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Elon Musk: Future Round-Trip To Mars Could Cost Under $500,000
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from the BBC:
"Rocket entrepreneur Elon Musk believes he can get the cost of a round trip to Mars down to about half a million dollars. The SpaceX CEO says he has finally worked out how to do it, and told the BBC he would reveal further details later this year or early in 2013. ... 'My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars — this is very important — so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there,' he said. 'The whole system [must be] reusable — nothing is thrown away. That's very important because then you're just down to the cost of the propellant.' ... He conceded the figure was unlikely to be the opening price — rather, the cost of a ticket on a mature system that had been operating for about a decade. Nonetheless, Musk thought such an offering could be introduced in 10 years at best, and 15 at worst."
Crikey. He could get that on kickstarter in about half an hour.
The cost of the trip might only be half a mil, but the board and lodging on Mars would run to $1000's per night (minimum stay 8 months until the planetary alignment is right for the return trip). Got to make the money back somehow and it's not like there would be many alternative places to stay
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Everything seems plausible, if you don't know what you are doing.
bullshit
Doubt that'll make a good rocket-fuel even if it is affordable.
Aside from the little detail of also sending enough supplies to sustain them on the trip and once they get there, and on any presumed return flight, yes.
... "Buzz" Aldrin's "Mars" Cycler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler
Send up a number of transport vehicles that run in an orbit between Mars and earth. It's not fast since it's using "gravity assist" trajectories (i.e. no fuel) all you need is the fuel for a shuttle to transfer the passengers to either the planet surface (or orbiting station).
Have a few of these transports in operation then you can have transfers every 4/12 weeks with the travel time of between 80 and 200 days depending on the orbital positions.
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LEO is nearly halfway to Mars surface in terms of delta-v.
So yeah, SpaceX is directly addressing the most important component of making Mars missions economically feasible.
If we can make access LEO a relatively cheap commodity, and make it so we don't have to lift every single thing that we're going to take to Mars all at once, and have a way to have robotic manufacture of fuel on Mars for the trip back, then I can totally see Musk's statement playing out.
It does all hinge on that first huge step though. Fortunately SpaceX is hardly neglecting that part, and progress is promising.
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There is no fuel to be found, but you can make fuel from the atmosphere (CO2) and water (and lots of power from solar cells or fission). This has been proposed for decades now. For everything more than a one-off foot print mission it's certainly worth the effort.
Elon Musk may be a bit crazy, but he's not an idiot. In fact SpaceX has done lots of things meanwhile that were deemed plain impossible with the kind of money they had in hand. The crucial point will be if SpaceX will be a profitable company in the next years. If they manage to make sane profits I'm pretty well sure that Musk will put every penny into going to Mars. He's *that* crazy, really.
That's just the internet teaser price. Add in checked luggage, oxygen, in-flight meals, in-flight entertainment (plastic head phones), airport taxes, taxi fare, hotel at the destination, and a quarter every time you use the lavatory, and you'll regret ever taking the cheap no-thrills space line. Stick with the established major carriers.
How does he plan on getting the fuel TO Mars in the first place?
He doesn't want to get it TO Mars, he wants to get it FROM Mars. There's enough CO2 and water there to produce your own fuel and oxidizer from local resources. Has been proposed (and demonstrated engineering-wise) since decades. This is not easy or cheap, but much easier and cheaper than to transport it there from Earth.
Incidentally, fuel accounts for about 1% of the $50 million launch cost of a Falcon 9. That's what Elon Musk is trying to say. If you can get to a point where reassembling and reusing the launch vehicle costs as much as it's fuel, you can bring the cost of space flight down by two orders of magnitude.
His plan sounds a lot like Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan detailed in The Case for Mars
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Probably something like this:
1) Use cheap SpaceX rockets to reach LEO.
2) Use multiple launches, carrying components of the Mars craft, the supplies, fuel, and crew on separate launches. This keeps you from needing a Giganto-rocket that ultimately couldn't lift as much as these separate launches anyway.
3) Transfer to Mars orbit (which is easier than getting to LEO)
4) Detach landing craft, land on Mars
5) Re-fuel with fuel conveniently pre-manufactured by previous robotic missions (this is the only part not obvious to me how it would be done for whatever that's worth).
