So the space shuttle Discovery has flown its last mission; it’s been towed over the nation’s capital like a bruised Chevy after a demolition derby before being deposited at the Udvar-Hazy air and space museum in northern Virginia.
Other space junkers — Atlantis and Endeavour — are being retired like Brett Favre in a pair of Crocs, too, bringing to end an underwhelming three decades of fruitless and tragic exploration of low-earth orbiting patterns.
Let’s face it: Once we beat the Russians to the moon, the national rocket grew limper than Liberace at a speculum convention. NASA has been dining out on a single 1969 hit longer than Zager and Evans.
The good news is that amateur hour is now over and the private space race has begun. Where two Cold War superpowers failed, let a thousand business plans bloom!
April 18, 2012
Reason.tv: The Space Shuttle Era is Over (Thank God!)
March 19, 2012
The PR problem of NASA
L. Neil Smith explains why and how NASA has managed to become so uninspiring (hint: it was deliberate).
The truth is, there are three kinds of people in the world, those to whom traveling to, landing on, settling, and terraforming the planet Mars requires no explanation, those for whom no explanation of any kind will ever suffice, and those who remain to be convinced.
Our job in that respect really amounts to putting the romance back into space exploration that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration carefully throttled out of it over the past half century. I think their secret motto was, “If you’re having any fun, you’re not doing it right.”
All that time, NASA and its supporters seemed to be asking desperately, why is the American public losing interest in what we’re doing? But the answer was in the mirror before them. In a desperate bid for false respectability, in a misplaced desire not to evoke visions of Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers or Captain Video, they ended up not evoking any visions at all, and thereby destroyed any reason for the average individual, the average man, woman, or child, to support their program.
I have also come to think — very reluctantly, believe me — that there has been a secret agenda, probably in echelons much higher than NASA itself, to prevent that average individual from ever getting into space, which may be why they opposed the whole “space tourism” idea so hysterically.
February 9, 2012
Michael Pinkus: Apathetic Ontario and the LCBO monopoly
In the latest issue of his OntarioWineReview.com newsletter, Michael Pinkus again expresses frustration with the government-run monopoly on retail sales of wine and spirits in Ontario:
I have made this point before when talking about the LCBO Food & Drink magazine, which competes directly with other publications in the province for advertising dollars; a magazine that is paid for by the people for the people, which sounds great and a pillar to build a country on, but not when you are competing against the very people who paid the money in the first place (magazine editors, publishers, writers, etc. are taxpayers too). One of the sad realities is that with each bottle a publisher buys they are paying to put themselves out of business.
It’s bad enough that the LCBO are the only game in town to buy booze … it’s bad enough that they waste millions of dollars a year on fancy stores (when they don’t have to) … it’s bad enough that a government run monopoly competes against their own populace and private enterprises for advertising revenue … but now they have to blow dollars on advertising themselves, buying expensive jingles and song rights … is that where you want your tax dollars to go? Could we not find better uses for this money, seriously? And what happened to social responsibility? They are advertising so we’ll buy more — does that seem counter-productive to the social responsibility pact. Heck, I don’t see this many ads for Premier Liquors out of Buffalo, and they have competition.
In the coming weeks we’ll look a little deeper into the LCBO, see what the Auditor General had to say, and read what the pundits are talking about. Find out why our booze prices are being raised mainly because we can’t be trusted as a society to police ourselves when it comes to drinking the devil’s liquid. I just can’t believe that all this is going down and nobody seems to be saying anything on the subject. Over the past few weeks I have been listening to CFRB: John Tory and Jim Richards both made mention, Richards went as far as to speak with Chris Layton (media relations mouthpiece for LCBO) — while both announcers shared their outrage with listeners over various aspects of the LCBO’s conduct (John: advertising; Jim: price raising), the apathetic Ontarians who bothered to call in had very little to say on the matter, many believing the LCBO is doing a bang up job.
A quick search of the blog shows that just about every mention of the LCBO is a negative one. No surprise there: the LCBO is a relic of the post-Prohibition era and is still run in a way that would be familiar to the state-owned “stores” of the old Soviet Union. They are undeniably better both in selection and in service than they used to be, but just about every positive change was wrought by the mere threat that the government of the day was looking at privatization as an option. As soon as the threat went away, the positive changes could be slowed or even stopped: after all, where else are you going to go to buy your wines and spirits?
