Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Fifty-Two Percent

12 Comments

That’s the (devastating) unemployment rate for young people:

Al Angrisani, the former assistant Labor Department secretary under President Reagan, doesn’t see a turnaround in the jobs picture for entry-level workers and places the blame squarely on the Obama administration and the construction of its stimulus bill.

“There is no assistance provided for the development of job growth through small businesses, which create 70 percent of the jobs in the country,” Angrisani said in an interview last week. “All those [unemployed young people] should be getting hired by small businesses.”

There are six million small businesses in the country, those that employ less than 100 people, and a jobs stimulus bill should include tax credits to give incentives to those businesses to hire people, the former Labor official said.

“If each of the businesses hired just one person, we would go a long way in growing ourselves back to where we were before the recession,” Angrisani noted.

…Angrisani said he believes that Obama’s economic team, led by Larry Summers, has a blind spot for small business because no senior member of the team — dominated by academics and veterans of big business — has ever started and grown a business.

But they went to Ivy League schools, and are smarter than us, so things will work out. Perhaps they just haven’t raised the minimum wage high enough.

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

Scrubbing The Atmosphere

28 Comments

Why aren’t we spending more money on it?

David W. Keith, a physicist at the University of Calgary, reviews some of the technologies for air capture of carbon and notes that there is not a single government program devoted specifically to that purpose. Dr. Keith estimates that less than $3 million per year in public money is currently being spent on related research, even though it could potentially be a bargain. He writes:

[Early] estimates suggest that air capture will be competitive with technologies that are getting large R.&D. investments. For example, the cost of cutting CO2 emissions by displacing carbon-intensive electricity production with roof-mounted solar photovoltaic panels can easily exceed $500 per ton of CO2. Yet even skeptics suggest that a straightforward combination of existing process technologies could probably achieve air capture at lower cost. And the fact that several groups have raised private money for commercialization suggests that there are investors who believe that it is possible to develop technologies to capture CO2 from air at costs closer to $100 than $500 per ton of CO2.

When I wrote about Richard Branson’s $25 million prize for figuring out how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, I wondered if governments and other entrepreneurs would follow his example (and if we would someday have nanobots gobbling up carbon dioxide). So far, I guess, the answer is no, but perhaps Dr. Keith’s article will stimulate some interest.

Don’t count on it. It doesn’t give them enough control over our lives, or force us to tighten our hair shirts sufficiently.

[Sunday evening update]

Things seem to have gotten a little off track in comments. Let me restate the question, to get more useful responses. Given that the people currently running the country think that atmospheric CO2 is a problem, and given that we are currently spending much money to address this (wind, solar, other non-nuclear “green” tech, etc.), why are we not spending a higher proportion on this? I contend that I have already described why. The collapse of the Soviet Union having (at least temporarily) given socialism a bad name, the socialists have taken over the environmental movement, and are using it as a Trojan Horse for their (non-environmental) collectivist agendas. I’m looking for alternate explanations from the usual defenders of the watermelons. I’m also looking for plausible ones, but I don’t expect to see them.

Business, Economics, Space

The Solar Power Satellite Business

66 Comments

Alan Boyle has a good rundown on the current state of play. I wonder, though about the assumptions underlying this comment:

To be competitive with other power sources, Maness figures that the powersat system’s launch costs would have to be around $100 per pound – which is roughly one-hundredth of the current asking price. Launch costs may be heading downward, thanks in part to the rise of SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, but Maness can’t yet predict when the charts tracing cost and benefit will cross into the profitable zone.

Launch costs to where? They’re that high to GEO, but not to LEO, and it doesn’t say where the satellite constellation will live. It’s going to be a long time before it’s a hundred bucks a pound to GEO, though though a robust market for LEO propellant depots will be a help in that regard. But we’re not far from having a thousand bucks a pound to LEO. Anyway, it would be nice to see more details on these things.

The bottom line, though, and the reason that I’m not that sanguine on the business prospects for SBSP, at least for base load, is this:

In addition to potential environmental concerns, large-scale solar farms can’t generate a steady flow of electricity at night, or during cloudy weather. But if engineers ever figure out a way to store up the intermittent energy generated by solar cells or wind turbines, at levels high enough to keep utilities flush with power, Maness thinks that would deal a heavy blow to his powersat dreams.

“At that point, I take my marbles and go home,” he said.

Yup. It’s not the technical risk of the space hardware and launch costs, but the risk of terrestrial competition as technology evolves, that is the biggest risk of all.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

ULA’s Heresy

53 Comments

I have a piece up at Popular Mechanics about the AIAA conference this week, and ULA’s non-heavy-lift architecture. Hell hath no fury like a rocket company scorned.

Meanwhile, it looks like there may be a battle in Congress to preserve the Ares pork. At some point, though, they’re going to have to confront budgetary and programmatic reality.

[Noon update]

Here is the permalink.

[Another update a few minutes later]

Paul Spudis has a longish essay on the history of the VSE, how NASA mangled it, and what we need to do going forward.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Time To Take Private Space Seriously

3 Comments

So sayeth The Economist:

Five years ago the idea that the private sector might have been capable of transporting cargo and people reliably into low Earth orbit was viewed as crazy. Much has happened since, and two things in particular. One was that Virgin Galactic, an upstart British firm, said it would develop a space-tourism business based around a craft that had cost only $25m to build. The other was that an equally upstart American entrepreneur called Elon Musk, flush from his sale of PayPal, created a company called SpaceX (whose Falcon rocket is pictured above, dropping its first stage on its way into orbit). He said he wanted to make it cheaper to launch people into space and wanted, ultimately, to send a mission to Mars—but that he would start by launching satellites.

It would be an understatement to say that both ventures were treated with scepticism. But they have now come far enough to be able to thumb their noses at the cynics. On September 3rd SpaceX signed a contract worth $50m with ORBCOMM, a satellite-communications firm. The deal is to launch 18 satellites for ORBCOMM’s network. Meanwhile, at the end of July, Aabar Investments, a sovereign-wealth fund based in Abu Dhabi, bought a 32% stake in Virgin Galactic for $280m. Aabar was not just interested in space tourism. It was also keen on a proposal to use Virgin’s White Knight launch system to put satellites into low Earth orbit. Will Whitehorn, Virgin Galactic’s president, said that one of the things which attracted Aabar was the fact that White Knight (an aircraft which lifts to high altitude a rocket that can then take either passengers or satellites onwards into space) could be flown from Abu Dhabi.

The “Giggle Factor” continues to dissipate.