Passage 1:
Reusable rockets
Up and down and up again
SpaceX’s latest launch could change the economics of going into orbit
Apr 19th 2014 | From the print edition
Goal of one’s own
EVERYTHING about space flight is superlative. Even relatively modest rockets are hundreds of feet high. The biggest (the Saturn V, which launched astronauts to the Moon) remains the most powerful vehicle ever built. But space flight is superlatively expensive, too. One reason is that, for all their technological sophistication, rockets are one-shot wonders. After they have fired their engines for a few minutes they are left to fall back to Earth, usually splashing ignominiously into the ocean.
Rocket scientists have therefore long dreamed of making something able to fly more than once. Such a reusable machine, they hope, would slash the cost of getting into space. The only one built so far, America’s space shuttle, proved a dangerous and costly disappointment, killing two of its crews and never coming close to the cost savings its designers had intended. But hope springs eternal, and several of America’s privately run “New Space” firms are planning to try again.
The furthest advanced is SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, an internet mogul. On April 18th it is due to launch one of its Falcon 9 rockets on a cargo-carrying trip to the International Space Station (ISS), something it has done twice before. This time, though, the main story is not the ISS mission, but the modifications the firm has made to the rocket itself.
The most notable are the four landing legs folded up along the side of its first stage. If everything goes to plan, once that stage has finished its job and detached itself from the rest of the rocket, it will fire its engines again. Instead of crashing into the sea, it will make a controlled descent, deploy its legs, slow almost to a stop off the coast of Cape Canaveral, and then drop itself delicately into the drink. Mr Musk gives himself a slightly-less-than-even chance of pulling this off.
Will you walk with me, Grasshopper?
If it does work, though, it will be the most dramatic demonstration yet of technology that the firm has been working on for several years. In 2012 SpaceX began flying an unwieldy-looking legged test rocket called Grasshopper. This was able to hover, manoeuvre around in mid-air, and land itself back on the pad that launched it.
Then, last September, it attempted to organise the controlled descent of a legless first stage. In what the firm’s engineers call a useful failure, the rocket’s engines restarted as planned, but as the stage descended it began spinning, flinging its remaining fuel against the walls of its tanks and starving its motors, causing it to crash.
This week’s test is intended to end up with the rocket in the ocean, chiefly for safety reasons in case something does go wrong. But SpaceX’s ultimate goal is to have the first stage fly all the way back to the pad it was launched from, and to land itself facing upwards. It will then be taken away, serviced, refilled with rocket fuel and readied to fly again. The firm wants, one day, to recover the Falcon’s second stage, too—though the greater altitude and speed the second stage reaches makes this a far tougher proposition.
Still, being the biggest, the first stage is the most expensive part, so retrieving it should make a huge difference to launch costs. SpaceX already offers some of the lowest prices in the business. Its launch costs of $56m are around half those of its competitors. Mr Musk has said in the past that a reusable rocket could cut those costs by at least half again.
If SpaceX can make its technology work, that will be the biggest advance in rocketry for decades. Whether it will translate into higher demand for space flight is less clear. Jeff Foust, who edits the Space Review, an industry newsletter, argues that even dramatically lower launch costs will do little to change the economics of the industry, at least for the governments and firms that make up almost all of its current customers. Launch costs, as Mr Foust points out, are but a small part of the total cost of developing, building and running a satellite network.
Mike Gold, an executive at Bigelow Aerospace, a firm that makes inflatable space stations—and which has an agreement with SpaceX to launch its products—thinks that most of the interest will come from people and organisations so far denied access to space. “Putting a big rocket like the Falcon in range of mid-size companies, research institutions and even wealthy private individuals, that’s a game-changer,” he says. “When the laser was first invented, no one had any idea what it might be used for. Today they’re everywhere. We’re still at that early stage with cheap rockets.”
