Elon Musk: I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026

An anonymous reader writes Elon Musk says that he'll put the first human boots on Mars well before the 2020s are over. "I'm hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it's certainly possible for that to occur," he said. "But the thing that matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multiplanetary." He acknowledged that the company's plans were too long-term to attract many hedge fund managers, which makes it hard for SpaceX to go public anytime soon. "We need to get where things a steady and predictable," Musk said. "Maybe we're close to developing the Mars vehicle, or ideally we've flown it a few times, then I think going public would make more sense."

Comments

Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still thinking about how they're gonna get (enough) water out of Mars to be able to make a self-sustaining city. Anyone know anything about this?

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Beck_Neard]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[loufoque]

You can extract hydrogen from the soil.
You can then mix it with oxygen to get water.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[dreamchaser]

There is most likely more than enough water on Mars in the permafrost and the ice caps, as well as small amounts in the atmosphere, and quite possibly in underground deposits that we have yet to discover. It's really an engineering problem, though I'm not sure it's one that can be solved that soon.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Karmashock]

If we have the energy we can make the water from local molecules. Energy is really the only problem ever.

With enough energy we could desalinate the oceans. Power power power.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Muad'Dave]

A solution already exists. My people have been using them for eons to eke out an existence on an arid planet. Of course constant exposure to the spice helps.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[NotDrWho]

Fine, so where do you get the oxygen?

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[NotDrWho]

Getting water on Mars isn't like digging a well on Earth. It's more akin to getting gold ore by processing tons of Alaskan dirt. It would be a huge operation, requiring a shitload of equipment and power--all just to support a small outpost.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[loufoque]

The atmosphere has CO2, which can be broken into graphite and oxygen. Of course, this process requires a lot of energy (otherwise we'd be doing it to fix our pollution problems here on Earth).

Otherwise there is also some water in the soil, too, not just hydrogen.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Anonymous Coward]

Well duh, you just extract it from the water we make.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[DrXym]

The alien pyramid of course.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[theshowmecanuck]

The north polar cap of Mars contains 1.6 million cubic kilometers of water ice. Same for the south polar cap. Or so says Wikipedia.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[rossdee]

Doesn't the soil of Mars contain Iron Oxide?

I am sure the rocks and sand are some sort of oxide. The reason Mars lost its water (billion years ago) was it has very little magnetic field - there was no shield against solar wind, and the water molcules in the upper atmosphere got split into Hydrogen and oxygen, and ther lighter hydrogen escaped.

Anyway water won't be much of a problem if you have enough energy.

Re: Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Anonymous Coward]

How much infrastructure do you need to melt an ice cube?

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Immerman]

Or, more easily once you have enough water to sustain an aeroponics bay, you can grow plants to produce food, biomass, and oxygen.

And as you point out there's water in the soil, not to mention the ice caps.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[theshowmecanuck]

Go away. This is not a conversation for people who want to tell us what can't be done.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[loufoque]

And what do you think plants make oxygen out of? CO2.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Immerman]

Because cutting chunks of dirty ice out of the ice caps and warming them up requires extensive infrastructure, right? Hint - we were doing the same thing here with glaciers and frozen lakes centuries before the industrial revolution - all you really need is an ice axe and a wagon.

And it's not like you need a steady supply of water, you only need more water whenever you wish to expand your biosphere. So build your initial colony near one of the ice caps, where you have plenty of water and lots of interesting geologic formations. It's not like temperature is a meaningful issue for habitats - the atmosphere is basically an planet-sized vacuum thermos bottle, and you're going to need to insulate yourself from the ground even in the warmest climates - building on short stilts should do the trick.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[dryeo]

The problem with the poles is the long periods of darkness. Solar power will be important as it takes time to set up the nuclear reactor and they'll need power away from the base. There are probably deposits of water in the mid-latitudes and can always mine the atmosphere.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[ShanghaiBill]

Fine, so where do you get the oxygen?

Oxygen is the MOST COMMON ELEMENT in the Martian lithosphere. It is also the second most common element in the Martian atmosphere. Reach down and pick up a handful of dirt. It is about half oxygen. The same is true of Martian dirt.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Immerman]

Yes, but they require a lot less technological support, and offer a lot more benefits, than trying to technologically produce useless graphite. They even produce their own energy for the reaction in a convenient self-replicating package - much more efficient than bringing solar panels or nuclear reactors from Earth.

And in fact nanocellulose (produced by pulverizing plant matter and rinsing away everything else) is an incredibly tough, strong, transparent, gas-impermeable and easily-molded substance which could be immensely useful on Mars where it's one serious drawback, water-solubility, is largely irrelevant. You could probably even use it to create new greenhouse domes, only needing the inner surface to be waterproofed to protect against humidity.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Immerman]

Well, I would assume you'd stay below the "arctic circle" so that you'd get sunlight year round - the year is almost twice as long after all, and you wouldn't want the ice-caps expanding over your colony every winter. Not to mention the morale problems of a year-long night. You just want to reduce the distance you have to carry your ice as much as possible. With luck we may even locate some permafrost deposits closer to the equator before colonization begins.

As for nuclear - I would assume they would carry a fully operational submarine-style self contained reactor with them - after all having lots of power available from day one would immensely simplify the construction of the colony, and a couple dozen megawatts would be more than enough power for a small colony, especially considering that they likely get at least twice as much additional power in the form of waste heat. The primary limitation on power production would likely be actually shedding that heat in a vacuum - presumably they'd create boreholes to dump heat into the conductive rock, with generation capacity scaling up as they increased the number of heatsinks available.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[davester666]

No. He specifically avoided mentioning whether said "human on Mars" would be alive or dead when they arrived on the planet, what speed they would be at when arriving, or whether they would have any food with them when arriving.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Teancum]

Solar power will be important as it takes time to set up the nuclear reactor and they'll need power away from the base

Not that I disagree with the general need for solar power, but there already is a nuclear reactor on Mars (in the form of an RTG on board the MSL) producing electricity. I don't think it is overly complicated to try to do that again, perhaps even on a slightly larger scale in the future. Four of the Apollo missions also sent up RTGs that are still generating power right now.

Not all nuclear power plants need to be set up like Springfield's nor operated by somebody like Homer Simpson.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[nitehawk214]

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/T...

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Thud457]

You don't have to worry about anti-nuclear NIMBYs on Mars.
You do have to worry about militant Greens though. K'breel's hive will slit your throat right quick if you hesitate in passing the water.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[painandgreed]

You can extract hydrogen from the soil. You can then mix it with oxygen to get water.

Great. How long before you can have an example of such tech demonstrating in Arizona?

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[jklovanc]

According to this oxygen is the fourth most common gas in the atmosphere at only 0.145% couple that with the atmospheric pressure of Mars being only .6% of earth leaves very little oxygen in the atmosphere. The article refer to the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere as "trace".

The oxygen in the dirt is bound up in oxides and may be difficult to extract.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[ShanghaiBill]

oxygen is the fourth most common gas in the atmosphere at only 0.145%

That is for MOLECULAR oxygen (O2), not for oxygen the element. The most common gas in the Martian atmosphere is CO2, which is 2/3 oxygen. To separate the O from the C, you can use electricity from PV panels, crops growing in pressurized greenhouses, or lichens growing in unpressurized greenhouses.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[jklovanc]

To separate the O from the C, you can use electricity from PV panels

It takes a huge amount of energy for that process. It is not as easy as separating water. Considering how far Mars is from the sun that would be a lot of solar panels.

crops growing in pressurized greenhouses

Which would die due to harmful radiation from the sun. On earth that radiation is redirected by the Van-Allen belt and Mars does not have one of those.

or lichens growing in unpressurized greenhouses.

Lichens grow extremely slowly and are not a viable food source. Lichen would also have the same radiation issue as plants.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[DanielRavenNest]

Mars has complicated geology, but mostly similar minerals to what the Earth has (they both formed from the same parent Solar Nebula). The presence of Iron Oxide give Mars a reddish tint, but so does the red clay soil in Alabama.

Mars also has a little native Iron on the surface, from metallic asteroids that re-entered. The various Mars rovers have come across chunks just sitting there during their travels. If you want to bootstrap some heavy industry, just go prospecting with a magnet.

Mars may have lost a lot of water, but the Solar System beyond the "Frost Line" (~2.8 AU) has lots of it in the form of native ice and liquid. There is likely a lot of hydrated minerals on Mars. The water is chemically bound, and so is not lost by atmospheric stripping.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[DanielRavenNest]

> Which would die due to harmful radiation from the sun.

Pressurized greenhouses that are buried under Martian soil, with outside mirrors to direct sunlight to windows, which have filters to block out excess UV. You want the mirrors to mildly concentrate the light, since Mars only gets about 40% of Earth's solar intensity.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[jklovanc]

According to this reflectors are not sufficient to stop the harmful radiation.

This might lead to he building of growth chambers under a radiation shield comprised of regolith with light provided from collectors located on the surface. NASA-sponsored research has shown that low power LEDs (light emitting diodes) could find applicability as a low power option for illuminating Martian crops.

A little research into your theories before posting might be in order.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[ShanghaiBill]

Mars only gets about 40% of Earth's solar intensity.

Not at the surface. Earth's atmosphere absorbs or reflects about half of the energy of sunlight. The Martian atmosphere absorbs far less. So, the light intensity on the surface of Mars is almost as bright as the light intensity on the surface of Earth.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[ShanghaiBill]

Lichens grow extremely slowly and are not a viable food source.

Just transport a small herd of caribou, which can forage on the lichens.

Lichen would also have the same radiation issue as plants.

Not true. Lichens can tolerate much more radiation than most other plants.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[jklovanc]

Just transport a small herd of caribou, which can forage on the lichens.

You are just being silly now.

Lichens can tolerate much more radiation than most other plants.

You didn't even skim the article you posted.

