When you learn something new, change your mind.

A few days ago I finished listening to the book Range by David Epstein, and it was good. Essentially it described to me something that I already knew, but in a way that I hadn't understood or articulated. People that do a range of different sports or jobs before getting to their current sport or job often have more success than people that specialize very early in their sport or job. 

One way this manifests is that people with a range of experience can give an analogy about a situation to describe it in a different way, and that might provide some insight to a group that they didn't have before to the current situation. He spends one chapter of the book talking about people that forecast different events, and the people that are able to forecast the best often have the largest range of experience, and relentlessly change their minds about thing as new information is presented. So I took some time to reflect on myself, do I have a good range of experience? Am I open to changing my mind on things? What have I changed my mind on in the past?

It both made me feel good about having changed my mind on a number of things, and also made me feel a little bad that I didn't seek out more diverse opinions on topics to intentionally change my mind more often. To give a big example, but also one that moved rather slow for me, 20 years ago I didn't think that universal healthcare made sense, it would be too expensive, end of story. However, over the last two decades, I've learned how much money insurance companies make, and how much money pharmaceutical companies make, and how much debt it takes to become a doctor, and how in many cases, like PEPFAR a dollar a day can actually save a person's life for decades. Would you save a person's life for $1.00 per day? I think that's a no brainer, yes, every single time. Raise my taxes to make that possible. I can pay an extra $10/day to save 10 lives a day. The United States is a wealthy country, how is it countries with half or a third of our average income per person can have universal healthcare, but we can't?

To give another example, I still can't believe I'm in manufacturing. In a few months it will have been five years, and admittedly my design skills are a little rusty. I always perceived manufacturing as dirty, dangerous, poorly illuminated, but the reality today is very different than the factories of 50 years ago. Plus there is a certain satisfaction to building something, you get to see the thing that you were working on come to fruition. In the design world you can spend years working on something, and then it can actually get canceled before it becomes reality, and that happened to me several times. Of course the risk in manufacturing is you build a whole new factory and never get to take the factory to production.

Another example is the three stage rocket. I need to write this one out more, but nearly three years ago I watched two coworkers debate a two stage versus a three stage rocket, and despite the fact that nearly every rocket company works around two stages, I've actually come down on the side of a three stage rocket. Why? Well, we know a first stage rocket can be reusable and land vertically, so now it's just a matter of making it more reusable and easier to reuse. We also know that orbital vehicles like the space shuttle can be reusable. However, due to the rocket equation, a two stage rocket just never really can get that much to orbit. So a solution that no one has implemented is make a three stage rocket, with stage one landing back on land within a few miles from the launch pad for easy refurbishment between flights. Stage two landing 1000 miles away on a barge, or better yet some piece of land, and then stage three being orbital, and either disposable, or reusable. Trying to make a second stage orbital and fully reusable means that the payload capacity will be small compared to the mass of the second stage, something like 5% of the dry mass of the second stage. It's like saying that you need a 5,000 pound SUV to deliver 250 pounds total to the destination... which is only two people and no luggage if the people are small. And the problem is reentry is always going to be harsh on vehicles, so that second stage in a three stage vehicle that is suborbital, you really want to minimize the reentry stress on that stage. 

The point of these examples are it's okay to change your mind, in fact, it's good when you are presented with new information. Often the ideal answer isn't clear and it can take a lot of research to find the best answer that incorporates all of the available data. It can definitely be hard to search out an opposing opinion at times, but it's often worth is to find a better solution.

An Economic Challenge of Rural Areas

I grew up mostly in rural areas, later in elementary school I lived in a town of 900 people, and then I went to middle school and high school in a town of about 2400 people. In the first town, which was more remote, the economy was definitely more agricultural. In the second, by a quirk of fate there were some manufacturing and professional services businesses in town, as well as a share of farming. In 2016 when I moved from a small city of 50,000 people to a town of 9,000 people, I didn't really expect to learn some of the things I learned. 

One example, in the town I lived in from 2016 through 2018, the hospital had closed, and there was an urgent care instead, along with a few private family medicine clinics. In a nearby town only 20 minutes away there was a hospital. Hospitals are a good thing for a community. They often have good paying jobs, they provide some stability, and when people get sick or injured it's good if they are closer to a hospital than farther away. So how do you keep a hospital open? Essentially two ways, either you have enough paying customers that it operates with a small profit (or a non-profit with a balance at the end of the year), or the second option is that someone funds the hospital even though it loses money. In the second example that could be the federal government, it could be a wealthy donor, it could be community donations. I don't really know how you get that second example to work across the whole USA in thousands of small towns, I don't have an answer for that. It seems like the federal government is the right organization to prioritize keeping hospitals open, but hospitals are a hyper local organization, so from another valid point of view, the solution to keeping each one open should be local.

