Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Space

What Do They Know?

5 Comments

As Clark says, I don’t know why anyone would think that space scientists or astronauts are experts on business. I don’t really care what Kathy Sullivan thinks the prospects are for suborbital tourism, and if I thought that astronauts’ opinions on the matter were of value, I can find many astronauts (including John Herrington, Rick Searfoss, etc.) who would disagree with her.

And who is this “Alvin” Aldrin of which they speak? Is that Andy’s evil twin? When I do a search for “Alvin Aldrin” I only get one hit–this article.

A couple other questions for Alvin/Andy. What numbers was he using for the Raptor cost? Marginal, or average per-unit? It makes a big difference.

In addition, I always get annoyed when people use a military fighter as a cost analogue for a spaceship. A lot of that dollar-per-pound number for the plane comes from something in it that weighs nothing at all–software. The avionics for the weapons systems, and the defensive systems are non-trivial in cost as well. Designing a combat aircraft, designed to kill other things and avoid being actively killed by other things, is an entirely different problem than designing a vehicle that has to only contend with passive and predictable nature (and pretty benign nature, for the most part, at least for suborbital). I’d bet that Burt’s own cost numbers for the SS2 already put the lie to Andy’s chart.

[Late afternoon update]

Jeff Foust has a much more extensive writeup of the discussion, which he apparently attended. As I suspected, it was Andy, not Alvin, Aldrin.

Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

A Kludge

17 Comments

Is this the future of air travel?

Engineers created the A2 with the failures of its doomed supersonic predecessor, the Concorde, very much in mind. Reaction Engines’s technical director, Richard Varvill, and his colleagues believe that the Concorde was phased out because of a couple major limitations. First, it couldn’t fly far enough. “The range was inadequate to do trans-Pacific routes, which is where a lot of the potential market is thought to be for a supersonic transport,” Varvill explains. Second, the Concorde’s engines were efficient only at its Mach-2 cruising speed, which meant that when it was poking along overland at Mach 0.9 to avoid producing sonic booms, it got horrible gas mileage. “The [A2] engine has two modes because we’re very conscious of the Concorde experience,” he says.

Those two modes–a combination of turbojet and ramjet propulsion systems–would both make the A2 efficient at slower speeds and give it incredible speed capabilities. (Engineers didn’t include windows in the design because only space-shuttle windows, which are too heavy for use in an airliner, can withstand the heat the A2 would encounter.) In the A2’s first mode, its four Scimitar engines send incoming air through bypass ducts to turbines. These turbines produce thrust much like today’s conventional jet engines–by using the turbine to compress incoming air and then mixing it with fuel to achieve combustion–and that’s enough to get the jet in the air and up to Mach 2.5. Once it reaches Mach 2.5, the A2 switches into its second mode and does the job it was built for. Incoming air is rerouted directly to the engine’s core. Now that the plane is traveling at supersonic speed, the air gets rammed through the engine with enough pressure to sustain combustion at speeds of up to Mach 5.

A combination turbofan/ramjet. Hokay.

If I understand this properly, the idea is to fly fast subsonic over land to avoid breaking windows, and then to go like a bat out of hell over the water. When I look at that design, I have to wonder how they can really get the range, with all of the drag that is implied from those huge delta wings, not to mention the wave drag at Mach 5. I also wonder where they put the hydrogen–that stuff is very fluffy, and needs large tanks. It’s probably not wet wing (it would be very structurally inefficient), which is why the fuselage must be so huge, to provide enough volume in there for it.

Sorry, but I don’t think that this will be economically viable. As is discussed in comments and the article, hydrogen is not an energy source–it’s an energy storage method, and it’s unclear how they’ll generate it without a greenhouse footprint. Moreover, it’s not as “green” as claimed, because dihydrogen monoxide itself is a greenhouse gas. I’ll bet that this thing has to fly at sixty thousand feet or more to get itself sufficiently out of the atmosphere to mitigate the drag problem, and that’s not a place where you want to be injecting a lot of water.

