GM…acknowledges that meeting customer and CAFE requirements is going to add to the cost of vehicles in the future and could put downward pressure on sales. The more advanced technologies, like fuel cells and batteries, face even bigger hurdles as neither one has yet proven commercially feasible and there is no guarantee that GM and its suppliers will be able to bring down the costs as hoped. Nonetheless, alternative propulsion systems will be GM’s top research priority going forward.
A non-Government Motors wouldn’t be doing such a nutty thing.
Why the bad economic news shouldn’t always (or ever, lately) be “unexpected“:
While our economy is enormously complicated, it seems reasonably clear that the current slump has turned into the “worst downturn since the Great Depression” precisely because of the ill-advised policies of the Obama administration. Those policies contradict the lessons of history, and there is no reason why their failure should be unexpected.
But “as any intelligent and informed person would have expected” doesn’t quite fit the media narrative.
Is that what the Merlin is? A little early to say, I’d say, but I think one could come up with some creative new vehicles using it in the lower stages and the R-10 up above. If I were in control of NASA R&T budgets, something I’d have done a long time ago was to pay Pratt to test them to destruction to determine how many restarts they could do and how many hours they could fire without refurbishment. If I were SpaceX, I’d be doing the same with Merlin. Perhaps they already are.
Speaking of rocket design, I see that the rocket scientists on the Hill have been sharpening their pencils. I guess that Bill Nelson not only flew into space once, but he must have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, too.
I know it’s more exciting than the prosaic reality, but someone needs to tell the copy editor at MSNBC that there is nothing in this article to indicate that SpaceShipTwo is going into space this fall. All it says is that they may start drop tests.
Which raises the question again — do they have an engine yet?
…that the president doesn’t read much. I’d be willing to bet that one of the things he hasn’t read is Hayek. Or Friedman. Or Sowell. If he had, he wouldn’t be such an economic ignoramus.
Only minutes after her department reported that payrolls had shed another 131,000 positions in July, there was Secretary Hilda Solis speaking brazenly of the “strong and immediate action” the White House had taken to save or create “more than 2.5 million American jobs.”
But as the market action showed, investors could see she didn’t know what she was talking about.
But then, Solis is no different from any number of administration officials who by their comments or actions demonstrate almost daily that they know nothing about creating jobs or anything else to improve the economy.
And why should they? There’s never been an administration led by so few people with any experience in the private sector — including the president, the vice president and even the treasury secretary, who last week wrongly called it a “myth” that raising taxes on high-income Americans would hurt small business.
I talked to Elon for half an hour or so last night, to make sure that I was getting the story straight on an article I’m writing for Popular Mechanics, but he didn’t really tell me anything that changed the relevant aspects of my story. It does, however, change the spin on the story that AvLeak did a few days ago, and they’ve provided a correction, based apparently on a similar conversation with him. It’s always possible to read too much into technical papers presented at professional conferences (not to mention retirement aspirations), and that seems to be what occurred here. SpaceX would like to build a heavy lifter, but they don’t see the market for it absent NASA interest, which sort of makes the point that I’ve always made — that it’s not affordable, or even necessarily the best way to do the exploration job. I am sure, though, that if NASA really needs a heavy lifter, funding SpaceX to build it is the most affordable option.
It turns out that the flight attendant who went nuts on the Jet Blue flight was gay.
I know you’re all as shocked as I am. Who ever heard of such a thing?
It reminds me of a piece that Mark Steyn wrote years ago, in which he noted that if you wanted to see the worst-dressed gay men in America, to take an airplane ride.