Another way to phrase it, in Iowa I used to bicycle with an internal medicine doctor, and one day he told he me he sees about 5,000 patients a year. Using that as a metric, we could say that it takes roughly 5,000 patients to fund one doctor. The number is probably somewhat less than that because there are specialists, pediatricians, OBGYNs and others that see a similar number of patients a year, but only see a subset of the population. Even if we reduce that by about 2/3rds to say 1500 patients to justify the salary of one doctor, as you get to the smaller towns of say 900 people, it gets hard hire and maintain a doctor. The doctor will likely be paid less than in a larger city, and will likely have essentially zero opportunity for career growth, whether that is teaching or getting into hospital management or learning a specialty. 

Again, I don't know what the solution is. I like the idea of universal healthcare, and specifically with funding for medical professionals in rural areas that is not directly related to how many patients they see or what type of tests and treatments those patients require. In other words, something that says, yes there is $X minimum amount of funding for doctors and nurses in towns of Y number of people every year, regardless of how sick or how many tests those patients are in a given year. In the current USA medical system there is an incentive for more medical tests, more prescription drugs, but not for keeping people actually healthy or having easy access to a doctor. I think that's wrong, and that's a systemic issue that applies to most of the whole USA medical system.

That's one small example, but it's a great example, because it's something that does affect nearly all small towns. Another example is business and industry. For example manufacturing, that's an easy one to talk about. NPR recently did a series about is manufacturing special, and the short story is that it is special, because it's something where blue collar jobs exist that don't require a college degree, yet manufacturing jobs pay well and typically have some level of career progression available, and overall they aren't especially dangerous. When I was living in the town of 9,000 people I worked in a facility that did manufacturing and had a total employment of about 400 people. I didn't actually directly support the manufacturing that happened there, I actually supported a manufacturing facility in Mexico. It was interesting because there was a pervasive fear that at any given time one mistake by any of the engineers would lead to the whole facility being shut down. I always thought that was ridiculous, but that fear is grounded in some very valid lived experiences. On the street where the factory was, there were the remnants of other businesses, especially one large warehouse that had shut down and laid off quite a large number of staff. That business closing, along with the local hospital closing, were both regularly talked about around town. Definitely not an every day sort of conversation, but every few months it would be brought up.

The real fear there, was that people would have to move if the business shut down. The people employed at the factory, maybe 200 of the 400 would stay, but the others would likely have a very very difficult time finding local work, and decide to move farther away. That's a big fear. It's something that is based on reality that happened in other towns. In a big city, like Denver, one company closing, even a big one, doesn't have much effect to the million plus people living there. There is an inherent stability to a large population economically, it's a diversified economy that not every small town has the luxury of.

I don't have all the answers, ha, I don't even have many of the questions to ask. I read probably a decade ago that many rural American communities are headed toward the minimum number of people to support the agriculture in those areas. I think that's probably true. And frankly, it probably doesn't include hospitals or much industry like manufacturing. Now every town is different, there will always be entrepreneurs who want to build businesses in their hometowns. There will be local and regional companies, maybe not one in every town, but when a few in neighboring towns close, the one remaining will likely have more business. 

The Christian Church in the United States is in Trouble

In the last 20 years, I have regularly attended six different churches. That's not a large count, but it is a fair number. The church is changing. Some of those churches have been healthy and stable, but a couple of them have been hanging on by threads. I'm not talking about actual Christianity, because as a believer, I believe that God has got it all taken care of. I'm talking about the human organization side of the Christian Church, the various congregations and denominations all over the country. They are struggling.

My wife and I are Christian, but when we go through the list of the friends we spend the most time with, only a few, maybe 15% of them, are Christian enough to regularly attend church. The ideology of the church has turned off many millennials, who see public figures that are not accepting of the poor or sinners. The church doesn't really appear to be a loving and caring place when viewed through their most vocal public figures. When public church figures are actively campaigning for a person that seems to have no values, and certainly not strong Christian values, people get turned off to any thought of moral aspiration coming from that group. As the saying goes, it takes years to build trust, and seconds to lose it. Of course, when you get into a church congregation, they are typically very caring, but it takes time and effort to get into that group. Many churches have somewhat stale congregations, where the same people have gone for 10+ years, and they all know each other, and aren't necessarily looking to add new people, so they don't feel especially welcoming. 

