From a statement from members of the Personal Spaceflight Federation:
We will persevere
All posts by Sam Dinkin
Continue forward
Some of us think of space heroes as only those who strap themselves into a rocketship. But people like these, who give their sweat and lives to build those ships, who take their families out to live in the desert and work incredible hours on tedious tasks to make those rockets fly, and who do so because they share the dream of an open frontier in space, they too are true heroes.
Rick Tumlinson in Space Frontier Foundation press release
Dinerman Lauds Heinlein in Wall Street Journal
Taylor Dinerman wrote a nice tribute to Robert Heinlein in today’s Wall Street Journal. He concludes:
In another hundred years, it will be interesting to see if the nuclear-powered spaceships and other technological marvels he predicted are with us. But nothing in his legacy will be more important than the spirit of liberty he championed and his belief that “this hairless embryo with the aching oversized brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will endure and spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency.”
Mr. Dinerman writes a weekly column for the Space Review.
Nice to see Taylor and Jeff Foust’s publication getting broader exposure.
90,000,000 Carat Diamond
I look at using chemical vapor deposition (and welding) to build a mono-crystalline, mono-molecular carbon space elevator over at The Space Review. Surprisingly, it will cost about what Brad Edwards budgeted for single-walled carbon nanutube (CNT) manufacturing.
If space elevators cost $25,000/kg and space delivery after the elevator’s up cost $10-$800/kg, then the second space elevator probably should be built out of less expensive, less exotic materials. If Kevlar is only 2% as strong as carbon nanotubes, you can still afford 50 kg of Kevlar for the price of 1 kg of diamonds at delivery costs and purchase prices less than $500 if elevator-quality CNT cost at least as much as bulk purchases of pure synthetic diamonds wholesale. One wouldn’t use Kevlar further down the elevator because then there would be a multiplier because we would need more Kevlar to hold the Kevlar and it would go up by a factor of e50 or so. But that doesn’t apply right at the base–it’s pretty much linear there.
Another issue I may explore is that if a Mars elevator can be 6 tons or less, it might weigh less than the fuel needed to take off from Mars or even the fuel and aerobrake to get from Mars geosynchronous orbit to the surface. Mars exploration economics change a lot if return oxygen can be carted up from the surface by elevator. Note that one would not necessarily need laser or microwave power to power a climber on Mars. Solar power for a climber would have it climb slower, but it would still climb.
A great place to work the kinks out of space elevator technology is the Moon. A Lunar space elevator going from a little ways Earthward of Earth-Moon L-1, would not need materials as strong as a space elevator for the Earth’s surface. If successful, it would allow much more mass to go down to the surface and much more return mass than the 46 metric tons of LSAM ascender and descender. A 7-ton Lunar elevator and some climbers powered from Earth would provide as much cargo capacity as Edwards’s starter elevator on Earth. Since Lunar exploration doesn’t really begin in earnest until late next decade according to the current (perhaps overly optimistic) vision, it might be worth doing some thought experiments about saving mass on the very first sortie to the Moon by using a Lunar space elevator. Pearson advocated this using M5 fiber to make a 7,000 kg Lunar elevator with 200 kg capacity a few years back. Forget thought experiments, launch the @$%#! elevator.
Fire and Ice Conundrum
In Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “Midnight Sun” posed the conundrum (a riddle with a pun as the answer) whether the world would end in global warming or cooling. Robert Frost also pondered this riddle in his 1920 poem.
I think I have the answer: “Fire!”
The pun is that this is what you say to clear a crowded movie theater. Now that you have the punchline, you can get the setup in my column in The Space Review which is up.
Gauntlet Picked Up
The fruition of Rand’s idea for a Centennial Challenge prize competition for a space suit glove is the front-page story of next week’s New York Times Magazine coming out tomorrow, but available today in New York and on the web.
Spoiler alert…
[Update on Sunday by Rand]
There’s also a piece at the Christian Science Monitor, as a commenter notes.
More Chinese Froth
China is doing some major tinkering with fiscal policy according to today’s Wall Street Journal. To try to moderate the flow out of bank savings into their stock market, they are decreasing the tax rate on savings from 20% to 10% and increasing the savings interest rate.
This will indeed get people to save more in the banks. But it will also give them more future cash from the lower taxes and higher returns. This may make them more confident about speculating in the stock market. This means that China’s mountain of cash will continue to grow. Here’s a report that China’s savings rate is 55%.
If you think about the combination of pension products (6% to get all the 401k matching seems typical), Social Security (12.4%) and Medicare (2.9%) we are doing a good bit of forced savings. If you add in home equity, most US workers in their prime are socking away 30% if you don’t deduct the debt they’re taking on.