6) Return to orbiter.
7) Return to earth.
LEO is the big obstacle. Earth's gravity well is a killer -- it's the largest of any rocky body in the solar system. If we can make LEO cheap and easy -- which just happens to be Elon Musk's major goal with SpaceX -- then we've made the rest of the solar system significantly cheaper and easier.
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I guess a whole lot is going to be riding on this next Falcon 9 launch. If it blows up on the launch pad I would think you might be right. Somehow I doubt that will happen, but who knows?
The problem with your reasoning is that Elon Musk is launching stuff into space and building real spacecraft, hiring real astronauts and getting stuff done. He also has that "crew-rated space capsule" and has even done the math to get it to Mars. In terms of the "long manifest", they are paying deposits to get onto that list, so there must be some actual people with money who are willing to spend several million dollars risking that something is going to happen.
I agree that SpaceX needs to go through the manifest, but Elon Musk does seem like he is able to deliver on his promises.
"My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system" ... NASA had that vision with the Space Shuttle, but even excluding all R&D and capital purchases, just the incremental costs per launch were orders of magnitude higher than $500k per seat. And that's just to LEO! OK, that's "halfway to anywhere", but maintenance is a bitch, the staff required is huge, on and on... NASA isn't a role model for efficiency, but I seriously doubt that the commercial sector is going to be able to outdevelop them in just 10-15 years.
I thought the same a few years ago, but SpaceX just did everything right then. Hey, they developed a launcher (two actually), launchpads and a spacecraft, built *and* launched them for about the same amount of money as NASA or ESA need to build a single launchpad. ESA's ATV alone (without the launcher and everything else) did cost *more* than what SpaceX did spend altogether until now and ATV is just a one-way orbital transporter with no reentry capability.
Outdeveloping NASA and the other government-fed entities seems very much possible.
If you think that a $50 used moped is just as sexy as a Tesla Roadster and has the same performance characteristics, I suppose you are correct.
As for "taking tax dollars", the only tax money that was dumped into Tesla Motors was a loan program put together under the W. Bush administration originally intended to be for General Motors, but somehow Elon Musk was able to work it out that Tesla qualified for the same program and got some of the money. It was also a loan that had to be paid back.
As for the cost of the vehicle, if you don't like it, don't buy it. The only reason why Tesla is currently "losing money" is because they are ramping up the factory in Fremont, California (the former NUMMI plant) and getting ready for production of the Model S. Tesla Motors did make money off of the Roadster... not just a technical profit but a rather substantial amount. It was enough that Toyota decided to become one of those "venture capitalists" investing in Tesla... where I hope the Toyota corporation knows a thing or two about how to manufacture automobiles. Yes, they are just a minority owner in the company, but it also wasn't a tiny investment either.
Elon Musk did say that he wanted to retire by living on Mars, and wants to make sure that he isn't alone there either. Given his age and what he has accomplished so far, he might just make it too.
It sure is a whole lot more sane than spending $30 billion dollars for a rocket that is half as powerful as the Saturn V and costs twice as much per pound as the Space Shuttle designed by the incredibly talented engineering firm known as the United States Senate. Which future do you really want to live in?
No, the shuttle shows us that government procured hardware is the most expensive imaginable. After all, when assembling components for the shuttle, the order of business seemed to be 1. Find congressional district where reusable components could be built 2. build them there 3. figure out how to get the stuff where it actually needed to be in the first place. 4. Jobs! I mean Re-election! Er.....Profit!
Musk is almost certainly talking out of his ass. I'll plunk down 500 grand to go to mars right after my Phantom game console shows up. That being said, of all the people trying to make space flight more of a private endevour that it has been in the past, Musk has his name on the very short list of people in the "put up" rather than "shut up" category. He's putting real shit into real orbit, not not dragging tourists up for glorified X-15 flights (no slight to the Virgin / Scaled composites gang, but they're not doing heavy lift at the moment, but what they're doing is Steerman bi-plane rides on a much more awesome scale.)