To give a specific example, I once went to a church that had a declining membership, and the people were worried about the church finances. Just down the street was a Hispanic church start up that was meeting in an old hardware store, and I suggested, why not share the church with them, let them use it Sunday afternoons? That's was actually scoffed at as something the congregation would never go for. Yet, that's one way that the Christian Church in this country has a chance at survival is to show that we're more united than we are divided. 

Right now baby boomers are keeping a lot of congregations alive. When they pass away, a lot of churches are going to close. To some extent I do think retirees for decades have filled a lot of roles at churches because they often have more time for volunteering than the younger working population has. Another challenge is that there is a shortage of pastors. Here is an occupation where often it takes several years of additional schooling, and then the pay is often very low, it's a degree without a positive return on investment. I've also seen a few churches where they essentially push the pastor out because they didn't like something that he or she did. Not that the actions were a fireable offense, simply that church leaders didn't like the pastor's words or actions. Church politics can be tough. Every time a pastor is pushed out of a church, people get upset, and some leave, because it's an unloving act by the congregation.

I don't know what the future holds for the Christian Church in the United States. I hope it's good, and membership is strong, but I don't know, it's hard to see that in the next decade or two.

Humans aren't going to Mars anytime soon.

For a very long time I wanted to go to Mars. Yes, I wanted to take that three year long lonesome trip through space with a small crew and a communication delay. It's the adventure of a lifetime! The adventure of a generation. It's hard to really conceptualize how far away Mars is, and while that is part of the appeal, I now realize just how significant the challenges are. The last 1.5 years I've been working on a lunar lander, which I viewed as a great step into seeing what it takes to send a lander to another body in the solar system. I've learned a tremendous amount about travel beyond Earth in the last 1.5 years. None of this is really proprietary, in fact, most of the learnings are from the Apollo days in the 1960s and 1970s, with only a few from the recent Mars rovers.

When you read the news articles, one of the recurring themes of a human trip to Mars is that we don't have the technology to do it. I would see that statement and not truly understand what that means. So let me give a few examples of the technology that we don't have ready yet:

