Business, Economics, Space

Marginal Launch Costs For Reusable Vehicles

43 Comments

I’m writing a paper that contains the following sentence: “Current reusable suborbital providers, such as XCOR Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, or Armadillo Aerospace, are likely to expand their performance envelopes into orbit over the next 10 to 15 years, driving prices down much closer to the marginal cost of propellant, which means potential prices of less than $100 per pound of payload to LEO.”

Can anyone find me a citation to substantiate this statement? I don’t really want to show my work in this document.

[Late evening update]

Ummmmm…folks in comments?

This is all fun, but I don’t need the argument — I know the argument. I need a citation of someone at least semi-credible who has made it, somewhere else.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Good Night, Moonshot

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Matt Welch has some thoughts on the mission creep of the “If we can put a man on the moon” analogy. It’s also an introduction to this month’s issue of Reason magazine, which is focused on space. It’s on the stands and in the mail now, and other pieces in it, including my own, and contributions from Greg Benford and Bob Zubrin, will be going on line over the next couple weeks.

[Update a while later]

I have some related thoughts over at Open Market.

Space

Underfunding Phobos-Grunt

12 Comments

…was the cause of the failure. Ultimately, I suppose so. But I’m not sure about this:

On the positive side, Phobos-Grunt’s aluminum fuel tank holding 8.3 tons of toxic fuel is likely to safely burn up during re-entry. “Aluminum has a very low melting temperature and rarely survives,” says space debris expert Nicholas Johnson of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

That’s assuming that the propellant isn’t frozen. Do we know that?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Don’t Know Much About Science

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Some thoughts about the “moderate” Jon Huntsman:

Nearly everything “liberal” about Huntsman is symbolic. His campaign’s iconic moment was an unprovoked Twitter comment in which he wrote: “To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

While politically loaded, this statement is nearly substanceless. A president’s “Belie[f] in evolution” has not had any bearing on public policy in a good while. And scientifically, the statement doesn’t mean much — “believing in” something is more the business of faith than science.

And “trust[ing] scientists on global warming,” taken literally isn’t actually agreement with Al Gore’s fevered warnings of 20-foot sea-level rises or endorsement of Democrats’ big-government energy proposals.

Science involves detail, nuance, and acknowledgment of uncertainty. Bluster about “believing in science” is just a self-congratulatory liberal trope meant to denigrate conservative rubes from the red states clinging bitterly to their guns and religion.

It’s identity politics, and Huntsman is identifying as a liberal or a moderate. That MSNBC hosts and liberal writers fall for this trick is telling, but just as telling is how much conservatives also buy into it.

It comes back to the mistaken concept of many that “science” is knowledge, rather than a process by which we achieve it. It is my own belief in science that creates my skepticism about AGW, because the process is intrinsically flawed, and the leading practitioners of “climate science” have betrayed it.

[Update a few minutes later]

I often joke about firing up the SUVs to stave off the next glacial advance, but now there’s a paper that says greenhouse gases will do exactly that. Of course, they still think that global warming is worse than a mile-thick sheet of ice. Have to stick with the narrative.

Mathematics, Political Commentary

The Minimum Sudoku Problem

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…has been solved.

Of course, this is for a nine-by-nine. There is nothing intrinsic to the sudoku concept that requires a nine-by-nine matrix, as far as I know. That’s just the size that utilizes the non-zero digits. Smaller ones would just leave out the upper numbers, and larger ones could continue by using letters, as in hexadecimal (though they would get increasingly tough to solve as size increased). People think that sudoku is about math because it has numbers in it, but it’s really just a logic puzzle. It doesn’t have to use numbers at all, but everyone knows them, so they make handy symbols. You could just as well use mah-jong tiles, or animals for a kid’s version.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!