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Why does it cost billions in order to travel to Mars? Explain that one then I might agree with you. If you are only suggesting it costs billions because the only way government bureaucrats have been able to figure out how to expand their empires to include a manned Mars mission is to ask for a trillion dollars from congress, then that is one approach.
The issue really is one of simply getting into low-Earth orbit cheaply. Drop that cost and getting to Mars can be done quite a bit cheaper. I don't know about a half million per seat, but it certainly could be done for less than a billion dollars a seat much less mutliples of a billion dollars. If mankind is ever going to get to Mars and doing anything realistic there, it simply must be cheaper.
The proof of this concept is simply letting Elon Musk have the legal ability to be able to try to do this, and to do so with his own money. Either he can get it done or not, but if idiots like you go around rewriting laws in Congress so people like him simply can't even try, we will never know if it is even possible. Space exploration is stagnating and the costs are escalating faster than inflation precisely because some groundhogs don't think there is any cheaper or easier way to get into space.
People seem to be saying this because the Space Shuttle was fantastically expensive. The problem with that is that where were a lot of poor decisions that went into the shuttle (the ceramic heat shield, and the solid boosters) that we don't have to repeat in every new reusable launch system. Even in the '90s with Venture Star NASA was trying to move away from those technologies because they knew they were expensive and not beneficial.
There's nothing wrong with looking at your failures, seeing where they went wrong, learning from them, and trying again. The result is by no means a foregone conclusion. Can you imagine if the Wright Brothers had said "people have been trying to build airplanes for a hundred years and no one's succeeded so we may as well not even try." It's absurd to think we should give up on reusable space craft simply because the Space Shuttle didn't save money. Especially since the things that made it too expensive are so obvious and fixable.
Well, whatever you do, a 500 K$ per person price tag for the whole trip doesn't work. Even if you solve all major technical obstacles -- with that price, you're gonna be flooded with many thousands of applicants, whom you cannot all provide with a seat in a space ship, which means that basic supply-demand mechanisms will drive the price up.
You're mistakenly equating the cost to send someone to Mars and what YOU would pay to go to Mars. High demand and almost zero supply doesn't drive up what it costs SpaceX to do it, just what it costs you to pay SpaceX to do it.
Musk didn't say he could sell tickets to Mars for $500k in 15 years, he said he could send people to Mars for $500k. That's a HUGE difference, and means there is no question of demand or supply involved.
NASA hasn't gone too much beyond where they were in the mid 1960's and in some ways are going backward. The SLS isn't anything more than a scaled down version of the Saturn V made with used parts from earlier spacecraft, so if SpaceX is at the same level that NASA was in the mid 1960's... in 10-15 years they will be far ahead of anything NASA is doing at the moment. It is sad to say, but Skylab pretty much was the pinnacle of the manned spaceflight program and it has been going downhill since. They've improved some procedures, but NASA hasn't really done anything genuinely inspiring with the manned spaceflight program other than repair the Hubble telescope. The Shuttle flights looked cool.... but really?
It terms of daring to go where nobody has gone before, NASA just isn't where it is at any more. Heck, they can't even duplicate Alan Shepard's first flight, even though Richard Branson is trying to make that happen.
The Space Shuttle suffered not from extreme abuse upon reentry, but rather from going through the bureaucratic grinding mill known as the United States Congress and the fact that it was envisioned to be "The One True Launcher" that would be used for everything and thus had to do everything possible in space and was built like a swiss army knife. It had to fly polar orbits, have cross-range ability to avoid "enemy" interception, carry a huge payload, and do all sort of other things that ate into its budget to meet the needs of every federal agency (not just NASA)...and that wasn't all. The cost of the orbiter started to go up because there were many early costs that were deferred until later because the bean counters felt they could go for a cheaper solution during the design stage and the early development that would end up costing more when it finally got to flight status. So many compromises were made on the Space Shuttle that frankly it ought to be a textbook example for how not to design a spacecraft and what happens when you let non-engineers become involved in key engineering decisions.
