Saudi Arabia has lowered its growth forecast and expects to post a budget deficit this year rather than an earlier projected surplus, a preliminary budget statement showed on Saturday.

The largest Arab economy expects real gross domestic product to grow by 0.03% this year, the document released by the ministry of finance showed, compared with a previous forecast for growth of 3.1%.

The document projected a budget deficit of 2% of GDP, compared with an earlier projection for a 0.4% surplus.

  • BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Mass point to point rocket travel will not be a thing anytime soon. The main hurdles are extreme cost, horrifically slow load and unload times, and high rates of death. Manned rocket missions have a ~1% fatality rate. That is many, many, many orders of magnitude from anything even approaching safe.

    Even if you are somehow ok with such extreme danger levels just to travel, the devastatingly slow load and unload times kill the only stated benefit. You can’t just launch them from anywhere, Space X is talking about requiring a ferry trip to a platform (slow). Then you have to get everyone fitted into (and later out of) a space suit. And no, you can’t just skip basic safety and not put people in a suit that will keep them alive in the event of an emergency. That step alone takes hours.

    No, the Concorde is practical in comparison.

    • zoe@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      lets see how this would pan out. also europeans didn’t make their ariane rockets as profitable as spacex did, and never achieved booster vertical landing. Spacex has a record of delivering on their promises, so they kinda should be taken seriously.