This concept doesn’t learn the true lessons of Concorde: like Shuttle, a lot of people have learned lessons from Concorde, but the wrong ones. The correct lesson is that we need to get rid of shock waves and drag. Once we do that, we’ll be able to cruise at reasonable speeds (say, Mach 2.5) everywhere, over both land and water, so we won’t have to build the vehicle out of exotic materials and eliminate windows. We’ll also be able to have fast transcontinental trips (two hours coast to coast) which is another huge market that this concept doesn’t address at all. Finally, it has to do it with a reasonable lift/drag ratio, so that ticket prices will be affordable. And I think that the fuel issue is superfluous–Jet A will be just fine for the planet, as long as fuel consumption is reasonable, which makes the vehicle design much easier, with much more dense fuel.

Fortunately, I’ve been working for over a decade with a company that thinks it knows how to do this, and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to start to move forward on it very soon.

[Via Clark Lindsey]

[Update in the late afternoon]

In response to the question in comments, there’s not much publicly available on the web about shock-free supersonics, but here’s a piece I wrote a few years ago on the subject.

Economics, Political Commentary

A Belated Defense of Giuliani’s Tax Policy

My pick for the Presidential race, Giuliani, has bowed out. I like his tax policies. Not that I thought that he could get them adopted, just that I thought that he could achieve what Bush achieved–slightly lower marginal and average taxes for 10 more years. Before you write me off as an elitist who doesn’t like graduated income taxes (which I don’t deny–but bear with me), I agree with Laffer on this point. Taxes are above the monopoly rate. This is expected since there are four (or more) toll takers: Federal income taxes, state income or sales taxes, county sales and/or property taxes, and city sales, income and/or property taxes. When you add up the various employer and employee taxes (federal only) on receiving the last dollar (ignoring the sales and capital gains taxes associated with saving or spending it), they add up in the top bracket to 35% federal + 2.9% Medicare including employer match. That is, if I get $100 in gross in the top tax bracket, I’ll have to pay $36.45 in tax and my employer will have to pay $1.45. If we frame the percentage like sales tax, I am taking home $63.55 and together, my employer and I are paying $37.90. That is a equivalent to a 59.6% sales tax on everything I buy. In other words, to get a dollar, we have to pay 59.6 cents to the government. I assert that this portion of total taxation alone is above the monopoly rate. Tax cutters would have a very easy time getting tax rates cut (and, perhaps counter intuitively, taxes increased) if they could re-frame the tax code to show tax as a percentage of net income at the margin instead of gross.

Do we really despise envy so much that we would rather have the rich indulge in additional leisure than provide the maximum amount to the Treasury?

Economics, Political Commentary

A Belated Defense of Giuliani’s Tax Policy

My pick for the Presidential race, Giuliani, has bowed out. I like his tax policies. Not that I thought that he could get them adopted, just that I thought that he could achieve what Bush achieved–slightly lower marginal and average taxes for 10 more years. Before you write me off as an elitist who doesn’t like graduated income taxes (which I don’t deny–but bear with me), I agree with Laffer on this point. Taxes are above the monopoly rate. This is expected since there are four (or more) toll takers: Federal income taxes, state income or sales taxes, county sales and/or property taxes, and city sales, income and/or property taxes. When you add up the various employer and employee taxes (federal only) on receiving the last dollar (ignoring the sales and capital gains taxes associated with saving or spending it), they add up in the top bracket to 35% federal + 2.9% Medicare including employer match. That is, if I get $100 in gross in the top tax bracket, I’ll have to pay $36.45 in tax and my employer will have to pay $1.45. If we frame the percentage like sales tax, I am taking home $63.55 and together, my employer and I are paying $37.90. That is a equivalent to a 59.6% sales tax on everything I buy. In other words, to get a dollar, we have to pay 59.6 cents to the government. I assert that this portion of total taxation alone is above the monopoly rate. Tax cutters would have a very easy time getting tax rates cut (and, perhaps counter intuitively, taxes increased) if they could re-frame the tax code to show tax as a percentage of net income at the margin instead of gross.

