Joe Katzman has a piece on it, and progress to date.
How To Deal With Them
In the wake of the shootings, Jennifer Roback Morse writes about the intractable problem of the mentally ill (as it’s more than abundantly clear that the shooter was). This is something with which I, unfortunately, have some personal experience. It is tragic, and frustrating. But in this particular case, it was also devastating to dozens of innocents and their families.
Window opening and closing or just opening?
Alan Marty, an investment consultant speaking at the Space Investment Summit yesterday, drew the comparison of semiconductor fabs right before the boom and the orbital access market. That there is $500 million of government assistance reducing the barrier to entry now for launchers and then for fabs. He said he thought the window for launching an orbital company is open now but will be closing. This suggests RpK and SpaceX will enjoy a long profitable run if they are successful.
Bob Werb, co-founder of the Space Frontier Foundation, said, “The window is opening and will open again and again,” in his remarks at the closing of the event.
I don’t see a big drop in access prices if these are the only entrants. Musk and French will reduce prices enough to shut out more expensive launchers, but then split the market and prices will drop no further. But that high price will continue to attract entrants once the subsidized entrants make good.
Please Overturn My Vote
Here’s the kind of question that a supposedly objective press would ask:
The quote from Senator Reid that Kathryn quotes below is especially peculiar given that Reid himself voted in favor of the bill the Court upheld today. So he wishes O’Connor could have still been there to overturn the law he supported?
Sounds almost like George Bush on campaign finance.
[Update at 8 PM EDT]
Jacob Sullum has more thoughts on “gun-free zones:”
Cho used two handguns, a .22 and a 9mm, neither of them especially powerful or exotic. Contrary to the false promises of gun controllers, firearms cannot be neatly sorted into “good” and “evil” categories; any weapon that can be used for self-defense (or for hunting) also can be used to murder people. A gun’s specific features matter even less if the victims are unarmed.
“We can’t have an armed guard in front of every classroom every day of the year,” Virginia Tech campus police chief Wendell Flinchum said after the shootings. Given the reality that police cannot be everywhere, it is unconscionable to disarm people who want to defend themselves.
Bad News For NASA Funding?
Jeff Foust has some tea leaves, in several posts, here, here, and here.
He also has a sign that Dr. Griffin has worn out his welcome on the Hill:
Give The Lunar Solar A Rest
One of the presentations at the Space Investment Summit was on Lunar solar power. Solar satellites were also referred to. One presentation noted that if a government agree to buy solar at $0.85/kwh (about a 900% subsidy) that space solar would pay. Great. You can make $50 billion if they give you a $70 billion subsidy. Hand me a glass of ethanol.
My previous best efforts on solar are here, here, and here.
I think there is a fairly simple case against. Grant that space solar is 4x as efficient per kilogram as Earth solar. Ignore the fact that people want more power during the day than at night. Grant that we can take raw silicon and turn it into solar cells with minimal remote human input. Grant that we can beam it. Ignore that if we import solar power in quantity that the price of coal and uranium will drop until they are competitive again as fuels.
Can’t we just set one of the ‘bots that will build the cells loose in an Earth desert? Doesn’t it require the transportation cost to space be on the order of 4 times the manufacturing cost for space solar to be economically effective? Even if we are just talking about the regolith eating robot, don’t we have to get transportation cost down to three times the cost of producing a sand eating robot and letting it loose in the desert? Am I missing something? I think this argument means space solar will never be competitive.
Space Science Bull
Thomas B. Pickens III gave the luncheon speech at the Space Investment Summit yesterday. He thinks that SpaceX and Rocketplane-Kistler are the “Toyota trucks” of the space infrastructure and that Space Hab will make a good business of packing science payloads to send to the Space Station. He is interested in ISS racks but can do free floating experiments and also work with Bigelow. I asked him afterwards if doing his “due diligence” as a board member before taking over as CEO he talked to the customers. He said that every customer said that they were interested if it were cheaper, more reliable and standardized.
I think that this market may not be as big as Bigelow and Space Hab are hoping. It remains to see if a business can be made. The Bull I prefer is Space Tourism. Space Hab did say they could do logistics missions too. Glad to have you as part of the industry, Thomas B. Pickens. Best of luck.
Free Market for Loans
New York Times says in an editorial that student loans should be subject to sunshine laws, careful policing and ethics rules that make it a crime to take money for access to colleges. This is misguided. Colleges will voluntarily step forward to show that their processes are clean now that there is focus on the issue. Those that don’t should be spared the regulatory burden. Students will go to the school that gives them the best overall package. Competition will steer students to the schools with the best policy–taking into account both student loan rates and what the school does less of due to the way it administers the loans.
More On Infantilization
On Monday, I wrote:
Here it comes. Now they’re going on about “the children, won’t someone think of the children“? Someone on Cavuto is demanding to know what they’re doing for “the kids.” Are they being kept warm, are they being fed, are they getting the grief counseling they need?
These “kids” are college students. Almost all of them are of the age of majority. They’re the same age as the “kids” who are off fighting for us overseas, who are seeing things just as horrific, or more so, every day. Yes, one doesn’t go off to an idyllic campus in the western Virginia mountains with the expectation that they’ll have to deal with something like this, but they’re not kids. In every society up until this one, they would have been considered adults, and many of them would have already been married (or not) and raising families. The notion that we should treat them like grade schoolers, for whom we are responsible for feeding, and heating them, is ludicrous. Yes, they’re upset, but I’m pretty sure that they’re still capable of feeding themselves, and finding a blanket, if shooting people somehow caused the heating systems on campus to break down. If I were one of them, I’d be insulted and appalled at this kind of stupid, stupid commentary.
Today, Mark Steyn expands much more eloquently on that theme, and on our culture of passivity:
The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and
A Trojan Horse?
Can the US trust the BBC? The folks at BritainAndAmerica.com don’t think so.