In space, the lichens turned dormant and did not metabolize, but once returned to Earth

If you missed it "dormant" means "not growing". Sure it may survive the radiation but it will not grow. Another point is that the experiment was done for 15 days and took place on the ISS which orbits inside the Van Allen Belt.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[dryeo]

There are reports of evidence of dust covered glaciers quite a bit further south that should be investigated and would be ideal including the possibility of tunneling into for a habitat shielded from radiation. Even at 50 deg latitude, approximately where I live, the winter days are pretty short.
As for a nuclear reactor, it is going to have to be specially designed due to the heat sink problem. As far as I know all our reactor designs currently depend on large amounts of water. I'd also guess that for safety reasons it'll probably be sent separately from the crew and either way it'll take time to set up bore holes or such for dumping heat. Solar will still be a good choice for vehicles, heavy equipment and such that may work far from the main camp as well as back up for the main camp including immediately after landing. I'd also assume that quite a bit of equipment will arrive ahead of the crew, including factories to process the atmosphere for oxygen, methane or similar for fuel and water.
Landing on Mars is hard due to not enough atmosphere for braking so manned craft aren't going to have much supplies within.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[dryeo]

RTGs are another option but still limited, not much of the right isotope of plutonium available and they don't generate large amounts of power. Solar is straight forward and even though Mars receives only 44% of the sunlight that Earth does, there are no clouds to interfere, (dust storms are rare) and more high energy UV. Much safer for heavy equipment, vehicles and such as well as any factories that are set to work before the crew arrives. As usual a mixture of technology is probably best.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[dryeo]

It'll take new tech to operate a reactor on Mars, if only due to the lack of rivers or oceans for heat dumps. The militant Greens will like nuclear as a technology to help turn Mars green, it's the Militant Reds who want to preserve Mars in its natural state that will be the worry.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[dreamchaser]

Getting water on Mars isn't like digging a well on Earth. It's more akin to getting gold ore by processing tons of Alaskan dirt. It would be a huge operation, requiring a shitload of equipment and power--all just to support a small outpost.

Which is exactly why I said it is an engineering problem. Right now we would not be able to do it, but in time I think we could, with the right engineering.

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Neil Boekend]

How would you get the caribou to put on sunblock?

Re:Water on mars for self-sustaining city

[Immerman]

Wow, I suppose tunneling into a glacier *would* be much easier than digging into rock. It could even be easier than burying sturdy surface in sand. Especially if you used big steam-powered "hot knives" melting away with waste heat from the reactor - the faster you burrow the more heat you can dissipate. Plus you end up with more water than you can handle - you could be building new ice structures on the surface with the water you excavated from below.

Hmm, I wonder how well you could seal the ice by playing hot steam over the surface. Could potentially make for some relatively airtight caves that could then be pressurized with cold oxygen (initially produced by electrolysis?). And with all that heat available constructing warm, dry living spaces within those cold caverns shouldn't take much more than some thin tents and foamed floor panels - any rips just let in cold air, so they're not an imminent safety threat like they would be with a CO2 cavern atmosphere. Of course the caves would gradually melt as heat leaked into the glacier, and you'd need to be constantly maintaining the walls, but it would offer a down-and-dirty way to create expansive living spaces quickly with little mass from Earth, more permanent structures could come later. Make some larger caverns maintained at just below freezing and you could even have space to go for a brisk walk or game of baseball. Chilly, but I could see it being a welcome change from being inside either the tents or an environmental suit, and all it costs you is some time and an air lock.

And with all that water - let's get the farms going! Maybe more ice caverns and tents initially, with raised low-mass aeroponics beds and banks of lamps. The plants then convert water and atmospheric CO2 into oxygen, food, and biomass. Process the biomass to extract the cellulose as nanocellulose crystals (~30MWh/tonne for current thermo-mechanical separation - added benefit, the "leftovers" can be dumped back into the fertilizer tanks to virtually eliminate trace element loss), and you've got a sustainable stream of extremely strong, versatile, translucent, oxygen-impermeable "plastic" with up to 8 times the strength/weight ratio of stainless steel from which to build more permanent structures. You do have to keep it dry, but that shouldn't be too much of a challenge on Mars, and the water-solubility could actually come in very handy for making repairs - just dissolve the damaged area to putty consistency and re-sculpt it.

Thanks for the new idea, I can tell I'm going to have fun with this. At first glance it seems like it could make it relatively easy to rapidly grow to a good-sized Mars colony with potentially very little imported industrial capacity - most of the essentials could be made with ice and hand-worked cellulose "clay". You could even build smaller one-piece cellulose domes within a pressurized ice cavern for convenience and then cut out a large enough opening through the wall to drag them to their desired destination. I wonder how hard it would be to fuse multiple pieces together in vacuum, if it could be done that would make larger construction *far* easier. I suppose if NC doesn't dry out too quickly in vacuum you might be able to at least run a bead of NC "caulk" between interlocking panels to make a seal that's at least airtight enough to pressurize a dome and do a more thorough joining job on the inside. And hmm - I bet you NC mixed with large-grain sand could make a pretty decent "concrete" for thick-walled radiation shielding, at least assuming the sand doesn't react chemically with the cellulose. Hmm - construct a dome with concrete block, caulk the seams as well as possible, and then pressurize it as much as possible with CO2 while troweling on a much more airtight seamless NC inner surface. Could have potential there. After all you should mostly just need to prevent the water from forming ice crystals or evaporating so fast that it disrupts the NC's matrix. And with a little luck you could get the moisture to permeate the surface of the blocks and have the various contact surfaces dissolve together.

Bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Putting something like this in the hands of the 'shareholders' is a bad idea.

Re:Bad idea

[queazocotal]

My favourite tweet of all time is from Musk.
'No near term plans to IPO @SpaceX. Only possible in very long term when Mars Colonial Transporter is flying regularly.'

Re:Bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

That's okay, because "shareholders" will never permit creating a self-sustaining colony, which by definition isn't required to purchase products or services from the company in question, and is therefore an unprofitable endeavour.

"Okay, so we've built a colony on Mars, but how's that going to affect the next quarter's results?"

Re:Bad idea

[michelcolman]

What I don't get is: who cares about hedge fund managers? Just do an IPO for the general public, small investors all over the world are more than eager to pour their money into SpaceX, they are literally asking him for it! Sure, it's a risky investment, and Elon's primary objective doesn't seem to be profit, but why say no to all that crazy excited volunteer funding? Unless he really has all the money he needs right now and wouldn't have any efficient use for more?

Re:Bad idea

[physicsphairy]

It's like saying, "I'll get around to it when pigs fly," except in this case the pigs are being strapped to very large rockets.

Re:Bad idea

[queazocotal]

Because unfortunately, an IPO for the general public means that unfortunate things happen.
You lose signifcant control of your company - possibly totally.
Musk developed Falcon Heavy - with essentially no market.
The Raptor engine currently in development has no market.
The requirement for reusability is reasonable from a long-term perspective.

You can't - as I understand it - legally IPO to only those sharing your vision. You are going
to get pension funds and hedge funds and ... purchasing slices of your company to diversify their
portfolios.
These may then not want you to go spending money on wild unprofitable in the next 10 years crap, but
to make next years dividend larger.

Re:Bad idea

[The Snowman]

You can't - as I understand it - legally IPO to only those sharing your vision. You are going to get pension funds and hedge funds and ... purchasing slices of your company to diversify their portfolios.

These may then not want you to go spending money on wild unprofitable in the next 10 years crap, but to make next years dividend larger.

This is part of the reason why every IPO files a prospectus with the SEC. SpaceX is what I would call "high risk" from an investment perspective. It could multiply my stock investment a thousand-fold, I could lose everything. This is not the sort of stock that most mutual and other funds would invest in. I believe the risk of going public is the stock market can be very fickle at times, especially with high risk, unproven technology: which describes SpaceX.

Staying private for now while the risk is higher means more stability for SpaceX. Elon Musk can still acquire capital and can still sell shares of the company, just not on a public market. Example: he could sell 25% of his company to a VC in return for a bucket of money, then pay it back in stock or cash after the IPO. But the company will not be subject to some of the market forces that govern publicly-traded corporations, which is a good thing in the short-term.

Re:Bad idea

[KingOfBLASH]

For the same reason Leveraged Buy outs Work. Public companies are accountable to shareholders, who tend to be very short term focused (as in, give me money soon!). They do this even at the expense of longer term vision (as in, give me much more barrels of money mañana). A completely private enterprise allows you to ignore short term whims, and focus on making money, long term.

Re:Bad idea

[michelcolman]

But as long as you keep more than 50% of the shares, you still have full control of the company, right? As long as you don't mislead the shareholders (which might lead to lawsuits) and make it clear from the start that this is a long term company which is just taking shareholders along for the ride without them having anything to say, what are the risks for SpaceX?

Re:Bad idea

[jbmartin6]

The risk there is that, if he sells too many shares, he will be forced by law to go public. The same thing happened to Facebook.

Re:Bad idea

[Applehu Akbar]

Doing anything useful in space requires long-term thinking. Wall Street doesn't do that, so keeping the operation private is not just the best way to go - it's the only way.

Re:Bad idea

[organgtool]

You hit the nail on the head. An IPO is a one-time fundraiser that requires permanently surrendering control of your company to a bunch of greedy, short-sighted psychopaths who are only concerned with doing whatever it takes to pump up the stock price, even if it means sabotaging the long-term viability of the company. It's beyond time to start exploring new methods of investing.

Re:Bad idea

[swillden]

You can't - as I understand it - legally IPO to only those sharing your vision. You are going to get pension funds and hedge funds and ... purchasing slices of your company to diversify their portfolios. These may then not want you to go spending money on wild unprofitable in the next 10 years crap, but to make next years dividend larger.

It's not quite that bad. It is possible to retain control; it just requires doing two things:

1. Retain voting majority. This has been done for well over a century by media companies (newspapers, originally) going public, and is what Google and Facebook did. You issue two classes of shares, one of which has dramatically more voting power than the other. The insiders keep the high-voting shares, the public buys the weaker ones. Set the numbers to ensure that the insiders retain a voting majority. Google has recently taken a further step to split it's low-power shares into low-power and no-power shares (actually a dividend paid out in a class of new shares), so that it can continue issuing new shares of the non-voting sort without further diluting the founders' majority. This is well-traveled ground.

2. Specify non-financial corporate goals in the prospectus and IPO materials, to make clear that accomplishing things like going to Mars are a higher priority than increasing shareholder value. This is necessary because otherwise it's assumed that the board and C-level execs have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value, and can be sued for failing to do so. It's always hard to make such a suit work, because it requires proving that an alternative course of action was clearly and obviously better, but as long as the company is following the goals stated up front to prospective buyers of the stock they can have no case at all. They knew they were buying a space exploration company that might generate some profits, rather than a profit-generating company that might explore the solar system.

Non-profit corporate goals for a for-profit company is also well-traveled ground. Google's IPO made clear that search result integrity and nebulous forms of technological advancement in the area of information organization, as well as being a good corporate citizen, were as high a priority as profit. This allows the founders to exercise control without fear of lawsuits accusing them of not fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities, since they can just say "Well, we told you money wasn't our only goal." There are lots of other examples. One very much on point is Tesla's prospectus, which made clear that advancing EV technology and helping to improve the environment are corporate goals, so Musk clearly knows exactly how this works.