Seriously, don't use the Space Shuttle as an excuse for why reusable spacecraft fail. A much better design was with the "Crew return vehicle" that was designed and even had some metal bent, but never made it into space due to shifting priorities on the part of the U.S. Congress. That should say something too, where there hasn't been a single spacecraft designed by the NASA manned spaceflight program which has made it from the drawing boards to making an actual flight into space for over 40 years (the last one was the Space Shuttle). It hasn't been for a lack of ideas or even billions of dollars spent toward building something else, it is just that every time something is tried *something* goes wrong and the design is scrapped for the next better thing. That happened so many times that America doesn't even have a spacecraft any more for astronauts to use.
Once you get into space you can also use other technologies for propulsion, like ion thrusters (low thrust.... but they can operate for a very long time with continuous thrust and insane specific impulse numbers) or even nuclear rocket engines like NERVA.
In theory, you can travel from the Earth to Mars in about six weeks and possible even less if you had the right engines. Yes, that takes a whole lot of energy.... but space is also full of a whole lot of energy too!
There are also things like Aldrin Cyclers and mission profiles that don't need to worry about how much mass is traveling between the Earth and Mars, so it becomes more like a cruise vacation on the journey complete with 5-star accommodations and staff along with entertainment. Those spaceships can literally be as big as you care... as large as any major cruse ship or larger. They can also be expanded to accommodate more passengers on each cycle or even have the construction crew "on staff" while in flight. It would be a bit of a trick to get the thing built initially, but the per passenger cost would be minimal and doesn't even need to worry about delta-v or even fuel at all and the staff can even be rotated out on each cycle. Food can be grown in such a vehicle, with air and water recycled as necessary... such a system is even being done on the ISS at the moment even though I'll admit it does need to improve to become practical on a larger scale. Solar arrays can be used for what energy needs such a vehicle might have. If you are going insane when running around a spaceship the size of a cruise ship, I can't help you out much. It may not look like a cruise ship, but then again stuff in space doesn't have to look like anything on Earth or even anything like what you've seen Hollywood come up with for spaceflight either.
In other words, it takes changing the notion of how things are done. The first few flights and getting the infrastructure set up are going to be expensive, but once that is built it doesn't have to be expensive for ongoing costs. The tough part is getting to and from the Earth to LEO or at worst to a "Earth Transfer Orbit" position. The sitting "as a sardine in a can" would only be for a couple days, and even then something like an Aldrin Cycler could be built to transfer between LEO and those other positions relatively near the Earth to get to the Earth-Mars cycler.
The idea that you are going to build a disintegrating pyramid starting from sea level at KSC bringing everything with you needed for the trip as you throw parts of your spaceship away is where the perception is flawed. Such a design methodology was useful in a wartime situation like how the Apollo program was built, but that doesn't need to be the only way to travel to other worlds. If anything, getting to the Moon with the Lunar Lander was about the limit of what you can do with chemical rockets flying on the disintegrating pyramid and Mars is simply unreachable. It is that mentality which creates the trillion dollar manned Mars missions too.
Actually he said round trip but only after being done in volume and with R&D paid down, he did say towards the end that fuel costs were only $10-20/pound but already the Falcon Heavy would break the $1000/pound barrier - I assume this is to LEO. The capacity is only 40% of that to GTO which is almost the same as Mars transfer orbit, so more like $2500/pound but it still puts a 150 pound person on his way to Mars for $375k. The delta-v needed from Mars to Earth is lower, about as LEO so $150k for a $525k total. Of course you'll still need a lander and life support but I assume at the $500k price point Musk expects there is among other things a working Mars colony that can be expanded using local resources.
Remember that at this price point we could put 36,000 people a year on Mars if we dedicated NASA's budget to it, I'm thinking of a society that makes their own fuel, builds their own domes, produces their own solar panels and expands their own oxygen, food and water supply. The trip costs would be just the trip costs, I don't know how low you could get the lodging cost but surely it can't be that bad in volume. If you assume you start with a fully stockpiled ship on both ends and only think capsule+people+life support for the trip then it doesn't seem that unfeasible. Of course right now we have none of that but it'd be stupid for every mission to bring their own base and supplies forever.
