Category Archives: Business

Business, Space, Technology and Society

A Suborbital Flight To Space

27 Comments

Everyone’s been paying attention to the “race” between Virgin Galactic and XCOR (a story that got more complicated yesterday), but Blue Origin apparently had the first successful private flight to a hundred kilometers since the X-Prize was won, over eleven years ago. It will be interesting to see when their next one is, to see what kind of turnaround capability they have. It’s now clearly possible that they’ll be offering passenger flights sooner than either of the horizontal approaches.

[Update a few minutes later]

As someone over at Arocket points out, this wasn’t just the first trip to space since 2004, but the first-ever vertical landing of a ship that had been to space (even if SpaceX lands a Falcon 9 first stage, I’m not sure what its apogee is). It was a big milestone.

[Update a couple minutes later]

OK, on rereading, it’s not clear that the booster went all the way to space, just the capsule, so maybe that hasn’t happened yet.

[Update a while later]

Jeff Bezos issues his first tweet ever.

[Late-morning update]

Jeff Foust has the story now, including the Q&A with Bezos.

[Update a few minutes later]

And here’s Chris Bergin’s story.

[Early-afternoon update]

[Update a while later]

Ashlee Vance has an amusing take on the pissing contest between Musk and Bezos.

BTW, it seems to be confirmed that there was only a 120-meter difference in apogee between booster and capsule, so it definitely made it into space.

[Update a few more minutes later]

For those new to the topic, I wrote an explainer about orbits and suborbits a little over a year ago.

Business, Culinary, Education, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Treating Brain Cancer

1 Comment

…with a ketogenic diet:

After quitting my job, I decided to study for a Master’s degree in Nutritional Therapy. As I got deeper into my course work,I was shocked to discover that everything I had learned during my undergraduate studies was either false, misleading, or outdated information.

It’s an anecdote, but a pretty powerful one. The ignorance about nutrition in the health-care field is probably killing thousands.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Collapse Of ObamaCare

8 Comments

The money-losing insurance companies pulling out of the market next year could be a huge election gift to Republicans. Not just for Congressional races, if the message is “we’re going to repeal it, and a Republican in the White House will sign that bill.”

[Update a while later]

ObamaCare insurers are suffering. That won’t end well.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

The Future Of Space

16 Comments

There was an interesting discussion this afternoon at Council of Foreign Affairs with Lori Garver, John Logsdon, and Charles Miller. The Youtube is now available. Note that they touch on many of the themes in my upcoming paper, on how we have to stop trying to do Apollo again, that SLS is a jobs program, that propellant transfer is a game changer, the need for a competitive private sector, etc. Lori was quite harshly critical of NASA (and Congress).