However, going public does add all sorts of complications and overheads, even if you structure it to avoid giving away control. If SpaceX really needed the influx of capital they could get from an IPO, it would make sense to jump through the hoops. But they don't, so it doesn't.

Re:Bad idea

[Scot Seese]

Well, obviously, Elon just needs to fund a $970 billion dollar Kickstarter.
   

Re:Bad idea

[swillden]

An IPO is a one-time fundraiser that requires permanently surrendering control of your company to a bunch of greedy, short-sighted psychopaths who are only concerned with doing whatever it takes to pump up the stock price

It's not one-time (well, the INITIAL public offering is, but it doesn't preclude later public offerings), and it doesn't require surrendering control, though it is necessary to take some steps up front to retain control.

Re:Bad idea

[organgtool]

People always come back with this argument, which is why I qualified it with IPO. And could you or someone else please explain how later public offerings don't dilute the ownership of the company amongst the existing shareholders?

Re:Bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

'No near term plans to IPO @SpaceX. Only possible in very long term when Mars Colonial Transporter is flying regularly.'

Good. The long-term value of SpaceX isn't necessarily the orbital contracts. It's the fact that if he's the only one flying to Mars, he basically owns the planet. There's a reason to go public: I wouldn't bet my earthbound retirement on it, but I'd love to take a flyer on owning 0.0001% of all future GDP from an entire planet. (It would be hilarious if I were to do so, and then use the proceeds to fund a Marsbound retirement, on account of the #1 cause of injury-related death on Earth is from old people falling and breaking their hips. If I don't have a heart attack during launch and entry/descent/landing, Mars is probably safer for me :)

Re:Bad idea

[Teancum]

The difference with later public offerings is that you can show a set market price value for each share and demonstrate exactly how much the additional shares are going to dilute the value of existing shares, not to mention that what is brought in from the offering is cash... presumably to make capital purchases that increase the value of the company more than the amount actually being raised (from a longer-term perspective).

An IPO is by definition something where the offering price is just a guess at what the market price presumably should be at. Google did an interesting approach to set that price, Facebook was oversold, but typically most people doing an IPO try to set the price a little bit below market value on the assumption that early investors might try to make some money on the initial early market moves that often (but not always) go up on the first few days of trading.

Re:Bad idea

[DerekLyons]

You hit the nail on the head. An IPO is a one-time fundraiser that requires permanently surrendering control of your company to a bunch of greedy, short-sighted psychopaths who are only concerned with doing whatever it takes to pump up the stock price, even if it means sabotaging the long-term viability of the company.

That's the cargo cult mantra - but it doesn't square with reality. Every place you look, you see companies investing and even going deep into debt for the long term (Amazon) and taking on huge, expensive, risky, long term projects (Boeing).

Re:Bad idea

[schnell]

They do dilute the holdings of the existing shareholders. However, when you do an IPO you have the option of making only a minority of your shares public. You can start a business that you own 100% of and then go IPO but only sell 49% of the stock and still retain majority voting rights. Or, like Mark Zuckerberg, sell a majority of the company but keep most of the "special" shares that carry 10x voting rights.

The reason most companies don't do this is that investors generally don't trust a company that they can't have a strong say in keeping or ousting the management team. (Which is a pretty reasonable concern.) If you retain majority control, just understand that you will make less money per share on your IPO due to those investor concerns... and if you aren't doing an IPO to make money, why are you doing it in the first place?

Re:Bad idea

[DanielRavenNest]

Mars has about the same land area as Earth. Start selling acreage. Mars can be hard to distinguish from Nevada ( http://prou.co/wp-content/uplo... ) and yet we built Las Vegas.

Re:Bad idea

[swillden]

could you or someone else please explain how later public offerings don't dilute the ownership of the company amongst the existing shareholders?

Sure, it's very simple. It does dilute the ownership of the existing shareholders, but it also increases the value of the company, so it doesn't dilute the value of the shareholders' shares.

For the simplest possible case, suppose there is one share worth $1. The market cap is 1 X $1 = $1, and the single shareholder owns the whole company. Now suppose the company issues another share, sold for $1. The company was previously worth $1 and it still has whatever assets and opportunities that made it worth that, but now it also has an additional $1 in cash, so the total value of the company is $2. Likewise, there are now two investors, each holding one $1 share, so the market cap is 2 X $1 = $2. The original investor now only owns have the company, but his half is worth the same amount the original company was.

So companies can raise money by selling more shares whenever they like. As long as those shares are sold at market price, the value of shareholders' holdings is unchanged, even though their ownership is diluted.

Re:Bad idea

[rmadhuram]

Kickstarter to the rescue!

Re:Bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

GOOGL, FB, etc all have share structures that guarantee the founders retain control forever even if they sell most of their stake. I imagine Musk would have little difficulty attracting capital with a similar structure.

Re:Bad idea

[solartear]

Musk developed Falcon Heavy - with essentially no market.

Falcon 9 doesn't use solid boosters like Atlas V, so Falcon Heavy is needed to free the AirForce from being dependent on a single company.

F9 lists as below 5,000kg to GTO. Ariane 5 lifts a few heavier satellites per year. There are a few Atlas V/Delta IV Heavy launches each year too heavy for F9. Falcon Heavy is far better for cis-lunar and interplanetary missions.

Even if it only costs SpaceX 5 launches per year, that's still like $400million in revenue.

At least Elon has the right goal

[Beck_Neard]

Touch-and-go is pointless; having a permanent settlement is the only thing worth spending all that money for, as he's saying. But at the same time, I wonder what safeguards a Mars settlement would really give us as a species. By far the most likely way for us to go extinct is by self-extinction, and a Mars colony would not prevent that.

Re:At least Elon has the right goal

[idji]

Going to Mars won't save humanity, but working out how to live away from Earth could, even if that means learning on Mars how to live under the Earth to survive the 1450's imps, 1950's Apocalypse Godzillas and 2010's Biotech Zombies...

Re:At least Elon has the right goal

[hexboris]

Just don't let politicians fly there and they are safe..

Re:At least Elon has the right goal

[Immerman]

That depends - a self-sustaining colony that doesn't require support from Earth is probably a viable long-term project, and Mars is probably the most hospitable place to build such a thing - mild effective temperatures (once you consider that the atmosphere is so thin it conducts minimal heat, local water sources, and an unlimited supply of CO2 delivered right to your doorstep.

And once you've got a self-sustaining colony you have species survival insurance. Global warfare is unlikely to involve a strategically insignificant Mars colony, and diseases will have to go through at least a month or two of incubation without showing symptoms to have a chance of infecting a cautious colony.

Initially though a permanent colony is unlikely to give us much insurance - instead it gives us a beachhead from which to expand, allowing later round-trip flights to be executed much more efficiently, opening the planet to exploration, exploitation, and colonization. It also provides a planetary way-station on the path to the asteroid belt, which could prove to be a far more lucrative advantage. And those two small moons provide excellent potential for well-shielded micro-gravity industrial and recreational facilities without the dangers inherent with adding such micro-moons to the much more gravitationally dynamic Earth-Moon system.

Re:At least Elon has the right goal

[Shadow99_1]

Personally as a sci-fi writer I like Ceres much better then Mars. It has a rocky core, but it's mostly solid water (aka Ice) having more water as mass then the entire Oceans of Earth. It has low gravity so transportation is effectively cheap, while not being actually 'zero-G' and so should help with some of the medical risks of pure zero-G stays. It even has signs of a very limited atmosphere of evaporated water. It's also situated in the 'asteroid belt' just past Mars.

If we do go to Mars we may want to steer some large ice asteroids from the belt down onto it. Though 'Mars Purists' may have some issues with these grand scale forms of terraforming to add more water and other needed materials to the planet. This is something we can only really do because no one lives on mars yet.

Re:At least Elon has the right goal

[danomac]

I dunno - when humans figure out interplanetary travel and efficient terraforming the human race will morph into a virus. Find new host, consume resources until host dies, then move on.

Re:At least Elon has the right goal

[Beck_Neard]

> And once you've got a self-sustaining colony you have species survival insurance.

Not really. A Mars colony, even a self-sustaining one, would be extremely fragile until it got up to a decent size, and it would be far more sensitive to political turmoil. If a major war happened on Earth, you really think Mars wouldn't get sucked in as well? At the very least, conflict would happen between supporters of various groups. And while humans on Earth can survive collapse of civilization, on Mars collapse of civilization means everyone dies.

Re:At least Elon has the right goal

[Immerman]

I quite agree about the colony probably needing to grow large before I would bet on it surviving alone, but it would be better than nothing. And if it had a few thousand people in it, well at that point I just might bet on them. Especially if there had been a preference given to highly maintainable and self-replicating solutions - for example developing a highly maintainable way to produce nanocellulose from agricultural biomass would provide them a reliable way to convert hydrogen and atmospheric CO2 into oxygen and an extremely versatile, strong, transparent, and oxygen-impermeable building material whose greatest weakness - water solubility, is easily manageable on a desert planet. Actually it potentially makes repairs quite simple and thorough: just return the problem areas to putty and re-sculpt it.

As for the political thing - you'd have a colony full of presumably quite intelligent, capable, and emotionally stable people (we did screen them for the hardships of colony life, right?) who chose to emigrate to a planet that will quite possibly leave them and their progeny too frail ever to safely return to Earth, in order to risk their lives establishing a human presence on an alien world. I would suspect they'd have a better-than-average chance of pulling together in the face of global war back home.

And Earth is unlikely to have a reason to get Mars involved - unlike orbital and possibly lunar colonies which might be able to play a tactical role in terrestrial battles, Mars has no strategic value to a conflict on Earth, and sneak attacks between planets would be pretty much impossible. Nations rarely waste resources during a war fighting over things that will give them no advantage. Worst-case scenario whoever "wins" on Earth flees the wreckage with their weaponry to Mars where the locals are unlikely to be capable of resisting effectively. It'll take a couple months to get there so there's plenty of time to discuss equitable terms of surrender - after all you probably don't want to exterminate the folks who know how to keep things running. Hell, they probably had negotiations going well before leaving Earth - at least to the point of asking what should be brought on the final resupply shipment for a long while.

Re:At least Elon has the right goal

[Beck_Neard]

> you'd have a colony full of presumably quite intelligent, capable, and emotionally stable people (we did screen them for the hardships of colony life, right?)

They're still human and could act unpredictably under pressure. And even if they were angels, there's no guarantee that their children would be the same.

> And Earth is unlikely to have a reason to get Mars involved - unlike orbital and possibly lunar colonies which might be able to play a tactical role in terrestrial battles,

If there's no reason for Mars to get involved then there's no reason to build a Mars colony. The whole point of interplanetary colonization is economic expansion. At some point there is going to be trade between Earth and Mars. And I mean trade of all kinds, not just raw materials. For instance, trade of intellectual property developed by Martian colonists.

