuz as old spaceships, saying the design was constantly being modernized.

Anyone want to take up a collection to have an order of crow delivered to Roscosmos?

[Update early afternoon]

A haiku:

Eating Crow

This was the era
Of reliability
Well so much for that

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

Is Higher Education Worth It?

2 Comments

A lot of it isn’t:

These estimates of high lifetime earnings levels make a common error: They assume that the current generation is going to get the same financial benefit from college that people did who graduated 40 years ago.

But things are different today. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 70% of all high school graduates go on to college — compared with 45% in 1960.

Then, only the brightest and best-prepared students attended college and the schools offered academically rigorous courses that prepared students for the future.

Now even middling high-schoolers attend college — and often learn very little. Then they enter a job market where a bachelor’s degree is relatively common — and must compete against many others for the same jobs.

Overpriced and underperforming, combined with government subsidies: thus are bubbles made.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Jumping The Broken Windows Shark

22 Comments

OK, so according to Paul Krugman, Alderaan should be the richest planet in the galaxy:

People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.

Well, if he means that if Washington had been destroyed, as I (jokingly) suggested (and some anticipated) earlier, he might have a point, but I doubt that’s what he means. I really think he’s serious.

[Wednesday morning update]

Krugman is claiming that he didn’t write it, and it was a case of identity theft.

[Update a few minutes later]

The identity thief ‘fesses up.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

The SLS Debate

15 Comments

Continues ad infinitum at NASA Watch, with the usual illogic from the usual suspects. This is a good analogy:

SLS is like Columbus postponing his voyages to try to build the world’s largest ship, using all the funds available to him for many years to do so. Instead of outfitting three modestly-sized ships with the crew and provisions to set out as soon as he can, Columbus spends many years to build an enormous ship. Meanwhile, no exploration is done. And Columbus makes sure the shipbuilding employs lots of people in key cities in Spain for political reasons, instead of designing the ship as efficiently as possible. In the end, the English beat Columbus to the New World because by the time Columbus finishes his ship, he can’t afford the crew or provisions for it, and the costs of simply maintaining the ship while it sits in its harbor are too high.

It reminds me of the story of Don Miguel de Grifo.

This is another good analogy:

Building SLS is like re-creating Saturn V without doing the rest of the Apollo program at the same time. It would result in SLS being cancelled, just as Saturn V was, for cost reasons, but without ever flying anything useful, because we weren’t doing another Apollo at the same time.

The only programs that could possibly use SLS would be hugely expensive and take a long time to develop. So if we finished SLS without working on the programs that would use SLS at the same time, we’d end up with a hugely expensive SLS draining money for many years before the payloads could possibly be ready, even if by some miracle all that huge amount of money appeared from somewhere (the Apollo program budgets were far greater, as a share of GDP, than NASA’s current budgets).

But some people just can’t get it. I can understand why rent-seeking senators want to fund this jobs program, but I don’t understand why any sensible space enthusiast does. But then, I guess that question answers itself, doesn’t it?

Business, Space

Seven Suborbital Spaceships

3 Comments

Here’s the story that I pitched to Popular Mechanics last week, but Michael Belfiore beat me to it. Oh, well, he probably did a better job than I would have, anyway. I see now that Near Space isn’t really suborbital — it’s a high-altitude balloon ride. Good for extended upper atmospheric research, not so good for weightlessness.