OK, I'm embarrassed. I grew up a child of the Space Age, hoping to be an astronaut or, at least, just get into space. I actually worked at NASA/JSC on the Space Shuttle flight simulators and subsequently next door at the Lunar & Planetary Institute. I have followed all things space for 50 years.

And, yet, this implication of the nascent space tourism industry never occurred to me until I read this article:

Science, perhaps even more than tourism, could turn out to be big business for Virgin and other companies that are aiming to provide short rides above the 62-mile altitude that marks the official entry into outer space, eventually on a daily basis.

A $200,000 ticket is prohibitively expensive except for a small slice of the wealthy, but compared with the millions of dollars that government agencies like NASA typically spend to get experiments into space, “it’s revolutionary,” said S. Alan Stern, an associate vice president of the Southwest Research Institute’s space sciences and engineering division in Boulder, Colo. . . .

Dr. Stern’s institute announced Monday that it has signed a contract and paid the deposit to send two of its scientists up in Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo vehicle. Southwest also intends to buy six more seats — $1.6 million in tickets over all.

That follows an announcement on Thursday that Southwest is buying six seats from another suborbital company, XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., which has been charging $95,000 a seat for tourists. XCOR’s Lynx space plane carries just two people — the pilot and the paying passenger — so each flight will carry an experiment and an institute scientist.

“We have built, on our own dime, three payloads,” Dr. Stern said. “We’re buying tickets, before there is a government program from suborbital providers, for our own people to fly with those experiments.”

The point is, these various private space enterprises not only will have research customers lined out the door, they will have strong financial incentives to develop full orbital capabilities, since there will be even more researchers who want to conduct experiments and place payloads in orbit.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit. ..fritz..

Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:58 AM | Comments (40)
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It's a lot of money in the real world but let's remember, the federal budget bears very little resemblance to the real world.

A report from the nonpartisan GAO, to be released Tuesday, compiles a list of redundant and potentially ineffective federal programs, and it could serve as a template for lawmakers in both parties as they move to cut federal spending and consolidate programs to reduce the deficit. Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), who pushed for the report, estimated it identifies between $100 billion and $200 billion in duplicative spending. The GAO didn't put a specific figure on the spending overlap.

The GAO examined numerous federal agencies, including the departments of defense, agriculture and housing and urban development, and pointed to instances where different arms of the government should be coordinating or consolidating efforts to save taxpayers' money.

I'm torn about this kind of story and the GOP pushing it hard. On the one hand, we have to get people acclimated to the idea that we are cutting money now. Not slowing the rate of growth and certainly not spending more. CUTTING money. This is the kind of thing people understand and support.

On the other hand, people can't simply wish away trillions of dollars in deficits, debt and unfunded future liabilities but cutting every politicians favorite trio of "Waste, Fraud and Abuse". If you entirely eliminated the $700 billion in the defense budget, you'd be less than halfway home to balancing just this year's budget.

So if this is sort of "look at all the waste" is a sort of gateway drug to hook people on the idea of cutting spending, great. If it becomes a "well, we've done the hard stuff, now you politicians better leave Social Security and Medicare alone!", we're in trouble.

Still, this kind of stuff is a useful rejoinder to idiots like Congresswoman Barbara Lee who says Republicans who want to cut the budge are anti-civil rights.

Black lawmakers on Monday said GOP-proposed budget cuts would move the country in the opposite direction of the civil rights movement.

The lawmakers, all members of the Congressional Black Caucus, used the last day of Black History Month to argue the GOP-backed cuts would fall hardest on black Americans.

"It's really especially poignant that this year during Black History Month, the Republican leadership has proposed a budget for fiscal year 2011 that will fall most heavily, mind you, on the backs of the most vulnerable in our society: African Americans, Latinos, and poor, those who have been shut of the American dream," said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who described the cuts as ill-timed and destructive.

"At a time when we should be remembering and uplifting the accomplishments and contributions of African Americans, to the history, culture, civil rights and economy of America, we are literally during this month debating steps that will severely undercut and undermine that legacy," she said.

Aside from the casual swipe at Republicans as racists which is a common as it is baseless, consider what this woman is saying...a major accomplishment of the civil rights movement was making blacks de facto wards of the state. I can't imagine a more horrible fate for fellow Americans and yet she's celebrating it. But I and most of you are racists or something.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:01 AM | Comments (178)
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Political deals to steer money to the middle of nowhere, threats to the livelihood of farmers and cities and towns that don't want Obama's toy trains ripping through their neighborhoods at 150MPH.

What could go wrong?

Philip Klein of the American Spectator found out.

Things took a more perplexing turn last December, when California's High-Speed Rail Authority announced its choice for the initial 65-mile segment of the line, connecting Borden and Corcoran. If you haven't heard of them, don't feel bad -- neither have most Californians. Together the towns have an estimated population of 25,000. But as the San Jose Mercury News noted, Borden "is an unincorporated community for which the U.S. Census Bureau doesn't even keep official population estimates."

Democratic Rep. Dennis Cardoza, no doubt frustrated the railroad money wasn't going into his district, dubbed it the "train to nowhere." In reality, "tracks to nowhere" might have been a bit more accurate, as the Authority never had plans to run actual high-speed trains until more than 200 miles of the system are built, and the rails reach one of California's major cities."

There's a lot in the story and you should take a few minutes to read it all but let me just pull one more excerpt to illustrate the folly, the fiscally dangerous folly, of this all.

If the system is fully built, it would cost an estimated $647 million a year for 30 years for state taxpayers to pay off the $9.9 billion in bonds that would need to be issued.

...Some have raised questions about the reliability of the estimate that the entire system would cost $43 billion. A Reason Foundation study projected that the real cost would be far higher, in the range of $65 billion to $81 billion. Wendell Cox, one of the authors of the study, says that based on international data, the cost of these types of projects tends to be underestimated by 40 percent to 100 percent, because public officials have every incentive to low-ball the figures to get projects approved.

Even if the $43 billion is accepted at face value, the funding is still a daunting challenge. According to the Authority's business plan, it needs to receive at least $18 billion in federal funding to complete the project, with the rest coming from the state bonds and private sources. Yet the project received a windfall in 2010 largely due to a confluence of historical factors that are unlikely to be repeated, namely, a Democratic president and Congress coming into power with a crisis they didn't want to waste.

"We got the most out of any state in the nation, $3.2 billion," Wall boasts. "So when we matched that with the state funding, we have $5.5 billion after one year of pursuing federal funding heavily."

So even there low ball budget figures don't add up and if they did (and again, they don't) the state would still be on the hook for well over $600 million/year for 30 years just in debt service. This of course is on top of the debt that already exists and pretty much has the state thisclose to insolvency already.

And best of all...that's just one state! Obama wants to replicate this across the country.

From the Slublog Collection

Posted by: DrewM at 06:46 AM | Comments (214)
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Ben Bernanke's plan worked

...Nearly everything is going according to the plan Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke hatched six months ago...

Construction spending likely to fall for third straight month in January

...lowest monthly level since July 2000...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 03:15 AM | Comments (160)
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Okay, Mouth, I've taken all I can stand... and I can't stand no more!

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:36 AM | Comments (90)
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