January 27, 2012
NASA Moonbase by 2020: not likely
I’m just as eager to see more manned exploration of the solar system as the next person, but Newt Gingrich’s announcement the other day is just so much moonshine:
The basic idea is not actually as far-fetched as it sounds. NASA in 2006 announced plans to set up a colony on the south pole of the moon, in around 2020, as a base for further manned exploration of the solar system.
The problem for Gingrich, a space enthusiast with ideas dating back decades for zero-gravity honeymoons and lunar greenhouses, is that the 2008 financial crisis came along and turned feasible projects into pipe dreams.
“A lunar base by 2020 is a total fantasy,” John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, told AFP.
“We got to the moon in the 1960s by spending over 4% of the federal budget on Apollo. NASA’s now at one-tenth of that level.”
The initial problem is both financial and organizational: for all the money being poured into NASA, each dollar is producing much less in the way of science and technology because of the calcified bureaucracy. NASA achieved great things during the Apollo program, but the bureausclerosis was setting in even before the first shuttle flew. To get the kind of results that the “old” NASA achieved, you’d have to blow it up and start from scratch — or better yet, privatize the whole shebang and get the bureaucracy out of the way of the entrepreneurs.
As Robert Zubrin pointed out in the February issue of Reason magazine, NASA has become far too concerned about safety — less out of genuine concern about the astronauts and other employees, but more because of the negative effects of bad PR on the next year’s budget. Under the current NASA management, none of the pre-shuttle launches would have been allowed because they were too dangerous (and we know how dangerous the shuttle was, in hindsight).
Is VIA Rail an unaffordable luxury?
It hurts me to admit that long-distance passenger rail is an expensive relic of the past, and Canada’s government-owned passenger rail corporation is little more than a drain on the budget. I’m a railway fan: I founded a railway historical society, for crying out loud. I love trains, although I rarely get to use them myself. The freight railway business is doing well and it should continue to do so, as it’s generally much more economical for long-haul bulk cargo than any other option. But unlike in Europe, where population density allows passenger railways to remain a key part of the transportation network, distances and population distribution mean passenger railways can only operate profitably in a few areas (Windsor-Toronto-Montreal-Quebec City, and Boston-New York-Washington, for example).
Lorne Gunter says that recent reports about the federal government looking to sell off some or all of VIA Rail make lots of sense:
Bloomberg reported last week that the federal Tory government is quietly contemplating privatizing some or all of VIA Rail. Good. It’s about time, just as it was about time in 1991 when the Tories under Brian Mulroney thought about selling off VIA, or in 2000 when the Chretien Liberals considered it, or 2003 (Liberals again) or 2009 — the first time the current crop of Tories mulled it over.
It’s easy to imagine that every few years, Transport Canada bureaucrats return to the cabinet drawer marked “Keeping the Minister Preoccupied,” extract the file labelled “Secret Plans to Privatize VIA,” blow off the cobwebs and hand it to their latest boss. Then they sit back and wait for the predictable outcry from assorted special interests and from those few central Canadians who do actually use the train regularly.
Most years, VIA spends nearly twice as much as it makes. In 2010, for instance, VIA’s expenses were $536 million, while its revenues were just $274 million. That left a deficit of $262 million that had to be made up by Ottawa. Put another way, for every dollar VIA charges passengers for tickets, taxpayers put in 96 cents.
Shortly after we got married, Elizabeth and I took the train from Toronto to Halifax and had a great time: it was a very enjoyable trip, and we thought of the train ride as part of the vacation, not just a means of transportation. I’ve always wanted to ride The Canadian all the way to Vancouver, but at no point in the last thirty years have I simultaneously had the time available for the trip (four days on the train in each direction) and the money (right now, with a big seat sale going on it’d cost $2,137 for coach seats or $5,253 if we took a cabin). If that’s only half of what the trip would cost at market rates, there’s no way the service could support itself.
So the annual VIA subsidy amounts to an income transfer from people in most of the country who never use a passenger train to people in the central core of the country who prefer to take the train rather than drive their cars from Toronto to Montreal, but wouldn’t do so if they had to pay anywhere close to the full fare for their trips.
Every time I write about the absurdity of keeping VIA rolling, I get letters from people who insist they prefer the train to flying, driving or taking the bus or who believe trains have a lighter environmental impact or who say they can’t afford other modes. Fine, but why is it taxpayers’ duty to split the cost of your unprofitable preferences with you, 50/50?
