Deep Space Industries has been acquired by Bradford Space. I had a brief exchange with Ian about this over the weekend. I wonder if they bought out Luxembourg’s stake? It would seem that it was premature to start an asteroid-mining company.
The Trump Presidency
“How it made me a better American.”
I will continue to praise Trump when he does something good, and criticize him when he behaves stupidly and boorishly.
[Update a few minutes later]
Per Karol’s comments about her disappointment with herself over not being more concerned about Obama’s depredations on the law and decency, a few months ago I started to put together a list of similarities between Obama and Trump, and there are more of them than either of their supporters want to admit:
- Reverse Midas Touch
- Cult
- Inarticulate Foot-in-Mouth Off Prompter
- Indifference/Hostility To Constitution
- Charismatic To Selective Audience
- Reckless Disregard For The Truth
- Travel Expenses
- Dunning Kruger
- Despised by members of his own party
Feel free to add in comments.
[Late-evening update]
I want to thank all those in comments who proved my point about the blind supporters of Trump being unwilling to recognize the similarities with Obama. I hope some Obama supporters will weigh in as well, to reinforce it.
The New Space Race
Nothing new for people who have been following this, but Jeff Foust has a good overview of the current state of play for SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Ultima Thule
Congratulations to Alan Stern and the New Horizons team. The flyby appears to have been a success, we now know that it’s bilobal, and it didn’t have a light curve because the spacecraft was (coincidentally) coming toward its spin axis. Not enough data yet to know if it has a 15-hour or 30-hour period, but we’ll start getting high-res pictures tomorrow. It will take two year to download all the data, though, to give similar resolution that we got for Pluto.
[Update a while later]
High(er) res tomorrow, not high-res.
A New Year’s Tip
The American Mediocracy
…is exhausted. As I’ve often noted, both Trump and Brexit were revolts against an unimpressive “elite” who thought themselves our moral and intellectual superiors, with no basis.
But like the Bourbons, the continue to know nothing, and forget nothing.
Ageism In Silicon Valley
This is a stupid attitude. The degree to which the young Turks denigrate experience, in which you’re over the hill at thirty, is just breathtaking up there.
It’s obviously of concern to me right now, because I’m planning a start up this in the new year, with other experienced people. Know where I won’t be looking for money? Sand Hill Road.
The Sad End Of XCOR
I hadn’t realized that people had put down the full amount of the ticket.
This number jumped out at me:
Xcor eventually raised at least $19.2 million, according to Crunchbase, a platform that tracks fundraising.
Virgin Galactic has spent hundreds of millions of dollars. One wonder what might have been had XCOR gotten even twice as much as they did.
I disagree with this:
The companies took very different approaches to the challenge of reaching space. Virgin Galactic uses a twin-fuselage carrier aircraft to hoist a space plane known as SpaceShipTwo up to a high altitude; it releases the smaller craft, which ignites its own rocket motor to blast into space. Earlier this month, the company reached space with its SpaceShipTwo vehicle for the first time on a test flight.
Using another vehicle or booster to propel a crew craft to space is considered a “much more traditional approach,” said Sonya McMullen, assistant professor of aeronautics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. But Xcor would have the Lynx climb all the way up under its own power.
“They really took the hard technological approach to the same problem,” McMullen said.
Even for suborbital, there’s not that much benefit to air launch. Single-stage to suborbit is not a technological challenge. While XCOR may have underestimated the technical challenges of Lynx, I doubt there were any that couldn’t have been solved with more funding. Of course, the uncertainty of the market size probably didn’t help in that regard. But losing that ULA contract, after the Air Force cut the funding, was the final straw.
And as I’ve often said, despite the failures (so far) to get a commercial suborbital operation going, there are no intrinsic reasons why it has to be difficult. XCOR had a good technical approach that ultimately failed to find sufficient investment, and VG made poor initial business and design choices that has resulted in them becoming a money sink in a sunk-cost trap for over a decade, despite the much vaster financial resources. As I noted in the last post, I expect that Blue Origin will finally show the way and allow us to determine the market, next year. Maybe even VG finally will as well.
The Year In SpaceX
A good summary, over at Wired. They didn’t accomplish all they planned, but it was a hell of a year, regardless, and next year promises to be better.
Along those lines, I’m a little disappointed that Blue Origin didn’t meet its 2018 goal of test passengers for New Shepard. I wonder what the issues were? Anyway, maybe next year will be the charm.
Bre Payton
I know some people at The Federalist, but I never met her. It sounds like she was a remarkable person, and quite a loss.