Category Archives: Business

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

The Heavy-Lift Empire Strikes Back?

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Thoughts over at Space Transport news. It was a little dismaying to see Augustine’s comment.

I have no predictions as to the outcome, but I’m not particularly hopeful, given the nature of bureaucracy and entropy. But we are continuing to get useful ideas out there, for the private sector to pick up on even if we continue to waste billions on NASA’s HSF program.

[Update in the evening]

This article would indicate that the panel overall remains stuck in the conventional wisdom that heavy lifters are on the critical path to space exploration. One of the hopes for my piece in The New Atlantis was to break that consensus, but it doesn’t seem to have succeeded, so far.

[Late evening update]

Here’s an interesting chart (that appears to have been captured by a camera at the actual presentation) that summarizes the seven options currently being considered. I assume that “IP” is international participation (aka the Russians). I’m not sure what “SH” means, but perhaps one of my readers will be smarter at deciphering than me. I’m guessing something like “Super Heavy.”

Note that the panel (as a whole — there could be dissent among individuals) assumes that refueling is not an option within the current budget, as the chart is currently configured. Note also that it assumes that Ares V is required. I assume that these two assumptions are not coincidental. Take away the heavy lifter, and there’s abundant budget for depots, and other things.

The real question to me is: what is the driver for the perceived heavy-lift requirement? Is it a credibility factor with the flight rate necessary for smaller vehicles to deliver all the propellant for (say) a Mars mission? Or a “smallest biggest piece” (again for, say, a Mars mission) that begs credibility in terms of ability to assemble it on orbit? Or a “let’s keep the options open for some kind of need that we can’t anticipate”? Or all of the above? I expect that we will know the answers to these questions in a very few weeks. I don’t think that the panel will hide the ball the way that NASA did with ESAS.

But one hint might be in noting that the Mars mission (presumably to the surface) is the biggest driver — it assumes both “many” Ares V launches while also noting that refueling is “enabling” (i.e., cannot be done without it). This is a simple recognition of the reality that at some point, even the heavy-lift fetishists have to recognize that there is a limit to the degree to which they can afford to avoid orbital operations — there are some missions simply a bridge too far to do with a single launch.

Anyway, I’m slightly more encouraged by this chart, if for no other reason that it recognizes refueling as a viable option, and that minds are clearly starting to change. I may have more thoughts anon, though, and it’s a long way to August 31st, I suspect, with a lot of perturbations to come.

[Update a few minutes later]

One other point. The chart isn’t good news for Ares I.

[One more update before crashing to catch with with loss of last night’s sleep]

“Brad” has some more comments on the table:

1) The porklauncher, Ares I, looks dead. Only two of the seven options use Ares I, and one of those two options uses commercial crew services as well.

2) Commercial crew services is going to happen. Five out of the seven options exploit commercial crew services.

3) The Shuttle orbiter looks like it will still retire close to schedule. Only one of the seven options extends orbiter operations through 2015.

4) Ares V may not survive. Even though HLV is endorsed with every option, Ares V is only included in four out of the seven, and those four (IMHO) consist of the less probable choices.

5) Propellant depots are enabling to one option, and mentioned as enhancing three options, so depots are not ignored and have a fair chance for future development. Particularly when you take into account that commercial services are included in every option.

6) The ISS is not going to de-orbit in 2016. Five of the seven options extend ISS operations through 2020. The committee’s hope to expand international cooperation will only emphasize the importance of the ISS. Perhaps this might not be a drain on NASA, if international cooperation offsets the cost of flying ISS beyond 2016.

[Thursday morning update]

Todd Halvorson reports on the subject. Does anyone else see something missing in the reporting? You know, the thing that’s “enabling” for Mars First?

Business, Economics, Space

Flawed Estimating

15 Comments

A post that starts out discussing how many members the Mars Society has devolves into claims of how much Martian missions will cost.