Our population doesn’t have a huge demographic bulge brought about by a one-child policy, industrialization and massive improvements in life expectancy. The upshot is China will have very high savings until the inverted pyramid kids (one kid who is the only kid of two parents who are each the only kids of two grand parents) get to the workforce. They can expect bequests, a healthy mortgage loan market and modern employee benefits. In the mean time, no amount of cajoling from Chinese or American treasury and central banking officials is going to curb the Chinese savings rate much.
The impact means cheap money across the board for another 20 years. According to the CIA World Factbook $180 billion of their savings is going abroad net. Since they get about $65 billion in foreign direct investment, they get to invest almost $250 billion a year abroad.
They have $1 trillion in bank reserves and gold compared to US’s $70 billion. They have about $300 billion in government debt or $1.2 trillion at purchasing power parity (PPP), compared to $10 trillion US. China has a vastly undervalued currency with gross domestic product (GDP) PPP estimated at $10 trillion at about 4 times the official exchange rate which puts their GDP at current fixed exchange rates at $2.5 trillion.
In short, with a floating exchange rate, China would have the world’s second biggest economy. And that is without the benefit of substantial deficit spending, a stock market, consumer credit, a public pension system up to western standards, a health care finance system up to western standards or any of a number of multipliers that the US already has.
In the next few years, we can look forward to China becoming an economic super power and not slowing its growth (10.7%) until it rises from $7700 per capita PPP GDP to that of Poland ($14k, 5.8%) or France ($27k, 2.1%). That is respectively twice and three and a half times what it is today. With four times as many people that’s 2-3 times as big an economy as ours in the next 40 years.
Can the US manage a peaceful decline and start playing the role of junior partner in defense alliances?
Last One Out is a Rotten Egg
The Bear Stearns bailout and failure respectively of two hedge funds with hundreds of millions (formerly) of equity and $10 billion+ of debt is causing some new soul searching among risk managers about the continuing sub prime overlending. The credit card issuer risk managers are taking the opportunity to tighten consumer credit for credit cards and probably soon other kinds of consumer credit.
By tightening credit card terms and mortgage terms, banks exacerbate the difficulty that sub prime borrowers may have making their house payment and refinancing their loans when teaser rates end. As lenders tighten terms, there will be a knock on effect of more sour loans. This is a game with a distinct first-mover advantage. Many consumers even in the sub prime market have more than one credit card. If Barclays credit cards (e.g., Juniper, US Air, Barnes&Noble, etc.) tighten their credit standards, Chase and Bank of America tighten their balance transfer requirements, banks that keep their offers open longest may be the ones that suffer in the event of a rise in consumer bankruptcy. Oddly, all of the acquisitions by Chase, Bank of America and others of competing credit card issuers means that they have internalized a higher share of the pain than in the last recession, but they are still fighting the last war.
The credit card and mortgage defaults may, in turn, dry up some sources of liquidity for hedge funds that buy credit card and mortgage backed securities and other consumer debt. There is still plenty of money gushing into the global financial system (China’s government and consumers are socking away a lot of money in anticipation of a labor shortage when they retire and no trillion dollar social security program to help them and expect India, Pakistan and Indonesia to join them as their demographic bulge matures coincident with speedy growth). So unwinding the sub prime fiasco will just increase the appetite for return and dollar denominated assets in other sectors of the world economy. But that’s small consolation for the millions of people caught in a credit crunch. A politician cleaning up bad credit is going to lose votes when voters find out the alternative is no credit.
My proposal is for there to be a federal car loan program and a federal health care loan program.
Ariane
Ariane is touted in an article by Andy Pasztor in today’s Wall Street Journal with a new person singing its praises–Mike Griffin:
Mr. Griffin declared the launch system “probably the best in the world, very smooth and very impressive.”
One quibble: there is an apple to orange comparison of the commercial launch business ($2.7 billion) to US national security space spending ($80 billion). Commercial space launch supports tens of billions in satellite products, services and content. A more relevant comparison would be to look at how much the Department of Defense spends on launchers. The total space budget for military and intelligence is in the $50 billion range. Launch costs presumably would comprise about 3-4% of that if they were more competition. I’m having a little trouble finding a good source of Pentagon launch spending budget figures, but I’m guessing it’s in the 5-10% range.
Who’s Ahead?
On Intrade, here’s the standings for the 2008 election (security pays 100 if individual is elected):
- 32.7 Clinton
- 17.4 Obama
- 16.0 Thompson
- 13.2 Giuliani
- 9.5 Romney
- 7.6 Gore
- 4.7 McCain
- 3.1 Edwards
- 1.2 Bloomberg
Adds up to 105. Could some partisans be trying to raise their favorite’s numbers?