The current CIA World Factbook says that China’s per capita purchasing power parity (PPP) is $7500. With about 4 times as many people as the US, that results in a PPP GDP of $10 trillion!? With a growth rate of 10.5% compared to our 3.4%, we can expect GDP to match at $15 trillion in 2010. At current exchange rates, China GDP is only $2.5 trillion which would give us until 2031 for us both to have a $30 trillion GDP. Russia was pretty menacing back in the 50s with a GDP measured in billions instead of trillions so assuring a ‘peaceful rise’ is worth a great deal.

If this seems like a big jump from the last you heard, it is. The 2004 estimate of China per capita gdp was only $5600 vs. the 2006 estimate of $7500.

In the US, we send up about 6 thousand million metric tons of carbon a year. That’s 20 tons per person. Carbon offsets are trading in Europe right now for about $15/ton. If we put in place a $15/ton carbon tax and a $15/ton carbon sequestration subsidy that would create money flows of $90 billion from the carbon emitting sector (33% more generation cost at most for electricity which costs $280 billion a year) and small but growing flows into forestry, biomass, ethanol and sequestration and long-term storage. If that is not enough to lick carbon, perhaps a $200/ton tax/subsidy would. That would be a $0.60/gallon gas tax but shoot the price of coal up by a factor of 10. The former tax might have a total distortion on the economy of about $15 billion or what we pay for the space program. 0.1% of the economy. The trillion plus money flow needed for the $200/ton tax/subsidy would probably distort the economy on the order of the existing generation industry and perhaps reduce productivity by $280 billion. That’s about a one-off hit of 1/40 of GDP. If the net carbon tax were used to lower the existing tax burden on the non-carbon portions of the economy, the effect might be far less. I think it’s an overly expensive insurance policy at $4000 per person, but at $300 per person it’s no big deal.

check out freespaceshot.com

Should be an interview at Out of the Cradle and the essay at The Space Review is up.

I am glad to see that XCOR isn’t trying to build both rocket engines and space suits any more. Orbital Outfitters has won Greason’s trust as being capable of producing economical, safe space suits.

Part of why the world economy will hum along is that the drop in the dollar has accelerated the drop in oil prices because oil contracts are generally denominated in dollars. Stocks of multi-nationals denominated in dollars should rise. Import prices for the US market should rise generally.
Spaceflights are denominated in dollars too. Russia, ever the capitalist country, has announced a rise in the price of spaceflights (via Space Today).

Maybe the Russians read my last post on this.

Russia says it’s sold out* on Space Station flights through 2009. To do more than the ISS Soyuz replacement runs, it has to raise prices to pay for the full cost of the Soyuz launch and production. I think that’s where the $45 million for 2 price came from announced a while back–a whole new Soyuz purpose built for tourism on a special tourism only mission. So far the 3 year wait list has not got people to pay the higher figure–no “special” Soyuz tourist flights announced on the manifest yet. So if you can make money at the price Russia is charging ($12 million? $20 million?) at two flights a year for three years, the market’s been proven. Futron says if it’s a US option, you can probably get twice as many folks. That’s over $100 million for orbital. A nice sweetener for a transporter that wants to service the Space Station. $20 million for a 100kg package is $200,000/kg. Seems like some room there for profit. No word on whether the ISS is sold out for tourist stays so Bigelow may need to offer some extra amenities to lure travelers his way. Given how the Russians have stiffed their gas customers, I would recommend that would-be tourists who want to go sooner up the bid price. Maybe some of the others in the queue will develop medical problems the same way some oil companies developed environmental problems.

(*nod to spacetoday.net and spacedaily.com)

WSJ calls for tradeable fishing quotas too. Here’s what I had to say about this when NY Times columnist Tierney called for it too.

The space economy keeps trying to justify itself with big ideas like Lunar solar power or a sun shade. The price of carbon offsets is only $5-$15 bucks per ton. This is very very inexpensive. We can continue to burn carbon like there’s no tomorrow and sequester it by pull CO2 out of the air. Kind of like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s atmosphere plant. Sequestration could be done for around $200/ton with unlimited tonnage (basically pumping the gas into the ground, like old natural gas fields, or making Calcium carbonate or something). For these other strategies to be worth exploring, they have to have the potential to be cheaper per ton of CO2 equivalent. I.e., less rays is equivalent to less of a greenhouse blanket. As we found out with sulfur dioxide, the cost ends up being less than 10% of what you might expect. (On the other hand, the benefits are also likely to be far lower.)

Earth’s albedo is already 30% according to Wikipedia. To increase the Earth’s albedo to 32%, to first order, we would have to cover 2% of the Earth’s dark surface with light colored material. How about big plastic floating buoys anchored to the sea floor in places where there are few days of cloud cover? Earth is 500 million square kilometers. We’d need to cover 10 million. A 30mx30m blue tarp at Tarp USA would cost about $450 or $0.50/square meter. The total cost would be about $5 trillion. Surely an overestimate given the mass production. Compare that to today’s launch cost of the 20 million tons that Space.com is putting as its lead story or $400 trillion. The story posits we can use an electromagnetic launcher. But most of the energy to run the launcher (and the drag) would end up as waste heat in our atmosphere (an exercise). If we can produce that much power cleanly, how about we just use the $400 trillion (or his number $3 trillion) to buy clean energy that produces no carbon and retire the carbon producing stuff. The cleanup job would also be a lot easier for the ocean tarps if we overshot and started an ice age.

If we can decrease the cost of getting to Earth-Sun L-1 by a factor of 100 to $200/kg, then we can just fly 2% of us to L-1 and generate 2% less greenhouse gas and 2% less waste heat. 120 million people weigh only 12 million tons. Of course there would need to be some stuff there for them to live on, but it begs the question of the need for such a weird brute force solution to solar flux.

for suborbital flight here. This is at odds with Futron. If there were a second generation rocket flight provider, they would not charge substantially less than the competition until another second generation provider entered the business. With $10,000/pop vertical takeoff flying fuel tanks with thousand flight lifetimes, then the price to 100km would be $100/kg. That’s about 1/6 the delta v needed to get to orbit.

At $100/kg we might be able to do an Atlas ICBM-sized point-to-point two-staged vehicle. A 118,000 kg reusable rocket that only cost fuel and crew time where fuel was 1/3 of cost would be filled with about 110,000 kg of liquid oxygen and kerosene. That’s about 35,000 gallons. At $3/gallon for kerosene and $0.50/gallon for liquid oxygen, that’s about $50,000. $150,000 for suborbital reusable for 12,000 miles would enable NY-Tokyo point to point suborbital. Maybe 6 person payload at $25,000/head. It’s enough to kill the supersonic business jet, much less the up and back tourist vehicle. We’ll see how much cash and regulation floods into the field.

There would also be demand for orbital vehicles with higher impulse suborbital rockets as boosters. I just don’t see the rockets becoming that cheap that fast without opening up vast new demand.

Respected planetary scientist and Lunar exploration policy expert Paul Spudis writes for the Space Review this week, a rare treat. He makes a strong case that there is Lunar ice and lays out a path where we should have strong proof in this decade. Ice is a bonus at the pole which will probably be developed for polar solar. Polar solar thermal with heat and cold from permanently lit and unlit portions should produce more than double the power per mass of other points on the Moon. That may be enough to lay a copper wire rather than build solar at a second site. The mass would be constrained by nighttime usage.

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