Category Archives: Business

New Space 2011 Begins

Jim Muncy is the first speaker, to open the conference; he is be introducing first Pete Worden, director of NASA Ames, who will introduce Lori Garver, Deputy Administrator.

Critical time for the opening of space from the home planet. Every generation thinks of itself as a critical time, but there are times when humanity is going down a slow-moving river and times it is riding rapids. Things are more critical and challenging right now, not because of any particular things that it going on, but the totality. Debate over what kind of program is part of it, first Dragon flight is part of it, work going on Mojave and Mesquite, Texas and Colorado party of it. Have friends inside and outside of NASA as committed to this frontier revolution as we are, including Pete Worden, who has been associated with more successful technology programs than anyone he knows.

Worden: Agrees with Jim that it is perhaps the most exciting time to be involved with the space program. Has great confidence in our society and thinks that the goals that SFF has been pushing are being adopted. On the verge of humanity’s permanent expansion into the solar system and beyond. Will only happen once in history, and this country is leading it, with the help of technologies being developed by NASA, but it will only happen if the private sector is involved. Sees that happening, and proud to be helping make it happen. Noting that Ames was part of the NACA, and wants to see NASA carry on in that tradition. Introducing Lori Garver, as long-standing friend and colleague, and now his boss and leading in many of these areas.

Lori notes that the notion that she is Pete’s boss is comical — Pete has never had a boss. When she and Pete met at National Space Society the goal was to create a space-faring civilization. NASA only has a subrole in that, but we are all involved in doing it. Proud that we have a space station that has been permanently occupied for over a decade, and that’s the beginning of a space-faring civilization. NASA’s role in expanding beyond is important, but not as important as what everyone else here is doing.

Telling the story of being in a cab with Rick Tumlinson on the Hill, when he told her that NSS was too beholden to NASA and the industry, and that he was going to start a new organization (twenty years ago), and the organization has come a long way since. Throwing away her speech that they wrote for her because she is with family. What they asked her to talk about was what was happening inside the agency about commercial space, but is instead going to give a policy sense of how that fits in to the new direction. Wants to return to the NACA role, in which NASA doesn’t compete with the private sector, but helps create and open new markets. But their job is also to expand farther, to reach for new heights and learn new things to benefit humankind. Includes aeronautics, space science and earth science. In her view, humankind has to expand and settle to survive.

NASA wants to nurture suborbital, and worked hard to get CRuSR program going to help reduce the costs of getting to and from suborbital space, as a stepping stone to reducing costs to orbit. If fewer tax dollars can be used on launch, more resources available for payloads.

Orbital space flight is a key market for NASA, to help bring down those costs. NASA is doing their own research on station, but need to open it up to others, and NASA not necessarily the best to recognize what’s most valuable.

85% of NASA’s dollars have always gone to the private sector — only difference is how they want to spend it, to encourage more private investment and innovation. Not just commercial crew. Sabotier is how they get water on ISS, and they negotiated a contract that was based on how much water they get. Now anchor tenant for cargo and crew on ISS, which will reduce costs both for the taxpayer and for non-government users.

Telling story of when she was a consultant to Fisk Ventures, interested in working on microgravity research on ISS. Invested millions of his own money, and worked with NASA for over two years to get a cooperative IR&D agreement. By the time he actually flew, the experiment was on Columbia… Will want to call him again when they can get the time down from two years to two weeks.

Noting that the new direction is not political, that it’s ridiculous to think that Obama did this to help himself next year. Would have been politically easier to maintain the status quo, even though it was headed over a cliff.

Has bipartisan support for new direction with NASA authorization bill. NASA’s job isn’t settlement, but NASA will be able to help much more as we do it.

Thrilled to be at Vesta now. Why an asteroid as the next human destination? To go to Mars, need to develop long-duration technologies, more affordable than another lunar mission. Not about setting goals and dates that cannot be met. But can we go in 2025? Just got a briefing from a company yesterday that said 2019.

Grew up wanting to leave the planet, and has attempted it on her own, but that’s not why she does it. Glad to be part of the march of civilization, and as Pete said, to be here at this unique time. ISS is good, but not enough, but we will go further. It is a challenging time. We don’t get to pick out times. What’s it like to be at NASA now? It’s a tough time to leave such an amazing program as the Shuttle and set our sights on the farther horizon. Can’t pick your time any more than you can choose when your kids will be teenagers. You have helped get us to this point, and thanking for all the work to date.

Muncy: How can we help?

Placing what we’re doing in the larger picture is important. Get into debates about what the rocket will look like, but the important thing is how to do this without wiping out the budget. Yes, people lose their jobs during change, but we need to show that we’ll create new jobs, not on the back of the American taxpayer. New course in space is to be successful not just for time being or next five years, but longer term.

Muncy, as she leaves the stage: “In case you don’t know, Lori is a true revolutionary.”

