Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Education, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Climate Jihadists

5 Comments

California is currently at their mercy:

Meeting the new target of an 80 percent cut by 2050 would require the use of even more speculative technologies, including those that the CCST reserachers considered to be “in development, not yet available” or merely “research concepts.”

Yet such problems do not seem to impinge much on Sacramento’s political class. Any group willing, as is most egregiously the case with the Latino caucus, to wage war on their own people, are not going to worry too much about such subtleties.

So then, who wins? It’s certainly not the environment, but some of the oligarchs in Silicon Valley may benefit as they have been feeding at the renewable-energy trough at the expense of less-well-off ratepayers. Then there’s the whole bureaucracy, and their academic allies, who can enjoy profitable employment by dreaming up new ways to make life in California more expensive and difficult for average citizens – envisioning schemes that the taxpayers have to finance. And, certainly, the climate change agenda could benefit multifamily housing builders, who will seek to force often-unwilling Californians into residences in which most would rather not spend their lives.

At some point, people are going to get fed up, but we don’t seem to be close yet.

Business, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Another Russian Failure

31 Comments

There is clearly a serious QC problem in the Russian program. A Proton just suffered another Briz-M upper-stage failure, and delivered a Mexican comm sat into Sibero-stationary orbit, which isn’t particularly useful.

And yet, the House appropriators cut the commercial crew budget. Again.

[Update a while later]

The Russians have been averaging two-and-a-third launch failures per year for the past six years. Also worth noting that the trend is getting worse. That’s two launch failures in the past three weeks.

[Update a few minutes later]

Whoa! Two failures in one day. Apparently the reboost engines on the Progress currently at ISS failed to fire as well.

[Late-afternoon update]

Here’s a fairly comprehensive story on today’s launch failure from Stephen Clark at Spaceflightnow.

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

Soyuz

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They still don’t know what happened on the Progress failure.

I noted at the time that this could result in a delay of the planned crew rotation on the 26th, and it has. I had a discussion with Jim Oberg on Facebook, and he didn’t think there was sufficient commonality, but he seems more concerned now:

Whatever the conclusions of that report may be, lessons can already be drawn from the accident, Oberg said.

“This and recent similar failures highlight the foolishness of judging mission success reliability based on historical statistics. It’s not just that each launch is a new roll of the dice — it’s a first roll of NEW dice,” he said. “The quality of fabrication and mission preparations reflect the CURRENT human and industrial context, and Russian space industry leaders have been so alarmed by those levels that they’ve repeatedly replaced the Russian Space Agency head with outsiders with nothing to show for it.”

This is a serious issue, and Congress’s response? To cut the funding for a Soyuz replacement.