January 7, 2012
Conrad Black: Current events vindicate Margaret Thatcher
The current situation in Europe proves that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was right all along:
Though it is probably happening too late to be overly gratifying to her, events are piling on to vindicate Margaret Thatcher completely in her reservations about British integration in Europe. Her response to the proposal to reduce Britain to a local government in a federal Europe was, memorably: “No, no, no, and never.” And her reward for her refusal to get on board what was then the thundering bandwagon of Eurofederalism, was to be sent packing by her own ungrateful party, though she was the only British political leader who had won three consecutive, full-term election majorities since before the First Reform Act expanded the electorate in 1832.
She was immensely popular with millions of Britons as a patriotic and courageous leader who took Britain off financial life support, saved it from strangulation by over-mighty, almost anarchistic unions, built a prosperous, home-owning democracy, threw the Argentinians out of the little corner of the British Empire they had wrongfully seized (the Falkland Islands), and played a starring role in winning the Cold War.
[. . .]
And as she liberalized the economy; imposed a free, secret ballot for labour strikes; lowered all taxes; privatized industry, housing, airports, almost everything except the National Health Service and the BBC; jolting economic growth resulted. Unfortunately, its most conspicuous exemplars included many successful entrepreneurs and financier types who offended British sensibilities by their garish and spivvy ostentation. The basis of Margaret Thatcher’s support was the Daily Telegraph-reading, gin and tonic-drinking, cricket-loving middle class, the backbone of the nation. But her enemies identified her with an infelicitous combination of Colonel Blimp fuddy-duddies and sticky-fingered, vulgar parvenus.
She had a somewhat hectoring manner in debates, and was notoriously impatient with what she considered pusillanimity from senior colleagues, sometimes calling cabinet members “blanc-manges,” or “suet puddings,” or even “spineless, boneless, men” (not necessarily inaccurately). Naturally less known was her exquisite courtesy and unaffected and egalitarian kindness to subordinates and strangers. It annoyed feminists that she was such a traditionalist, and weak men that she was a strong woman. But she triumphed by perseverance and courage; to the end, though a stirring speaker, she was nervous before a speech. She was a strong woman, but not at all a mannish one.
December 12, 2011
SpaceX Dragon to dock with ISS in February
Lewis Page on the recent announcement from NASA and SpaceX:
NASA has announced that — all being well — the first mission to the International Space Station by a privately built and operated spacecraft will lift off on February 7. The craft will be a Dragon capsule launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket, both made and handled by techbiz visionary Elon Musk’s new company SpaceX.
“We look forward to a successful mission, which will open up a new era in commercial cargo delivery for this international orbiting laboratory,” said NASA honcho William Gerstenmaier in tinned quotes announcing the planned date. However he didn’t stick his neck out, adding cautiously:
“There is still a significant amount of critical work to be completed before launch, but the teams have a sound plan to complete it and are prepared for unexpected challenges. As with all launches, we will adjust the launch date as needed to gain sufficient understanding of test and analysis results to ensure safety and mission success.”
August 17, 2011
August 7, 2011
Addressing traffic congestion (in any city)
Everyone knows that gridlock leads to wasted time and increased stress, but the effects of degraded mobility are worse than most people realize. Traffic congestion deprives job-seekers of opportunities, robs businesses of customers, and hastens the exodus of residents from the central city to the suburbs.
And although mounting gridlock may seem like the unavoidable result of increased population and strained budgets, the experience of nations from France to Australia proves otherwise. Reason Foundation draws on what’s worked worldwide and recommends a three-part plan:
1. Expand roads with underground tunnels and elevated structures.
2. Use pricing to keep traffic flowing.
3. Pay for new projects with private-sector financing instead of taxes.That plan can help Chicago or any other city bust congestion and boost economic growth.
June 7, 2011
Intolerance of educational experimentation
Brendan O’Neill surveys the range of responses to the proposed establishment of a new private for-profit university in London:
It is ‘odious’, ‘repugnant’, ‘parasitic’, ‘hypocritical’, a ‘travesty’, a ‘money-grubbing’ scheme, and ‘it would be better all-round if its doors never opened’. Wow. What is it? A whorehouse? A Satanic church? A junk-food chain that specialises in feeding fat straight into children’s veins via a drip? In fact it’s a proposed new London-based university, called the New College of the Humanities, which says it will teach students the best of literature, culture and history for a fee of £18,000 a year. And yet judging from the unhinged coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that someone had proposed opening a Ratko Mladic fanclub in Islington.
