…seems to have weathered the transition from film to the digital world.
Category Archives: Business
Doubts About Depots
Josh Hopkins has a thoughtful article over at The Space Review on the issues that must be addressed by proponents of propellant depots. I may have a response a little later, but I would note that Boeing has done a lot of work on the concept, and may have answers to some of the questions. In any event, we could have resolved them with a tiny fraction of the money that we just pissed away on Ares over the past four years.
[Update early afternoon]
In comments over there, Jon Goff makes one of the points that I would have had I gotten around to it (we’re getting ready to move, and writing SBIRs among other things, around here). It’s worth repeating:
2-Regarding launch costs: I think most depot researchers, like myself, would agree that if the cost for propellant delivery were truly likely to be in the $30-60kg range, that depots weren’t likely to make sense. However, is using delivery of cargo to a manned space station, where the cargo carriers themselves have to function as pressurized space station modules, really that realistic of a starting point for estimating the cost of propellant delivery to a likely unmanned depot? I know that that was probably the easiest way to do the analysis, since those numbers are available…but aren’t we setting up a strawman here? First you pick the obviously most expensive route (having the tankers be fully-functional prox-ops vehicles), and then pick one of the most expensive possible cases of such vehicles–vehicles designed to interface with a manned space station.
This is a typical tactic of opponents of an idea — to pick a worst case, and sort of imply that it’s a best one. It is not a realistic assumption, and was one of the flaws that jumped out at me at the time.
Another one is the concern about departure windows. Yes, launching from earth gives you more flexibility, but so what? If there are multiple opportunities per month from orbit (and there are, depending on how much you want to pay in delta vee for wider windows), then it doesn’t help you much to be able to launch more often from earth when your HLV architecture won’t be able to afford to launch more than a few times a year, even using the cost estimates of its most ardent proponents.
[Tuesday morning update]
Clark Lindsey has further thoughts.
[Bumped]
The End Of Tinkering?
Well, it’s not gone, but it certainly has gone out of fashion compared to when I was a kid. How many kids work on their own cars these days? Though I would note that just changing a head gasket is not equivalent to rebuilding the whole engine.
I think that this is part and parcel of the whole academic bubble, which continues to inflate beyond economic reason. Particularly in today’s economy, people should realize that plumbing can’t be outsourced.
[Update about noon]
Speaking of the upcoming pop of the education bubble, some schools are now not allowing parents to see their children’s grades in college. How many parents are going to put up with that and continue to pay tuition to such an institution? The notion of “treating students as adults” works fine for students who are actually adults. But adults pay their own way. There’s a lot more to being an adult than simply surviving long enough to reach the age of majority.
Getting Rid Of The “Public Option”
The Augustine Options
I have some thoughts this morning, over at Pajamas Media.
Is It Constitutional?
Obamacare, that is. Not that Obama cares. Have to break eggs to make an omelette, doncha know?
Why Mars Is Hard
Jim Oberg has a good piece today. It’s just not as easy as the Barsoomophiles want to believe. That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be an ultimate goal, but we need to put first things first — reducing the costs of launch, developing critical technologies (particularly propellant handing and manufacturing from ISRU) and preliminary scouting to the moons before it will be practical to put people on the surface.
[Mid-afternoon update]
It’s official: NASA is a jobs program. Not that that’s news…
“…critical skills”, “industrial base”, and “workforce retention” have been frequently-mentioned items in the committee’s deliberations to date, so I suppose I should have seen this coming, but it’s still one of the starkest illustrations I’ve encountered why government programs and NASA in particular will never accomplish the goal of making humans a spacefaring species.
Fortunately, there are alternate paths.
Cost Effectiveness
Bjorn Lomborg says that if global warming is a problem, there are much cheaper and faster solutions than carbon reduction.
Are We Having A Conversation Yet?
Some health-care thoughts on the disingenuity of the president and his administration from Ann Althouse.
[Late Sunday night update]
Mark Steyn also has some health-care thoughts:
there he was, reassuring the crowd that the provision for mandatory “end-of-life counseling” has “gotten spun into this idea of ‘death panels.’ I am not in favor of that.” Well, that’s good to know. So good that a grateful audience applauded the president’s pledge not to kill them. He has no plans, as he put it, to “pull the plug on Grandma.”