Perhaps. But although SpaceX is a commercial firm, simple profitability is not its only goal. Mr Musk has been perfectly frank about his long-term aim: “to die on Mars, preferably not on impact.” After the Falcon 9, the firm plans a beefier version called the Falcon Heavy. That, in turn, would be a dress rehearsal for something called the Mars Colonial Transporter.
Mr Musk wants to build a machine that would let him offer prospective colonists a (one-way) trip to the Martian surface for about $500,000—or, as he puts it, roughly the cost of a nice house in California. Perfecting reusability is essential for achieving that dream.
If you build it, will they come?
Hard-headed commentators may roll their eyes at such ambition. And history suggests reusability is difficult to do properly. The shuttle itself, for instance, was intended to fly every week. In the end, it made only 135 trips over the course of 30 years. There is a credible case that it proved more expensive, in the long run, than old-fashioned throwaway rockets would have done. Yet SpaceX has already shaken up an industry once mired in stifling conservatism. A successful fully reusable rocket would just be the latest example in a long tradition of it confounding its critics.
Passage 2:
Global warming
Another week, another report
Options for limiting climate change are narrowing
Apr 19th 2014 | From the print edition
THE Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a gathering of scientists who advise governments, describes itself as “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral”. Its latest report, the third in six months, ignores that fine distinction. Pressure from governments forced it to strip out of its deliberations a table showing the link between greenhouse gases and national income, presumably because this made clear that middle-income countries such as China are the biggest contributors to new emissions. It also got rid of references to historical contributions, which show that rich countries bear a disproportionate responsibility. That seems more like policy-based evidence than evidence-based policy and bodes ill for talks on a new climate-change treaty, planned to take place in Paris next year.
The new report is intended to measure how far governments have met their promises, formalised in 2010, to keep the global rise in mean surface temperatures compared with pre-industrial times to less than 2°C. It says they are miles from achieving that goal and are falling further behind.
Between 2000 and 2010, it says, greenhouse-gas emissions grew at 2.2% a year—almost twice as fast as in the previous 30 years—as more and more fossil fuels were burned (especially coal, see article). Indeed, for the first time since the early 1970s, the amount of carbon dioxide released per unit of energy consumed actually rose. At this rate, the report says, the world will pass a 2°C temperature rise by 2030 and the increase will reach 3.7-4.8°C by 2100, a level at which damage, in the form of inundated coastal cities, lost species and crop failures, becomes catastrophic.
The report looks at what would be needed to rein back the rise in temperatures, so that it would not exceed 2°C. This, it says, would mean cutting greenhouse-gas emissions in 2050 to between 30% and 60% of their levels in 2010. Unfortunately, emissions are still rising and are likely to increase by around 10% by 2030, at which point, the IPCC suggests, there will be only a 33-66% chance of hitting the 2°C target. By 2100, moreover, the burning of fossil fuel would have to cease altogether unless all the carbon dioxide thus generated is captured and stored.
The panel puts enormous weight on carbon capture and storage (CCS): in some versions of its calculations, doing without it raises the cost of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by between 30% and 300%. But CCS remains unproven at a large scale.
The IPCC still thinks it might be possible to hit the emissions target by tripling, to 80%, the share of low-carbon energy sources, such as solar, wind and nuclear power, used in electricity generation. It reckons this would require investment in such energy to go up by $147 billion a year until 2030 (and for investment in conventional carbon-producing power generation to be cut by $30 billion a year). In total, the panel says, the world could keep carbon concentrations to the requisite level by actions that would reduce annual economic growth by a mere 0.06 percentage points in 2100.
These numbers look preposterous. Germany and Spain have gone further than most in using public subsidies to boost the share of renewable energy (though to nothing like 80%) and their bills have been enormous: 0.6% of GDP a year in Germany and 0.8% in Spain. The costs of emission-reduction measures have routinely proved much higher than expected.