• We don't have a spacesuit to be used on Mars. This is modestly significant. Mars has a lot of advantages, it has a thin atmosphere, the temperature is more temperate than the Moon or even the International Space Station, so the suit will likely be slimmer than the bulky in space suits that are currently used for spacewalks, and were used on Apollo on the Moon. So while it should be easier to design and manufacturer the suit, as far as I know there has been no serious work on a Mars suit yet, and it's the kind of thing that really will need a few years of dedicated work before it's ready to be used by humans on Mars.
• It's not clear how to launch a vehicle from the surface of Mars back into Mars orbit. There are a couple sub points here. 
• First, the baseline architecture for the Mars Sample Return mission costs around $11 billion, and that's to get back about 15 kilograms (34 lbs.) of samples from the surface of Mars. One astronaut weights a lot more than 15 kilograms. Now, Rocketlab proposes they can do it in house for only $2 billion... but remember this is for low tens of pounds of payload from the surface of Mars back to Earth. This first point being it's very expensive, and we've never done any launch from the surface of Mars. 
• Second, a human lander will likely be significantly different than the small sample return rocket. SpaceX is proposing using Starships, which definitely work on paper, but there is a question about how exactly to fully fuel those Starships. Mars has a lot of CO2, so just bring along a big garden and turn that into a lot of oxygen, which you can cool and condense into liquid oxygen. However, to get the hydrogen for the sabatier process, I'm not clear on exactly how to get that. The baseline is to harvest water, and then do hydrolysis to get hydrogen and oxygen, but we've never harvested water on Mars. However, you're going to need likely at least a hundred metric tons of water, maybe 1000 metric tons of water, and that's a lot. We haven't even harvested 1 kilogram of water, let along the possible 1,000,000 kilograms that could be needed to launch a large rocket off the surface of Mars. Now it's possible to take all of the return trip fuel with you, say bring five ships, one with the people, and four with fuel, and just refuel the human ship on the surface and/or in Mars orbit, and leave the four tankers behind. But the point of this is that exactly how we are going to launch a human crew sized vehicle off the surface of Mars is not clear and will require a few years of engineering to make sure we can actually do it.
• My assumption is that almost everything on a short Hohmann transfer orbit to and from Mars with an astronaut crew of say four people will essentially use expendable consumables. What I mean by consumables:
• Oxygen for breathing and water for drinking, they will essentially take a whole lot of each and then CO2 and urine and excrement will essentially be dumped overboard. Some amount may be recycled, but in the event the recycler fails, you'll need to have a lot of spare.
• Clothing will maybe be washed by hand on Mars, but for a fifteen month stay it has to be expected that clothing, boots, gloves, and likely whole spacesuits will wear out. So does each astronaut need to bring one Mars suit and some spare parts like o-rings, or four whole spacesuits? Again, we don't have a good baseline for how we will wear out clothing on Mars. 
• You're going to have to take a lot of food for the three year trip. We probably can't grow potatoes fast enough like in the book and movie The Martian. It may sound super minor, but the 33 month trip will need roughly half of the time in microgravity, and half the trip at 1/3 Earth gravity on Mars, and the systems for food and living will need to work in both gravity environments. Again, sounds trivial but I'm not sure we really know it will be that easy.
• We're going to need a lot of solar panels, a whole lot. I don't even know how many. Let's say that one human for habitation and some driving around the lunar surface needs 10 kilowatt hours per day, and four people land on Mars, that's 40 kilowatt hours per day. Given that solar panels are less efficient on Mars, you're going to need a lot of solar panels. And honestly, depending on the amount of driving that is baselined, as well as electricity needed for food production experiments or rocket fuel production, 10 kilowatt hours per person per day could be far too little. Again, this is an area where presumably we can modify already existing solar panels, and batteries for use on Mars, and we don't really have to worry about clouds on Mars, just the changing of the seasons, but it's going to take some work to make a mass efficient system.
• All of the pressure vessels, engines, heat shields, and human habitations, assuming that they are the only one of their kind, will need to be repairable. The risks of a crack or accident leading to higher than expected pressure loss will necessitate the ability to repair these pressure vessels. Repairs have been done on the International Space Station, and Apollo 13 is a famous case study in making do with what you have.  The items for for heat shields, engines, pressure vessels will need to be repairable, because a tiny micrometeoroid could render most pieces of equipment inoperable. Will people need to weld on Mars? Will people need to repair wire harnesses on Mars when a pin gets bent? Will people need to patch holes on their habitation walls? How many o-rings and seals will we need to replace because Martian dust cuts the seals? This is all pretty basic stuff, but a single cut o-ring could mean mission failure. 
• Rover wheels for a human sized rover on Mars is a big problem. The Curiosity rover shredded it's wheels faster than than expected, and traveled not that far of a distance. A human rover will probably go something like 1000+ kilometers in 15 months, compared to the 33.5 kilometers for Curiosity rover in 12 years. In other words, we're going to need better Mars rover wheels, and we're going to need spare tires. Again, this is not trivial and will take years of development here on Earth. While there are full size prototypes that NASA has developed, the whole logistics of a rover and spare wheels is a really big deal. The rover itself would be much more useful if it's a pressurized rover and could make multiday trips farther away from the landing site. This adds a fair amount of complexity and mass to the rover, something that we really should be seeing qualification prototypes of say two years before launch so that we can make sure to work out the details.
• People will get sick and hurt. I've thought about it a lot over the years and I am pretty confident that the single most important person on a mission to Mars, would be a doctor. There are so many different ways that people could get sick or hurt, and it's very possible that we discover ways we hadn't even thought of, such as what Mars dust does to lungs when it gets into the habitation. I'm not actually that worried about radiation, it's a relatively known phenomena and while clearly dangerous, would again be rather known for a three year trip. While this bullet point isn't stopping us from going to Mars, we're going to have to take a small emergency room worth of medical supplies and hope that we brought the right stuff. If a person gets cancer on the outbound trip to Mars, orbital mechanics dictates that you have to stick out the whole mission, because the fuel required to do a direct abort and get back to Earth is not part of the plan. Similarly, there is a psychological component to leaving Earth, and barely being able to even see it in the sky that is a whole new challenge we don't really know how to handle. Presumably the people on the trip will be highly qualified and highly trained and have very strong emotional fortitude, but when you can't see Earth, and there is a five minute communication delay, and your parent died, and the X-band antenna broke so you only have S-band text messages, that's a lot of stress
• Last point, it's going to take a lot of launches from Earth in 2028 in order to land humans and the equipment on Mars, with the capability to launch off Mars and come back to Earth in 2031. In round numbers, if we say one Mars landing ship will carry people, and four ships will carry equipment and fuel, and each of those five ships will require 10 refueling flights, we're talking 55 rocket launches in the second half of 2028, all for this one mission. That's simply a lot of coordination for launches, rendezvous and docking maneuvers, even if 50 of those are short 24 hour long refueling flights. This is certainly not impossible, in fact it's probably even easy. However, rendezvous and docking is actually still not a trivial activity despite the fact we have been doing it for nearly 60 years. So 55 events mean that we need pretty high reliability of all the sensors and mechanisms to make this happen.

