Category Archives: Business

Business, Space

Gwynne Shotwell At ISPCS

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Aim of her talk is to embolden those who want to enter the space industry, and encourage those doing it. Lows and highs in the industry, but right now lots of highs.

Company formed in March, 2002, she was seventh employee to bring in business, ended year with fourteen. 2006 Falcon 1 first flight, lot of people never involved in industry before. Couldn’t fly from Vandenberg because of safety concerns, had to go out of Kwajalein. Learned a lot on first failure — SpaceX became a very different company that day. 2006 also year they won COTS agreement, historical public-private partnership. Created Falcon 9 and Dragon, and made US competitive in space launch again.

Moved into new cavernous facility in Hawthorne in 2008 (now running out of space). Also year of first successful Falcon 1 flight. Also won Cargo Resupply Contract. 618 employees at end of that year.

2010, successfully flew Falcon 9 twice, and successfully recovered Dragon capsule. Signed largest commercial contract ever with Iridium (half a billion dollars), ended year with 1200 employees.

Didn’t fly in 2011, because getting Dragon ready to fly. Flew successfully to ISS in 2012, developed new version of Falcon 9, 2000 employees.

Showing Falcon 9R launch video.

What’s next?

Into regular operations. First flight for SES out of the Cape in less than a month, with another commercial launch, and four flights to ISS. Developing suits, seats, life support and escape systems for Dragon to carry people. First flight in about three years, don’t know if it will be NASA or SpaceX astronauts, first flight just to orbit and return.

Falcon Heavy still in work, expecting $1100/lb. 53 metric tons. Grasshopper more in the media than Elon this days, a rock star. Showing latest Grasshopper video. “This is not fake.” 25 people working Grasshopper program, about 3000 who want to. Moving to Spaceport America for Falcon-9R test vehicle. Showing photo of first stage three meters above the ocean fully intact (didn’t survive impact). “Really close to full and rapid reuse of stages.” First time photo has been shown. Not high resolution, but clearly a full vertical stage. First flight in New Mexico hopefully in December.

We want to go to Mars, think it’s the right place to go. Describing similarity of Mars to earth in terms of geographical features — grand canyons, volcanoes, rocks. Showing Mars landscape, with similarity to American southwest.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The ObamaCare Train Wreck

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Thoughts from Richard Epstein.

Even its supporters are having trouble excusing it. Read this from Ezra Klein.

Hey, it’s not like this wasn’t perfectly predictable, and predicted.

[Update a while later]

Was the site crash caused by rate shock?

[Update a few minutes later]

Wow, even the New York Times is becoming racist:

“These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.’ ”

Interviews with two dozen contractors, current and former government officials, insurance executives and consumer advocates, as well as an examination of confidential administration documents, point to a series of missteps — financial, technical and managerial — that led to the troubles.

It’s almost like these people think politics is more important than actually competently running the government.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Perverse Incentives Of ObamaCare

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Yes, by all means, you should earn less money:

This, right here, is the toxic essence of the welfare state. It’s already been proven over and over that for the lower classes, welfare incentivizes permanent dependence: Since one gets more money receiving a raft of federal entitlements than one would get earning a salary at a low-level job, it’s a rational economic decision to remain unemployed, on purpose. Which millions of Americans do, generation after generation, creating a permanent underclass that only consumes the common treasury without ever contributing anything to it.

What Obamacare does, as demonstrated by this eye-opening article, is bring the same economic disincentive to the middle class: It is now a rational economic decision for the average American to earn less money. And to earn less you must work less, and when you work less, you contribute less to the common good.

With people intentionally contributing less to the common good, there will be less federal money available to finance the subsidies (which are fiscally unaffordable even without this problem), leading to an unavoidable downward economic spiral for the entire nation.

That’s OK. Remember, the president told us that, at some point, you’ve earned enough money. He’s just lowering that point.

Business, Health, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Expensive ObamaCare Web Site

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There is no good excuse for it:

From the evidence, it’s clear that the Obamacare exchange servers saw errors of all different kinds. They weren’t prepared for the load, even though this was never very heavy. California reported about 600,000 unique visitors, and Colorado reported about 55,000 unique visitors.

There were screen captures of database errors, not because the data was bad, but because the structure that holds the data was misdesigned.

There were 404 errors, which are totally design errors, meaning that the web sever was trying to get to a page that didn’t exist. (This led to the best hashtag of the day, #404care.)

There were non-descript server errors like the one I got from the California server.

There were user-interface errors. At about 10:00 AM, Colorado suspended new accounts on its site (it’s one of the ones using its own site, not the main exchange site), and didn’t get around to allowing new accounts again until 3:00 PM. At that point, the “New Account” button sent you to the login page for existing accounts. If you chose to enter your childhood phone number for a secret question, it wouldn’t take it, no matter what format (certainly not the format it used when asking for your current phone number).

This is why I say it was clear that this wasn’t just one of those things. The volume of inquiries wasn’t high by large-system standards, and the rest of the errors were in the control of the programmers.

These were design and execution errors, pure and simple. They were all catchable, with proper beta and load testing.

Yup.