Do we really despise envy so much that we would rather have the rich indulge in additional leisure than provide the maximum amount to the Treasury?

Economics, Political Commentary

A Belated Defense of Giuliani’s Tax Policy

1 Comment

My pick for the Presidential race, Giuliani, has bowed out. I like his tax policies. Not that I thought that he could get them adopted, just that I thought that he could achieve what Bush achieved–slightly lower marginal and average taxes for 10 more years. Before you write me off as an elitist who doesn’t like graduated income taxes (which I don’t deny–but bear with me), I agree with Laffer on this point. Taxes are above the monopoly rate. This is expected since there are four (or more) toll takers: Federal income taxes, state income or sales taxes, county sales and/or property taxes, and city sales, income and/or property taxes. When you add up the various employer and employee taxes (federal only) on receiving the last dollar (ignoring the sales and capital gains taxes associated with saving or spending it), they add up in the top bracket to 35% federal + 2.9% Medicare including employer match. That is, if I get $100 in gross in the top tax bracket, I’ll have to pay $36.45 in tax and my employer will have to pay $1.45. If we frame the percentage like sales tax, I am taking home $63.55 and together, my employer and I are paying $37.90. That is a equivalent to a 59.6% sales tax on everything I buy. In other words, to get a dollar, we have to pay 59.6 cents to the government. I assert that this portion of total taxation alone is above the monopoly rate. Tax cutters would have a very easy time getting tax rates cut (and, perhaps counter intuitively, taxes increased) if they could re-frame the tax code to show tax as a percentage of net income at the margin instead of gross.

Do we really despise envy so much that we would rather have the rich indulge in additional leisure than provide the maximum amount to the Treasury?

Economics

Hyperbole

14 Comments

Bob Zubrin is still selling flex-fueled cars (at least conceptually), which might be a good idea, but I wish that he weren’t doing so with over-the-top rhetoric and economic ignorance. Here’s the very first graf:

Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez recently joined Iranian president Mahmoud Amadinejad in threatening to raise oil prices to $200 per barrel. The threat should be taken quite seriously. With no practical transportation fuel alternative to petroleum available to the world market, the OPEC oil cartel has already been successful in raising prices an order of magnitude since 1999, with a 50 percent increase effected in 2007 alone.

I disagree that this threat should be taken seriously. The notion that oil can ever get to a sustainable $200/barrel, in inflation and currency-adjusted terms, is ludicrous, regardless of the clearly malign intent of Hugo and Mahmoud. They are not capable of achieving this. No one is.

First of all, they don’t control the world’s oil markets. The Saudis (and increasingly, the Iraqis) will have a major say as well. But even if you could get an agreement within OPEC to do so (a ludicrous notion in itself, because the individual members tend to look after their own interests), it still would never happen. First, many states would cheat. But more importantly, the current price is unsustainable at near-term (over the next decade or two) projected demand levels because there are many new sources that are available at production costs much lower than current prices (e.g., tar sands and shale in the western US and Canada). The only reason that they haven’t brought down the price yet is that they’re only starting to come on line.

And if the price did somehow get to that value (as the Saudis understand, even if economically ignorant boobs like Ahmadinejad and Chavez don’t) it would cause a recession that would depress world wide demand. Also, unless you can drive the price of oil to zero, it’s not going to starve the oil dictators of their oil revenues. The only way to do that is to take away their oil (as we did with Saddam). I’m not necessarily proposing that we do so–just pointing out the only realistic way to accomplish it.

On top of this, much of the price rise that Bob Zubrin decries is due to the weak dollar, and has nothing to do with either supply or demand of oil.

Maybe such overblown rhetoric and economic nonsense will sell the concept for him; it’s certainly worked to good effect for the global warm-mongers–but I’d be more persuaded if he’d be more realistic. There are a lot of good arguments for ending the burning of oil for transportation as soon as we can, and I wish that he’d stick to them, instead of doing an impression of Gary North.