Tag: capitalism

Roscosmos budget slashed 30%

10:46 pm

How’s that consolidation working out for ya? The Russian government announced today that it will have to cut the budget for its space program by 30 percent over the next ten years due to the country’s deepening economic problems.

In line with its reduced funding, the space agency has agreed to delay a manned flight to the moon by five years – to 2035 from 2030 – and scrap plans to develop a reusable rocket, a potentially valuable cost-saving technology. A Roscosmos spokesman previously said the agency would reassess its plans after 2025.

Essentially, the consolidation of Russia’s entire aerospace industry into a single corporation run by the Russian government has produced a very expensive government program unable to accomplish much of anything for a budget of 1.4 trillion rubles ($20.4 billion) from 2016 to 2025. Sounds kind of like NASA, doesn’t it?

Give me competition over a centralized program any day, and see great things happen. Go with a centralized government program, and watch as the life ebbs from the creativity of everyone.

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Self-tightening shoelaces!

9:05 am

Science marches on! Nike has unveiled its first pair of shoes that has automatically tightening shoelaces.

The Nike HyperAdapt 1.0 features a sensor inside that detects a heel sliding in, causing the shoe to automatically tighten around the foot. Two buttons on the side then allow the wearer to manually tighten and loosen the shoe until they have themselves a snug fit.

According to Nike, this ability to change tension on the fly solves what is apparently a “typical” problem for athletes: distraction. It does so by allowing precise adjustments to eliminate tight tying and the slippage that results from loose laces. It also imagines a future where a sports shoe can sense the moment you need a tighter fit for a quick mid-game maneuver and adjusts itself accordingly.

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Virgin Galactic awards contract

8:58 am

The competition heats up: Virgin Galactic has awarded a contract to a Waco company to strengthen the wings of a 747 it intends to use the first stage for LauncherOne.

L-3’s work will make the left wing stout enough to support a rocket that would launch in flight from beneath the wing. This rocket would propel satellites into space for commercial and government customers. Company spokesman Lance Martin said that for confidentiality reasons he could not disclose the value of the contract or the length of the plane’s stay in Waco. He said performing work for Virgin Galactic and Branson should enhance L-3’s image, saying, “the customer speaks for itself.”

I suppose I should be excited by this, as it suggests that LauncherOne is moving forward. Considering Virgin Galactic’s history, however, I find myself sadly disinterested. I won’t get excited by this company again until they actually begin flying something.

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ULA official resigns

8:48 am

In an update to the story last night about the head of ULA rejecting comments made by one of his chief engineers, that engineer has now resigned.

[Brett Tobey, formerly ULA vice president of engineering] resigned his position, effective immediately, ULA chief executive Tory Bruno said in a statement. ULA is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing. “The views, positions and inaccurate statements Mr. Tobey presented at his recent speaking engagement were not aligned with the direction of the company, my views, nor the views I expect from ULA leaders,” Bruno said in the statement.

In other words, we can’t have too much honesty here. There are games that Congress and ULA play with each other to justify the billions in subsidies the government gives ULA, and to note these games in a straightforward way is to note that the emperor has no clothes. We can’t have that.

I hope Tobey finds a job at SpaceX.

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ULA head rejects his engineer’s remarks about Aerojet Rocketdyne

9:47 pm

The heat of competition: The head of ULA has disavowed his engineers’ remarks that plugged Blue Origin’s engine for the Atlas 5 while dissing Aeroject Rocketdyne’s.

The engineer was giving a talk at the University of Colorado this week where he made it pretty clear that ULA favors Blue Origin over Aerojet Rocketdyne, but had to make believe they were treating both companies equally in the competition to replace the Atlas 5’s Russian engines in order to keep the Air Force happy. Bruno is probably now doing some damage control, as the government still wants to justify the Aerojet Rocketdyne contract (whose only real purpose was as a government pork barrel jobs program). Considering all the money the Air Force and congressmen give to ULA, he has to keep them both happy. And telling the world that their Aerojet contract is a waste of government money is not a very good way to do this.

Nonetheless, he also admitted that Blue Origin is way ahead in development, and is thus most likely to win the competition anyway.

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China plans first commercial rocket company

9:13 am

The competition heats up: A Chinese company has announced plans to start a new commercial rocket company to compete for the burgeoning space launch market.

China Sanjiang Space Group Co. is preparing to enter the commercial-rocket business with a launch slated for 2017, Xinhua reported Tuesday, citing the company’s chief engineer Hu Shengyun. Some Internet companies have expressed interest in collaborating on commercial launches, Hu said.

The Kuaizhou-11, translated as “fast vessel,” rocket is being developed by the Fourth Academy of China Aerospace Science & Industry Corp., a major missile supplier to the People’s Liberation Army, according to China Daily.

There is not much information at the link. The rocket was first launched in 2013, but not much has been revealed about it since.

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What next for the computer Go program?

9:07 am

Link here.

The software uses neural networks to learn from experience. For example, to train for its Go match the computer program studied 30 million Go board positions from human games, then played itself again and again to improve its skills.