I do think that humans can in fact launch to Mars in 2028, all of these technology issues can be solved in the next four years, but in order to do that, we need to work on it as soon as possible. More likely is a 2030s human trip to Mars. 

A final note on the rover, when studying the Apollo missions, the first three landing missions, Apollo 11, 12, and 14 did not have a rover and only covered a few miles walking on foot. Apollo 15, 16, and 17 covered 10s of miles of ground and did excellent science while on the surface of the Moon. Going to Mars without a rover is foolish. And going with only an open buggy style rover is slightly better, but still short sighted. A human can only do a space walk for in the neighborhood of 8 hours, and then there are issues like eating, getting tired, having a bowel movement, and even sleeping. The oxygen and carbon dioxide part is the easy part to solve. If we assume that a Mars space suit is very flexible and an astronaut will be able to do 2 miles per hour, that's a maximum radius of 8 miles that a person could walk. That's wildly optimistic, on Apollo 14 the astronauts struggled to walk about one mile away from the LEM before struggling with navigation and not being able to see the LEM. Similarly on an open buggy with a top speed of 20 kilometers per hour (12 miles per hour) would be able to cover more ground, but that has to be traded with the possibility that the buggy breaks down and the astronauts have to walk back to the habitat. On Apollo 17 the furthest that the two astronauts drove the lunar buggy was about 5 miles away from the LEM, so that worst case they could hike back to the lander. Two buggies would provide redundancy, but also add quite a bit of mass. Also, for people that have not done much off roading, there isn't much point in going a lot faster than those speeds, you're going to be bouncing all over the place even at those slow speeds. The point of all this is to say, without a pressurized rover, you would essentially be stuck on a deserted island without the capability to explore much more than maybe 10 miles in any direction, which over 15 months is somewhat limiting.

Back to racing Ultramarathons!

 It's been a long time. The last time I raced an ultramarathon was September 2018, the IAU 100 km world championships in Croatia. I had a pulmonary embolism at the time, and didn't know it, so I basically ran 10:00 pace, had an average heart rate of 180 beats per minute, and after 4.5 hours, called it quits as I was getting lapped on the 10 km circuit. Then in the spring of 2019 I broke my ankle in two places and partially tore two ligaments. While I started to recover from that injury, and did a couple 40 mile trail runs, ultimately my ankle wasn't really healing, and in the winter of 2021-2022 it got to the point I could not run 3-4 miles without ankle pain. I didn't know if I would ever run long distances again. So in April 2022 I had a stem cell procedure where bone marrow was taken out of my hips, centrifuged to get the step cells, and they were injected into my ankle bones and ligaments. The recovery was hard, and it really took about 8 months before I started to feel actually better from it, but I did start to feel better.

2023 I gradually felt better and on a trip to Seattle in September I went for a 12 mile run, the first that long in over a year. It felt good, so when I stumbled into free entry for the Boulderthon half marathon in October 2023, I thought, 'hey, why not go run a half marathon and see what happens?' I ran 1:37, which while not fast by any means, it was a huge improvement from where I had been the past few years. I've never ran the Boston Marathon, and it's one of the things that still motivates me, so I decided to try and go qualify for it. I registered for the Napa Valley Marathon in March, and while I was on 3:00 pace for about 16 miles, I fell off and hit the wall, coming in at like 3:24. So I registered for another marathon, the Revel Rockies downhill marathon in June, and managed to run 3:01:00, getting 4:00 under my qualifying time, however the criteria to get in to Boston in 2025 was to be 6:52 under your qualifying time, so I didn't get into Boston. But it gave me a lot of confidence.