The response to Professor AC Grayling’s educational experiment, for which he has recruited other ‘star’ professors such as Richard Dawkins and Niall Ferguson, has been extraordinarily intolerant. No sooner had the press release about the new university been emailed than Grayling and Co. were being accused of selling out working-class students and the ideal of ‘education for all’ by opening an institution that only the wealthy (and those lucky enough to secure a scholarship) will be able to afford. As one journalist summarised, the initiative has met with ‘universal scorn from commentators in the national press’. Journalists have described the university as a ‘disgrace’, ‘nauseous’ and ‘disgustingly elitist’. The Twittersphere, always keen to ape the pronouncements of its heroes on the op-ed pages, heaped 140-character fury upon Grayling’s vain/pathetic/evil/doomed initiative.
Not to be outdone, members of the University of London Union and other radical student groups called an ‘emergency meeting’ last night. Not an emergency meeting to discuss the corrosion of liberty and free speech in the West or the future of the Arab uprisings — as radical students might have done in the past — but an emergency meeting to discuss how to crush this new uni. ULU’s vice president called for it to be blacklisted, insisting that the University of London refuse to recognise or work with this ‘repugnant’ institution. There was a serious debate about how to shut it down before it had even opened. One left-wing group said we must ‘stop Grayling’s sham university’ because it’s the ‘thin end of the wedge [of privatisation]’. Without so much as a whiff of self-awareness or irony, it went on to describe New College as ‘an attack on free education’. Yes, that’s right — this educational institution must be smashed in order to defend ‘free education’. Perhaps we should also burn its books in the name of defending book-reading.
Of course, if the quality of teaching at the New College of the Humanities is not up to an acceptable standard, it will fail and the university will close. That does not appear to be any part of the motivation for all the screaming and wailing. It rather implies that they’re actually afraid it will succeed, which might start raising questions about the existing university system.
April 8, 2011
The economics of Falcon Heavy
Charles Stross runs the numbers on the new SpaceX Falcon Heavy:
SpaceX announce Falcon Heavy. It’s been expected for some time — it’s been on their road map for a few years — but it’s worth repeating: man-rated and with a payload of 53 tons to Low Earth Orbit, Falcon Heavy has the largest payload of any space launcher since Energiya and the Saturn V, and it’s dirty-cheap by EELV standards at $80M-120M per launch. Moreover, it can’t easily be dismissed as vapourware because it’s an evolutionary development of a real, flying launch vehicle (Falcon 9) — a Falcon 9 core with two extra first stages strapped to the sides as boosters (and some fancy cross-stage plumbing to run the central core motors off fuel bled from the strap-ons, so that at BECO the central stage still carries a full fuel load). With the giant Iridium NEXT contract SpaceX have landed (the largest commercial launch contract in history), not to mention the ISS resupply contract, SpaceX looks likely to have the cash flow to build and fly this thing.
[. . .]
Note that these days the budget for a big Hollywood blockbuster — Avatar, for instance — can push over the $0.3Bn mark. It’s hard to say what the media rights to the second! ever! manned Moon program! would be, but it’s hard to see them going for much less than a major blockbuster movie. I think it unlikely that the expedition could be run entirely on the media rights, but they should certainly make a double-digit percentage contribution to the budget. Add the opportunity to tout for the science budget of some major agencies (by carrying lunar orbiter packages as payload, perhaps?) and it might be possible to raise $250-500M towards the costs of a $600-1000M expedition.
Is Elon Musk planning on being the 13th man on the moon?
More on Falcon Heavy at The Register.
April 6, 2011
India’s educational triumphs and hidden flaws
India has vastly increased the numbers of students who go on to post-secondary education, and strives to keep tuition low and entry open to as many prospective students as possible. This great success in enrollment hides some pretty nasty deficiencies in the actual quality of education being offered:
Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.
So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.
[. . .]
Business executives say schools are hampered by overbearing bureaucracy and a focus on rote learning rather than critical thinking and comprehension. Government keeps tuition low, which makes schools accessible to more students, but also keeps teacher salaries and budgets low. What’s more, say educators and business leaders, the curriculum in most places is outdated and disconnected from the real world.
[. . .]
Muddying the picture is that on the surface, India appears to have met the demand for more educated workers with a quantum leap in graduates. Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade group.
But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India’s high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group.
There’s no easy solution to this problem: by lowering educational standards, you reduce the employability of your existing graduates. If you raise standards, you increase the cost of education, both to students and to the government. Privatization may be the answer, but it won’t come cheap, and therefore will be politically dangerous to implement.
