Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Betraying Science

November 21, 2009 Rand Simberg 73 Comments

Here’s a nice summary of the significant contents of the email dump. Regardless of the validity of the science, these people have thoroughly discredited themselves, and given AGW skeptics a vast arsenal. Thankfully, this is going to make it much more difficult for the warm-mongers to implement their anti-free-market agenda. I suspect that if cap’n’tax wasn’t already dead in the Senate, it will be now.

[Update mid afternoon]

Powerline has been going through the emails. The picture that emerges is not that of scientists seeking truth, but of partisans, protecting (at the least) their own pet theory, and possibly a broader agenda as well, at the expense of truth and the reputations of anyone who dares to question them..

[Sunday morning update]

When in doubt, delete:

These emails appear to show that, when faced with a legitimate request under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act, these global warming alarmists preferred to delete their emails with one another about the crucially important IPCC report–the main basis for the purported “consensus” in favor of anthropogenic global warming–rather than allow them to come to light. This is one of many instances in the East Anglia documents where the global warming alarmists act like a gang of co-conspirators rather than respectable scientists.

I don’t think it’s an act.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Entrepreneurs Go On Strike

November 21, 2009 Rand Simberg 7 Comments

Thoughts at The American Thinker:

For many decades, the American dream has been undergirded by the faith that regardless of its current state, the economy would come back around thanks to the greatness of ordinary people being free to do extraordinary things. Thus the bold gunslinger mentality many business owners have had in previous recessions, refusing to participate, and even expanding cheaply to grab market share in the next recovery.

But it’s different now, and there is no denying it. The dream itself is being killed by legal and regulatory micromanagement. Washington is determined to employ policies to cure something that can be cured only by government getting the hell out of the way.

A small business summit in the White House will accomplish nothing unless the invitees include unions and lawyers and bureaucrats, in which case it will be devastating. When did a union or a lawyer or a bureaucrat ever start a business? How many times a day do they kill one?

And that’s the climate entrepreneurs see. Unions, lawyers, and bureaucrats gain more power and leverage every day. The big opportunity now is to spend government money: an eighteen-million-dollar government contract to create an awful Recovery.org website, SEIU union jobs in ObamaCare, bankruptcy lawyers, and perhaps carbon credit trades coming. There are ACORN-style crony contracts to be had, not to mention all the jobs created by the David Axelrod astroturfing media escapades. If you are connected or if your dream is to enrich yourself by killing the dreams of others, then the field is ripe for you.

Ayn Rand saw this coming.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Quoteworthy

November 20, 2009 Rand Simberg 26 Comments

On mandates:

In the primaries, Obama distinguished himself from Clinton on health care by opposing an individual mandate. In the general election, he distinguished himself from McCain by opposing taxes on health benefits. So now he is trying to pass bills with both an individual mandate and taxes on health benefits—and his supporters are saying that Congress should go along because he won the election.

“I won” is not a substitute for substantive policy discussion.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

An Evil Right-Wing Attack On Obamacare

November 20, 2009 Rand Simberg 3 Comments

…by NPR.

Business, Economics, Space

The Suborbital Refueling Dance

November 19, 2009 Rand Simberg 9 Comments

Jon Goff has an interesting variation on a concept that’s been around for a long time, but never implemented: refueling a suborbital vehicle in space to allow it to get to orbit. It’s in between Black Horse, which did an aerial fueling (or rather, oxidizing, since the propellant transferred was the oxidizer rather than the fuel), and standard orbital refueling. There’s an up side and a down side to it, relative to aerial refueling.

The down side is that unless the suborbital trajectory is fairly high, at least in velocity, you don’t have a lot of time for the operations before entering the atmosphere. You’d only have a few minutes, but that might be enough to transfer several thousand pounds of propellants. You’d have a trade as to whether to transfer just fuel, or just oxidizer or both. The latter would increase the likelihood of failure, since you’d have to mate two transfer booms, and simultaneously transfer two fluids.

The up side is that, out of the atmosphere, it’s easier and safer to fly in formation, because there are no wind gusts to worry about, and the physics is much more predictable (gravity doesn’t tend to vary much over non-astronomical times).

