General

Fame, If Not Fortune

I had a first on Friday night–a Lileks-like moment. I’m often recognized by my name badge at space conferences, but when I checked in at the American counter at LAX on Friday night, the agent recognized my name on my driver’s license, and asked if I was the space blogger. He told me that space was supposed to be about exploration, not a jobs program. I told him that it actually was a jobs program, but that it should be about space settlement.

Anyway, thanks for the service–usually I have to schlep my bag over to the X-ray myself, but he told me that for Fort Lauderdale, he could put it on the conveyor behind him.

Popular Culture

The Jinx Is Broken

Until yesterday, Michigan hadn’t won a game since Bo Schembechler died, last November. Let’s hope that the rest of the season will go much better. Mallett actually looks like a better natural quarterback than Henne ever has. It’s not obvious who should start next week, even if Henne is healthy.

Administrative

Back To FL

Blogging continues to be light. I’ve been working on a piece for Popular Mechanics. I’ve got a red eye tonight, but I need to make a Fry’s run, and meet someone for dinner. Back later, for those of you who have inexplicably been on the edge of their seats.

Space

Back In Business

OK, I’m back in the ARES Torrance office, and I’ll be flying back to Florida tonight. Some conference thoughts:

This was a little disappointing, relative to last year. It seemed much more like a traditional AIAA conference (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but it had much less of a NewSpace flavor, for two reasons, I think. First, last year was sort of an anomaly, because it was up in San Jose on Ames’ turf, and it was really Pete Worden’s conference. He worked pretty hard to make it a NewSpace conference. Second, it was (let’s face it) a bad year for NewSpace. While there are some success stories (more on that in a minute), the explosion at Scaled put a damper on things somewhat, and RpK’s problems will haunt people raising money, though they had a somewhat unique situation. There was very little NewSpace presence, at least relative to last year.

On the other hand, Jeff Greason was on the first morning’s plenary panel, and was a refreshing new voice, in conjunction with the usual suspects from the Aerospace Industries Association and other usual suspects. As he noted himself, a few years ago, there wouldn’t have been even a slot on the panel for someone like him, let alone him personally. XCOR has come a long way, and seems to continue to do well.

He was also on a panel with Elon, in which “the Gap” was a topic of much discussion, and for some, consternation. This Wired article describes it (sort of). Why this is big news, I don’t know. There has been a “gap” ever since January 14th, 2004. It was intrinsic in the VSE announcement. All that’s changed is that it’s increased slightly, from four years to five. Stop the presses!

I hope that Elon can live up to his boast, and I suspect that Jeff does as well. I suspect that what he meant to say is that it won’t be closed with fully reusable vehicles in that timeframe (a statement with which I agree). I don’t think (as the article implies) that he was saying that Elon won’t be able to do it. Only the future will tell.

One other interesting (and concerning) bit of information. Though it wasn’t publicly announced there (because it’s not really an announcement), based on a reliable source, they still don’t know what caused the explosion in Mojave. The implications of that are troubling. I would think that it means that they can’t move forward on a nitrous hybrid system, and have confidence that this won’t happen again, until they know why it happened the first time. That implies that (assuming they don’t come up with an answer in which they have confidence) they will either have to change oxidizers (probably to LOX) or perhaps go to an all-liquid system (something I’ve long advocated, and speculated they might do).

This could be an opportunity for one of the engine companies (XCOR jumping first to mind), since it’s unlikely in the extreme (particularly considering what happened with the hybrid development) that Scaled would try to develop one on its own. That’s probably the only way to move forward fast enough for Virgin to start generating revenues in a reasonable amount of time.

Economics

Reward the Speculators

The mortgage-backed securities price drop reflects the natural tendancy of people to be sloppy with other people’s money. In this case, it was primarily the mortgage brokers shoveling out other people’s money to borrowers and hedge funds asking not quite enough questions about who is monitoring the borrowers before shoveling their investors money to purchase the loans. These capitalist swashbucklers should be lionized, not villified. If the US economy is not utilizing all of its productive capacity, we need to find some way to nudge it to work harder. If prime borrowers have borrowed all the money they want, then the extra money to get the economy moving has to be lent to subprime borrowers or monetary policy will be pushing on a string like in Japan where the nominal interest rate has been zero for a while and the real interest rate negative.

So expect the extra money to go into irrational stocks or to risky borrowers. If it doesn’t go to them and Congress isn’t swift enough to write everyone another $300 check, then we will just have idle capacity. Without a housing boom, instead of an overhang of houses that would be in danger of being foreclosed, we would have fewer houses, more unemployment, lower wages and lower GDP. We should continue to figure out ways to get money into the hands of people who will spend it even if they are speculators, sub prime borrowers, exuberant speculators and intrepid entrepreneurs.

Personally, I am in favor of subsidizing all consumer borrowing so that the benefits of rate cuts don’t accrue disproportionately to creditworthy borrowers. But whether it’s health care, green cleanup, space settlement or defense that you think needs more money spent on it, to just leave capacity idle is in my opinion even worse than spending it on my last choice.

Space

Light Posting

I don’t have Internet where I’m staying, and while I’ll probably have wireless for the next three days at the conference, there will be way too much going on to have any time for live blogging. I’ll try to provide at least some daily highlights, though, and live coverage if there is any breaking news, as there was last year.

[Tuesday evening update]

I don’t know whether it’s my computer, or the wireless in the convention center, but this is the first time I’ve been on line all day, when I got back to where I’m staying, with ethernet. Probably little blogging from the conference…

Education

Research Request

I just got an email. I don’t in fact have time to answer all these questions, but perhaps some of my readers do. I think that the nation needs more engineers. I also think that it’s sad that the nation doesn’t seem to value them as much as it should, and that they’re often treated particularly shabbily by the aerospace industry:

Hello,

My name is Harley Wilkinson. I’m a student at Camdenton High School in Camdenton MO. I’m in a Project Lead The Way class and am writing a paper about a field of engineering. I was wondering if you would have the time to answer a few questions for me about your job and the training/education you needed.

1) What is an average day’s work routine is like.
2) What is your particular job duties.
3) What were some of the more helpful college courses you took to prepare you.
4) Do you have any regrets of things you wished you would have done diffrently education wise.
5) As someone straight out of college what is the average starting salary.
6) What high school classes do you believe helped you the most.

If you would be able to take the time to answer these questions it would be greatly appreciated. If not I understand that your time is valuable.

Thank You,
Harley Wilkinson

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!