March 4, 2011
Israel’s largest defence company moving toward privatization
Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) is a state-owned company with a great reputation for quality and innovation. The Economist looks at their moves toward going into private control:
When Mr Shamir, an important figure in Israel’s booming high-technology business, took on the job of sorting out his country’s biggest industrial company in 2005, state-owned IAI was in a wretched condition.
For one thing, it had never quite got over the blow to its self-confidence when the Lavi, an advanced dual-role combat aircraft, was cancelled by the government headed by Mr Shamir senior in 1987. Although the Lavi was on course to meet all its performance targets, the cost of the project and American concern that it was helping to finance a rival to its F-16 and F-18 fighters killed it. For IAI, it meant that it would never again try to make a fast jet on its own.
For another, despite recovering much of its technological élan, IAI was an organisational and financial mess. Executives say it had gone three years without a formal chairman and two years without a signed financial statement. Banks had seized some of its financial assets and its chief executive of 20 years, Moshe Keret, was facing bribery allegations (he denied these and the case was dropped for lack of evidence). The firm was also in the grip of the Histadrut union federation, which fought all attempts to slim a bloated workforce and introduce merit-based remuneration.
February 17, 2011
Victor Shih interview on China’s economy
The Browser interviews Victor Shih:
What do people get most wrong when they think of the Chinese economy?
The biggest misperception about China is that it’s a dynamic market economy — it isn’t. It’s a fast-growing, state-dominated economy with some dynamic, private-market aspects. If you look at investment, a main driver of growth, much of it is going to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or shareholding companies dominated by state entities. Or it’s going directly to government investments carried out at a central or local level. The misperception has abated recently following Richard McGregor’s book on the Chinese Communist Party. People are realising that the party is still behind much of what happens in China.
[. . .]
Your first choice is Yasheng Huang’s Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. I believe this book successfully demolishes the idea that China is developing a new economic model called ‘market authoritarianism’.
I think Yasheng goes a little too far with some of his claims. But the broad outline is correct. There was a period of healthy organic growth in the 80s, driven by the de facto private sector. Many township and village enterprises were collectives or owned by the local government. But in reality they were private enterprises. This changed in the mid-90s, especially with the adoption of the ‘grasping the large and letting the small go’ policy that circumvented the special interests in the state sector. When Deng Xiaoping was alive, his executive vice premier, Zhu Rongji, wanted to bankrupt or merge many of the smaller state-owned enterprises into larger ones. It was a political tactic to further reform. And it worked.
The problem was that it created these giant, state-owned enterprises. Recent statistics reveal the state sector made a profit of 2 trillion renminbi last year, of which the 122 largest SOEs made 1.35 trillion. They have combined assets of over 10 trillion dollars and have become an enormously resourceful and powerful interest group. Their CEOs have numerous ties with top political leaders and sit on the party’s central committee. Most bank loans, issued bonds and stock-listing proceeds in the system go to these conglomerates. There’s still a private sector but it has been squeezed tremendously, especially in the last two years.
[. . .]
Most investment bankers like to talk things up, but that’s not something we can accuse Carl of doing.
By the late 90s, China’s banks were technically insolvent because the non-performing loans ratio was 40 to 50 per cent. Carl’s still a big fan of Zhu Rongji, the former prime minister. One of Zhu’s greatest achievements was to ‘solve’ the problems in the banking sector by setting up asset-management companies and recapitalising the banks. Today, of course, the banks are still lending very recklessly despite a lot of reform — the formation of credit and risk-management committees, for example. The banks continue to require bailouts and recapitalisation from the Chinese government, which props them up so that they can sell these bank shares to the public in Hong Kong or Shanghai. Carl sees this process as a kind of Ponzi scheme.
December 9, 2010
A step closer to private space travel
SpaceX’s Dragon capsule was successfully launched into orbit:
Judging by the excited faces of SpaceX employees after the live webcast, everything went perfectly. Dragon, the world’s first orbital space capsule built by the private sector, will now orbit the planet a few times over the next couple of hours before splashing down in the Pacific.
It is a small but significant milestone. The unmanned demonstration mission wants to prove that Dragon is able to deliver crew and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). The reason for all the excitement is that the working capsule really points the world firmly in the direction of greater involvement by the private sector in providing trips to space. More competition means lower prices. Lower prices mean better access. After the retirement of the shuttle, Dragon would be able to deliver crew and cargo to the ISS on top of a Falcon 9 rocket.
Here’s hoping that NASA won’t succeed in choking off/crowding out other private launch efforts.
More information (including some graphics) at the BBC website.