The problem with government health systems is not that they pull the plug on Grandma. It’s that Grandma has a hell of a time getting plugged in in the first place. The only way to “control costs” is to restrict access to treatment, and the easiest people to deny treatment to are the oldsters. Don’t worry, it’s all very scientific. In Britain, they use a “Quality-Adjusted Life Year” formula to decide that you don’t really need that new knee because you’re gonna die in a year or two, maybe a decade-and-a-half tops. So it’s in the national interest for you to go around hobbling in pain rather than divert “finite resources” away from productive members of society to a useless old geezer like you. And you’d be surprised how quickly geezerdom kicks in: A couple of years back, some Quebec facilities were attributing death from hospital-contracted infection of anyone over 55 to “old age.” Well, he had a good innings. He was 57.
He also points out the asininity of using life expectancy as a figure of merit for different systems, as so many proponents of a government takeover so disingenuously do:
“Life expectancy” is a very crude indicator. Afghanistan has a life expectancy of 43. Does this mean the geriatric wards of Kandahar are full of Pushtun Jennifer Lopezes and Julia Robertses? No. What it means is that, if you manage to survive the country’s appalling infant-mortality rates, you have a sporting chance of eking out your three-score-and-ten. To say that people in Afghanistan can expect to live till 43 is a bit like saying the couple at No. 6 Elm Street are straight, and the couple at No. 8 are gay so the entire street is bisexual.
Which brings us to the United States and its allegedly worst health system in the developed world. Here’s the reality: The longer you live in America, the longer you live. If you’re one of those impressionable “Meet The Press” viewers who heard New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg bemoaning U.S. life expectancy, and you’re thinking, “Hey, I’m 77. Just about at the end, America-wise. Maybe it’s time to move up north or over to Europe, and get a couple of bonus years,” don’t do it! If you’re old enough to be a “Meet The Press” viewer, your life expectancy is already way up there.
America is the Afghanistan of the Western world: That’s to say, it has a slightly higher infant-mortality rate than other developed nations (there are reasons for that which I’ll discuss in an upcoming column). That figure depresses our overall “life expectancy at birth.” But, if you can make it out of diapers, you’ll live longer than you would pretty much anywhere else. By age 40, Americans’ life expectancy has caught up with Britons’. By 60, it equals Germany’s. At the age of 80, Americans have greater life expectancy than Swedes.
How can this be?
He explains. Hint: it’s not because we have socialized medicine.
The President’s Space Policy Dilemma
A good wrap up over at the Orlando Sentinel:
For NASA allies on Capitol Hill, news that the agency does not have enough money to do what it wants is not so shocking. For years, members of congressional science committees have complained about underfunding.
But in a time of enormous budget deficits, a major boost is seen as unlikely.
“NASA is getting $18 billion a year. That’s more than all the other [space] agencies in the world combined. It’s very difficult to make the argument for more money,” said Vincent Sabathier, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Sabathier said NASA’s best hope lies in giving a greater role to its international partners to develop key components of an exploration system, such as using a French rocket to launch a U.S. capsule.
One point that people don’t understand, though, is that it isn’t a budget problem per se. It is a budget problem in the context of the politics. As I said over at Space Politics:
It is disheartening — but not surprising — to read that the Augustine Commission doesn’t see any way the current NASA budget can get us back to the Moon or to any of the spectacular alternatives that have been contemplated in anything like a reasonable time frame.
Actually, it’s not that the NASA budget can’t do it — it’s that NASA can’t do it with that budget, given its political constraints. Certainly it could be done for that amount of money, or even a lot less.
A long as we have a political requirement to maintain thousands of jobs at KSC and Marshall and Houston, it’s going to be hard to reduce costs. That’s a point that needs to be made strongly in the panel’s report. If the politicians want to shut down human spaceflight, or dramatically increase the budget, we should at least be clear on why those are the two options — it’s not because it is as intrinsically expensive as NASA always makes it. By the time Dragon is flying with crew, Elon will have spent far less than a billion dollars, a tiny percentage of what NASA plans to spend on Orion and Ares I. And the difference in size doesn’t explain the difference in cost. What does explain it is that he’s spending his own money, and his primary focus is on developing space hardware that closes a business case, not “creating or saving” (to use the administration’s wonderfully nebulous criterion) “jobs.”