When they teach themselves to be better drivers than humans.
Category Archives: Economics
NASA Has Selected Its Lunar Lander
Now comes the fun part.
I’m writing a piece similar to this for The New Atlantis. It’s hard for people who are still thinking in Apollo mode to get their head around just how revolutionary this is.
The Intellectual Frontier
Victims Of Communism Day
It’s not one to celebrate, but to commemorate. Particularly when so many of our elected “leaders” seem oblivious to that history.
The “Green New Deal”
…will impoverish America.
Why yes, yes it would.
NASA’s Starship Award
Five reasons it’s a watershed moment in human spaceflight.
It’s the biggest departure from the ancient Apollo mentality that the agency has ever made.
[Sunday-morning update]
Casey Handmer does a thorough analysis of just how revolutionary this capability is. We will get not only cheap lunar (and other space) transportation, but cheap lunar bases based on one-way trips of Starships. It also probably means that, for a long time, lunar ISRU for propellant will make no economic sense.
[Bumped]
The Martian Atmosphere
…just became slightly more breathable.
This is the kind of thing that NASA should be spending more money on, instead of unnecessary giant rockets.
End Of The Line For Falcon Development
SpaceX is throwing in the towel on fairing recovery, at least in terms of catching them.
There is always a tradeoff between reusability and expendability in terms of minimizing cost per flight. Shuttle had some notoriously bad design decisions, because they anticipated a higher flight rate than they ever got. At the end of the program, it was clear that it would have been cheaper to expend the SRBs than to recover and refurbish them, because of the high fixed costs of the recovery fleet that had to be amortized over a low flight rate. Expending the ET cost tens of millions per flight.
Elon was determined early on to recover as much of the vehicle as possible (they spent years trying to figure out how to recover the upper stage of the Falcon), but he finally decided that the only solution was to scale the vehicle up, and go to stainless steel to handle entry heating, so the focus is on Starship now, and Falcon 9 has reached the end of its development cycle.
NASA’s Lunar Surprise
They’ve selected SpaceX for the lunar lander. Eddie Bernice Johnson is not happy.
I think this is a message to Congress that if they want to increase the amount of money NASA has to waste on Artemis, they’re going to have to increase the budget.
[Update a while later]
Here is the source-selection report.
I haven’t read it yet, but I wonder if the fact that SpaceX can takeoff and land with minimal blasting of regolith, with its engines so high on the vehicle, was a significant factor?
[Update a few minutes later]
Glancing through it, ouch. Dynetics Technical Rating was “Marginal.” For the highest bid…
No, Dr. Fauci
We are not “ruled by the science.”
I get very tired of people who clearly wouldn’t know what science is if it planted a boot up their fundament talking about how they “follow” it.