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!
Category Archives: Economics
Martian Concrete
They should be using nuclear for power, though, not solar.
Two Questions On Climate Change
Put me in the “Maybe/Yes” camp.
A Spaceship Has Landed
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.
“Expert Climate Economists”
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.
Oil
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.
Corporate Profit Margins
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.”
The Space Age
We’re still not there.
But we are (finally, no thanks to Congress) getting closer.
The Space Mess In Russia
Bob Zimmerman has some thoughts:
Overall, Rogozin’s comments suggest that there is a great deal of confusion within Putin’s government on what to do in space. On one hand he says they want to do it cheaper. On the other he says they want to build a very expensive rocket. Then with his third hand he adds that they still plan to go to the Moon, but also took out his fourth hand to note that their goal is not the Moon or Mars, but doing things cheaper.
I’m encouraged that they want to copy us in our folly of building a giant rocket. It will hold them back just as it does us.
An Unnatural Consensus
Judith Curry says we can’t understand climate without understanding the underlying natural cycle. And we don’t.
It’s insane to be making policy decisions on the basis of our current state of knowledge.
[Update a while later]
“Science journalists are not science advocates, and scientists are not science.”
Yes, scientists are not science. Corollary: There is no such thing as a "science denier." https://t.co/WCPG64bmNu
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) December 30, 2015