[Update a few minutes later]

Too busy to take notes now, but the conference is actually being streamed at SpaceVidCast.

Time To Raise Taxes

on the poor:

Distressingly, neither the president nor the Democrats offer any rigorous account of the optimal level of tax progressivity. Rather, the president seems to think that no matter how high the current marginal tax rates, the correct social policy is to move them upward. As such, he cannot explain why the top marginal tax rate for the rich should not approach 100 percent as they accumulate more and more wealth. After all, why not push the limits if efforts to redistribute wealth do not at some point impede its creation?

My view is the polar opposite of Obama’s. I believe, now more than ever, that the optimal level of progressivity in the system is zero, so that today’s marginal adjustments in taxes should increase taxes on those on the bottom half of the income distribution. To explain why, let us start with the premise that the defenders of any progressive tax have to give some principled account of the optimal degree of tax progressivity. They have to identify which of the infinite number of progressive tax schedules they embrace, and then explain why it is best.

They can’t. It’s all about “fairness,” not rationality or revenue. Or preventing the country from going into a tipping point of entitlement.

[Update a while later]

Are we having a Gettysburg moment in the long cold civil war?

If so, I hope that the Republicans continue to press their advantage, as Meade didn’t.

The “Adult In The Room”

…has blown up a bi-partisan plan. Because reelection is more important to him than saving the economy, or country.

[Update a few minutes later]

Our petulant and inept president.

It’s a bad combination. And I think that more and more people are starting to recognize it.

[Tuesday morning update]

Is Barack Obama a has been? I think he’s a never was, and people are finally starting to figure it out.

[Update a few minutes later]

Thoughts on the Obama plan:

As the president faced the nation on Monday evening, he knew his economic legacy was on the line. Historians will judge him for his economic stewardship.

The assessment will not be good. Going deep into his presidential term, he presides over a country that suffers from high unemployment, record home foreclosures, and a no-growth economy. But when the most pivotal issue of our decade emerged — a $16.8 trillion debt crisis — where was the “Obama plan”?

The sad truth is there is no Obama plan and there never has been a plan. The president gingerly approached the debt crisis as he has approached other issues: intellectually, coolly, passively, and with great detachment.

Bill Clinton never had a plan to balance the budget, either. It didn’t happen until the Republicans took over. But not having grown up a red-diaper baby, he was more ideologically flexible than Barack Obama.

[Update mid morning]

Remembering the golden age of Clinton. Accurately, unlike the Democrats who think that the boom was a result of tax increases.

Going Galt

The government’s war against business, energy and jobs continues:

I got a permit to open up an underground coal mine that would employ probably 125 people. They’d be paid wages from $50,000 to $150,000 a year. We would consume probably $50 million to $60 million in consumables a year, putting more men to work. And my only idea today is to go home. What’s the use? I don’t know. I mean, I see these guys — I see them with tears in their eyes — looking for work. And if there’s so much opposition to these guys making a living, I feel like there’s no need in me putting out the effort to provide work for them. So as I stood against the wall here today, basically what I’ve decided is not to open the mine. I’m just quitting. Thank you.

As some have already noted, for some people Atlas Shrugged is a cautionary tale, for others it’s a how-to manual.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Actually, there are parallels on other fronts as well:

“As federal criminal statutes have ballooned, it has become increasingly easy for Americans to end up on the wrong side of the law. Many of the new federal laws also set a lower bar for conviction than in the past: Prosecutors don’t necessarily need to show that the defendant had criminal intent. . . . The U.S. Constitution mentions three federal crimes by citizens: treason, piracy and counterfeiting. By the turn of the 20th century, the number of criminal statutes numbered in the dozens. Today, there are an estimated 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, according to a 2008 study by retired Louisiana State University law professor John Baker. There are also thousands of regulations that carry criminal penalties. Some laws are so complex, scholars debate whether they represent one offense, or scores of offenses. Counting them is impossible. The Justice Department spent two years trying in the 1980s, but produced only an estimate.” Yet we retain the fiction that everyone is supposed to know the law.

From the book: “There’s no way to rule innocent men… When there aren’t enough criminals, one declares so many things to be a crime… that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”

We really are living it, and she really was prophetic.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems related, somehow: the Anglosphere, before the lights went out.

Is The Left Right?

Claire Berlinski is suffering a little cognitive dissonance.

My brief response, without a lot of deep thought. I can’t speak for Europe, which never had anything resembling our Constitution and Bill of Rights, but I think that the biggest flaw of the Founders was in failing to recognize the apparently ductility of the Commerce Clause, which has basically rendered the 9th and 10th amendments moot. They also perhaps didn’t anticipate the degree to which the courts might come to aid and abet to that end. But at bottom, it is not a failure of freedom, but a failure to adhere to the original intent of the Constitution to limit government.