Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Telling It Like It Is

10 Comments

Bob Bigelow doesn’t suffer the fools who have been stupidly criticizing commercial space gladly:

We are becoming a member of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation at this time to join with like-minded organizations, who want to see America be able to compete again in the global space launch marketplace, and push back against the pernicious misconceptions that are being perpetuated to harm the Administration’s commercial crew initiative.”

“Specifically, I’m appalled by the condemnation of commercial crew as being somehow less safe than government programs, and the refrain that commercial companies need to prove they can deliver cargo before they deliver crew. In regard to the latter, a leading contender for commercial missions, the Atlas V, has had 21 consecutive successful launches. This rocket is arguably the most reliable domestic launch system in existence today. It strains the bounds of credulity to claim that any new rocket would be able to trump the safety of a system that has an extensive record of flawless operations.”

“Moreover,” Bigelow added, “we’re extremely pleased to be part of the Boeing team constructing the CST-100 capsule under the auspices of NASA’s own Commercial Crew Development program. Boeing’s unparalleled heritage and experience, combined with Bigelow Aerospace’s entrepreneurial spirit and desire to keep costs low, represents the best of both established and new space companies. The product of this relationship, the CST-100 capsule, will represent the safest, most reliable, and most cost-effective spacecraft ever to fly. Again, I don’t understand the critics who say ‘commercial’ entities can’t safely build a capsule. Why is it that Boeing, the company that constructed the ISS itself, can’t safely build a capsule that would go to their own space station? These are the sorts of questions and issues that we will be posing in Washington as a member of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.”

“Pernicious misconception” is actually kind of a nice phrase for it. I’d like to see more details on the “CST 100” capsule. I wonder what the TLA is? Crewed Space Transportation? And what happened to 1-99? 😉

Business, Space

SpaceX Press Conference

37 Comments

Elon — half a billion dollars, biggest commercial launch deal in history. Reinforces fact that Falcon 9 is vehicle of choice not just for NASA but also for commercial sector. Also a lot of international customers. Good thing for US in particular because vehicles are built 100% in the US. US hasn’t been cost competitive in launch market, but are now.

2015-2017 for launch. Expect a couple dozen launches before then.

Bobby Block: What does mean in terms of what you’ll be looking for from the government to accelerate both crew and cargo?

Elon: Won’t make much difference, but does validate the NASA’s approach. Over the long term the cost to NASA and the taxpayer will be less because fixed costs will be divided by larger number of launches. Dragon is currently long pole, and this deal doesn’t affect that.

Block: People talking about Shuttle extension and more flights. If Shuttle is extended will it affect COTS?

Elon: Doesn’t see it affecting things. Assume that everyone knows that extending/restarting not a viable option. An extra Shuttle flight will cost a lot of money, more than SpaceX is getting for the entire NASA constract.

Claire Moskowitz: When launching out of Vandenberg?

Elon: Two years from now, roughly. Using SLC-4, former Titan IV facility (just like at the Cape). So they have a good understanding of what it takes to convert, 12-18 months.

Moskowitz: How about Taiwan launch on Falcon 1e?

Elon: Been in discussion for a couple years. Planning to do a number of Falcon 1e launches. Over forty launches manifested by the end of the year.

Alan Boyle: How many launches is the contract? About ten? One more provider to receive lion’s share?

Elon: No insight into other provider. SpaceX is primary provider, so other will be a backup or secondary. Can’t comment on exact number of launches, depends on final satellite configuration.

Elon: Most of the money goes to satellite production, the half billion is just the launch piece. Part of the cost is dispenser development, so it’s not all launch costs.

MSNBC: When is next launch, and what is cash situation (talking about Pasztor’s billion-dollar number).

Elon: Pasztor’s article rife with errors. In good financial shape but may take on debt for working capital. May also take in strategic investor. Next launch toward end of summer. Falcon 9 carrying operational version of Dragon.

Todd Halvorson: What is total backlog of Falcon 1/9 launches?

Elon: Low thirties in terms of backlog. Will be over forty by the end of the year.

Halvorson: Assuming that Iridium are polar, will any be equatorial?

Elon: Some chance of equatorial, but all current plans high inclination.

Irene Klotz: Location of Falcon 1e with Taiwan satellite?

Elon: Kwaj.

Klotz: How much to convert SLC-4 for Falcon 9?

Elon: $40-$50M.

Klotz: Who was competition for Iridium?

Elon: Everyone. French satellite, so no restrictions on American content issue. Global competition.

Klotz: How is data analysis from flight going?

Elon: Not a lot to report. It went great. Slight roll anomaly isolated to probably the roll-control actuator, but still not positive, still seeking internal consensus. A little too concerned that it went too good. Will be looking for “near misses” to prepare for next flight.

Space News: Is contract for all seventy two birds, or just a piece of the Constellation?

