Forward-thinking is one of the most enchanting areas in economics. While Malthus and Ricardo agreed on the gloomy vision of the future, Mill described the wider stationary state and foresaw it in a more optimistic way. Space sciences and improvements in our technology provided us with the solution decades ago, although economics have not noticed this possible solution of the classical stationary state until now. This article incorporates this knowledge into economics. Calories integrate the supply of means of production and the demand for means of consumption in one market. The stationary state could come only if the demand for means of subsistence grows faster than the supply of means of production. Increasing scarcity of free calories exceeding the minimal required volume of it preventing the malnutrition and death will push the calorie price up while economy will move towards the stationary state. But where to get the land when the very last piece of it -even the deserts -will have been already cultivated? Increasing scarcity of land opens possibility for firms to make profit from producing land. Thus, the classical stationary state is only an illusion.

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This paper argues that individual members of Congress engage in economic opportunism, voting in the best interests of their constituents based on economic heuristics, when considering space policy legislation. Multivariable logit analysis is conducted on five votes in the House of Representatives to test the hypotheses. The economic opportunism effect is captured in the models by the presence of NASA Centers, relative importance of space industry and NASA procurements. Findings suggest that economic benefits to a member's constituency can play an important role in legislative voting, particularly when legislation deals with federal aerospace funding, when space policy bills lack over-reaching bi-partisan support. In recent years the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has seen its funding fall prey to partisan budget battles and party line voting, but this was not historically the norm. As we move forward into a future where NASA funding may become more scrutinized and politicized, this paper supports the thesis that individual members of Congress care more about the funds for their constituents than the other aspects of space policy.

A novel approach to aggregated payroll data analysis using the logarithmic mean Divisia index decomposition is applied to the US Aerospace manufacturing industry during the period of 1998 to 2012, both in nominal and real terms. The period covered improves the understanding of how the aerospace manufacturing industry deals with severe economic blows in the area of the most important factor of production, namely labour. The decomposition was based on three factors: the wage effect, the size and the number effect. The results show that the wages are less influential than the restructuring processes when considering the aggregated payroll. Unlike what simple wage indices suggest, the wage effect in real terms contributed only to a moderate increase in payrolls by a factor of 1.15, which is about the same contribution resulting from the increasing number of firms in the industry. The cumulative size effect in the investigated period was about 0.647. The results show that the relatively stable real labour costs of the US aerospace industry were a consequence of the shrinking size of firms which compensated the growth of average wages.