DeepMind’s founder and chief executive Demis Hassabis mentioned the possibility of training a version of AlphaGo using self-play alone, omitting the knowledge from human-expert games, at a conference last month. The firm created a program that learned to play less complex arcade games in this manner in 2015. Without a head start, AlphaGo would probably take much longer to learn, says Bengio — and might never beat the best human. But it’s an important step, he says, because humans learn with such little guidance.

DeepMind, based in London, also plans to venture beyond games. In February the company founded DeepMind Health and launched a collaboration with the UK National Health Service: its algorithms could eventually be applied to clinical data to improve diagnoses or treatment plans. Such applications pose different challenges from games, says Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington. “The universal thing about games is that you can collect an arbitrary amount of data,” he says — and that the program is constantly getting feedback on what’s a good or bad move by playing many games. But, in the messy real world, data — on rare diseases, say — might be scarcer, and even with common diseases, labelling the consequences of a decision as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ may not be straightforward.

Hassabis has said that DeepMind’s algorithms could give smartphone personal assistants a deeper understanding of users’ requests. And AI researchers see parallels between human dialogue and games: “Each person is making a play, and we have a sequence of turns, and each of us has an objective,” says Bengio. But they also caution that language and human interaction involve a lot more uncertainty.

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Blue Origin engine testing update

9:33 am

The competition heats up: Jeff Bezos has released an update on Blue Origin’s test program of its BE-4 rocket engine, being built as a possible replacement for the Russian engines in the Atlas 5.

Bezos’s final comment kind of explains why Boeing has favored them over Aerojet Rocketdyne for this engine:

One of the many benefits of a privately funded engine development is that we can make and implement decisions quickly. Building these two new test cells is a $10 million commitment, and we as a team made the decision to move forward in 10 minutes. Less than three weeks later we were pouring the needed three-foot thick foundations. Private funding and rapid decision making are two of the reasons why the BE-4 is the fastest path to eliminate U.S. dependence on the Russian-made RD-180.

I imagine however a lot of Congressmen are upset by this. If they do it too cheaply or too quickly there will be far less opportunity to spend pork in their districts!

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March 10, 2016 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast

9:40 am

Embedded below the fold. I would dub this podcast an updated summary of what I in 2005 called the new colonial movement.

We are at the dawn of a new colonial age. The growing space competition between nations is in many ways very reminiscent of the 19th century competition between the European powers to colonize Africa and the South Pacific. In the 1800s, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom aggressively competed to carve up the undeveloped world. The result was foreign-run colonies controlling most of the Third World, for both good and ill, for almost a century.

Today, a new list of nations – India, China, Japan, Russia, Europe and the United States — are throwing their resources at space exploration in much the same way. Their goal, unstated but indisputable, is similar to the colonial powers of the 19th century: to obtain future domination over unclaimed territories in space.

This quest will, like the previous colonial efforts, be a long, complex and difficult historical process. Just as the colonial movement dominated much of 19th century politics and history, the growing desire by nations today to settle and control the solar system is also likely to dominate human history for centuries to come. The significant difference, however, is there are no aborigine peoples in space. The colonization of the solar system offers the hope of oppressing no one while bringing benefits to everyone who does it.

» Read more

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SpaceX estimates 30% price cut from reusable 1st stage

11:04 pm

The competition heats up: At a satellite conference on Wednesday SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell estimated that they will be able to cut the price of launch to about $40 million, a 30% cut from their already low prices, once they can reliably begin reusing the first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket.

Given that SpaceX has no intention, for now, of recovering the second stage, she said a launch with a previously used first stage could be priced 30 percent less than the current Falcon 9 rockets.

SES of Luxembourg, SpaceX’s biggest backer among the large commercial satellite fleet operators, has said it wants to be the first customer to fly with a reused stage. But SES Chief Executive Karim Michel Sabbagh said here March 8 that SES wanted a 50 percent price cut, to around $30 million, in return for pioneering the reusable version.

Shotwell said it was too early to set precise prices for a reused Falcon 9, but that if the fuel on the first stage costs $1 million or less, and a reused first stage could be prepared for reflight for $3 million or so, a price reduction of 30 percent – to around $40 million – should be possible.

Shotwell also said they hope to launch 18 times this year, with the first Falcon Heavy launch now set for November. This is another two month delay from their previous announcement, which had said they were hoping to launch in September.

With only two launches so far this year, I must say I am skeptical they can achieve 16 more launches in the year’s remaining 9 months, a rate of about one almost every two weeks. They have never come close to this schedule, and though I believe they can eventually do so, I don’t think they can do it so quickly.

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ULA’s parent companies express caution about Vulcan

10:52 pm

The competition heats up? The executives in charge of ULA’s parent companies, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, today expressed mixed support for the development of the Vulcan rocket, designed to replace the Atlas 5.

For more than a year, Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been investing in the rocket on a quarter-by-quarter basis and the ULA board leaders said this week that the practice would continue. “We have to be prudent, disciplined stewards of any kind of investment,” Ambrose [Lockheed Martin] said. “Vulcan would be like any other investment decision.”