In a sane world, NASA would have long ago built an X-vehicle to prove out the concept, but that’s not the world in which we live. What I’d like to see is a prize for the first demonstration of such a propellant transfer operation, which all of the suborbital folks – Scaled (or VG), XCOR, Masten or Armadillo or others — could go after. You could have tiers of total propellant transferred, or total propellant transferred in a given time.

The other appealing thing about it is that, as Jon notes, it has benign abort characteristics. Which brings to mind another prize that NASA could offer (again, in a sane world). If reliability is really valued (the focus on heavy lift in general, and Ares in particular, would indicate that it’s not particularly, despite the advertisements), like low cost, it will only be achieved through high flight rates, and no one will really believe it until it’s been demonstrated. Fortunately, reusable suborbital vehicles are capable of lots of flights for low marginal cost per flight. So all they need is funding to do lots of flights. I would propose a prize for a consecutive number of successful deliveries to orbit (you could even start off with suborbital missions). Or, rather, consecutive number of non-failures, where failure is defined as losing the payload. In other words, you wouldn’t be penalized for an intact abort. The prize would be won when the requisite number of missions were flown with no losses. Abort rate could be a tie breaker for multiple winners.

If you wanted to have a demonstrated reliability (defined as non-payload loss, not mission success) of 0.999, you’d have to fly a thousand flights. If the marginal cost of a suborbital flight is, say, $10K, this would cost ten million, about the same as the X-Prize. So offer a fifty-million dollar prize, and see who goes for it. Once that’s won, offer half a billion for orbital.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

George W. Hoover

November 18, 2009 Rand Simberg 4 Comments

Ilya Somin says that George Bush should, finally, stop giving a bad name to free markets:

Bush’s belated support for free markets follows in Hoover’s footsteps. After leaving office in 1933, Hoover wrote books and articles defending free markets and criticizing the Democrats’ New Deal. Some of his criticisms of FDR were well-taken. Many New Deal policies actually worsened and prolonged the Great Depression by organizing cartels and increasing unemployment. But by coming out as a free market advocate, the post-presidential Hoover actually bolstered the cause of interventionism because he helped cement the incorrect impression that he had pursued free market policies while in office, thereby causing the Depression. Bush’s post-presidential conversion creates a similar risk: it could solidify the already widespread impression that he, like the Hoover of myth, pursued laissez-faire policies which then caused an economic crisis.

What should Bush now do if he genuinely wants to help the free market cause? The best thing would be to take up economist David Henderson’s half-joking suggestion that he “express his regret at nationalizing airport safety, carrying out illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens, raiding medical marijuana clinics, bailing out General Motors, AIG and other companies, and socializing prescription drugs for the elderly [the biggest new government program from the 1960s until the present financial crisis].” Bush could also point out that he advocated an ideology of “compassionate conservatism” that included vastly expanded government, and an “ownership society” that (in his own words) involved “us[ing] the mighty muscle of the federal government” to incentivize dubious mortgages of the kind that helped cause the financial collapse of 2008. The greatest contribution Bush can now make to free market policies is to dispel the impression that he pursued them while in office.

Unfortunately, as Somin points out, the likelihood that he will admit his perfidy to markets, or the disastrous nature of many of his domestic policies, is pretty low, so the best thing he can do for free markets now is to just shut up.

Economics, Space

Apollo Is Over

November 16, 2009 Rand Simberg 33 Comments

But some people can’t get over it:

The Flexible Path tries to satisfy everyone with a long laundry list of destinations, but it is more noteworthy for what it pushes back to the end of the line. The Program of Record (Vision for Space Exploration) has the objectives of manned landings on the Moon and Mars. The Flexible Path does the opposite—an anti-Vision—and tries to do everything except manned landings on the Moon and Mars. Lunar landings are replaced with lunar orbits, and Mars landings are replaced by Mars flybys and possibly Mars orbits. “Look but don’t touch” eliminates the servicing of surface equipment, in-situ resource utilization, and sample return for the Moon and Mars. Manned flights are two-way missions, so removing sample return is particularly short-sighted. The Augustine report includes part of a quotation from President Kennedy: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…” If the Flexible Path had been around during Kennedy’s time, all the Apollo landing missions would have been cancelled.