The cost to the Moon ($150-300 B)or to Mars ($599-899 B, just small change for the better feeling) covers the round trips and the base setup for a period of 20-30 years. It would no longer be to plant a flag there stuff as the last lunar trip did. The cost is the stay and the development the new world for a period of 20-30 years each in this century. For the return to the Moon, it would cost $10-12 B each year for the 20-30 years period. For the Mars cost, it would cost $20-30 B or more each year for the period of 20-30 years.

When I see thing like this, I just shake my head. Beware prognosticators bearing costs of space activities.

No one knows, particularly because the activity itself is often ill defined, but even if not, such estimates do not, because they cannot, take into account future changes in technology, and particularly future changes in launch costs that may arise from much greater private activity. They also often make foolish assumptions about no propellant depots, and multiple launches of a heavy lifter, etc.

John Mankins offers a useful corrective, one comment later:

I’d like to make just a general observation about this topic: there is no one “firm fixed price” way to explore and develop a frontier. There are NO “prix fixe” menus for the future.

However, there are lots, and lots of choices. As it happens, some of these yield lower costs, others yield greater accomplishments, and still others result in faster (or slower) schedules. Examples include:

– What kind of propulsion will be used?
– How many crew members will go on what missions?
– Will we use local re-fueling of vehicles?
– Will missions systems be expendable or reusable?
– Will the program employ ISRU (in situ resource utilization), and if so, how soon?
– Will electrical power cost $100 per kilowatt-hour, or $0.10 per kilowatt-hour?
– Will life support closed or open?
– Will robotic systems be autonomous? capable of learning? or teleoperated? or…?

etc., etc., etc.

There are two extremes to avoid. First, we should never assume that future exploration missions will be “too cheap to meter” in order to make a sale to Congress. And Second, we should never claim that human exploration missions will be unimaginably expensive as a means of indirectly supporting other goals in space.

The space community can be its own worst enemy: we cannot allow this to happen.

We should try to stay focused on the goal of extending human presence and activity into space — using both robots and humans — and work constantly to make the accomplishment of that goal as affordable, beneficial and rapid as possible through aggressive innovation, appropriate technology advancements, and well-managed systems projects…

Not to mention a much greater utilization of the private sector, and particularly that portion of the private sector whose goal is to go to Mars (e.g., SpaceX).

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Eliminating Private Insurance

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Was Barack Obama lying then, or is he lying now? And why isn’t the mainstream press pointing this out?

Oh, right.

[Update a few minutes later]

Thoughts on the unprincipled toads who claim to represent our interests:

In the one exchange I’ve seen, Specter tried to explain how he goes about learning what’s in a 1,000 page piece of legislation. Specter said that, because of time constraints, his practice is to divide responsibility for reading the bill among his staffers. This explanation brought boos from the crowd.

The Senate fancies itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Senate is not a deliberative body at all — not when Senators concede that they would vote on legislation to overhaul one-sixth of our economy, and arguably the most important sixth, without having read the legislation. Specter’s defense that there’s not enough time for him to read it all himself simply raises the problem in a more acute from: why would the world’s greatest deliberative body consider legislation on a timetable that leaves Senators with insufficient to see for themselves exactly what’s in the bill?

Americans inevitably will disagree over how our health care system should operate. But nearly every American would agree that Senators should know what’s in major health care legislation before they vote on it, and that such legislation should not be enacted in a rush.

No, there are Americans like commenter “Jim” who thinks this setup is just dandy, as long as it gives him the socialist system that he wishes to impose by stealth on the rest of us.

[Early afternoon update]

Thoughts from Kevin Hassett:

Here’s how it works. Democrats propose something radical and unpopular, like President Barack Obama’s health-care plan. Then the Blue Dog Democrats traipse onto the public stage claiming to carry the banner of fiscal responsibility and moderation.

The show is covered the same way by the media every time. The virtuous, “centrist” Blue Dogs share the concerns of the American people, the story goes, and have enough votes to stop Nancy Pelosi and the fringe from radicalizing American policy. After “tough” negotiating sessions, the Democrats cave in to Blue Dog demands, producing a bill that is moderate and reasonable.

Except that it’s all just nonsense, meant to create the illusion that Pelosi isn’t dictating the details of Democratic bills in the House. In fact, she is.