Elon: Doesn’t want to discuss that, ask Iridium.

ALan Boyle: Any better sense of how long the Dragon test article will stay in orbit? Is there another client for the mission, perhaps classified? Can you say anything?

Elon: Laughs, can neither confirm or deny. Dragon will stay up for a year or two, and burn up on entry.

Halvorson: Comment on how SpaceX operates versus legacy companies in terms of costs?

Elon: Doesn’t like to give sound bites — oversimplifies. Needs to write a paper on it. Like asking why Southwest is cheaper. Not just because they use 737s. SpaceX operates on a Silicon Valley OS and DNA. Sort of like an Intel or Apple or Google of space transport. Vertical integration helps also, once problems are solved. Too much outsourcing in traditional aerospace. They cut out middlemen. Using legacy components means inheriting legacy cost structure. Tightly integrated team, with factory on the same floor as engineering. Everyone in a cube, including him. Also, very simple, with same propellants in both stages. Upper stage simply a short version of first stage. Same engine on both stages, so lots of economies of scale from Merlin.

Klotz: Launch escape in house, or contract?

Elon: Building liquid escape engines into sidewall of Dragon, which will be safety improvement over solid. Won’t have to eject a tower. Having something that you have to eject every flight seems like a crazy idea. Will have escape capability all the way to orbit.

International Business: Is this part of the two and a half billion in contracts?

Elon: Yes, it’s about $2.7B, including this, through 2017, but bulk over the next five years.

Are Chinese competition?

Yes, when international customer.

How much financial margin? Can you avoid the Sea Launch problem?

Elon: Cash flow not significantly affected even in stand down. Sea Launch suffered from single-point failure of launch platform. Tough to recover from. SpaceX has site flexibility of Vandenberg, Cape and Kwaj.

Space News: Might want to check out if Chinese were eligible to bid for Iridium work.

Elon: Not sure they were, just thought they were because of French satellite. You may know more than me, but didn’t think there was an ITAR issue.

Conference over.

[Update a few minutes later]

The one question that I didn’t capture was mine. I asked him if they knew yet why the first stage didn’t survive entry, or if they would have to wait for another flight to get better data (because they didn’t get the microwave imaging data they wanted). He said that they still didn’t know, and might not figure it out until they try again. I followed up, asking if he could conceive of a time that they might just give up on it, and pull the recovery systems out to give them more payload. I was surprised at the vehemence of his answer (paraphrasing): “We will never give up! Never! Reusability is one of the most important goals. If we become the biggest launch company in the world, making money hand over fist, but we’re still not reusable, I will consider us to have failed.” I told him that I was very gratified to hear that, because I like reusability.

[Early afternoon update]

Here’s Bobby Block’s report on the presser.

Uncategorized

Racist Conservative Soccer Hatred

41 Comments

Jonah has some thoughts on the idiotic notion that conservatives don’t like soccer because they’re racist. I agree with him that most anti-soccer animus is just backlash against “progressive” soccerphilia, much of which derives, I suspect, from a knee-jerk multi-culti worship. It’s not an American sport, therefore it is to be admired. I am indifferent to soccer, but I do enjoy poking fun at it, only because it stirs up the right sort of people:

it seems to me that Zirin is displaying that all too common tendency among leftwingers to assume that if conservatives dissent from liberal affections and priorities, it must be because conservatives are evil. A far more plausible and good faith explanation for the conservative reaction to soccer can be found in the liberal overreaction to soccer. It seems to me that most of the conservatives I know who make a fuss about the World Cup (I should say a “make a negative fuss,” since I know quite a few conservatives who love soccer and the World Cup. I am not one of them.) do so because they are sick of being told how soccer is the future; how it’s elegant and sophisticated and cosmopolitan. As with women’s professional basketball, journalistic and other elites tell the masses they’re supposed to love it – and they just don’t. Moreover they resent being told to “evolve” in their sports tastes. Now, tastes change of course, and soccer will undoubtedly grow in popularity. But being told that all the smart and decent people love something is a sure way to get the Irish up in a lot of Americans. I am willing to concede that some conservatives get carried away in their anti-soccer tirades, usually just for fun, but I’d very much like to see a few more liberals admit that at least some of the soccer-mania here in the states is driven by a faddish desire to seem hip and worldly.

But we know that any disagreement with “liberals” has to be rooted in racism, right?

[Update a while later]

Per some comments, I would note that my sports preference is for a game with strategy and time to contemplate the next move (e.g., football, baseball). I have an extreme dislike for any game with continuous motion with the point of getting a ball/object into the opposing team’s goal. That is, basketball, hockey…and soccer.

Political Commentary, Space

How Risky Are The Russians?

17 Comments

Some thoughts from Jim Oberg.

