Deep Space Industries has been acquired by Bradford Space. I had a brief exchange with Ian about this over the weekend. I wonder if they bought out Luxembourg’s stake? It would seem that it was premature to start an asteroid-mining company.
Category Archives: Economics
The New Space Race
Nothing new for people who have been following this, but Jeff Foust has a good overview of the current state of play for SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Ageism In Silicon Valley
This is a stupid attitude. The degree to which the young Turks denigrate experience, in which you’re over the hill at thirty, is just breathtaking up there.
It’s obviously of concern to me right now, because I’m planning a start up this in the new year, with other experienced people. Know where I won’t be looking for money? Sand Hill Road.
The Sad End Of XCOR
I hadn’t realized that people had put down the full amount of the ticket.
This number jumped out at me:
Xcor eventually raised at least $19.2 million, according to Crunchbase, a platform that tracks fundraising.
Virgin Galactic has spent hundreds of millions of dollars. One wonder what might have been had XCOR gotten even twice as much as they did.
I disagree with this:
The companies took very different approaches to the challenge of reaching space. Virgin Galactic uses a twin-fuselage carrier aircraft to hoist a space plane known as SpaceShipTwo up to a high altitude; it releases the smaller craft, which ignites its own rocket motor to blast into space. Earlier this month, the company reached space with its SpaceShipTwo vehicle for the first time on a test flight.
Using another vehicle or booster to propel a crew craft to space is considered a “much more traditional approach,” said Sonya McMullen, assistant professor of aeronautics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. But Xcor would have the Lynx climb all the way up under its own power.
“They really took the hard technological approach to the same problem,” McMullen said.
Even for suborbital, there’s not that much benefit to air launch. Single-stage to suborbit is not a technological challenge. While XCOR may have underestimated the technical challenges of Lynx, I doubt there were any that couldn’t have been solved with more funding. Of course, the uncertainty of the market size probably didn’t help in that regard. But losing that ULA contract, after the Air Force cut the funding, was the final straw.
And as I’ve often said, despite the failures (so far) to get a commercial suborbital operation going, there are no intrinsic reasons why it has to be difficult. XCOR had a good technical approach that ultimately failed to find sufficient investment, and VG made poor initial business and design choices that has resulted in them becoming a money sink in a sunk-cost trap for over a decade, despite the much vaster financial resources. As I noted in the last post, I expect that Blue Origin will finally show the way and allow us to determine the market, next year. Maybe even VG finally will as well.
The Year In SpaceX
A good summary, over at Wired. They didn’t accomplish all they planned, but it was a hell of a year, regardless, and next year promises to be better.
Along those lines, I’m a little disappointed that Blue Origin didn’t meet its 2018 goal of test passengers for New Shepard. I wonder what the issues were? Anyway, maybe next year will be the charm.
ObamaCare
Funny, all the smart people were telling me that if I opposed it, it was because I wanted people to die.
Gate-Why
Jeff Foust has the latest on the Gateway debate. To me it’s insane to even think about launching a lander wet, but if they admit they could do it dry, it takes away a lot of the justification for SLS.
Starship Progress
SpaceX has shifted from composite to stainless steel, and will do initial flight tests “early next year.”
Mike Griffin
For Secretary of Defense?
I agree that we need someone who understands the technology threat at the helm of the Pentagon. But I wonder how familiar Goldman is with Griffin’s actual record when I read “praise” like this:
The overriding strategic risk to the United States is the loss of our technological edge, and the Defense Department needs a leader with the vision and expertise to restore it. Michael Griffin would be an excellent choice. A first-rate physicist, Dr. Griffin headed NASA under the Bush 41 administration.
First, Mike knows physics, but I wouldn’t call him a “physicist.” He’s first and foremost an aerospace engineer (not that there’s anything wrong with that). The problem is that, during his tenure at NASA, he devastated the space R&D budgets and promoted Constellation, an attempt not to develop needed new technology, but to repeat Apollo (except this time “on steroids”) with decades-old technology based on Saturn and the Space Shuttle.
At the time he left the agency (unwillingly) in 2009, all that was being developed to get back to the moon was a rocket designed to carry a capsule into low earth orbit, with no serious plans for things like a lunar lander, and those items were far over budget, and slipping more than a year per year (one of the reasons that, almost a decade later, we remain dependent on the Russians for access to our own space station). Even if they’d succeeded, the planned flight rate would be very low, at ridiculously high cost.
Now, in theory, he could argue that he is now older and wiser, and learned his lesson from that, but that’s negated by the fact that he continues to support their successors, the SLS and Orion. So, if we need someone to restore our technological edge, it’s hard to make the case that he’s the right guy for the job.
[Update a while later]
OK, if Mike Griffin were SecDef, just what would he do, going on past performance? Would he propose a giant expendable combat aircraft, based on parts from F-15s and F-16s, that would fly once a year, and each service could take a turn?
The Boring Company
I didn’t work up the gumption to go look at Elon’s tunnel last night, but Megan Geuss did. Most seem to have been less than whelmed.
[Update a few minutes later]
Elizabeth Lopatto took a ride, too.
[Afternoon update]
Gizmodo has a round up of pans:
Hopefully Musk and his engineers will be able to make the ride feel less like a dirt road sometime in the future, especially if they want to build this concept in Chicago, as they promised in a high-profile press conference with the mayor back in June.
But even if they make the ride more pleasant, where does that leave this transportation concept more broadly? There are plenty of underground highways in America. But they haven’t offered a very futuristic alternative. They’ve only delivered more single-family cars—which appears to be exactly what Elon Musk is putting in the pipeline.
Elon Musk has done some very impressive things with SpaceX and Tesla. But his futuristic Loop transportation system leaves a lot to be desired. Namely, the futuristic part.
Seems like the roll out was premature.
[Thursday-morning update]
Over at Popular Mechanics, a less critical review.
[Bumped]