Category Archives: Business

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

ITAR Emergency

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Yesterday at the #NSRC2013 meeting, Andrew Nelson, COO of XCOR, announced both in his talk and at a noon press conference that there was good news and bad news on the ITAR front. The good news is that communications satellites were moved back from the munitions list to the commercial list, for the first time in about a decade and a half. That’s good news for the US comsat industry, which has lost almost all of its business to other countries since the late nineties when they had been declared munitions.

The bad new is that suborbital vehicles, such as XCOR’s Lynx, have been put on the munitions list, which will make it much harder for the companies making them to export them. Imagine the impact on US exports if Boeing commercial transports were moved to the munitions list…

But the good news is that neither of these decisions are final — there is a public review period of this rule making for the next few weeks. It’s a good opportunity for anyone, not just affected industry, to weigh in, and try to get the latter decision reversed. Jon Goff (who I saw at the conference today) explains the stakes (and the danger):

My concern is that while this NPRM does go a long way towards solve some of the key ITAR problems (particularly related to GEO communications satellites), it creates dangerous precedents in other areas–like forcing manned suborbital and orbital vehicles and satellite servicing robotics explicitly onto the munitions list. My worry is that by relieving the pain of the most vocal, and financially well-established part of the space community (GEO commsats) while leaving the rest of us in the lurch, I worry that this will completely kill any impetus for further repair of ITAR for many years. Basically, this may be the community’s only chance to fix some of this damage, because if we don’t, those of us in the satellite servicing and manned spaceflight industries will be battling ITAR without the help and clout of the commercial communications industry on our side like we have this time. And it would be a travesty if something like Lynx or Dragon (or Sticky Boom™) were continued to be treated as dangerously as say a ballistic missile, a supersonic fighter jet, or a main battle tank. While all of these may be “dual-use” in some fashion, that’s what the EAR was meant to deal with–not ITAR, which was meant to deal specifically for systems whose primary use is military.

Make your own voice heard while there’s still time.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Detroit

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…heads to the pawn shop:

This is another grim reminder of just how destructive Detroit’s corrupt machine politics have been. At one time, Detroit was the manufacturing capital of America and one of the country’s great cities; today it’s trying to stave off a kind of modern-day bonfire of the vanities.

This is the fate of the country at large if we don’t send a better class of people to Washington.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Climate Campaign

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How it plans to get its groove back:

Look for this to be the headline of the next IPCC report, due out in September. The report will walk back previous estimates of climate sensitivity, but will affirm that we’re still doomed unless we go ahead with the previous program of handing over power to bureaucrats to control our energy supply. You read it here on Power Line first.

The interesting part will be to see whether climate orthodoxy proposes a new, and theoretically more plausible, GHG emissions reduction target and timetable, like a 50 percent cut by the year 2060. I doubt it. Hatred of “fossil fuels” is the categorical imperative of modern environmentalism, and it long predates the arrival of global warming as an issue. The original complaint was that that hydrocarbons produced too much conventional air pollution, but once we solved that problem global warming became the fallback position. Nothing will deter environmentalists from this wisp—certainly not facts or progress. I’m betting they’ll stick with the previous 80 by 50 target. But if they come in with a different one, I’ll do the math to figure out what year in the past it will take the U.S. back to: I’ll bet it will still be something like 1925. Stay tuned.

It was never about science. It was always about control, and political power.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

A US Lunar Colony?

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New legislation is being introduced in the House:

The Reasserting American Leadership in Space Act (H.R. 1446), introduced by Rep. Bill Posey (R-Florida), would direct NASA to come up with a plan to return to the Moon and “develop a sustained human presence” there by 2022.

…But Houston, we may have a problem passing the Reasserting American Leadership in Space Act, considering that in September 2009, President Obama’s blue ribbon Human Space Flight Review Committee concluded that any plans on the part of NASA for future human exploration of space beyond low-Earth orbit would be “perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources.” In other words, further exploration of the Moon would require money that NASA just does not have and is unlikely to get from Congress.

That’s not the problem. NASA has plenty of money to establish a lunar base. What they don’t have is the discretion to spend it intelligently toward that goal, instead being forced by the same people proposing this bill to waste billions on a launch vehicle it doesn’t need to do so. Someone needs to tell them that, if NASA won’t.

Business, Space

Midland, Texas

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It ain’t pretty, but it works:

Among the non-energy businesses setting up shop in Midland, the city is particularly proud of XCOR, a private aerospace firm specializing in suborbital flight and rocket-engine development. Both its headquarters and its R&D facilities are relocating from their original location in Mojave, Calif. In addition to the obvious economic benefits, the move will confer a unique distinction on the city: Midland International will be the only facility in the United States that is both a commercial airport and a designated spaceport.

Spacecraft and oil rigs might seem to be miles apart, but in truth the two high-tech industries have a great deal in common: a constant need for engineers, technicians, and scientists, a focus on materials development (XCOR has a line in developing non-flammable plastics), and shared environmental concerns.

They don’t have their spaceport license yet, but when they do, they’ll be the first dual-use facility, from a commercial standpoint.