Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

Ex-XCOR

11 Comments

Jeff Foust has the story on what Jeff Greason and Dan DeLong are up to (Aleta is going to join up, too, according to an email exchange I had with Jeff G. this weekend). I’ll probably have one of my own up this week.

[Afternoon update]

Alan Boyle (who it was pleasant to visit with in Seattle a couple weeks ago) has a story up now as well.

[Tuesday-afternoon update]

Here is my interview with Jeff over the weekend:

RS: How are you doing?

JG: My health is great, I’m enjoying a lot of long walks through my neighborhood in Midland, Texas, and I am excited about the next phase of my career.

RS: How long has this been in the works?

JG: It is all quite new. I made the decision to leave XCOR at the beginning of November. XCOR reorganized back in June and that took both me and Dan off of any management role on the Lynx. Due to the focus of resources on completing the Lynx, my efforts to work on next-generation R&D projects didn’t gain the traction inside XCOR that I hoped, so I didn’t feel I was in a situation where I was contributing the best that I could to the industry. Once I decided to leave XCOR, I recognized that I have a lot of experience with a problem that many companies have been frustrated by – how to shorten the vehicle prototyping cycle so that time to market is faster and the fly-learn-build cycle is faster. So I decided to set up a company to solve that problem. It’s called Agile Aero and we’re just getting started.

RS: Will you be staying in Midland?

JG: Dan, Aleta, and I all like Midland, so we’ll stay here if we can.

RS: Is anyone else involved in the new company?

JG: Dan DeLong had left XCOR for his own reasons, but since he found out what Agile Aero is working towards, he’s decided to join. Aleta Jackson was laid off just after I left, and she’s also decided to join.

Do you have any financial backers? Do you have any prospective customers?

JG: I have had some initial offers of investment and we’re certainly interested in talking to others; I expect we will need additional resources to hire more people. Realize that right now what we have is a clear understanding of the problem we want to solve – vehicle development speed. We haven’t solved it yet! But I’m confident we have the experience to do it, starting from a clean sheet of paper with our collective experience in the industry. As for customers, I’m definitely interested in talking to them because it will help us know which capabilities to demonstrate first, and I have already had some interesting “can you do something like this?” questions. I also expect we will be available to offer some expertise to other companies while we work on our core technology.

RS: Does XCOR retain rights to any IP on the orbital vehicle? Or do you still plan to do it with another entity? If so, is the new company that entity, or will that be a separate venture?

JG: Before we start working on any vehicle concept for any market, we first need to demonstrate rapid prototyping of vehicles – the faster vehicle ideas can turn into reality, the faster the time to market. Solving this problem will inform how a future vehicle system should be designed and built, and once we’ve done it, an orbital system might look quite a bit different from what I imagine today. I don’t want to make specific vehicle plans until we get the prototyping capability in place. As to whether we would do an orbital system for ourselves or for another customer, time will tell. I would love for XCOR to be one of our customers. Agile Aero intends to make a rapid prototyping capability available for many clients once we have the basic technology in hand. It is a bit like the niche that Scaled Composites used to fill – enabling other companies’ creative aerospace projects, although Agile Aero will be focused on higher performance aircraft and space vehicles. I’m extremely interested in fully reusable launch architectures, and once we have the tools in our toolbox I’d welcome such an opportunity.

[Bumped]

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Political Correctness

6 Comments

Jonathan Chait has decided he’s been mugged enough by the campus fascists:

The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement. (For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important, bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)

American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state. The continuous stream of small-scale outrages it generates is a testament to an illiberalism that runs deep down to its core (a character I tried to explain in my January essay).

Of course, given his own history, he’s not the best standard bearer for the message.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Richard Posner

5 Comments

…and the Constitution:

This has implications that go far beyond the judiciary. The only reason for not tarring and feathering any government official for effrontery when they tell us what to do is that their power to do so is somehow legitimate. But that legitimacy comes from the exercise of constitutional power. If the Constitution doesn’t mean anything, well, then, maybe it’s time to go long on pitchforks. Because without the Constitution the angry mob is just as legitimate as the perfumed princes of the state.

Here is Josh Blackman’s take down of Posner.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Return Of The Frontier

10 Comments

Thoughts from Wretchard on the recent commercial space bill:

The Dawn of the Space Mining Age probably signals the Twilight of Socialism as much as it does the end of all material poverty. It marks the end of a way of life. We live in a special time; a brief epoch when the human universe has become as small as it will ever be, a moment when no man living is more than a few moments away by text messaging from any other and no home is beyond 48 hours of subsonic jet travel.

If man takes to the Cosmos, then distances will become real again; and goodbyes will be for the first time in a hundred years once more forever.

The price of knowledge and plenty is to leave the Hive. Someday we may regard our stuffy politically correct Earth with more tolerance than is presently the custom. The future does not belong to those poor souls on American campuses who become hysterical at the slightest perceived micro-aggression, but to those with the boldness to take risks. In that context humanity may someday miss such coddled children in nostalgia for a lost Eden, which no sooner found at the start of the 21st century, just as soon slipped away.

A lot of people seem to be misunderstanding this, though:

The 2015 Space Act does more than recognize property rights; it breaks down bureaucracy by exempting the space industry from much regulation until 2023. As with the historical Western frontier when the law remained “back East,” there will be few sheriffs in the far reaches of the void. There, as nowhere else on 21st-century Earth, safety is your own lookout.

As his own blockquote from Eric Stallmer indicates, the only thing that won’t be regulated (that is, continue to not be regulated, as it never has been in the past) will be the safety of spaceflight participants. Everyone will still need to get launch licenses from the FAA, and continue to satisfy it that the public is not at risk, and that the launch isn’t contrary to the national interest.

As for treaty compliance, I actually had a beer with Ram and Steven Freeland (from Australia, a signatory to the Moon Treaty) on this topic a few years ago in Lincoln, and we politely agreed to disagree on the issue. The bill is not in conflict with the OST, though it clearly is with the Moon Treaty. But the latter, contra this foolish piece, is not “customary international law.” The US has no obligation to it, never having ratified it.

[Late-morning update]

Related thoughts from a well-known professor of space law, over at USA Today.

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