Plus, you're going to have a lot of people with cultural ties to the various nations on Earth. What if a war between the USA and China breaks out - how will American-descended colonists get along with Chinese-descended colonists?

But all of this is ignoring the elephant in the room - human politics is based on brinksmanship, and always has been. It's our nature. And yes, it even exists among 'smart' groups (in fact, it's more pronounced in 'smart' groups). We survived in spite of this because of sheer numbers and resilience. But things won't be the same on Mars. You can't have brinksmanship in a fragile colony.

I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026

[MindPrison]

Ooh, the mob is at it again, this time they want to dump a body on mars.

Re:I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes more sense than inventing time travel so that the mob can dump its bodies in the past.

Re:I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026

[Anonymous Coward]

Elon Musk says that he'll put the first human boots on Mars well before the 2020s are over.

It is human boots. It says so right here in the summary. NASA could have done that by sneaking a boot in one of the rover missions.

Re:I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026

[theshowmecanuck]

That's 'cause the desert is filling up with idiots building space ports. There's no room to dump bodies any more. When all ya got is lemons, make lemonade.

Re:I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026

[Immerman]

Seriously - why would you want to provide evidence of the crime before you even commit it? Everyone knows the smart money is on dumping your bodies in the *future*

SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City

[stiggle]

He's building his framework of companies to support a colony there.

SpaceX to get there and then Tesla electric propulsion charged via better efficient solar panels from Solar City, needed due to the dimmer sun further out in the solar system.

Just needs a building system using Martian resources next (concrete based on martian dust)

Re:SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City

[KingOfBLASH]

There's plenty of minerals on Mars. Maybe the first few years you'll have to stick to the imported habitat module, but if you send some geologists / chemists / minerologists in your first wave you'll likely figure out in quick order what you can mine / smelt into building materials.

Re:SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City

[Payden K. Pringle]

Sounds like he's in the middle of some Space Civ V and he has a winning strategy, at least for the foreseeable future.

Re:SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City

[DerekLyons]

He's building his framework of companies to support a colony there.

The problem isn't building a framework of companies (which he only is if you squint and tilt your head just right), the problem is building a framework of technology. He (or more actually we) are missing two key ones - a dependable life support system with sufficient endurance to get there and a way to land the vehicle(s). And that's *without* considering the complete lack of any significant development in in-situ resource development. Or the near lack of Mars surface suits. Or... well, I could probably go on but I'm only on my first cup of coffee and thinking is still hard.

But at least I'm drinking coffee rather than kool-aide and actually *trying* to think.

Re:SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City

[Anonymous Coward]

concrete 3d printing? automated mining tech?

If he figures out how to make a whole automated manufacturing system that could go from raw ore to rocket motors that could be dropped on a planet, he would eventually get to the point he could tell the stock market to bugger off, as he has everything needed for a colony to be self sufficient.

Re:SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City

[angelbar]

NO, we need first a feasible human cloning technology. -Make cloning Musk a priority-

Re:SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City

[Overzeetop]

Better to clone his money. 'Cause it's going to take a lot more than he currently has to do what he wants to do.

Re:SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City

[electrosoccertux]

but seriously, how do we make money off Mars?

Besides tourism. I think we would all love to visit.

Re:SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City

[david_thornley]

Space-X is looking at routinely landing stages on rocket power. That, I think, accounts for how to land the vehicles.

Re:SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Humans have landed on the Moon and on Earth; Mars isn't substantially harder. Likewise we have sealed suits good enough for space, the Moon, and Ebola wards, so Mars shouldn't be a big stretch. A "life support system" is just a big tank of oxygen and stores of food and water. Making it "high endurance" just means having a bigger tank. Maybe I'm missing something but these all seem pretty doable. If you mean that Musk hasn't literally built this Mars-specific equipment already then you're right.

As for in-situ resource extraction, construction, setting up a self-sustaining enclosed biosphere, . . . yeah, we're not even close on that stuff. Dumping all that stuff prebuilt from Earth would take a shit-ton of rocket fuel. Having humans build it on Mars from Mars resources would require massive life support stores to get them through the start-up period--so a shit ton of rocket fuel. We could save a lot by doing it without humans: send some very advanced robots down to do very primitive mining, smelting, etc. and finally make additional robots, then have them build the whole human habitat with Mars resources. But we aren't anywhere close to having the technology for that. I bet we could develop it with existing scientific knowledge (plus maybe a bit more about Mars geology), but I also bet no one has the will and the resources to do it.

Déjà vu

[Anonymous Coward]

Total recall. Too bad Mars is smaller than the Earth and is not really a viable solution to compensate the human population growth... Anyway, so cool!

Re:Déjà vu

[91degrees]

Most of Earth is underwater. Mars has only slightly smaller land area than Earth.

Re:Déjà vu

[Anonymous Coward]

Very good point!

Re:Déjà vu

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of Earth is underwater

In Soviet Mars, most water is underearth!

Re:Déjà vu

[91degrees]

So that's why it's called the Red Planet!

Re:Déjà vu

[Gavagai80]

The 99% of Earth's land area which is uninhabited would be considerably better for accommodating population growth though... and after that you can make some floating cities.

Re:Déjà vu

[PapaSmurphy]

What? Lets run some numbers, instead of pulling them out of our ass:

Surface Area of Land on Earth: 149,000,000 km2 (source)
Earth Population: ~7 billion (source)

Dividing the two, I get about .02 km2 per person. That's not a lot of room, on average. Can we pack more people on the planet? Obviously so, but claiming that the earth is 99% uninhabited seems extreme. Don't forget, we also need land for things like plants and insects and other animals. You know, an ecosystem.

Re:Déjà vu

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be extreme if that was what was being claimed. He wasn't saying 99% of earth is uninhabited, but talking about the 99% of whatever area IS uninhabited.

Re: Déjà vu

[Anonymous Coward]

.02 km2 * 1000000 m2 / km2 = 20000 m2 a person. That's a lot of room considering apartments are generally 100 m2

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Musk

Rewriting..

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm HOPEFUL that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it's certainly POSSIBLE for that to occur,"

Title for news article:

"I'll Put a Human On Mars By 2026"

They are not the same thing. The news editors should be impartial about the facts.

Re:Rewriting..

[Immerman]

They are. The most important fact being that sensationalist headlines get more eyeballs looking at your ads.

And Extroverts not welcome

[OzPeter]

There was a story last week about how extroverts would be the worst possible people to have along on a multi-month trip to mars in a very small spaceship. That is something that introverts are better suited for doing.

Extroverts Don't Belong on Mars

Re:And Extroverts not welcome

[electrosoccertux]

yes, because we all just shut down when things get awkward and stair at the ground. what will we do when the internet latency is 2m RTT?

And they will get there riding...

[gatzke]

And they will get there riding a HYPERLOOP!

Ha, yeah, right.

The new DD Harriman.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now what he really needs is a fusion powered engine...

Re:The new DD Harriman.

[Immerman]

Well, we've got some really powerful ion drives under development, and if Polywell fusion is as close to going commercial as some indicators suggest then it could be a shoe-in. Certainly for power-versus-mass they seem to be the best fusion approach.

Re:Science Fiction

[itzly]

The same human behavior that destroys Earth will also destroy Mars, with the difference that Mars is already pretty thoroughly destroyed to start with.

Simple

[gweihir]

Kill. Freeze-dry. Compress. Ship. See?

Re:Simple

[BlueStrat]

Kill. Freeze-dry. Compress. Ship. See?

You and all the politicians first. We'll be right behind you.

Honest. :)

Strat

Re:Simple

[gweihir]

_I_ have no interest in going to Mars.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine. Just don't stand in the way of the people who do.

"The meek shall inherit the Earth..."

Re:Simple

[KingOfBLASH]

What will we do without the telephone headset sanitizers when the plague breaks out?

Re:Simple

[Immerman]

Fortunately the rise of the cell phone has rendered the sanitizers superfluous.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

but _WE_ have an interest in sending you to Mars.

Re:Simple

[gweihir]

Please, by all means, go ahead. Earth (and the universe at large) could really benefit from a reduction in idiots.

Re:Simple

[Areyoukiddingme]

Fine. Just don't stand in the way of the people who do.

"The meek shall inherit the Earth..."

"Two feet wide and six feet long." --Lazarus Long

Re:Science Fiction

[mfh]

Read the comment that I have linked to, because it solves this problem in a unique way.

Re:Science Fiction

[Warbothong]

Of course it would be pretty awesome to be able to colonize Mars, but we're not there yet and putting a human being there unless there is a real reason to do so is wasteful and a safety risk.

You're right that there needs to be a 'real reason', but we can say the same thing about, say, Australia. Why do we make so many wasteful and potentially dangerous trips there every day? Because there is a thriving colony of humans there.

It's a bootstrapping problem. Visiting/emmigrating to a martian colony would be a 'real reason' to go to Mars; so that's what we need to build.

Ok, next question.

[will_die]

When does he plan to get the first person from Mars back to Earth?

Re:Ok, next question.

[SuricouRaven]

The only reason to bother doing so is PR. Keeping them alive for a few years is easier than bringing them back, and there is plenty of science to be done. The rovers have barely scraped the surface - literally.

Don't view it as suicide. Everyone dies eventually - a mars trip just hastens the inevitable.

Re:Ok, next question.

[KingOfBLASH]

It doesn't have to hasten it though. While it may be incredibly romantic to go somewhere to do science for a couple of years, and die gloriously in the service of the goddess Knowledge, if we do colonization right, it's more like committing not to go home for a couple decades.

Sure, the first 10-20 years building up Mars City will take a lot of time, but if you pick young people (under 30) then you have maybe 30-40 years to build up the Mars-Earth Express bus line. You just have to ensure that once they get there they can be mostly self sufficient.

Re:Ok, next question.

[tomhath]

You just have to ensure that once they get there they can be mostly self sufficient.

Yea, you "just" need to do that. No water, no food, no building materials, almost no energy - minor problems that never seem to come up in Sci Fi. Of course if you could "just" get all that stuff up there you could also have just landed a pretty nice fleet of autonomous rovers.

Re:Ok, next question.

[SuricouRaven]

Aside from the problem of a life support and food production system that can operate for 30 years, with a lead time on spare parts measured in years, and fresh supply shipments very limited. Plus the severe lack of medical services. Eventually a reliable colony would be possible - but the first few waves will just have to hope nothing breaks down and that the political environment back on earth keeps the resupply rockets flowing.

Re:Ok, next question.

