Armadillo has reportedly given exclusive marketing rights for suborbital passenger flight to Space Adventures. I’m not sure that’s a great idea — it might restrict the market somewhat if others, like Incredible Adventures, can’t sell them as well. I wonder what they got for it.
Category Archives: Business
What Is Obama’s Motive In Space?
Brian Micklethwait tries to figure it out. I think he’s overthinking it, myself. I agree with this commenter:
Obama doesn’t believe in space exploration and doesn’t care about it. He is uninterested. Therefore he doesn’t attempt to manage it or fix it the only way he knows – by state management. He is willing to leave it alone, to ignore it, to stay away from it. He cares about social policy (“spreading the wealth”) – space has nothing to do with this. It’s not his cup of tea.
It doesn’t really matter. The policy is what it is. Now we have to fight to get it implemented, and unfortunately, that means (ironically) a fight with people who should be supporting it if they were true to their own principles.
The Insurance Mandate
If the court upholds this odious legislation, it will have effectively removed all limits on federal government power. Which of course would be just fine with the totalitarians who voted for it.
Where Is The Outrage?
Suppose that, a week before the Congress voted on whether or not to authorize military force, a document had been generated that showed there were no WMD in Iraq. Suppose further that it was reported that the Pentagon had sat on it, and not released it until weeks after the vote. And when asked why, the explanation was “we didn’t want to influence the vote.” Then, a Pentagon official comes out and denies that it was deliberately withheld, though the record clearly shows that the information was known by the defense secretary prior to the vote.
Imagine the howls from the Democrats and the press, and calls for firings and impeachment, and demands for a new vote.
Substitute health care reform for Iraq, HHS for Pentagon, and “will cost much more than advertised” for “no WMD,” and that’s exactly what has happened.
[crickets chirping…]
The Continuing Lie
No, Virginia, there was no deregulation.
Bye Bye, LAS
Funding for it is ending this week:
Orbital Sciences Corp. is warning subcontractors supporting development of a launch abort system for NASA’s Orion crew capsule that funding for the effort will cease April 30, according to industry sources and documents.
No more money down that rat hole. This is good, not just because it doesn’t waste any more money on it, but because it makes it harder for Orion to compete with Dragon or Orion Lite for crew delivery if Lockheed Martin tried to use their subsidized system to get into that market. Boeing couldn’t have been happy to have heard that Orion had been resurrected, when they were making a decision about whether not to put their own money into a crew capsule (with the help of their CCDev contract). I don’t know if this will be enough to assuage their fears, though.
I Have Seen The Future
Yesterday, I took a tour of the new (well, new to me — I hadn’t seen it because they moved while I was in Florida) SpaceX facilities in Hawthorne. They are quite impressive, as are all the rocket parts being manufactured there. No cameras were allowed, unfortunately. It’s even more impressive considering how little (relative to other similar projects) money has been spent. I would say that this is the current state of the art in expendable launch systems, with plenty of room for future cost reduction (including at least partial reusability). It makes me curious to visit Decatur now, to compare it to the Delta/Atlas production process.
The Free-Market Frontier
The Orange County Register has come out in favor of the new direction in space.
I’m Just Glad Someone Did
Harry Reid, not Lindsey Graham, killed the climate bill.
A Commercial Space Development Scenario
John Hare lays one out, over at Selenian Boondocks.