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.

My wife is a giver to University of Texas athletics. They find her some excellent seats that are hard to find priced at face value. IRS allows her to deduct 80% of the reservation fee. If the reservation fee includes the face value of the tickets, then IRS allows her to deduct 80% of the reservation fee minus the face value of the seats.

I think it is time to start university space sports foundation membership in which entitles one to preferred seating on spaceflights. This foundation should team with a spaceflight operator that can offer a limited number of seats to the public at bargain rates. E.g., fly to the space station for $12 million, but preferred seating reservations and a seat to members of a foundation that pay $20 million to join. Will IRS then allow an 80% deduction of the $8 million net reservation fee to those who join?

NASA’s announcement regarding their proposed Moon Base has been impetus this week for collective soul searching about whether the cost of returning to the Moon is:

• worth it
• worth more than alternatives

Can we all agree that if the Moon were home to 650,000 people and had a GDP of $100 billion that it would have been valuable to settle? Having a second planet makes the species more resilient to a variety of catastrophes. A new economy with new entertainment, travel, engineering and art would be a good value to humanity.

Alaska has 650,000 people and a state GDP of $40 billion/year. Wikipedia said that the US bought Alaska from Russia for the equivalent of $1.7 billion in 2006 dollars (or what Google bought You Tube for). It would cost far more than that to settle the Moon.

I propose spending $1 trillion to settle the Moon. It’s a lot. But if we disengage from Iraq, the US can spend that amount of money in about four years. How to spend it?

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Wired says “about 200″ suborbital sales. That would be about $40 million in sales which was last reported at about $20 million recently. Maybe ‘about’ is like the ‘about’ in the Quicken mortgage radio commercial that says the mortgage rates are “about 5%”, but then reports an APR higher than 7%. Using the same formula, maybe they really have more than 280. Note that at a rate of 50,000 in ten years as reported at space.com, 280 is less than a 3-week backlog. At one flight for six per week from Mojave, that’s nearly a one-year backlog, but that’s a low utilization rate (<15%) if they are building five craft that can be flown with a shorter turnaround time than Space Ship One’s demonstrated 5-day turnaround.

This is at odds with Futron. 50,000 seats is a flight every other day for each of his anticipated fleet of five. If the $200k price tag holds, that would be $10 billion in ten years. He anticipates a big price drop. His customers may not be there for him when he’s ready to fly. The $20 million reported in Virgin deposits are refundable. It may be difficult to hang onto all those customers if it does take Virgin “an extra year” to make it to market. It will only take him one week to fly off all of his $20 million in deposits for his 80 paying customers and 20 non-paying customers at the rate needed for 50,000 in ten years. 6 people times 5 ships times 3.2 flights (1 of the 5 flies on both the first and last day of the week). The price may drop quickly indeed.

With major fanfare (front page of Financial Times and op-ed page of WSJ Europe), the top six accounting firms worldwide have released a paper outlining their recommendations for accounting overhaul. The most interesting is real-time accounting. I like it. For companies that are earning cash, we can see it pile up day after day.