Category Archives: Business

Business, Political Commentary, Space

It’s D-Day

3 Comments

For a sensible space program:

This week members of the House of Representatives are trying to steal away your space frontier future, just to preserve the Space-States’ status quo. Contrary to the White House’s request and recommendations of the Augustine Commission, Representative Bart Gordon’s proposed NASA Authorization Bill slashes commercial space by 95%, reducing it to $250 million over 5 years instead of the proposed $6 billion over five years. The House version of the “NASA Irrelevancy Act of 2010″ also adds extremely heavy restrictions to commercial crew spending, designed to delay the program’s start.

Congressional ostriches seem willing to sacrifice practical, innovative exploration today for the possibility of Apollo-redux tomorrow. Friends of commercial space, now is the time to call Chairman Gordon, as well as the other members of the House Science Committee, to say, “Please restore the President’s funding level for commercial crew, have the House Committee postpone a vote, and go back to the drawing board to put together a sustainable plan that makes sense for NASA and the nation!” The Committee Representatives’ phone numbers are listed below.

My congressperson isn’t on the committee, but if yours is, call them.

Spasibo, House authorization committee. The Russians will love you.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

As Dave Weigel Was To Conservatives

9 Comments

So is Steve Pearlstein to businessmen.

I heard that interview in the car, and was just shaking my head. How is it that someone this clueless about business and businessmen covers them as his beat? Just another reason that the legacy media is going down the tubes. As one commenter noted, that interview could have come right from Atlas Shrugged.

Via Instapundit, and yes, Amity Shlaes’ history of the Depression makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than any others I’ve read of it.

Business, Space

Flying On Its Own?

5 Comments

I’m getting well-sourced indications that the first SpaceShipTwo drop test will occur today, and that they’re taxiing in Mojave.

[Update a few minutes later]

They may be having problems. The vehicle is reportedly out on the apron, but all the engines have been shut down.

[Thursday morning update]

Well, whatever the problem was yesterday, they seem to have fixed it.

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Land Of Obama

23 Comments

Leads the way to fiscal meltdown:

The state of Illinois — broke, overleveraged, and still refusing to get its accounts in order — is up to something interesting: selling bonds to meet its pension obligations. As one of the many states that refuse to set aside adequate money to fund its public-employee pensions, Illinois is headed to the debt markets to raise $3.7 billion for pension liabilities to get it through the year. This is a double dip: In January, Illinois sold $2.4 billion in bonds for pension obligations. Actually, make that a triple dip: It sold $10 billion in bonds to fund its pension liabilities in 2003. “States don’t traditionally fund their pensions with debt,” says CNN in a nice bit of understatement, “but the practice frees up other money that can be used for operations.” The double whammy here is that Illinois’s pensions are in trouble because it already spent the money it needed for its pension contributions in past years on other spending: Which is to say, Illinois is borrowing money it will have to repay eventually to repay the pension money it already spent to pay for other spending it couldn’t afford then and can’t afford now. If you’re wondering where Barack Obama developed his fiscal finesse, you don’t have far to look.

And wasn’t it nice of them to send him to Washington where he can do the same thing to the rest of us?

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

The Big Green Lie

26 Comments

Exposed:

Greens who feared and climate skeptics who hoped that the rash of investigations following Climategate and Glaciergate and all the other problems would reveal some gaping obvious flaws in the science of climate change were watching the wrong thing. The Big Green Lie (or Delusion, to be charitable) isn’t so much that climate change is happening and that it is very likely caused or at least exacerbated by human activity. The Big Lie is that the green movement is a source of coherent or responsible counsel about what to do.

The greens claim to be diagnosticians and therapists: that they can both name the disease and heal it. They are wrong. The attitudes and political vision of a group of NGO pressure groups may work when it comes to harassing Japanese whale ships in the Antarctic; this vision and these people come up short when set against the challenge of moderating the impact of human industrial activity on the earth’s climate system.

