A Canadian company has gotten funding to move forward on a molten-salt reactor. I think a lot of sensible people are realizing that if carbon really is a problem, nuclear is the solution, despite the insanity of people like Naomi Oreskes.
But my question is: Would this be a useful tech for space, either for electric power generation or propulsion? The company could do a spin off called Extraterrestrial Energy.
A recognition by NASA that the vehicle has no missions. Too bad Congress doesn’t understand that.
This is what happens when you come up with Design Reference Missions to match a design, instead of the right way around.
@NASASpaceflight Look up the phrase "solution looking for a problem," and you'll see a picture of SLS.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) January 12, 2016
[Update Wednesday morning]
More from Loren Grush over at The Verge:
But the SLS is expensive, and NASA’s budget is at the lowest it has been in decades, even with the new budget allotment of $19.3 billion for the 2016 fiscal year. The cost of developing the SLS through 2017 is expected to total $18 billion. And once the rocket is built, each launch is going to cost somewhere between $500 and $700 million, which makes it unlikely that the rocket will carry astronauts more than once a year.
If they’re only flying once a year, there’s no way the launch cost is that low. It’s at least two billion. I don’t know where that $500-$700M number comes from, but it’s probably marginal cost, which is a meaningless number for a vehicle with such a low flight rate.
[Bumped]
A new, visionary video from ULA.
It’s great to see this kind of vision from a major player. Tory Bruno really seems to have shaken the place up. And compare this to the paltry offering from NASA. Also note: Look ma, no SLS!
They should be using nuclear for power, though, not solar.
Put me in the “Maybe/Yes” camp.
Over at The Space Review, Jeff Foust has the story of Spacex’s return to flight before Christmas, and Sam Dinkin looks into the economics of reusability.
Are apparently morons:
When asked at what date climate change will have a net negative impact on the global economy, the median survey response was 2025. In the recent past, climate change likely had a net positive impact on the global economy, due primarily to the effect of carbon fertilization on crops and other plant life. However, even contrarian economists agree, when accounting for the vulnerability of poorer countries to climate impacts, global warming has been hurting the global economy since about 1980.
The NYU survey asked when the economic benefits we experienced up to 1980 would be completely wiped out; 41% of respondents said that’s already happened. Another 25% answered that it would happen within a decade, and 26% said we’d see net negative economic impacts by 2050. If we continue with business-as-usual pollution and warming, on average the experts predicted a GDP loss of about 10% by the end of the century, and that there would be a 20% chance of a “catastrophic” loss of one-quarter of global GDP.
There is no scientific evidence to believe any of this.
Thanks to technology, we’re not going to run out of it.
Nope. “Peak oil” was always a myth. We’ll replace it with something else long before we run out, just as we did with whale oil.
The public thinks it’s 36% on average. This kind of ignorance and innumeracy is why they think we can solve our fiscal problems by “taxing the rich.”
We’re still not there.
But we are (finally, no thanks to Congress) getting closer.