Hope I’ll see some of you at the Space Access conference in Phoenix next month.
[Update at 9:30 AM]
Attendees will get to hear John Carmack talk about cool vehicles like this one.
Category Archives: Economics
It’s That Time Of Year Again
Hope I’ll see some of you at the Space Access conference in Phoenix next month.
[Update at 9:30 AM]
Attendees will get to hear John Carmack talk about cool vehicles like this one.
It’s That Time Of Year Again
Hope I’ll see some of you at the Space Access conference in Phoenix next month.
[Update at 9:30 AM]
Attendees will get to hear John Carmack talk about cool vehicles like this one.
The Economics Of “Free”
A fascinating and very useful article on the value of waste. It’s must reading for anyone who wants to entrepreneur on the web, in my opinion. I found the byline amusing:
Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is the editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail
. His next book, FREE, will be published in 2009 by Hyperion.
Will he be giving the book away?
[Via Geek Press]
The Economics Of “Free”
A fascinating and very useful article on the value of waste. It’s must reading for anyone who wants to entrepreneur on the web, in my opinion. I found the byline amusing:
Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is the editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail
Will he be giving the book away?
[Via Geek Press]
The Economics Of “Free”
A fascinating and very useful article on the value of waste. It’s must reading for anyone who wants to entrepreneur on the web, in my opinion. I found the byline amusing:
Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is the editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail
Will he be giving the book away?
[Via Geek Press]
Which Is Greener?
Driving, or walking? John Tierney stirs up a hornet’s nest of vegans and other morally overrighteous high-horse riders (see comments). I mean, to question Ed Begley, Jr. Isn’t that just the height of apostacy?
This reminds me of a piece that I’ve been thinking of writing about overall energy and fuel costs, including human fuel. With the ethanol boondoggle, we’ve gone back to the point at which we’re using crops for transportation (something we largely left behind at the end of the nineteenth century) and we now have increasing prices in both food and fuel as they compete with each other for the same farmland. This isn’t a good trend for the Third World (consider that one of the effects of the ethanol subsidies has been a dramatic increase in corn and tortilla costs in Mexico, making a poor country even more so).
Better Print Some More Money
Zimbabwe’s inflation rate is 100,000%:
In Africa’s fastest shrinking economy, per capita gross domestic product in Zimbabwe fell from about $200 in 1996 to about $9 a head last year.
What a disaster Mugabe has been. It shows how easy it is to destroy a once-vibrant country (Rhodesia was the bread basket of southern Africa) with insane government policies. And the sad thing is that his fellow African autocrats refuse to denounce him. I’ll bet that if there was a free and fair election there today, the people would vote Ian Smith back in.
Does Solar Photovoltaic Make Sense Yet?
An interesting discussion of the current economics.
What Do They Know?
As Clark says, I don’t know why anyone would think that space scientists or astronauts are experts on business. I don’t really care what Kathy Sullivan thinks the prospects are for suborbital tourism, and if I thought that astronauts’ opinions on the matter were of value, I can find many astronauts (including John Herrington, Rick Searfoss, etc.) who would disagree with her.
And who is this “Alvin” Aldrin of which they speak? Is that Andy’s evil twin? When I do a search for “Alvin Aldrin” I only get one hit–this article.
A couple other questions for Alvin/Andy. What numbers was he using for the Raptor cost? Marginal, or average per-unit? It makes a big difference.
In addition, I always get annoyed when people use a military fighter as a cost analogue for a spaceship. A lot of that dollar-per-pound number for the plane comes from something in it that weighs nothing at all–software. The avionics for the weapons systems, and the defensive systems are non-trivial in cost as well. Designing a combat aircraft, designed to kill other things and avoid being actively killed by other things, is an entirely different problem than designing a vehicle that has to only contend with passive and predictable nature (and pretty benign nature, for the most part, at least for suborbital). I’d bet that Burt’s own cost numbers for the SS2 already put the lie to Andy’s chart.
[Late afternoon update]
Jeff Foust has a much more extensive writeup of the discussion, which he apparently attended. As I suspected, it was Andy, not Alvin, Aldrin.