Moreover, the assumptions used to calculate long-term costs in the models are, as Robert Pindyck of the National Bureau of Economic Research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put it, “completely made up”. In such circumstances, estimates of the costs and benefits of climate change in 2100 are next to useless. Of the IPCC’s three recent reports, the first two (on the natural science and on adapting to global warming) were valuable. This one isn’t.
Passage 3:
Infrastructure financing
A long and winding road
The world needs more infrastructure. How will it pay for it?
Mar 22nd 2014 | From the print edition
AS INVESTMENT opportunities go, lending money to a consortium building three prisons in rural France does not have the cachet of backing the latest Silicon Valley IPO. A new subway line in Seoul or energy pipelines in Texas will not set many pulses racing, either. Unglamorous as they may be, such investments are vital for economic growth. Yet financing infrastructure is falling out of favour with banks. Can other investors plug the gap?
European lenders, which used to dominate infrastructure financing, are now busy repairing their dented balance-sheets. Meanwhile the new “Basel 3” rules are steering banks away from the long-term loans (often stretching beyond 20 years) required by backers of infrastructure projects. The one exception is Japanese banks, which have stronger balance-sheets and are keen to put money to work.
Banks are not only wary of making long-term loans, they are also reluctant to take as much risk as before. Whereas they used to be happy to lend 90% of the construction cost of a large project, such as a toll road in America, that figure is down to something like 70% now. This forces the backers to come up with more of their own cash. In the same way that housebuilding slows when banks cut the supply of cheap mortgages, infrastructure construction dries up when financing gets tighter.
All this is contributing to a widening gap between the amount that is being invested in infrastructure and the amount that ought to be. It will cost $57 trillion to build and maintain the world’s roads, power plants, pipelines and the like between now and 2030, reckon consultants at McKinsey (see chart). That is more than the value of today’s infrastructure. By one estimate, infrastructure spending currently amounts to $2.7 trillion a year (about 4% of global output), yet $3.7 trillion is needed.
With public finances straitened, governments are unable to make up all of the shortfall. Some, notably China, can pay outright for the stuff that needs to be built. But most others (and private investors such as telecoms firms) rely on financing of a sort which has not been as readily available since the financial crisis.
That is creating a need, and opportunity, for new entrants. Long-term investors such as insurers and pension funds are eager to plough money into infrastructure, as are endowments and sovereign-wealth funds. These financial titans have over $50 trillion to invest. Nobody is suggesting that their entire pile should be used to fill the $57 trillion hole. But only 0.8% of their assets are invested in infrastructure projects. That seems too low, given the natural match between the long-term liabilities of such investors and the long-term cash flows that come from these projects.
Better yet, returns from debt secured against real assets are high relative to similarly rated corporate or sovereign bonds. Financial instruments linked to infrastructure are typically hedged against inflation and offer stable returns, with low volatility and little correlation with other asset classes. They are illiquid, but that is of little concern if you are intent on holding on to stuff for decades. And when things go wrong, investors have a better chance of recovering most of their money, says Mike Wilkins of Standard & Poor’s, a ratings agency.
Enthusiasts speak of a budding asset class. Long-term investors have snapped up loans which were originally made by banks, or are figuring out ways to issue their own. Natixis, a bank, put together the €300m ($417m) loan to the trio of French prisons, but nearly €100m will go straight onto the balance-sheet of Ageas, a Belgian insurer. Such arrangements are becoming more common. Many bank teams have been poached by institutional investors. Issuance of bonds linked to infrastructure projects has soared, albeit from a low base.
Sovereign-wealth funds and others after the raciest returns are keen on owning infrastructure assets rather than just lending to them. Private-equity firms have raised $250 billion to spend on infrastructure, up from $9 billion a decade ago, says Preqin, a data provider. Blackstone, a buy-out firm, is among those that financed a $900m hydroelectric dam in Uganda that provides half the country’s electricity. Bringing in private investors has benefits beyond shifting debt off public balance-sheets (a wheeze behind many of Britain’s less-than-stellar public-finance initiatives). The three prisons in France will be built by a contractor that will bear the risk of cost overruns, for example. Unlike lackadaisical local authorities, the companies involved will be deeply bothered if the prisons open late, as payments will kick in only once they are available. If operating them is dearer than expected, investors will suffer. Private-sector rigour can thus bring down the cost of public services.
