Its murder rate is worse than a war zone.
As Stephen Green says, socialism is war, against the actual people.
Category Archives: Economics
The Greening Of The Earth
Few, if any, dispute that atmospheric CO2 levels have been increasing since the industrial revolution. What is in dispute is the effects of this. The prevailing media narrative is that “OMG we’re all gonna die!” but this is an interesting post.
Earth-Departure Orbital Mechanics
An interesting post over at Selenian Boondocks.
I’m heading to the airport in a while to head back to Florida, but this time to Orlando for the annual AIAA space conference (which it looks like will not be wiped out by a hurricane as it was by Irma a year ago).
California’s Poverty Rate
It’s the highest in the country. I like the unironic use of the word “despite.” I think they misspelled “because of.”
Branding In Space
There seems to be a lot of concern in the science journalism community about Bridenstine’s potential proposal to allow sponsorship of missions:
Bridenstine’s proposal would set a dangerous precedent for NASA’s future. By suggesting that commercial partnerships could help fund NASA’s missions, it implies that the agency is not worth funding through the usual means—annual budgets carefully negotiated and ironed out by lawmakers. And their constituents believe that the space program is important; according to a study from the Pew Research Center in June, 72 percent of Americans say it’s essential for the United States to continue to be a world leader in space exploration. If Nike is ready and willing to drop millions of dollars to sponsor the next mission to Mars, why should lawmakers bother spending any taxpayer money on it? The world’s premier space agency shouldn’t have to resort to brand sponsorships in the absence of political will. And even if brands could float the first few years of a mission, they might not have the stomach for the years, or even decades it sometimes takes for NASA’s most ambitious missions to come to fruition. [Emphasis added]
There is a false assumption here that a) the purpose of NASA spending is “space exploration,” and that the negotiations and “ironing out” have much to do with “space exploration” as opposed to zip-code engineering. The sooner that we recognize that there is in fact an absence of political will, and accept that space exploration should be privatized, the way it was until the end of WW II, the sooner we’ll start to make more progress.
[Update a few minutes later]
More from Ken Chang.
One In Five College Students
…are considering suicide.
I never considered suicide in college (or at any time in my life). I may have missed the signs, but I am unaware of anyone I knew who did so. But that was four decades ago. I think it’s a sign that too many young people are going to college. And they’re paying too damn much for it.
Space Resources
Reusability
Jeff Foust writes about the unheralded 25th anniversary of the DC-X flights, and what has happened in the past half decade to see the promise that it offered a quarter of a century ago finally coming to fruition. I attended the 20th anniversary, but the only thing happening this year is a dinner in LA later this month.
I would note, per the criticism of the “purists,” that SSTO is highly overrated. Two-stage systems are much more flexible and efficient, particularly for off-nominal missions (e.g., high inclination or high altitude). SSTO would make sense only for a large traffic model to a single destination, probably equatorial.
Airworthiness For Spacecraft
I missed this earlier in the week, but Mike Snead has a long essay on passenger safety over at The Space Review. It’s a useful history, that touches on many of the themes of my book, but I believe that it’s technologically premature to apply the principles to human spaceflight. Spaceflight participants (not passengers) must be aware of the risks of the varied methods of building spaceships, and accept them accordingly. No one should, at this point in history, get aboard one with the same expection of getting safely off that one does with an airliner, particularly because different people have different risk tolerances and goals. There will come a time when trips to space will be considered common carrier, on certified vehicles, but we are years from that time.
Russian Rocket Development
So much for them being competitive on the world market. One wonders what it is about Rogozin that results in Putin continuing to keep him in charge.