If you could start to approach those rates you could possibly even make a living going to Mars, if you go for a 10 year trip and is a $100k/year software developer - which you can be from a cubicle on Mars - you can probably pay your own trip and boarding. Okay, the millionaire playboys will be first but if they can fund the R&D, get the volume up, cost down, fund the initial base then maybe you can get a snowball effect where lower costs lead to more people lead to lower costs. It won't solve earth's population problems but at $500k/person then colonizing Mars starts to look realistic. Once you're past a few thousand individuals they can procreate on their own too, though I suppose this is at odds with sending software developers ;).
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Reusable spacecraft in space. The problem with every interplanetary mission plan is that it is a one time plan, or always involves launching the entire spacecraft form Earth every time. Why launch an interplanetary spacecraft to LEO multiple times? Launch it once and after that just launch fuel, supplies, and people. Maybe the a new lander or parts of a lander will need to be launched each time. Since, Ion engines are useful once in space fuel needs would be greatly reduced. A spacecraft that never lands should suffer very little wear and tear, so quit trying to build a single spacecraft to handle all phases of the travel plan. In addition, a reusable spacecraft that never lands can probably be built bigger and more comfortable than one that needs to survive re-entry.
1) Build one spacecraft that launches stuff to LEO.
2) Assemble an interplanetary craft in LEO along with a lander.
3) Launch supplies and crew to LEO. (could be multiple launches)
4) Transfer crew to interplanetary craft.
5) Set interplanetary craft on transfer orbit.
6) Land lander.
7) Do Stuff.
8) Launch lander to interplentary craft.
9) Return interplanetary craft to LEO.
10) Transfer people to LEO landing craft.
11) Repeat from step 3
This is one of the reasons I find any plan to de-orbit the ISS is stupid and wasteful. Even if there is no other science to be had, why waste a perfectly good transfer station for interplanetary travel? It would also probably be a good place to perform vehicle assembly since the interplanetary craft might makes sense to launch in multiple pieces or, if in a single launch, partially disassembled, so it does not have to be designed to survive launch stresses in a fully assembled state.
In the U.S. Navy, the only thing that forces a submarine to surface is strictly food, as the spaces aboard ship are too small for them to grow it. Six to nine month deployments where they stay underwater the whole time are even pretty common. In other words, your analogy is sort of flawed here. Yes, they can surface... but doing so compromises their mission and that is something they won't do.
In terms of gravity, spinning a spacecraft can do wonders. You want to keep the spin rate below about 1 RPM, but that merely implies the size of the vehicle or the length of the tether to the counter weight. That isn't being done on the ISS because.... it has been proposed as a possible module and was even one of the original module designs. It was cut for pure political reasons, not technical ones.
As for radiation, a tank of water does wonders to stop just about all hazardous radiation you would encounter in space. You might need to hunker down in some reserved spaces for a few days when a solar flare goes by, but it isn't impossible to cope with or to even predict when it happens. The Space Weather Prediction Center already exists to do forecasts for solar storms, where I'm pretty sure more resources would be put into trying to make more accurate predictions for manned spaceflight.
In terms of the vacuum of space, 30 m of water is the same pressure difference as going from sea level to space. On top of that, it is a whole lot easier to build something to keep pressure in (like a balloon) than to keep the pressure on the outside from crushing you. Spacesuits are more complicated because you want to bend that balloon to make it useful, but that is also a solved engineering problem based upon suits of armor fabricated at the time of Henry VIII of England.
As for extremes in temperature, it isn't that big of a deal either. Space is a very good insulator and the largest problem you have is simply getting rid of excess heat as you need to radiate it away as convection isn't an option. To keep a spacecraft from getting too hot one one side, rotating the vehicle is again key, something almost all satellites use even now much less manned vehicles.
I'm not saying that the issues you are complaining about are invalid, but it is something that there is experience and knowledge on how to accomplish them, where the largest factor in their use is simply getting them into space in the first place as launches to LEO have been so expensive in the past. When a liter of water costs $100k or sometimes more to put it into space, weird sorts of attitudes about what is important start to happen with spacecraft designs. Elon Musk is suggesting he might get that below $500 or perhaps even less with these reusable spacecraft, which is partly where the $500k per person round trip to Mars comes from.