The transition from banks to other investors is, however, not seamless. Projects that are ideally suited for banks often don’t appeal to the new moneymen. Insurers and pension funds often dislike “greenfield” projects. Beyond construction delays and cost overruns, they worry assets will not prove as profitable as advertised. Much of their focus is on putting together straightforward deals—for roads and other well-understood kit—in predictable places such as Europe. Investing in 30-year projects further afield is too risky for most.
The main concern from investors is a shortage of suitable projects. In Europe, a wealth of capital is chasing a dearth of deals. For governments digging for growth, smarter planning could result in a lot more of the infrastructure they crave.
Passage 4:
HISTORICALLY SPEAKING
The Verse Heard Round the World
Emerson's patriotic poetry captured the spirit of Lexington for generations to come.
By AMANDA FOREMAN
Updated April 18, 2014 7:16 p.m. ET
April 19, 1775, was a quiet day in America's Thirteen Colonies—except for a deadly encounter in Lexington, Mass., between about 80 militiamen and 700 British regulars. Neither side had been expecting a fight, and no one knows who really fired the first shot. But accident or no, it set off one of the greatest social and political experiments in history.
The Battle of Lexington was also the inspiration behind one of America's best-known poems, the "Concord Hymn" by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Even those unfamiliar with the poem will recognize the line: "Here once the embattled farmers stood/ And fired the shot heard round the world."
A single act can indeed change the course of history, and Emerson's line has often been invoked since the poem appeared in 1837. It is particularly associated with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip. Though powerful forces were already building before the Habsburg archduke's death, Princip's shot is widely regarded as the blast that set them free.
Many watershed events fit Emerson's evocation. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River on Jan. 10, 49 B.C., he set in motion the rise of the Roman Empire. When Christopher Columbus reached the island he called San Salvador on Oct. 12, 1492, he brought the Old and New Worlds together, with cataclysmic consequences. In our own time, after President Harry Truman's decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, the existence of humankind became conditional.
But that is not the full story or even the full meaning of the "Concord Hymn." At its heart lie the nameless "embattled farmers" who gave their lives to the cause of liberty. The question for Emerson was how to memorialize their selfless acts when their identities were lost to history. In part, he found the answer in his own act of writing. Memory won't last, he acknowledged, "When, like our sires, our sons are gone." He could only hope that the monument commemorating the battle, "Time and Nature gently spare." Instead, Emerson put his faith in the ineffable "Spirit, that made those heroes dare/ To die." It had inspired the farmers as it now inspired him—and would, he believed, have the same effect on future generations who read his poem.
On the eve of the Civil War, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow revisited the events surrounding the Battle of Lexington. Like Emerson, he was deeply convinced of the transformative power of poetry. Choosing the night before the battle as his subject, Longfellow offered a similar lament about the fragility of memory: "Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;/ Hardly a man is now alive/ Who remembers that famous day and year." He also revisited the nameless farmers, who "gave them ball for ball."
But Longfellow was recalling the spirit "borne on the night-wind of the Past" not as a celebration but a warning. The Union had been brought into existence by a single shot; the message in "Paul Revere's Ride" was that a similar event could trigger its destruction. Longfellow's poem could be described as a prayer, an invocation that "The people will waken and listen to hear…the midnight message of Paul Revere."
It isn't fashionable to write patriotic poetry nowadays. But if the spirit of Lexington lies sleeping in the U.S., it is very much awake in other parts of the world—as in Ukraine, where a vulnerable, embattled young democracy is making a gallant stand of its own. April 19, 1775, was a day of hope, of bloodshed and ideas made real. Emerson and Longfellow didn't want us to forget.
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