It’s stiff competition, but this may, in fact, be the stupidest space piece ever written. As Stephen Green says, the Left jumps the shark, in a rocketship.
Category Archives: Economics
SLS And Orion
The Senate Launch System is four years old (if you count from when NASA actually rolled out the design — it’s more like five years when it was first stipulated in the NASA authorization bill). Some thoughts at the time from Jerry Pournelle.
And Stephen Smith has a history of Orion (the capsule, not the nuclear-powered spacecraft, which just slipped another two years, and even NASA is no longer pretending will ever go to Mars):
SpaceX spent 100% of its own money to develop the Falcon 9 booster and the upcoming Falcon Heavy. The cargo Dragon capsule cost $850 million to develop; $400 million was NASA seed money, while $450 million was SpaceX money. It was only four years from SpaceX receiving its first commercial cargo contract in August 2006 to the first test flight in December 2010. The first Dragon delivery was in May 2012. Dragon was designed with the eventual goal of using it for people, so the crewed Dragon V2 would seem likely to avoid much of the design delays that might plague other commercial crew companies.
Orion and SLS have no urgency, because there’s no profit motive. The contractors get paid regardless of their pace or success; it’s required by law. Their lobbyists ensure through generous campaign contributions that Congress will prohibit any competition. Representatives of NASA space centers populate the space authorization and appropriations committees in the House and the Senate; their priority, sometimes stated explicitly, is to protect the taxpayer-funded government jobs in their districts and states.
Maybe, someday, we’ll actually see NASA crew climb into an Orion capsule atop a Space Launch System booster at Pad 39B. But it will be tens of billions of dollars after we see commercial crew companies do it for far cheaper.
Yup. I’d bet it never happens. It certainly shouldn’t.
Supersonic Airliners
This is a pretty extensive discussion. I don’t see hydrogen as the fuel, but when you’re a Reaction Engine hammer, every airplane looks like a nail.
Jerry Brownout
California’s disastrously stupid energy policy.
Scott Walker And Unions
He wants a dramatic overhaul of labor laws. It’s long overdue. They’re a relic of the thirties.
I haven’t read the proposal, but it’s worth noting that he could eliminate public-employee unions with the stroke of a pen. That’s how Kennedy created them.
Bernie’s Proposals
They would add $18T to the national debt. That’s essentially doubling it (again, after Obama already did it once), not even counting the unfunded liabilities of social security et al.
Related: BS from Bernie:
Bernie Sanders, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, spoke at Liberty University today. You can read his speech here. It is useful, in that it exposes the extent of Sanders’s ignorance and radicalism. Any deconstruction of a speech this bad must be selective.
Read the whole fisking. It’s also worth noting, in contrast to when a conservative speaker comes to a leftist college, how politely he was treated.
Labor Day
I know it’s a day late, but I agree with Kevin Williamson: We don’t need this quasi-Canadian crypto-communist holiday.
I don't consider Labor Day flag worthy.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) September 7, 2015
Why We Can’t Go To Mars
Yet…
Stephen Fleming gave a talk on that subject at Dragoncon this weekend (I should go some time). I haven’t looked at them yet, but his slides are on line, and I suspect there’s some good input to the Kickstarter there.
[Update a few minutes later]
Still haven’t been through slides, but I’m amused to see that he stole my graphical book-cover them in the very first one.
[Reading through]
I’d note that in his slides on the “Martian Defense Grid,” someone on the Mars panel at the AIAA meeting last week called Mars our “Jamestown.” High casualties to initial pioneers.
[Update a few more minutes later]
I wish we could show those charts of the unknown shape of the health/gravity curves to Congress. It makes a powerful case for a gravity lab, but only to people who actually give a damn about Mars. Actually, someone should show them to Elon.
A New Class Of Cholesterol Drugs
I wish I had more confidence that they’re not just treating a symptom:
As for the efficacy of the drugs, it is not yet proved that very low LDL levels produced by drugs lead to sharp reductions in heart attacks, strokes and deaths from cardiovascular disease, as researchers have seen in people with the naturally inactive PCSK9 gene.
Many cardiologists, though, are persuaded by a large body of evidence supporting the idea that the lower the LDL, the lower the risk.
“I believe lower is better and do not believe that a very low LDL is harmful,” said Dr. Daniel Rader, a cardiologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
Others, like Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale, urge caution. “We are in a period of exuberant enthusiasm about these drugs,” he said. “We could just be performing cosmetic surgery on a lab value.”
If it were certain that the PCSK9 inhibitors were safe and effective in preventing heart attacks and deaths there would be no need for clinical trials, he noted.
$14,000/year is a lot of money for a treatment for which we have no idea whether or not it’s effective. I think improving diets would be much more cost effective.
[Update Tuesday morning]
Here’s a longer piece about the new drugs and the issues. Note: 1) It is assumed that the goal is to lower cholesterol, and that this will in turn result in lower mortality and 2) No mention of diet as a potential solution. Of course, it’s hard to get people to change their diets. But I suspect that to the degree that doctors are telling people to do so, they’re still telling them to cut out sat fat and cholesterol, despite all the actual science, and probably still telling them to follow FDA food-pyramic advice, which is junk science.
[Bumped]
Growing Metal Structure
Modumetal uses nanotechnology — manipulation of matter at the molecular level — to micromanage at a very small scale to better control the conditions and substances through which electroplating occurs. Basically, the company grows metal on a surface in a way that makes it easier to shape and tinker with the material’s characteristics. Lomasney says it’s similar to how nature controls the environment related to a tree’s growth— sunlight, soil, location, temperature—and then creates a tree that is a product those conditions.
This is the sort of thing that Eric talked about in Engines of Creation almost thirty years ago. It’s one of the reasons that any plans NASA has for Mars missions decades from now are already obsolete.