Safety should not be NASA’s highest priority. That way lies stagnation.
[Update a few minutes later]
Hey, Vance, was safety “the highest priority” for Apollo 8?
Category Archives: Business
Green Energy In Germany
German businesses are considering jumping ship for cheaper energy prices in the developing world or (gasp!) the United States. For households, these subsidies have acted like a particularly regressive tax. The poor [more] feel the bite of higher electricity bills than do the rich. Germany’s new energy and economy minister Sigmar Gabriel is expected to announce a plan to cut renewable energy subsidies later this week in an effort to keep electricity prices down. That will be a step in the right direction, but significant damage has already been done.
And all in the name of junk science and pseudo-religion.
More on the EU’s turnaround at Der Spiegel.
China’s Shadow-Bank Bubble
Is it about to pop?
If too many shadow lenders go under, China’s credit-dependent economy might slow down too much. Of course, this might happen no matter what the government does. Shadow banks have made so many loans the past five years that it’s hard to believe a lot of them won’t go bad. They can borrow more money to try to hide any losses, but that wouldn’t be easy if inflation and interest rates rise. The worst of the worst would go bust, and people might panic once they discover that their guaranteed returns were neither. They might already be. China’s biggest bank just announced that it won’t make investors whole after it sold them a trust product called “Credit Equals Gold #1″—yes, that’s really what it’s called—that looks likely to lose money. It’s China’s version of Wall Street selling people crappy CDOs it told them were risk-free.
Goody.
The Normal Healthy Paranoia
…of the launch business.
SpaceX has gone through quite a learning process in the past decade, and now they’re poised to take over the industry.
Safe Is Not An Option
Jeff Foust has a review of the book (in the context of last week’s release of the 2013 ASAP report, which I’ve been meaning to comment on), over at The Space Review.
[Update a while later]
And of course the server at The Space Review would go down the day that he reviews my book. I must have crashed it with my link. 😉
SLS
NASA doesn’t plan to use it very much. This isn’t really news, but it’s nice to see them point out the implications:
Given the SLS Block 1 launch processing manifest (4-5 years with little to no activities), there is a potential of not having sufficiently trained personnel. Issue – Yellow (May require personnel with advanced skills not readily available).
As I write in the book, even ignoring the cost implications:
From a safety standpoint, it means that its operating tempo will be far too slow, and its flights too infrequent, to safely and reliably operate the system. The launch crews will be sitting around for months with little to do, and by the time the next launch occurs they’ll have forgotten how to do it, if they haven’t left from sheer boredom to seek another job.
What a mess.
The Invisible Judith Curry
Apparently, she doesn’t fit the narrative.
[Update a while later]
Gee, maybe global warming isn’t worth doing anything about.
Yeah, may be.
[Update a few minutes later]
Curry responds to Michael Mann’s accusation that she is “anti-science.”
[Update a couple minutes later]
Has the sun gone to sleep?
Who cares? After all, all these genius climate scientists have been telling us the sun doesn’t affect the climate.
[Monday-morning update]
More thoughts on the invisible Judith Curry from Donna LaFramboise.
[Bumped]
The Democrats’ War On The Young
The young are finally starting to get unhappy about it.
The Republicans should hammer on this the same way the Dems lied about the fake “war on women.”
Jobs And Technology
A good survey at The Economist on the coming tsunami on unskilled labor, for which no government is prepared. They’re right that the most important thing is to reform K through post-grad education, root and branch, but there are a lot of entrenched interests that will continue to fight that.
Ariane
Looks like they’re in big trouble. It was a business model set up to compete with the Space Shuttle, not a truly reusable vehicle with modern technology. They may continue to get some business for Ariane 5 for political reasons, but I’d say their only chance is back to the drawing board with Ariane 6.