They come up short in many areas.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Obama Is Not A “Socialist”

9 Comments

Technically speaking, anyway:

I’ve already commented on this issue twice, remarking that Obama technically is a fascist, but that it is much better to call him a statist or corporatist. But there is the tricky issue of whether a word should be defined by experts (to the extent economists are experts on anything) or whether it is more appropriate to accept the common understanding of what a word means. I don’t have a firm opinion on that issue, but if socialism now means someone who believes in lots of government intervention and redistribution, then Obama is a socialist (heck, Bush also would be a socialist). But if we stick with the official definition, which involves government ownership of the means of production, then Obama has relatively few policies that meet that standard.

He does have a Marxist outlook, though (as all true fascists do).

[Update a few minutes later]

Why Obama is failing. Because he lied his way into office:

…we were lied to about this by Obama and the MSM winked. Yet it was a far more significant lie than Clinton’s proclamations about Monica Lewinsky, which only peripherally affected affairs of state and were obviously the desperate acts of a man caught cheating. Obama’s prevarication was about the very essence of his political views. Widely desirous of electing its first black president — I felt this myself but did not act upon it — the nation gulped and swallowed the lie, but, consciously or unconsciously, it did not forget.

Now we are where we are. We have a president that no one wants to listen to because we do not fully believe him. His own party is deserting him not just because they know his ideas are unpopular. They also know he is unable to convince anyone. We have shut him off.

The irony, of course, is that his biggest supporters, who still continue to support him — young people and blacks — are being hurt the most by his policies.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Which Senator?

51 Comments

…will save the space program from a Shuttle-derived parasite eating up all the technology funding?

This bill, however, will probably not get very far. Note Jim Muncy’s comment to the NASA Watch item:

Fortunately, most authorization bills can’t proceed in the Senate without unanimous consent. Which means one Senator can stop this monstrosity.

We continually hear about how “The” Congress is opposed to the Administration’s plan for NASA. However, most all of the vocal opposition to the plan has come from a limited number of Congresspersons protecting Constellation related projects in their states and districts. They deliberately biased the hearing witness panels to eliminate voices of independent support for the administration’s plan.

I’m thinking maybe Sam Brownback.

As a commenter somewhere (maybe over at Space Politics?) said, the key to settling space isn’t going farther now — it’s reducing the cost of access and making it routine. Commercial crew will do that for LEO, and the new technology development programs will do it for beyond. And heavy lift, particularly a Shuttle-derived version, will just continue to delay the day that we become spacefaring, as the falsely perceived need for it has done for forty years.

[Update a few minutes later]

What is Bill Nelson thinking?

A draft of the bill, obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, was presented to NASA last week by the committee, chaired by Florida Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson. So far the White House has not commented on the bill, but several Florida Space Coast leaders have expressed concern about its impact here.

Of particular concern is the fact that Nelson — Florida’s main space supporter — would take away billions of dollars from commercial rocket and technology development that over the next decade would have diversified the aerospace industry in Florida and provided KSC with new jobs and prestige.

…Frank DiBello, the president of Space Florida, the state’s aerospace development body, is not pleased. “We don’t want to sacrifice Florida seed corn for an increased R&D role to be politically expedient and save jobs for Utah and other states,” DiBello told a Brevard County jobs-development meeting Saturday.

“The Senate bill kills outright the promise of a real R&D opportunity for KSC. It’s not good for Florida. I don’t know who Bill Nelson is listening to, but it’s not his constituents,” DiBello said.

Of course, the question itself is generous in its assumption that there is any cognition at all going on here. Bill Nelson has never struck me as the sharpest tack in a drawer of pretty dull ones, and this is just more evidence of it.

Business, Space

The Long Fall Of Rocketplane

19 Comments

Some thoughts on the lessons of space investing, from Jeff Foust.

Fortunately, the situation that Jeff describes is starting to change. I think that VCs are starting to get interested now. The situation at NASA, where the agency is openly supportive of commercial (as opposed to the past, in which it was hostile, and often told investors doing due diligence not to waste their money) is one factor that may be helping.