Sigh…

I’m sorry that Mark Whittington’s stupid “Look but don’t touch” phrase seems to be picked up by more and more people, because it’s so misleading. Not doing the planetary surfaces first is not an “anti-vision.” It is simply a different vision, and much more practical one. I will say that “flexible path” is not my preferred plan — I would in fact go chase the lunar rainbows sooner than later, but it’s the best path of any of the proposed Augustine alternatives, because the methods that NASA has chosen for lunar return are simply unaffordable. And it doesn’t eliminate planetary excursions — it just puts them off until they do become more practical, and we’ve developed more deep-space experience. The commission continues to see human Mars landings as an eventual goal. But if you’re going to do that, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to me to go to Phobos or Deimos first, which requires much less earth-departure propellant, with the potential for getting more propellant from those bodies for expeditions down the gravity well.

And suppose that instead of the lunar goal, Apollo had in fact been about beating the Russians to an asteroid, or Phobos, in an unsustainable manner (as the lunar missions were performed)? How would we be any worse off today? In neither case would it have been about opening up space.

The Flexible Path attempts to replace the Ares 5, capable of lifting 160+ metric tons to low Earth orbit, with a less capable launch vehicle, going as low as the 75 metric tons of the EELV-derived vehicle. The notion that the Flexible Path brings us closer to Mars is dispelled by this push for a less capable launch vehicle. Being physically closer to Mars, in terms of distance, does nothing if it runs away from the energy and mass requirements of a Mars landing. The variety of missions possible using the Ares launch vehicles is actually wider and more diverse than what the Flexible Path allows. The Ares launch vehicles are certainly more than capable of launching missions to Lagrange points, near-Earth objects, and any other destination on the list. Reduced capabilities make the Flexible Path decidedly inflexible.Sigh…

This is an extremely simple-minded view of “capabilities.” Is a vehicle with a larger payload better than one with a smaller payload? Yes, all other things being equal. But all other things are rarely equal. One has to take a total systems approach to determine the optimum, and not just focus on a single system element (this applies to safety as well as cost, by the way). If, for example, one can buy ten flights of the smaller vehicle for the cost of a single flight of the larger one, which is better? It’s hard to say, unless one looks at the total mission cost, including amortization of development, as well as legacy value toward the future. Unless one imagines that one will be able to do a Mars mission with a single launch of Ares V (and even its proponents admit that you can’t), then eliminating it does not necessarily affect ability to get to Mars at all.

Consider two alternate architectures. One invests in the development of a large launch system sized for (say) a lunar mission, and ignores the orbital operations necessary to assemble pieces in orbit, or to fuel them. The other takes the money that could be spent on launch systems and instead focuses on the latter technologies, using them to leverage the transport capabilities of existing or slightly modified vehicles.

At completion of development, the former has a lunar transport system (as long as it doesn’t go down for some reason) that has no other capabilities, because it is too small to go anywhere else, and there was no investment in the orbital technologies necessary to do multiple launches with it. And if it goes down for some reason for some significant period of time (as every launch system has to date, other than the EELVs, and it may just be a matter of time for them), the entire enterprise is shut down. If one wants to go to Mars, it will be necessary to either develop those technologies originally spurned, or to develop a (perhaps impossibly) larger-yet launch system. And each flight will be horrifically expensive, and the vehicle will never develop high reliability, because its flight rate will be too low. This is taking the fundamental mistake of the Shuttle (which was not reusability) and tripling down on it.

On the other hand, the latter course provides a system which can assemble arbitrarily large interplanetary missions in orbit to any destination, using a variety of launch systems, ensuring that any one of them standing down does not prevent human space missions beyond LEO. So which one is truly flexible, not to mention resilient?

The Flexible Path replaces set destinations and set dates with a hazy cloud of uncertainty. NASA did not achieve Apollo like this. If the Flexible Path is as good as its proponents say, why will it be applied to human spaceflight exclusively? The entire space agency should have a chance to experience this new transformative policy. But with lesser objectives, lesser launch vehicles, and a lesser budget, it is unlikely the rest of the agency would enjoy the experience.

Let me say it one more time. It doesn’t matter how NASA achieved Apollo, for two reasons. First, Apollo had nothing to do with space. Second, NASA had an essentially unlimited budget with which to accomplish the goal, which was not to open space to humanity, but to beat the Russians in a technological joust. Until we understand this, and stop yearning for something that never was, and never will be, we will continue to waste billions of taxpayers’ money on Cape spectaculars, and never make much progress in space.