[KingOfBLASH]

Except you can get air from the dirt on the surface of Mars. It's mostly iron oxide, harvesting the Oxide you get Iron + Oxygen -- both two useful items. Water is available in frozen form, or you can make it by a) recycling your own waste and b) getting hydrogen from the soil. Methane can also be harvested from Mars. I forget the exact chemistry involved but I know it's possible.

So now you have a source of energy, a source of air, and something to drink. Bring along some seeds for your new vegetable garden and you're set for basic needs.

Will you need shipments from Earth from time to time? Sure, but most of what you need can either come with you or be sent quite infrequently.

And each time more people come, or more supplies, you can add to your manufacturing ability on Mars. Maybe shipment #2 brings a blast furnace and people are now able to melt sand to glass. Maybe shipment #3 brings actual animals from earth so you can now breed your own farm animals.

Of course, you're right, all this does assume a sort of organic growth. If we just send two people, and no more, or no more supplies, at some point they'll die prematurely. But why would you just send a few people to Mars? You should build up a colony a few people at a time, until you have a city producing everything you need.

Re:Ok, next question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty of water. It just happens that it is frozen.

Plenty of building materials. After all, even the pyramids were built with stone.

Plenty of energy - just not necessarily in a form immediately usable. Decent solar cells work quite well - and have been shown to work for 10 years and still going...

Plenty of oxygen - happens to be locked up in rocks and minerals... and in carbon dioxide.

And you don't read the hard Science Fiction (or science fact for that matter) or you would have known that.

Re:Ok, next question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on who goes there.

The first settlers in America were the same way - no medical, little food, no infrastructure, lead time on spare parts measured in years... and fresh supply shipments nonexistent.

Re:Ok, next question.

[SuricouRaven]

A great many of them died, and they were settling in a place that had a breathable atmosphere and soil you could grow crops in.

Re:Ok, next question.

[SuricouRaven]

Harvesting the oxide means you're bringing earth-moving equipment, chemical processing, and a furnace - either solar or nuclear. All of which is going to need maintenance and spares.

Even sending robotic missions ahead, it would be possibly the single most expensive project in the history of mankind.

Re:Ok, next question.

[KingOfBLASH]

"It's going to cost a lot of money" is not really a good argument as to why we shouldn't do it.

It cost a lot of money to send out Columbus to find the new world. Would you say that was a bad investment?

The key is benefit vs money paid in, along with payment schedule. I would wager that once we start colonizing the stars, we'll find trade between earth and its new found colonies will cause the economy to grow.

Getting to that point will be expensive, but the return on investment is worth it.

Besides, total cost will be most likely amortized over a number of years.

Re:Ok, next question.

[werepants]

The MCT concept he's described includes a free ride back to earth. I believe the architecture he's envisioned is something like the Aldrin cycler (at least in some respects). The transporter is going to move ~100 people from Earth to Mars, and then go back to Earth for another load. Adding a few homesick passengers for the return trip won't be a significant burden on that kind of vehicle.

Re:Ok, next question.

[KingOfBLASH]

Except the early settlers didn't know nearly as much about America as we do about Mars.

They looked a map, said hey it's the same latitude as italy, it must be really warm and the reality was that the ocean currents bring arctic waters down south and make the land colder than it should be.

We have a clear advantage in that we have MUCH more knowledge about where we're colonizing. Granted, there will be surprises, but I think we have a better chance of surviving then the original colonists.

Re:Ok, next question.

[wired_parrot]

The type of person you want on a dangerous and risky mission to mars is one with strong survival instincts, one who will do everything in his means to ensure the survival of the mission. That is the exact opposite of the type of person who'd volunteer for a one-way mission. You do not want a person willing to die in charge of a multi billion dollar endeavour. And if you did volunteer on that mission, you wouldn't want your team members to be suicidally prone.

Re:Ok, next question.

[Anonymous Coward]

The MCT concept he's described includes a free ride back to earth. I believe the architecture he's envisioned is something like the Aldrin cycler (at least in some respects). The transporter is going to move ~100 people from Earth to Mars, and then go back to Earth for another load. Adding a few homesick passengers for the return trip won't be a significant burden on that kind of vehicle.

I was about to say that the problem is getting the homesick travelers out of Mars' gravity well, but with solar cells + H2O + CO2 = fuel, and Musk having mostly solved the reusable rocket problem, the math starts to work. Getting the reusable rocket onto Mars into one piece is a little tricky, but that's because landing on Mars is tricky, but it gets a bit less tricky if you have reusable launchers on Earth that can loft up fuel tanks for the cost of the fuel.

Re:Ok, next question.

[Immerman]

Hear, hear. And I think the fact that they used "Sci Fi" instead of SF or Science Fiction is pretty good evidence that they don't dabble in the hard stuff. Sci Fi seems to mostly be associated with stuff that barely qualifies as science-themed fantasy. If you've already allowed yourself magical teleporters and warp drives of course you're not going to worry about the day-to-day practicalities.

Re:Ok, next question.

[Immerman]

Why extract oxygen from the soil? You've got an unlimited supply of CO2 delivered right to your doorstep, and the plants you're already growing for food and oxygen recycling will be happy processing as much of it as you care to provide.

Re:Ok, next question.

[Immerman]

Life support is relatively easy - technology is largely unnecessary, Biosphere 2 exposed and overcame most of the major problems of doing it organically using little more than a greenhouse. And a near-polar Martian colony would have ready access to unlimited water and CO2, virtually eliminating the problems faced by BS2, and making expansion limited primarily by how fast you can build greenhouses. Something that could likely be created quite easily with inflated UV-blocking balloons on an insulated foundation.

Re:Ok, next question.

[Overzeetop]

Every read any American history? Pretty much the same thing.

Re:Ok, next question.

[SuricouRaven]

Do not underestimate the sheer magnitude of that lot of money. It isn't a matter of 'should we.' It's a matter of 'can we.'

Putting Curiosity on Mars took $2.5B. That's a lot of money, but affordable for the most economically successful countries like the US. How much more would it cost to put up a colony? The ships would have to be a lot bigger, and it would need many of them. The total cost would easily enter the tens of billions just to get the materials there, and that's before you consider the century-odd of support before it is fully independent and the R&D costs. I'm cynical: Mankind may be willing to spend that much on finding new ways to kill each other more efficiently, but there just isn't the political will to drive expansion today.

Re:Ok, next question.

[SuricouRaven]

There's some nasty radiation at the surface of Mars. Not much of a magnetic field, remember. I'm not sure how that would effect plants, but the crew are going to want a big lump of something massive above their heads.

Re:Ok, next question.

[tomhath]

There might be water but it would require far more energy and machinery to extract and purify than Musk could send to Mars

Rocks as building materials? Really? How are you going to quarry them? Even if you could quarry them how are you going to move them? Even if you could move them, building a pyramid won't help. Again you're talking heavy machinery and lot's of energy

Solar cells? Forget it. This is Mars, sunlight is much fainter and the atmosphere is very dusty. The only possible source of energy is a nuclear power plant, and Musk isn't going to launch one of those

Oxygen? Same as water, presence of the chemical doesn't make it available

I don't read science fiction. I do read real science. They are not the same

Re:Ok, next question.

[Immerman]

Sure, but that has little to do with life support. There are plants with impressive radiation resistance, and shielding is trivially easy to accomplish on a planet - just bury your primary living structures.

Re:Ok, next question.

[Anonymous Coward]

The early American settlers had air and water available for free. Their environment offered a survivable temperature and a diverse ecosystem to exploit. Their day-to-day survival didn't depend on sophisticated technology that needs a megafactory with a worldwide supply network to build.

In addition, soon after the arrival of the first colonists, shiploads of raw material and laborers were brought over as well. The Mayflower could carry a hundred people (in cramped condition) and at least 100 tons of cargo. For comparison, the entire Apollo spacecraft weighed a bit over 4 tons.

Re:Ok, next question.

[electrosoccertux]

We need to genetically engineer a superior race and send them to colonize it for us. Call the ship the Botany Bay. What could possibly go wrong.

Re:Ok, next question.

[KingOfBLASH]

Just because there are a number of as yet unsolved problems does not mean something is not worth investigating, or trying to do.

Re:Ok, next question.

[KingOfBLASH]

Which is why such push from Elon is so interesting.

The fact of the matter is NASA is going to be very inefficient compared with a private enterprise. You know in NASA budgets they tack on all kinds of things not related to space exploration, and on top of that, they're probably inefficient at what they do.

The key is going to be recovery of cost. When we start doing space exploration seriously we'll begin to find trade based on space. If that pays back the cost of exploration, you'll see a feedback loop where people will explore more and more

Re:Ok, next question.

[Areyoukiddingme]

Solar cells? Forget it. This is Mars, sunlight is much fainter and the atmosphere is very dusty. The only possible source of energy is a nuclear power plant, and Musk isn't going to launch one of those

I wouldn't bet money on that.

Especially considering there is already a nuclear power plant tooling around on Mars right now. It's not a reactor, but it's most definitely a power plant. Of course he would prefer to have a reactor. He might not even have to found yet another company to get it going. He might be able to buy a LFTR from China before his quoted timeframe runs out.

Re:Ok, next question.

[Areyoukiddingme]

Even sending robotic missions ahead, it would be possibly the single most expensive project in the history of mankind.

Measured as a percentage of GGDP (Global Gross Domestic Product), I'd be willing to bet the pyramids cost more than establishing a Mars colony.

Re:Ok, next question.

[SuricouRaven]

What trade, exactly? Space is really rather a lot of nothing, and what little is up there is prohibitively expensive to bring back. Some asteroids are potentially minable, but not valuable enough to justify the cost. Other than that there's not really anything of industrial value except for a few microgravity manufacturing operations* that could be done in earth orbit.

* You could grow really nice crystals, fewer flaws than on earth. Possibly valuable in semiconductor manufacturing, and certainly useful in scientific instruments.

Evolution in action!

[wisebabo]

Since we don't know what the long term effects of low-gee gravity (Mars is 1/3 that of Earth) as well as the higher level of background radiation (Mars' atmosphere is too thin to screen out a lot it), we're going to be evolving a new race of Humans! (I guess we'll call them Martians).

This is the way Nature has done it for billions of years and it's worked. It's called Evolution. Sounds fine except Evolution works through DEATH, DEATH killing off those who can't survive long enough to pass along their genes to the next generation. So we may find that the first generation of colonists on Mars are going to have an absolutely horrific death rate (in addition to all the problems they'll run into with accidents, running out of supplies, breakdowns, etc.) but the next generation will be less so and so on. This is not a pretty picture but then again Nature; "red in tooth and claw" rarely is.