So I registered for the Fat Ox 24 hour USATF national championship in November this year. If I won, and ran 145 miles, I would get entry to the 2025 world championships. The two times I've gone to the world championships, once I had a stress fracture and then had whole body cramps, and the other time I had the pulmonary embolism. I'm a good runner, I have this talent that God gave me, and I don't feel that I've really had the chance to show that on a big stage. 

The Fat Ox 24 went really well! I set a speed limit for myself of 8:30 per mile, and only had a few laps faster than that. I drank a lot of Maurten, gatorade and electrolyte drink, and didn't hit the wall until 110 miles. I did slow down in the heat of the afternoon, and fell off my goal pace of 150 miles, but I was doing well. After my 2:30 AM hitting the wall, I was able to get back out there and keep going to ultimately get 125 miles, and 3rd place for the men, and 6th place overall. While not the top end goal I had for the race, it was really exciting to be back, and run something like that with essentially no pain. Or at least, not the ankle pain that I battled for several years after my skiing accident in 2019. 

What's next? I already put my name in the Leadville 100 lottery, and I'd like to take another crack at making the 2025 24 hour world championship team, but for now I'm still in recovery mode. I went on my first run after the race, 12 days later and only 3 miles, and it went well, but I am clearly still tired. 

What just happened in November 2024?

It's a few days after the 2024 US presidential election, and I'm distraught. Instead of a well qualified candidate who aimed to make life better for all people by expanding healthcare and fighting climate change, we elected a narcissistic self centered person who will sow chaos and suffering.

Of course, I've read a lot in the last few days, and this particular article stuck out to me: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/us-progressive-election-trump-maga

Let's go through the issues...

Deporting 10 million people is logistically incredibly difficult. Simply finding all of those people, physically transporting them to another country, and processing them through the legal system are three very difficult activities that will require a huge amount of money that us US citizens will have to come up with. Mexico is not going to pay us take take a million people into it's country. And who is going to do this work? I do realize that there are a number of younger men that look forward to doing this work, but we're probably talking 100,000 people that need to be active full time participants in this for there to be a remote chance of deporting so many people. Will that be active duty military people going door to door asking to search homes? This is an area where I fully expect the new administration to put a lot of effort, and likely separate many families in the process. Plus, as a downstream effect, this is going to definitely increase grocery prices. First generation immigrants play a big role in food production, and who is going to replace them? See this infographic: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/content/essential-role-immigrants-us-food-supply-chain

Stopping the wars in Ukraine and the middle east will not happen in 24 hours. I presume that he will take whatever current deal Russia offers, and try to force Ukraine to agree to it, and I'm sure the deal will be so bad that Ukraine won't accept it. In the middle east, I presume that he will simply send Israel more weapons to kill more people, and do nothing to actual sign any peace treaty. Which likely means that Israel will bully it's enemies until one of them strikes back in a show of modest force, and the whole thing will escalate again. Then there is China and Taiwan, I don't think that will be a quiet part of the world for the next four years. Let's not forget the whole continent of Africa, although unfortunately, we will as a country essentially ignore the whole range of challenges they are sure to face the next four years.

He ran on rolling back EPA regulations, and as 2024 is expected to be the hottest year on record, with several hurricanes that wrecked destruction across Florida and North Carolina, I can only expect the next four hurricane seasons to be worse. I expect wild fires to be bad as well. 2020 and 2021 were bad years but the last three were not so bad here in Colorado. I expect that in the next four years there will definitely be some very large very destructive wild fires. Global warming is real. Sea level rise is real. Trying to roll back the already inadequate incentives to mitigate climate change is a recipe for further destruction. A category 5 hurricane is going to hit Miami (and Mar-a-Lago) some day. There will be 20 foot above sea level storm surges, maybe 25 feet or more like we saw with Hurricane Katrina. There will be tornados, crops will die, people will get asthma. Honestly, this issue is becoming what I view as potentially the single most important issue since the most lives and the most money is at stake. No one is really pushing for this, but I think we need to start a Climate Corp. in this country like the Peace Corp or Ameri Corp to do climate change prevention and mitigation actives, as well as go into destroyed areas after natural disasters and help clean up. It's something that we could use a lot of strong people for since it's going to be hard work. 

