Comparing and contrasting NASA and private industry. I prefer the term “space transports” to RLVs, though.
Category Archives: Economics
Ex-XCOR
Jeff Foust has the story on what Jeff Greason and Dan DeLong are up to (Aleta is going to join up, too, according to an email exchange I had with Jeff G. this weekend). I’ll probably have one of my own up this week.
[Afternoon update]
Alan Boyle (who it was pleasant to visit with in Seattle a couple weeks ago) has a story up now as well.
[Tuesday-afternoon update]
Here is my interview with Jeff over the weekend:
RS: How are you doing?
JG: My health is great, I’m enjoying a lot of long walks through my neighborhood in Midland, Texas, and I am excited about the next phase of my career.
RS: How long has this been in the works?
JG: It is all quite new. I made the decision to leave XCOR at the beginning of November. XCOR reorganized back in June and that took both me and Dan off of any management role on the Lynx. Due to the focus of resources on completing the Lynx, my efforts to work on next-generation R&D projects didn’t gain the traction inside XCOR that I hoped, so I didn’t feel I was in a situation where I was contributing the best that I could to the industry. Once I decided to leave XCOR, I recognized that I have a lot of experience with a problem that many companies have been frustrated by – how to shorten the vehicle prototyping cycle so that time to market is faster and the fly-learn-build cycle is faster. So I decided to set up a company to solve that problem. It’s called Agile Aero and we’re just getting started.
RS: Will you be staying in Midland?
JG: Dan, Aleta, and I all like Midland, so we’ll stay here if we can.
RS: Is anyone else involved in the new company?
JG: Dan DeLong had left XCOR for his own reasons, but since he found out what Agile Aero is working towards, he’s decided to join. Aleta Jackson was laid off just after I left, and she’s also decided to join.
Do you have any financial backers? Do you have any prospective customers?
JG: I have had some initial offers of investment and we’re certainly interested in talking to others; I expect we will need additional resources to hire more people. Realize that right now what we have is a clear understanding of the problem we want to solve – vehicle development speed. We haven’t solved it yet! But I’m confident we have the experience to do it, starting from a clean sheet of paper with our collective experience in the industry. As for customers, I’m definitely interested in talking to them because it will help us know which capabilities to demonstrate first, and I have already had some interesting “can you do something like this?” questions. I also expect we will be available to offer some expertise to other companies while we work on our core technology.
RS: Does XCOR retain rights to any IP on the orbital vehicle? Or do you still plan to do it with another entity? If so, is the new company that entity, or will that be a separate venture?
JG: Before we start working on any vehicle concept for any market, we first need to demonstrate rapid prototyping of vehicles – the faster vehicle ideas can turn into reality, the faster the time to market. Solving this problem will inform how a future vehicle system should be designed and built, and once we’ve done it, an orbital system might look quite a bit different from what I imagine today. I don’t want to make specific vehicle plans until we get the prototyping capability in place. As to whether we would do an orbital system for ourselves or for another customer, time will tell. I would love for XCOR to be one of our customers. Agile Aero intends to make a rapid prototyping capability available for many clients once we have the basic technology in hand. It is a bit like the niche that Scaled Composites used to fill – enabling other companies’ creative aerospace projects, although Agile Aero will be focused on higher performance aircraft and space vehicles. I’m extremely interested in fully reusable launch architectures, and once we have the tools in our toolbox I’d welcome such an opportunity.
[Bumped]
The Private Space Race
Back To The Future
Like me, Eric Berger noticed the irony of last week’s successful spaceflight and NASA’s announcement of regressing to expendable SSMEs.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Gerald Black noticed, too. I disagree that NASA should be funding any new rockets, though, reusable or otherwise. Leave that to private industry.
Climate Hysteria
..is creating a climate of intolerance.
That’s not an accident.
The Domestic Imperialism Of The Welfare State
It’s time to end it. Long past time, I’d say.
Common Sense On Climate
The Economist remains overconcerned, but at least its editorial board recognizes how unrealistic the warm mongers are:
In short: thinking caps should replace hair shirts, and pragmatism should replace green theology.
But that doesn’t support the collectivist agenda.
Judith Curry
She is a heretic, who has been cast out of the tribe:
In the run-up to the Paris conference, said Curry, much ink has been spilled over whether the individual emissions pledges made so far by more than 150 countries — their ‘intentional nationally determined contributions’, to borrow the jargon — will be enough to stop the planet from crossing the ‘dangerous’ threshold of becoming 2°C hotter than in pre-industrial times. Much of the conference will consist of attempts to make these targets legally binding. This debate will be conducted on the basis that there is a known, mechanistic relationship between the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and how world average temperatures will rise.
Unfortunately, as Curry has shown, there isn’t. Any such projection is meaningless, unless it accounts for natural variability and gives a value for ‘climate sensitivity’ —i.e., how much hotter the world will get if the level of CO2 doubles. Until 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gave a ‘best estimate’ of 3°C. But in its latest, 2013 report, the IPCC abandoned this, because the uncertainties are so great. Its ‘likely’ range is now vast — 1.5°C to 4.5°C.
This isn’t all. According to Curry, the claims being made by policymakers suggest they are still making new policy from the old, now discarded assumptions. Recent research suggests the climate sensitivity is significantly less than 3˚C. ‘There’s growing evidence that climate sensitivity is at the lower end of the spectrum, yet this has been totally ignored in the policy debate,’ Curry told me. ‘Even if the sensitivity is 2.5˚C, not 3˚C, that makes a substantial difference as to how fast we might get to a world that’s 2˚C warmer. A sensitivity of 2.5˚C makes it much less likely we will see 2˚C warming during the 21st century. There are so many uncertainties, but the policy people say the target is fixed. And if you question this, you will be slagged off as a denier.’
This is religion, not science.
Giving Thanks For Private Spaceflight
Thoughts on Monday’s flight from Instapundit, with an appreciated plug for the book.
Smart Highways
This is the future of intercity transport, not “stupid” high-speed rail.