The only way to make sure that there are enough Humans to evolve into Martians is to have a very high birth rate. So perhaps, as Dr. Strangelove would have it, we should have a wildly disproportionate sex ratio of females to males, in order to have the maximum population growth ("and they should be of a highly stimulating sexual nature" :). So maybe there's something in it for (men) to go to Mars!

Of course we could actually avoid all this trauma (and sex?) by avoiding the natural selection process of Nature by fully understanding the problems we will face. Then we could either, pre-select the individuals who happened to be genetically endowed to survive and reproduce under those conditions or genetically engineer people who can. But that would actually require spending (comparatively little) money on such things as a centrifuge for the ISS to study mammalian reproduction under partial-gee situations. Since our species is not particularly good at planning (climate change anyone?) it appears as if we may be colonizing the old fashioned way; send a lot of people and see who lives.

I think the first polynesians to cross the pacific in their canoes, the first americans to walk across the bering strait and even the first pilgrims to land in New England (1/3 died the first winter) would sympathize.

Re:Evolution in action!

[dcw3]

Since our species is not particularly good at planning (climate change anyone?)

Okay, I'll bite. What does one have to do with the other?

Re:Evolution in action!

[asylumx]

Actually, evolution works through life, not death. The best adaptations for the given environment get to reproduce and produce young. It is entirely possible that in low gravity, something in our reproductive systems doesn't work as we'd expect and it becomes much more difficult to produce children -- in which case, the natural selection would be through which mutations allow children to be conceived and raised rather than through death.

I think you may have a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution if you believe it works only through death. Evolution is about generations (many, many generations), not about a single lifetime. Evolution isn't about the death of the mutations that don't work, it's about the reproduction of the mutations that DO work. The examples you gave about pilgrims has nothing to do with evolution.

Re:Evolution in action!

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Mars has an atmosphere about 3% the density of earth's. You can keep pushing people out the airlock forver and they won't evolve into anything but a bigger pile of frozen corpses.

Re:Evolution in action!

[Anonymous Coward]

we should have a wildly disproportionate sex ratio of females to males, in order to have the maximum population growth ("and they should be of a highly stimulating sexual nature" :).

I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor, er, uh, wisebabo.

Re:Evolution in action!

[Anonymous Coward]

He is pointing out the often short sightedness of humans.

We've known that carbon dioxide can cause a greenhouse effect for decades, we burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide for decades, we know the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been going up roughly equal to the amount we are releasing in to it for decades, we've known temperatures have been trending upwards for decades. At this point rather than doing anything we are currently looking to put it off for a few more decades.

Now he is saying that we could do many more studies close to earth to improve the chances of any colonies on mars being able to thrive from the start rather than have the large mortality rate that has happened in many of the past colonizations on earth.

Re:Evolution in action!

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans will never adapt to life on Mars. Mars will never be terraformed.

The solution isn't to selectively breed people who can survive on the barest whisp of an atmosphere, the solution is to try to genetically engineer a completely new form of human that can survive on silicate dust and a tiny atmosphere. Or encode human brains in silicon, and have robots walk the surface of Mars.

The alternative is just to give up and work on the engineering of constructing giant self-contained Biospheres. But we'll never breed humans to survive on the face of Mars.

Re:Evolution in action!

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution works over millions of years. You send your 20 colonists to Mars and they have unexpected problems. You are not going to have 5 colonists who are way more able to survive than the others by genetic luck. You are going to have 20 colonists with basically all the same problems. Maybe a couple have genes that make them .0000003% more able to survive and reproduce. Doesn't matter, because you are not going to have millions of years for natural selection to play out.

These colonists are either a) all going to die or b) develop a technological solution to the problem within the first generation. If a human colony survives on Mars it will be because we develop technology to adapt Mars to humans, not because humans biologically adapt to Mars. They will get these technological adaptations in place really quick; relative to the time scale of evolution it will be effectively instantaneous. And once the perfect Mars habitats are built humans will survive just fine, with no evolutionary pressure.

Now there may be very subtle ongoing problems/pressures: very small hazards that the humans don't even notice and so don't solve technologically. Then people might evolve very very slowly to adapt to these hazards. But it will take millions of years (and they'll probably become aware of even very subtle problems within 100-1000 years) and the changes would likely be very subtle.

It is however likely that Earth humans and Mars humans will start to diverge just from being isolated from each other. That wouldn't be Mars adaptations, but more just benign, random little differences like between different races today on Earth. The Mars colony would presumably be too small and too integrated to preserve existing racial diversity; they'd converge pretty quickly into a homogenous group.

Obligatory SiFi reference

[Anonymous Coward]

...Get your ass to Mars!

Toxic Mars

[Silpher]

Too bad Maris is toxic as fuck : http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

Re:Toxic Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

Only some of it.

Even earth is toxic as fuck.

Cherry pits have cyanide, water will kill you (only takes a couple of thimble fulls inhailed). Oxygen kills you, Air pollution kills, You can freeze, die of heat, starve, gravity, sunlight causes cancer ...

Re:Huh?

[Arashi256]

If only there was some way to find out these things. Some sort of "engine" that would allow you to "search" for things. Somebody should invent that.

Goodwill gifts for the native Martians?

[Snufu]

Anything but blankets.

2026?

[Snufu]

Give us a gun big enough and we'll get you there in a few weeks.

H.G. Wells Aerospace

Re:2026?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jules Verne, I believe....
"From the Earth to the Moon"
H.G. Wells used an unobtanium (metal heated in a helium flame becomes able to block gravity)
"The First Men in the Moon"

Re:2026?

[Snufu]

Verne Aerospace was first to the moon (1865). But they never achieved trajectory precision good enough to reach Mars.

Wells Aerospace, on the other hand, was able to reverse engineer a few of those Martian cylinders shortly after the "visit" (~1899.)

Why exactly...

[philmarcracken]

Achievement Unlocked: Landed on Mars

It's like one of those tutorial achievements you unlock for having a pulse. What in the wide world of fuck do we gain from that red dustbowl, exactly?

Re:Why exactly...

[Anonymous Coward]

An almost unlimited supply of red dust!

Re:Why exactly...

[Gavagai80]

What's the point of doing anything beyond following basic survival and reproduction instincts at all? Most things on Earth are done simply because someone wants to or finds it exciting.

Re:Why exactly...

[Applehu Akbar]

Which is made of the exact two things you need the most.

Re:Why exactly...

[Anonymous Coward]

We would need a bit of H2 as well.

Heinlein's answer

[sabbede]

Anybody remember the Long Run Foundation from "Time for the Stars"? Because it sounds like that's what Elon needs.

Re:Huh?

[jones_supa]

Ah, you mean the engine of a Tesla car! Well, I guess I'm gonna hop behind the wheel and go searching people who might know who this Elon Musk guy is.

Does the guy know?

[Brandano]

I would be pretty pissed off if I were to find myself on Mars all of a sudden with no explanation.

Re:Does the guy know?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just reserve judgement until Dejah Thoris shows up.

Re:Does the guy know?

[Anonymous Coward]

as reputedly the most beautiful woman on two worlds it should be worth the wait!

Weyland

[Anonymous Coward]

If he gets people on Mars and is able to turn space travel into a good profit we will have the IPO of the millenium. I would say a trillion dollar market capitalization could be easy. If a bunch of phones and internet tablets can get you to the half trillion range then a trillion dollars would actually be quite low. Perhaps something in the range of Dutch East India Company which some historians estimate to have been worth over 7 trillion dollars in todays money. Weyland Industries anybody?

Re:Weyland

[Anonymous Coward]

Only after a merger with Yutani Construction Company... :)

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[Drethon]

Maybe but I'd rather have someone say let's shoot for the moon (or Mars) rather than just making a ton of profit using patents on old technology.

You are not going to crowdsource this

[sjbe]

What I don't get is: who cares about hedge fund managers?

Because they are the ones that have the money. I'm not saying that to be snide, I just don't think you truly appreciate how cash flows on that sort of scale work. If the project isn't going to be government funded then you are going to have to get the money from large investors. Hedge fund investors would be a significant part of any such discussion since they own big stakes in most of the companies that would be involved in the engineering and financing of such a project.

Just do an IPO for the general public, small investors all over the world are more than eager to pour their money into SpaceX, they are literally asking him for it!

I appreciate your optimism but I think it is misplaced. Such a mission would cost at minimum, many billions of dollars. Probably hundreds of billions if not trillions. For comparison, the International Space Station which is barely out of the Earth's atmosphere has thus far cost $150 billion and that is FAR less complicated than getting a man to Mars. (that's roughly $500 for every person in America or ~$20 for every person on Earth) The chances of successfully crowd funding that via small investors is remote at best. I think you are greatly overestimating people's willingness and ability to fund such a risky endeavor, especially given that it is quite unclear whether a human could even survive the trip. With all due respect to Mr Musk I think the notion that we will have boots on Mars within 10-15 years is absurd unless one or more large nation states are enthusiastically behind the project and willing to fund it.

Re:You are not going to crowdsource this

[werepants]

I appreciate your optimism but I think it is misplaced. Such a mission would cost at minimum, many billions of dollars. Probably hundreds of billions if not trillions. For comparison, the International Space Station which is barely out of the Earth's atmosphere has thus far cost $150 billion and that is FAR less complicated than getting a man to Mars.

You forget that SpaceX has brought launch costs down by a significant factor already through nothing more than optimizing traditional launch architectures for cost. Making rockets reusable, which they have essentially demonstrated the capability of (at least for the first stage) promises to bring costs down by at least an order of magnitude, if not more. $200,000 is the cost for fuel IIRC, and of course you've got operations costs, but how much of the $60 mil per launch is on a throw-away vehicle? Don't forget the considerable engineering advantage that comes from having a (mostly) unsullied launch vehicle returned to the pad for analysis - that promises an ability to iteratively improve designs based on flight samples that simply isn't available with expendable launch vehicles.

Considering as well that LEO is half way to anywhere (in terms of delta v) and the costs that are working out, I don't think it is at all unrealistic. Challenging, yes, but Musk has a track record of making grandiose claims, and then following through.

Re:You are not going to crowdsource this

[Immerman]

If I recall correctly, I believe I heard that roughly 95% of the cost of a current launch is the throw-away vehicle, so being able to reuse it even a handful of times would reduce the launch costs dramatically.

As far as LEO is concerned - it's not quite so simple. For radiation-hardened electronics that don't mind taking years to reach their destination, yes, it's halfway to anywhere. But for humans - LEO is still almost completely shielded from ionizing radiation by Earth's magnetosphere. As soon as you leave the magnetosphere you need much thicker radiation shielding*, which dramatically increases the mass of the vehicle. For an interplanetary flight you must choose between either even thicker shielding and more supplies for a long flight, or much higher speeds and a lot more fuel so you can neutralize all that excess delta-v at the other end.