Take the health bill. For any moderate and sensible individual, the key problem with Obama’s approach is that it calls for a public insurance plan, run by the government, that will compete with private plans.

…Make no mistake. If a public plan is enacted, it will move us swiftly toward socialized medicine with a single government payer, an objective Obama has endorsed in the past.

I agree that the Blue Dogs are not the friends of either the Republicans or the American people, but I also agree with Ramesh that there are other reasons to oppose this bill.

And as an aside, I hate the phrase “make no mistake.” It’s usually a bit of political rhetoric (like Obama’s verbal fetishes of “…as I’ve said before,” and “Let me be clear”) and throat clearing to indicate a massive whopper to come. I don’t think that Hassett is wrong, but I wish that he’d avoid that cliche.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Unseen Costs

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…of the minimum wage:

Several years ago, the city council of Santa Monica, Calif., decided to make the town a workers’ paradise by passing a union-backed law requiring everyone to be paid at least $12.25 an hour.

At the time, restaurant owner Jeff King complained to me that that law would “dry up the entry-level jobs for just the people they’re trying to help.”

He was right. It’s why gas stations no longer hire teenagers to wash your windshield. Wage minimums tell employers: “Don’t give a beginner a chance.”

Such losses are hard to see, but they are widespread. One company closes because it can’t afford to pay higher wages. Another decides to produce its product with fewer workers, and another never expands. Perhaps most importantly, there’s the business that never opens. The people who were never hired don’t complain—they wouldn’t know whom to blame—they don’t even know that they were harmed. They are the unseen victims.

And many of them are black, and the people that the economic ignorami, including the African-American one in the White House, falsely purport to be helping.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Not A Jobs Program?

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A couple months ago, I offered some advice to the Augustine panel:

Ignore the politics

Yes, of course Senator Shelby (R-AL) is going to want to see a new vehicle developed in Huntsville, Alabama, and Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) is going to want to ensure the maintenance of jobs at the Cape, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and various Houston-area congressmen are going to want to maintain jobs at Johnson Space Center. That will take priority in their minds over actual accomplishments in space.

But your job is to tell the policymakers how to give the taxpayers the best value for their money — and how to maximize our space-faring capabilities as soon as possible, so that if we do see something coming at us or find riches off the planet, we can take advantage of it.

Think of yourself like a Base Closing and Realignment Commission that provides recommendations for the nation as a whole, not local interests. Let the politicians argue about how to preserve jobs (while ignoring all of the jobs and wealth not being created due to the opportunity costs of their parochial decisions).

I don’t know whether he read it or not, but he seems to be following it:

A presidential space panel on Thursday challenged NASA’s vision of establishing a base on the moon and instead weighed other ambitious options that include free-ranging spaceships that could visit destinations throughout the inner solar system.

Noticeably absent, however, was discussion of NASA’s work force — despite a packed hotel ballroom filled with dozens of Kennedy Space Center workers worried about pink slips.

“We’re not designing any option with the idea in mind of preserving or not preserving the work force,” said Norm Augustine, the retired Lockheed Martin CEO who leads the 10-member panel named by the White House to evaluate NASA’s human spaceflight program.

…But even testimony from Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp did little to steer the conversation in that direction. He warned that Florida faces an “economic shock wave” during the time between the shuttle’s retirement and the first launch of its problem-plagued successor, which may not be ready until 2019.

“Due to the impending gap, Florida is bracing for a hardship — the magnitude of which the state has not seen for decades,” said Kottkamp, who estimated that the 7,000 job losses at KSC could ripple into 20,000 more unemployed workers on the Space Coast.

Defense has the same political problems, of course, with the fight in Congress to keep the F-22 funded being the latest example, and one in which the arguments are explicitly made that they have to do so to preserve jobs, with whether or not it actually helps us defend the country a second-tier issue at best. It’s even harder to fight this pork mentality when it comes to something as unimportant as space exploration and development, so we’ll see how long Augustine’s attitude remains once the politicians get involved. But I’m glad that we will at least make clear the difference between a program designed to explore and develop space, and one designed to make work for the politically connected.