Women's healthcare is under attack. More mothers will die from sepsis in preventable miscarriage care. Contraception will be under attack, and women will go into poverty raising children, which doesn't help most children to grow up in poverty. Couples that want to use IVF to have children, will not be able to do that in some places. We need to trust women to make the decisions that are best for them. Thinking that a bunch of politicians and business people can make the best decisions for women's health is ridiculous! I used to be a solidly pro-life anti-abortion white male, but I now realize that's ridiculous. I'm still very pro-life, but a law about abortion being illegal doesn't make the world more welcoming for unborn babies, policies that give women all the resources that they need for their health and the health of babies does make the world more welcoming for fetuses. I'll give an example, when a women wants to have a baby, gets pregnant, has a miscarriage, and the doctors don't operate until it's too late and she has to have her uterus removed, she can no longer have a baby. You have just stopped that woman from having the baby she wants.

Tariffs are an interesting one, because we do actually have a number of existing tariffs, mostly started by the President around 2018, which Biden kept during his administration, and contributed to inflation the last few years. In other words, there is actually a small price win here by removing some tariffs, but in all likelihood there will be more tariffs, which will lead to more price increases, one estimate I saw was expected to increase costs for the average household $2,500 per year. But I suppose this is what people voted for, so we'll just get to wait and see what happens.

Taxes are another interesting area, the Tax Cuts and Jobs act of 2017 lowered taxes quite a bit, and they expire in 2025... hahahaha. I'll explain, this seemed to be a change election, people weren't happy with the party in control of the White House or the legislative branch because of prices and perceived safety, so they voted for change. However, when it comes to taxes, the last four years we have actually been living with taxes that I think are already too low that expire soon and revert to their higher levels. So there will be a small battle to simply keep these current taxation levels, and a larger battle to reduce taxes. In other words, I think it's unlikely to see dramatic change where taxes are concerned, and it's possible, although very unlikely that they actually go up if legislation cannot be passed to keep the current taxation levels.

The national deficit and national debt are interesting ones too. One particular campaigner for the winning party seemed to be excited to cut national spending by $2 Trillion a year, and I don't see how that happens without at least touching Social Security. Infographic here: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727 In other words, I do think we need to do something to get closer to a balanced budget, and I like taxing the rich as a start, like adding a "high" tax bracket for incomes over $10 million per year of like 49% where there are no deductions or lower tax rates for capital gains. It would apply to a tiny portion of people and generate a fair amount of revenue. Another item to address is Social Security taxes and benefits, and while the fixes are pretty easy actually, I doubt that they will be implemented the next four years, which makes them a little more difficult to implement in 2029 to 2032.

So where does that leave us? In something of a wait and see mode. Will Project 2025 come to fruition? What policies will actually be enacted remain to be seen. Will new higher tariffs, government spending cuts, and mass deportation make the stock market go up? I think it's probably fair to say, 'okay, make America great, here is your chance.' I'll try to have an open mind and hope I am surprised by the shared prosperity that we enjoy in the years to come.

As a Christian I take a lot of comfort in my faith in God, and yet, Christians carried out parts of the Holocaust and owned slaves for centuries. There is no guarantee of an easy life in the Bible, on the contrary, there can be a lot of hardship that is foreshadowed.

The Orbital Space Launch Industry Waiting Game

I've been working in the space industry now for six years, after a bit of a fight to get into it. The industry has changed in that time, and is in an interesting place, that I feel other commentators have not really addressed it. Six years ago the race was on for new orbital space launch vehicles. Mostly small launch vehicles. However that market has contracted with perceived winners like Virgin Orbit, as well as companies like Vector, going out of business. A large part of the reason for the small launch competitors going out of business is that SpaceX rideshares can cost only $5 million dollars for 800 kg to a 500 km orbit, at a price of $6,250/kg (and that's rounding up from $4.8 million to $5 million). Now, there is a lot of advantage to a rocket taking a spacecraft to exactly the orbit it wants to be in, that's worth a lot, but I don't know that it's worth 3-5 times as much for every customer. Specifically because for those extra million or millions of dollars you can take a propulsion system and extra fuel to get where you want to go.