* And radiation shielding is a two-edged sword: shielding against the solar wind is relatively easy - but that much shielding means the cosmic rays start to interact with it, creating large cascades of much more damaging secondary particle radiation, which requires even more shielding. In LEO they just don't bother with shielding against cosmic rays at all, because the particle cascades created from the mostly low-mass atoms in the human body aren't terribly dangerous, unlike the particle cascades created from heavier metals.

Re:You are not going to crowdsource this

[werepants]

This is a solvable problem. The serious danger to life (as in, kill you before you get to Mars) comes from unpredictable solar activity, and you handle that by storing your fuel, water, and other significant mass behind you (pointed towards the sun). The remainder of the threat comes from galactic cosmic radiation, and this is a predictable, low-level dose. We don't understand the impact of these long term low dose rates very well though... the projected cancer risk depends on the veracity of the Linear No Threshold model, and we've got good reasons to believe that this isn't telling the whole story. It very well might be the case that low levels of background radiation don't have a detectable impact on cancer rates. The fact that Colorado experiences higher constant radiation due to uranium in the soil and lower atmospheric shielding means that the residents experience more radiation than the rest of the US, yet Colorado's average lifespan is longer.

So, GCR might have an impact, it might not. Even assuming that LNT is accurate, though, the risk is still potentially tolerable. Suppose it doubles your cancer risk - there's still a good chance that heart disease is still the dominant factor in your lifespan, not to mention the considerable risk of launch and reentry. We shouldn't make radiation more of an issue than is warranted - if you've got a 1% chance of dying on launch/reentry, it doesn't make sense to call off a mission because it gives you a .5% chance of dying in the next 20 years from cancer. You're inconsistently allowing one type of risk and disallowing another.

One suggestion I've seen is to send smokers, who then quit cold turkey. Besides the obvious social/physiological issues with this, the data shows that a person quitting smoking and substituting the galactic background radiation would come out ahead in terms of life expectancy - so this tells you what level of risk we're talking about. If a trip to Mars poses less cancer risk than another legal activity that people willfully engage in, that says to me that it is an acceptable level of risk for an informed person to choose to take.

Re:You are not going to crowdsource this

[werepants]

Also, on the 95% figure, let's do some order of magnitude estimates. If we assume they can get the rocket expense to approach 0 through reusability (big assumption) then that makes the launch cost $600/kg. Let's round up to $1000/kg because you aren't going to reach zero and to give us a bit of margin. If you then assume that the average person is about 50 kg, and let's say you need 10 times that weight in supplies and vehicle to get one person to Mars, then you have 500kg X $1000/kg = $500,000 for a trip to Mars. Which is, I believe, precisely the figure that Musk has quoted as the target price for a ticket.

There's nothing that makes this impossible, and indeed, we'd expect (if he sends 100 people per trip, as described on the MCT) that costs can be made lower as they gain more expertise, etc.

It's also interesting to see that the recurring costs of the ISS are $3 billion/year to host 6 people with supplies provided on expensive rockets from Earth. If we assume the same reduction in living costs (2 orders of magnitude) based on lower launch costs and the possibility of in-situ resource utilization, we get $5 million per year, per person for the first stages of the colony. This is outside of the realm of a normal person, but a downright steal for a government that wants to support an explorer, or for a rich person who wants to live in the most exotic place imaginable. The real question is when the price to host a person on Mars could get matched by their economic output on Mars...

In 2009, there were 8,274 people who reported an annual income over $10 mil/year in the US. Let's say, after including all the other rich in the world, we can get 1% that many interested and willing to pay to live on another planet - that would be 80 people who could financially sustain themselves (maybe) in the first years of a Mars colony existing, for $400 mil/year.

I know I got kind of off on a tangent there. There are a lot of assumptions involved and so there's nothing authoritative about this, but still, I don't think we have to plan on anything impossible happening to imagine a small, sustainable colony being developed. Fun times.

Re:You are not going to crowdsource this

[Immerman]

Somehow I doubt many people who could afford the trip on their own dime would be interested in partaking of the early stages - not much luxury to be bought at any price on Mars, and while the low gravity might be fun the frozen airless desert probably isn't most people's idea of "exotic" - usually that term is reserved for places where the drinks wear umbrellas and the women, bikinis.

I think though that it will quite likely not take long at all before the maintenance costs of someone on Mars fall well below what they do on the ISS. Consider - a colony built on the edge of a glacier and equipped with a submarine-size nuclear reactor could easily burrow into the ice for water and even shelter. (How difficult to melt a mostly air-tight ice-cave inside a glacier? Then just add an air-lock) With a nuclear reactor for heating your big problem would be keeping the walls from melting too quickly. With unlimited heat, water, and CO2 you could start farming, which would provide plenty of food and oxygen, and if you had a small thermo-mechanical processing plant you could extract nanocellulose from the waste biomass, providing an extremely strong and versatile oxygen-impermeable construction plastic grown from nothing more than water and CO2.

So almost unlimited food, water and oxygen, and potentially a moderate stream of easy-to-work construction material could all be produced on-site from local materials with only moderate mechanized infrastructure. I suspect Earth could rapidly become the source primarily for "high technology" goods and trace elements we can't find a convenient source of on Mars. Most else would be luxuries and upgrades.

And honestly - if we could get a nanocellulose 3D printer going - now *that* could be a killer use for the technology. On Mars most stuff is going to be an extremely limited-run, and how much weight could you shave by only shipping the non-plastic parts of things from Earth. Sure it will probably be a lot weaker than it could be, but nanocellulose is insanely strong to begin with, and you can always sculpt axe handles and wall panels by hand, maybe even do sand-mold casting.

Re:You are not going to crowdsource this

[werepants]

And honestly - if we could get a nanocellulose 3D printer going - now *that* could be a killer use for the technology. On Mars most stuff is going to be an extremely limited-run, and how much weight could you shave by only shipping the non-plastic parts of things from Earth. Sure it will probably be a lot weaker than it could be, but nanocellulose is insanely strong to begin with, and you can always sculpt axe handles and wall panels by hand, maybe even do sand-mold casting.

I toured Lockheed Martin's facility in Colorado Springs a while back - they have a system they developed (and tested!) that can extract hydrogen and oxygen from lunar regolith. One main byproduct was fairly pure titanium dioxide, and they had proposals in place to extend the system to make cast titanium parts. If you have enough energy, anything is possible - imagine if you could use 3D printing and laser sintering to build custom titanium parts, while getting water and fuel as well. It's technology like this that will make it feasible to open new frontiers. Although as you mentioned, you need something substantial, like a nuclear powerplant, to make this work. Energy makes or breaks the entire thing.

Re:You are not going to crowdsource this

[Immerman]

Okay, that's pretty cool. That kind of technology could actually make lunar colonies viable even without a convenient icy crater - though you still need a source of carbon to produce that all-important biomass for a sustainable colony. And that jagged lunar dust is still likely to be a challenge.

A lunar colony though promises to be far more commercially viable - if you can refine and deliver rocket fuel to orbit without having to lift it out of Earth's gravity well.

The only way humans....

[Anonymous Coward]

....can make a permanent settlement on Mars is if the productivity of each human > the cost of keeping them alive on Mars.

Otherwise, the colony is not self-sustaining, it just becomes a money pit and would die off if not kept life support by the founding nation.

This is one of the reason why we have not colonized Antarctica at all (the treaties are meaningless)....the cost of keeping 1 human alive there > the wealth produced by each human. We do have the technology to survive in that environment, but all this adds to the cost of life.

Same thing with Mars...We have the technology to survive on Mars (not so sure about surviving the trip there), however all this high tech adds significant cost. Lets assume for a second it costs 2 billion dollars to get 20 humans there (number pulled out of my ass, the real cost is probably much higher atm)....that means each one would need to produce $100,000,000.00 of wealth just to break even...just to get there! Add to that the costs of keeping them alive year after year.....

You can always make the argument that this is the required initial investment that will pay off further down the line....But what politician plans 200 years down the road, where he cannot get the glory or the benefits?

Re:The only way humans....

[cheesybagel]

If you could legally drill oil in Antarctica I bet there would be people living there.

Re:The only way humans....

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as the wealth generated by each human > costs of keeping them alive there + the cost of running the operation. I am not sure currently that is the case, however in the future if technology keeps improving and lowering costs it could happen. This is why some countries have already (internationally unrecognized) claims on Antarctica.

Radiation

[splashbot]

If he wants to put a live human on Mars, or at least make martian orbit, he has to solve the radiation shielding problem. In order to do that he will have to basically carry a large bulk shield into space. Water is ideal for this purpose because it contains a lot of hydrogen that can absorb the secondary neutron radiation that is formed when protons that make up the solar wind cause spallation in the material of the vehicle. To deflect charged particles in the first place you need a strong magnetic field which requires a power source. Here is a link. http://www.nasa.gov/directorat... . This is the only unsolved problem, besides who will pay the bill.

Re:Radiation

[Anonymous Coward]

Water is extremely heavy and thus will be extremely expensive to put into orbit.

Re:Radiation

[Anonymous Coward]

lava tube. the base could go in a lava tube, where a few meters of solid rock should stop anything that nature can throw at you.

Re:Radiation

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why it's made of H and O. Then, you burn them together. It provides propulsion AND guess what the product is? WATER! Good old H2O.

"Human on Mars by 2025..."

[Culture20]

"...dead or alive"

Re:"Human on Mars by 2025..."

[IrquiM]

At least it's a start....

Re:"Human on Mars by 2025..."

[Areyoukiddingme]

"...dead or alive"

So we send a lawyer first. No big deal.

Well, except for the second group arriving, only to discover the lawyer has claimed all the land and filed his claim...

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[NotDrWho]

Releasing the patents on his charging tech wasn't exactly done for altruistic reasons. He needs that to become the standard so Tesla doesn't have to build all of its own charging stations.

Rest assured that he makes plenty of money off all the other patents that Tesla keeps.

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm notice what he didnt say? I'll bring him back.

Multi voting shares

[nuggz]

Sheesh, sell off a bunch of low vote, or non-voting shares.

There was a big whine fest about the Google share split of the C, non voting, but everyone forgets that nobody can buy B class stock (10 votes per share).

Companies do it all the time, and some investors are okay being silent partners if they think the management is good.

New Space Race

[geoscodin]

This time it's NASA vs SpaceX

It could happen

[DaWhilly]

Nothing in the article has to be done by a living person. He could just send a corpse and still meet the goal of getting a person there, land, and return the body.