In September 2015, ULA’s leaders said a ban by Congress on the Russian RD-180 rocket engine, which powers ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket, was a leading driver behind the measured investment in Vulcan. But that issue was temporarily resolved in December, when Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) used a must-pass spending bill to eliminate the engine restrictions that had become law just weeks earlier.

Now, Ambrose pointed to “uncertainties” with launch policy, while Cooning [Boeing] said disagreements between lawmakers and the Air Force on the best approach for ending RD-180 dependence have given them pause, further justifying a “cautious and conservative approach.”

In other words, now that the law requiring a quick replacement of the Russian engine has been repealed, these executives feel less compunction to build Vulcan, something I had sensed in December and had commented on. As a result, they are telling us, in their tangled corporate ways, that they are not going to invest much of their own money on Vulcan, unless the government forks up a lot of cash for them to proceed.

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XCOR wins Vulcan engine design contract

10:05 am

The competition heats up: ULA has awarded XCOR a design contract for building an upper stage rocket engine for the Vulcan rocket.

This is good news for XCOR, though there is one important caveat: A close reading of the press release at the link shows that the contract does not guarantee that ULA will use this engine in Vulcan. XCOR must deliver, and ULA must be satisfied with what they produce.

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Another Falcon Heavy customer switches to different rocket

2:15 am

The competition heats up: Afraid of more delays in SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, Inmarsat has booked a Russian Proton rocket for a 2017 commercial satellite launch.

London-based Inmarsat is the second Falcon Heavy commercial customer to have sought a Plan B given the continued uncertainties in the launch schedule of Falcon Heavy, whose inaugural flight has been repeatedly delayed. Carlsbad, California-based ViaSat Inc. in February moved its ViaSat-2 consumer broadband satellite from the Falcon Heavy to Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket for an April 2017 launch, securing what may be launch-service provider Arianespace’s last 2017 slot for a heavy satellite.

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Jeff Bezos gives a tour of Blue Origin

8:56 am

The competition heats up: Jeff Bezos gave his first tour of Blue Origin’s facilities for eleven journalists on Tuesday.

The article is chock full of interesting details about the company’s plans. To me these details about their New Shepard test program are the most interesting:

“We’re going to fly it until we lose it,” he said. The plan is to test the spaceship many, many times without humans aboard. At some point, Blue Origin will run a test in which the crew capsule will have to blast itself clear from the propulsion module at maximum dynamic pressure – a scenario during which the propulsion module will almost certainly be destroyed.

Not to worry, though: More crew capsules and propulsion modules are already under construction at the factory. “By the time anybody gets on, I think you should be willing to bring your mom,” Bezos said.

They also hope that this test program will proceed to launching humans by 2017.

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Second solo Ariane 5 launch in 2016

8:46 am

The competition heats up: In successfully placing a commercial communications satellite in orbit last night, Arianespace also did its second consecutive single satellite launch.

The Ariane 5 rocket is designed to carry two satellites, and normally does so in order to maximize its profit per launch. That they have done two straight commercial launches without a second satellite suggests to me that the competition from SpaceX is taking customers from them. The scheduling of the secondary payload usually suffers because priority is given to the primary satellite. Those customers thus might be switching to SpaceX in the hope they can gain better control over their own launch schedule, while also paying far less for their launch.

Then again, considering how unreliable SpaceX’s own launch schedule has been, it is unlikely these customers will have yet gained any scheduling advantages.

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Free government money for Aerojet Rocketdyne!

8:16 am

Crony capitalism: Even though ULA prefers Blue Origin’s engine for its Atlas 5, the Air Force continues to fund Aerojet Rocketdyne’s new engine.

The U.S. Air Force announced Feb. 29 it was investing $115 million this year, and with options, as much as $536 million over the next five years, in [Aerojet Rocketdyne’s] AR1, a new liquid oxygen- and kerosene-fueled main-stage engine. The contract award is part of an Air Force initiative to end reliance on the Russian-built RD-180 engine that powers ULA’s Atlas 5 workhorse rocket.

Aerojet says it has two potential other customers to use the engine, but will not name them. In reviewing the field, the only customer I can think of that might be interested would be Orbital ATK (for its Antares rocket), and even there I have doubts. Thus, it appears to me that these funds are really being distributed to prop up a company that is failing, not to build anything useful the government needs.

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India’s space agency ISRO gets a budget boost

9:37 pm

In its new budget approved by India’s government the country’s space agency ISRO was the only science agency to get a significant budget increase, approximately 7.3%.

In the short run this is good, as ISRO has been using its funds wisely and accomplishing a lot for a little, while trying to encourage private development in India’s aerospace industry. In the long run, however, this will not be good, as government agencies always grow more than they should while sucking the innovation and creativity from the private sector. This is what NASA did in the U.S.

Hopefully, India will see how things are changing in America with private enterprise reasserting itself after a half century of government stagnation in space development and copy what we are doing.

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