Some reflections from Bob Zimmerman.
[Update a while later]
Here‘s Eric Berger’s take on the significance.
This picture doesn’t flatter her. She’s quite stunning in person.
Category Archives: Economics
We Demand A Collectivist Space Program
An ignorant rant against the “billionaire space race.”
[Update a while later]
As would be expected, Alan Boyle has a more intelligent take on the “race.”
SLS BS
It’s like these people are living in an alternate reality. No sane program manager is going to want to use SLS. And a billion dollars a flight? That might be the marginal cost, but it’s not the average.
[Saturday-morning update]
More thoughts from Bob Zimmerman.
Asteroid Mining
A nice essay by Martin Elvis.
Turning Seawater Into Freshwater
This will be great if it’s scalable.
Chaos
When it is in the interest of the state, the state will create more.
Space Solar Power
This seems pretty ambitious on China’s part.
The Lockdowns
As some of us predicted, they were probably the greatest public-health mistake in human history.
The Globalists
The G7 summit shows that they are in big trouble.
I don’t think they realize what is coming to them politically.
An ELEO Thought Experiment
Imagine that you could have 150,000 tons of cargo (or people) delivered to equatorial LEO annually, at $60/lbm. What would you do with it? What are the markets? We’re talking on the order of $5B/year.
[Update late afternoon]
Note that that’s less than a quarter of the NASA budget…
For that money, we could have 150,000 tons of material/people in orbit, or pay for another year of SLS/Orion.
[Friday-morning update]
Thanks to a comment, I went and rechecked, and found an error in the spreadsheet. The cost is more like $20/lbm.