This slow-motion policy train wreck has been going on for years. Decades, in fact. We knew back in 1986 that we needed a more robust transportation architecture, but we trusted NASA to fix it when it just wasn’t up to the job, and never will be. Jobs have always been more important than space, and that will remain the case until space becomes important again, as it was briefly in the early sixties. The only way out is to promote competition and market development in the private sector, which is finally starting to happen with the new policy, if Congress doesn’t screw it up (again). What is so frustrating is that if we’d had sensible plans for the VSE five years ago, and Bush hadn’t allowed Mike Griffin to copulate with the chihuahua for this past half decade, we’d be very close to not having a gap at all.

[Update a while later]

In that two-year-old PJM piece that I linked last night, I just noticed this bit of prescience:

In hindsight, if the goal of Apollo had been to open up the space frontier, rather than a crash program to send half a dozen astronauts to the lunar surface, it would have been better to state as a goal that we would establish an affordable and sustainable transportation infrastructure to and from the moon. As it happens, that was in fact what George W. Bush proposed four and a half years ago in the Vision for Space Exploration, but NASA apparently missed the memo. But that never was the goal of Apollo. The goal of Apollo was to simply prove that a democratic socialist state enterprise was technologically superior to a totalitarian one. Once we had beaten the Soviets to the moon, it was mission accomplished, and no need to go back. The remaining missions after Apollo XI were simply programmatic inertia, using up the hardware after the production was shut down in 1967, when it became clear that we were going to win.

The problem was that, as already noted, Apollo cost a lot of money. So much so that after landing only six crews, we flew the last mission thirty-six years ago, and shelved the technology that enabled us to achieve it, because it wasn’t providing an economic return commensurate with the cost to the taxpayer. In fact, it spurred a new use of the phrase among frustrated space enthusiasts. Since 1972, they’ve been able to ask “If we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we send a man to the moon?” The answer is that we couldn’t afford to continue to do so, at least not the way we’d been doing it (which is a reason why NASA’s plan to redo Apollo, pretty much the same way, will likely not be sustainable, either). To use Apollo as a model for the provision of our most vital commodity — energy — would be economically ruinous.

Emphasis mine. Did I call it, or what?

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Sorry, It’s Not The Manhattan Project

32 Comments

…or Apollo. I suffered through the president’s speech so you don’t have to.

The most egregious part of it was when he compared energy independence to Apollo. Here’s my response from the campaign:

He’s never met a problem that, in his mind, the “full power of the government” can’t solve.

It’s an understandable appeal, but it betrays a certain lack of understanding of the problem to think that we will solve it with a crash federal program, at least if it’s one modelled on Apollo.

Putting a man on the moon was a remarkable achievement, but it was a straightforward well-defined engineering challenge, and a problem susceptible to having huge bales of money thrown at it, which is exactly how it was done. At its height, the Apollo program consumed four percent of the federal budget (NASA is currently much less than one percent, and has been for many years). Considering how much larger the federal budget is today, with the addition and growth of many federal programs over the past forty years makes the amount of money spent on the endeavor even more remarkable.

But most of the other problems for which people have pled for a solution, using Apollo as an example, were, and are, less amenable to being solved by a massive public expenditure. We may in fact cure cancer, and have made great strides over the past four decades in doing so, but it’s a different kind of problem, involving science and research on the most complex machine ever built — the human body. It isn’t a problem for which one can simply set a goal and time table and put the engineers to work on it, as Apollo was. Similarly, ending world hunger and achieving world peace are socio-political problems, not technological ones (though technology has made great strides in improving food production, which makes the problem easier to solve for governments that are competent and not corrupt). So most of the uses of the phrase never really made much sense, often being non sequiturs.

It’s important to understand that landing a man on the moon (or developing atomic weaponry as in the Manhattan Project — another example used by proponents of a new federal energy program) was a technological achievement. Achieving “energy independence,” or ending the use of fossil fuels, are economic ones. And the former is not necessarily even a desirable goal, if by that one means only getting energy from domestic sources. Energy is, and should remain, part of the global economy and trade system if we want to continue to keep prices as low as possible and continue to provide economic growth.

Nothing has changed. My commentary remains true today.

[Wednesday morning update]

If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we stop the leak, Mr. President? That’s a much better Apollo analogy.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

But Don’t Call Them Fascists

5 Comments

Ed Schulz says that the president should act like a dictator tonight. Does he mean that Obama should be “the decider”?

[Update a while later]

This seems related somehow:

Remember, there are Americans who believe that if you run into your congressman and ask him a question, the congressman has a right to not merely hit you in response, but to have you arrested. And their vote counts every bit as much as yours.

Not that it’s an excuse, but it looked to me in that video like Etheridge was at least two sheets to the wind, with a third coming loose.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Oh, and no need to play Name That Party! They just lie about it. Because obviously, only Republicans are violent and have scandals.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!