I would add one more point, for those who fear the Yellow Menace on the moon, or any other nation that follows the Apollo paradigm. Space will not be opened by throwing large vehicles away a few times a year. If we couldn’t afford it, at the height of our power and influence in the sixties, why should we believe that any other country can?

[Update in the late afternoon]

Incoherent in his apoplexy, seething with unreined rage, foaming at the mouth and eyes bulging, beard afire, Mark Whittington leaps so hard at his chain that he breaks it, and pounds out incomprehensible gibberish on his keyboard about this post and the previous one.

What?

I’m exaggerating? You don’t say…

I also think it’s hilarious that his permalinks still have double page markers, after all these years of running that blogspot blog.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ray from Vision Restoration blog makes a very good point over there:

The Program of Record has virtually nothing to do with the Vision for Space Exploration except at the most superficial level, such as the initial destination (the Moon). The Flexible Path as outlined in the report is a lot closer to the Vision for Space Exploration than the Program of Record. Check out the Vision for Space Exploration documents, the Augustine Committee report, and the status of Constellation – or see some (of many) examples here of how far the Program of Record is from the Vision for Space Exploration.

It is really annoying to have to deal with commentary by people who have no idea what they’re talking about, and don’t even bother to read the class assignment. Including Mark Whittington.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Setting It Up

November 16, 2009 Rand Simberg 4 Comments

…and knocking down a straw man, over at The Space Review, by Dr. Day:

Occasionally, space activists critical of NASA claim that whereas the civilian space agency is a badly-run bureaucracy that ought to be eliminated and replaced with something else, the military manages to do a much better job with its space program. The military, which they believe to be immune to congressional micromanagement and political interference, somehow manages to do great things in space.

Which “space activists critical of NASA”? With whom is he arguing? Can he name names? I wouldn’t claim that this argument has never been made, or that there aren’t people who hold such a view, but I’m not aware of any. It certainly isn’t representative of “space activists” in general. So I’m not sure what his point is. He then goes on to kick the straw out of the thing with a list of past and current DoD space (and other) procurement screwups, with which anyone who has been following things is quite familiar. And his conclusion?

By now you might have detected a common theme here: procurement of complex hardware is hard. Many projects are over-budget and behind schedule, not just at NASA, but everywhere.

Actually, that’s not the common theme that I detect. The common theme that I detect is that the government procurement system for space is seriously FUBAR, whether civil or military. One of the places that such cost and schedule problems aren’t the case (at least not to the huge degree that the government programs are) is SpaceX. Yes, things have taken longer than they hoped, and probably cost more, though we have less insight into that, because we don’t know what the original estimates were, but here’s the bottom line: they have mostly developed both a launch system and a pressurized return module, capable of carrying crew with the addition of life support and launch escape, for about a hundredth of the cost that NASA estimates it will take to develop Ares I alone. And what is the “uncommon” theme here? SpaceX is doing it with their own money, and not subject to government procurement rules and the dictates of porkmeisters on the Hill.

[Early afternoon update]

Clark Lindsey has further thoughts:

SBIRS and many such projects at least have the virtue of advancing the state of the art. ARES I retreats from the state of the art. Rather than building on lessons learned from the Shuttle and taking a step forward towards practical, low cost reusable space transport, Griffin backtracked the agency and led it down the Ares I dead end where no development path to lower cost space access exists. Furthermore, it was known from the start that Ares would be hugely expensive both to develop and to operate. It is just an added insult to the taxpayer that, on top of all that, Ares turned out to have several serious technical problems that resulted in delays and even more costs. Hanging around with a rough crowd offers no excuse for this miserable project.

Indeed.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Health Care

November 16, 2009 Rand Simberg 25 Comments

Mafia style:

Where would meals be better and cheaper? A city where customers could choose between restaurants competing in a free market? Or a city where everyone was forced to buy all their meals at a few mafia-controlled restaurants?

Like the mafia, Congress wants to make you an offer you can’t refuse. At least the mafia doesn’t pretend that it’s acting for your own good.

Hey, it’s the Chicago Way.

Transterrestrial Musings

Category Archives: Economics

Betraying Science

Entrepreneurs Go On Strike

Quoteworthy

An Evil Right-Wing Attack On Obamacare

The Suborbital Refueling Dance

George W. Hoover

Apollo Is Over

Setting It Up

Health Care

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!