With all of that being said, the space industry seems to be in a waiting game to see what the next generation of launch vehicles in development can deliver. Those include the Blue Origin New Glenn, Rocket Lab Neutron, United Launch Alliance Vulcan, and of course, the most interesting, first fully reusable orbital rocket, SpaceX Starship. To cut to the chase, my personal opinion is that it will cut the cost to orbit for payloads around half to three quarters. There are predictions of Starship cutting the cost by 90% or even more. Falcon 9 can take 22,800 kg to orbit for roughly $60 million at roughly $2,600/kg, and Starship is predicted to take 100,000 to 150,000 kg to orbit and again be fully reusable.  A recent Payload report suggested that current SpaceX costs for a Falcon 9 are under $20 million for each Starlink launch. 

Some differences, a Falcon 9 has a total of 10 main engines, and a Starship has a total of 39 main engines. Engines are the largest subsystem cost in most launch vehicles. So having four times as many engines means four times as many inspections. Plus, the Merlin engine is very simple as far as rockets go, while the Raptor is a more complicated cycle (a full flow staged combustion versus a fuel rich gas generator). This suggested to me, that the engines are going to need a lot of work. That's not necessarily true, but the Raptor has more moving parts and operates at higher pressures which can create a lot of wear and tear. Additionally, Starship has a large number of thermal tiles on the upper stage for reentry, and at least initially, those are going to need a lot of inspection and likely refurbishment between flights, like the Space Shuttle had. 

To estimate that Falcon 9 $20 million dollar launch cost estimate breakdown on paper here are my estimates:

• Launch Fees (insurance, FAA fees, etc.) - $1 million
• Expending upper stage hardware - $5 million
• Inspections between flights - $1 million
• Amortized cost of the reusable first stage hardware - $4 million
• Fuel - $500,000
• Mission Operations cost (people, ground support equipment, communications, ground transportation, launch pad, etc.) - $3.5 million
• Research and Development recouped costs to make it possible - $5 million

Of course these could be wildly off. Specifically the mission operations cost, it's probably a lot less than that, but then again, I don't know. I know that for the airlines those operations costs are substantial, and a lot more goes into a rocket launch than an individual commercial flight from Denver to Chicago.

The reason I don't think that Starship will bring down costs 90% from the existing Falcon 9 costs, is that to do that you have to quintuple the payload to orbit, and half the cost to do so. Using the above numbers, I don't think the launch fees, inspections, fuel, or mission operations costs are going to budge, in fact, in the short term for the first 100 flights them are probably going to go up. In the long term, my estimate is they are about the same, which due to inflation will be less than they are today, but a small percentage lower, not half the price. That leaves the $10 million to come out of difference between expending the second stage, the amortized cost of the first stage hardware, and R&D. Taking $4 million out of the second stage cost, halving the cost of the first stage amortization, and halving the cost of the R&D only takes out $8.5 million, and based on the complexity of reusing an orbital vehicle (which we learned on the Space Shuttle program) that is likely a very optimistic estimate for the second stage costs and R&D. 

One glaring oversight in this analysis is that I looked at SpaceX's estimated costs, and not the current estimated customer costs. Which is to say, instead of charging roughly $60 million for 22,800 kg, SpaceX needs to charge roughly $30 million for 110,000 kg to orbit. While that may be possible, there doesn't seem to be much incentive to actually do that when charging $100 million for such a launch would still be a 2/3rds reduction in cost, and leave presumably a large profit margin and get the cost to orbit under $1,000/kg. That would be well under any of the current competitors, and it remains to be seen where that would put it in relation to the next generation of launch vehicles.

So we seem to be in a waiting game as these test flights and engine tests are conducted. The entire industry is waiting to see where the costs end up in 2026, 2028 and beyond because it radically changes how things are designed and what sort of missions make sense. It would be great to send an orbiter to both Uranus and Neptune but with current launch prices it's still very cost prohibitive to do that. Similarly, mining in space will likely become an industry in the future, in particular mining water on the moon, but it's wildly easier at $260/kg than $1,000/kg to orbit, and at current prices around $3,000/kg, the industry doesn't actually exist. NASA struggled to drill a three foot deep hole on Mars just to measure the temperature.

A risk of this whole article is that I basically just talked about one launch company, since they already have the cost per kilogram lead and look to reduce that cost even further. SpaceX has been landing orbital rockets since December 2015 and still no one else has been able to fully replicate that feat. Looking ahead another nine years, I do expect at least two other companies to replicate that feat, and probably more, but then again I would have expected someone else to do it by now. Which is to say again, we're in a waiting game this year and probably all of next year to see where launch costs shake out and what new space missions become economically feasible.