Re:It could happen

[JazzLad]

Did he even say anything about returning the body? You're still over-thinking it.

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[Applehu Akbar]

But he's going to do it anyway.

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[marcello_dl]

> No way! Not even possible.

Pffft. Get one, step on it, voila'.

For something completely different, I'll put a man on LEGO, any takers?

Goes Big

[robstout]

One thing you have to say about Elon Musk, he doesn't believe in going small. I think he's overlly optimisitc, but I really hope he does it.

Headline is incomplete...

[willworkforbeer]

He actually said, "...by 2026 I will put a human, specifically my ex-wife, on Mars"

And as a gold digger, she may qualify as the mission's mining engineer.

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[ShanghaiBill]

Umm notice what he didnt say? I'll bring him back.

For good reason: a "Go and Return" mission will cost ten times as much as a "Go and Stay" mission. We should send robots first, to set up infrastructure, and set up a supply cache that can last a few years. When that is done, we send the the first colonists. Follow on missions bring more supplies and more colonists. There is no good reason to bring anything, or anyone, back to Earth.

Talk is cheap & You Bore Me, Musky..

[hunnybunny]

Elon Musk template headline: "Elon Musk Says He Will Do $(THING) by $(DATE)"

...slashdot faithfully reports every word.
...wife says "Oooh, that's nice, dear..."
...world says "Again? Whatever..."

Re:Talk is cheap & You Bore Me, Musky..

[Overzeetop]

I agree. He never should have abandoned the Telsa and SpaceX ventures. Said he was going to do stuff and then *poof* he just dropped them and they rotted on the vine. Oh, wait...

Musk must finish what he started

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Tesla is not producing affordable family car yet. He needs a gigafactory to make batteries first. Then got side tracked into packing people into some sort of tubes used by the tellers in drive through banking window. Then he is going on to Solar city that hopes to become a distributed power supplying utility that does not need any public rights of way. That requires mega billions in investments. Now suddenly putting a man in Mars.

Musk, any one project you have done would earn you a lasting place in history. If you successfully complete the solar city and electric passenger car alone, you will be compared to the likes of Ford, Bell, Edison... Please focus on finishing what you started instead of constantly shifting focus like someone afflicted with attention deficit disorder.

Re:Musk must finish what he started

[Overzeetop]

I don't see SpaceX or Tesla (or this nascent solar venture) being set aside; the first two seem to be gaining speed by the quarter. I don't think he'll make it to mars by 2029, but having a goal - even a lofty one is the first part of any plan. Since the work/research the other companies are doing are pretty crucial to the mission, I suspect they will continue.

And the men you mention were not famous for a single (or even two) major accomplishments (okay, maybe not Ford), but for a lifetime of achievement.

Re:Musk must finish what he started

[werepants]

Tesla is not producing affordable family car yet. He needs a gigafactory to make batteries first. Then got side tracked into packing people into some sort of tubes used by the tellers in drive through banking window. Then he is going on to Solar city that hopes to become a distributed power supplying utility that does not need any public rights of way. That requires mega billions in investments. Now suddenly putting a man in Mars.

Musk, any one project you have done would earn you a lasting place in history. If you successfully complete the solar city and electric passenger car alone, you will be compared to the likes of Ford, Bell, Edison... Please focus on finishing what you started instead of constantly shifting focus like someone afflicted with attention deficit disorder.

Because it's clearly impossible for affordable electric cars to be developed at the same time as affordable rockets... Musk isn't shifting focus. SpaceX has always, always been about getting to Mars. Musk has just been revealing more of that mission publicly, as he's gained credibility for his successes and won't be laughed off stage anymore. Many have suggested that SolarCity and Tesla are each part of that big picture as well - high efficiency power generation and transportation will both be significant requirements for a Mars colony.

Re:Musk must finish what he started

[bledri]

... Please focus on finishing what you started instead of constantly shifting focus like someone afflicted with attention deficit disorder.

1. He's not doing it all alone. He's got 2 or 3 people working for him (by 2 or 3, I mean over 10,000).
2. He founded SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla in 2003. He didn't intend to be involved with Telsa, but the original CEO almost killed the company. Now both companies are kicking ass. People whine about delays, but delays are the natural result of pushing boundaries aggressively and don't matter when you're still outpacing everyone else.
3. He's on the board of Solar City because he provided the seed money, he is not involved operationally.
4. He spent a few days thinking about hyperloop and then put the idea in the public domain (the bastard!)

Elon Musk is doing fine and luckily will ignore your advice.

Re:Musk must finish what he started

[david_thornley]

One of the interesting things is how he's approaching his goals, plotting out important steps. Getting to Mars requires getting a whole lot of stuff to LEO first, and Space-X has been doing some very interesting and promising work in getting whole lots of stuff to LEO first. If all he does is drop cost to LEO by a whole lot, that's a tremendously useful achievement. It also will make a whole lot of money, making it easier to finance a Mars trip. Similarly, producing luxury electric cars is worth money, and it's a good step to work on things needed for more affordable ones.

No He Won't, There Is No Money in Exploration

[Scot Seese]

I admire Elon Musk. But he's dead wrong. Neil Degrasse Tyson is right.

As others have pointed out, taking your company public means surrendering a significant amount of control over the long term. Board members and share holders like revenue. It's all about the next quarter. They don't like pet projects that are giant money sinks without the remote possibility of a return. Persist on that path post-IPO Elon, and watch yourself be fired from your own company, ala Steve Jobs.

NDGT is spot on the issue of exploration. It takes a government interested in (mostly) pure science without profit motivation.

You want to put people on Mars? I'll tell you what puts people on Mars - the U.S. government thumbing their nose in the face of Chinese ascendancy - Ala Cold War 2: Space Boogaloo.

Let the government, or team of governments blow tax dollars on building Mars mission tech. That tech will filter down to private enterprise years later, so the next generation of Elon Musks can farm minerals off asteroids, or some other future commercial endeavor.

Elon is overreaching with this.

   

Re:No He Won't, There Is No Money in Exploration

[Overzeetop]

Screw that. The government is out of money and over extended. Even the Chinese would be hard pressed to raise the capital to do this governmental style. There's a reason a private operation can do things faster and easier than a government when it comes to research/exploration: less red tape and less concern for human life. It makes impossible tasks nearly improbably difficult.

If Elon Musk wants to spend all his own money and profits chasing this fantasy, I say to let him. It could be he just doesn't want an IPO now, and this is his way of scaring off the greedy investors that want a piece of the pie. Or maybe he means it. Either way, it's no money out of my pocket, and if he succeeds it would be pretty cool. And then we can slap him with regulations - hopefully before he tears up the red planet and leaves it for scrap.

Re:No He Won't, There Is No Money in Exploration

[skaralic]

He could always do a Facebook, i.e. IPO but keep the majority of the shares to himself. That way he gets the cash and keeps control.

Re:No He Won't, There Is No Money in Exploration

[werepants]

Board members and share holders like revenue. It's all about the next quarter. They don't like pet projects that are giant money sinks without the remote possibility of a return. Persist on that path post-IPO Elon, and watch yourself be fired from your own company, ala Steve Jobs.

Which is why Musk isn't going public until Mars transport is alive and well.

NDGT is spot on the issue of exploration. It takes a government interested in (mostly) pure science without profit motivation.

You want to put people on Mars? I'll tell you what puts people on Mars - the U.S. government thumbing their nose in the face of Chinese ascendancy - Ala Cold War 2: Space Boogaloo.

Let the government, or team of governments blow tax dollars on building Mars mission tech. That tech will filter down to private enterprise years later, so the next generation of Elon Musks can farm minerals off asteroids, or some other future commercial endeavor.

Elon is overreaching with this.

Have you considered whether going to the Moon and building the ISS is sufficient government "trailblazing" to get private industry rolling? It's no secret that SpaceX has developed their rockets so cheaply thanks to leveraging all the data and tech expertise that NASA makes available. As well, your entire point relies on the idea that space access will continue to be as expensive as always (the cost is likely to come down an order of magnitude or so in the near future thanks to SpaceX's efforts). It has been almost 50 years since the Apollo program started. Government has had their shot, and they've shown that what they can accomplish in space is symbolic trips for national pride.

If we want to do new things, it doesn't make sense to keep relying exclusively on the same old institutions that have failed for decades to accomplish them.

Re:No He Won't, There Is No Money in Exploration

[bledri]

I admire Elon Musk. But he's dead wrong. Neil Degrasse Tyson is right.

I admire Neil Degrasse Tyson, but he's basically shilling for NASA. (I like NASA, more on their limits below.) And he is over simplifying what people's motivations where.

As others have pointed out, taking your company public means surrendering a significant amount of control over the long term. Board members and share holders like revenue. It's all about the next quarter. They don't like pet projects that are giant money sinks without the remote possibility of a return. Persist on that path post-IPO Elon, and watch yourself be fired from your own company, ala Steve Jobs.

Good thing Elon Musk has stated over and over that he won't take SpaceX public until all the long term development is done, specifically for those reasons.

NDGT is spot on the issue of exploration. It takes a government interested in (mostly) pure science without profit motivation.

You want to put people on Mars? I'll tell you what puts people on Mars - the U.S. government thumbing their nose in the face of Chinese ascendancy - Ala Cold War 2: Space Boogaloo.

Let the government, or team of governments blow tax dollars on building Mars mission tech. That tech will filter down to private enterprise years later, so the next generation of Elon Musks can farm minerals off asteroids, or some other future commercial endeavor.

NASA lives and dies by congressional funding and congressional funding is fickle. NASA has done great things, but those days are over and where basically a fluke. President's come in, they say they want to return to the Moon or go to Mars but they don't push congress to fund a coherent plan. Next president comes in, new plan, still not funded. When congress does fund something, the funding is based on getting jobs in their own districts not on what actually makes sense from an engineering standpoint. Look into the history of the "Space Launch System" (that's the rocket congress wants NASA to build that would be used to send people to Mars.) It's mandated that it must use components from Space Shuttle technology. In the space industry, the Space Launch System is known as "the rocket to nowhere." NASA's history is littered with cancelled projects due to the fickleness of Presidents and Congress.

At this point in history, the US Congress is incapable of funding an expensive and on going coherent space program. I don't see that changing in the next twenty years. NASA may land a man on Mars in the 2030s, but I doubt it. But even if NASA does land a human on Mars in the 2030s, they are not working on the technologies, infrastructure and transportation systems to put a colony there. If NASA puts humans on Mars, it will be just like when we landed on the Moon. Plant a flag, shout "we're #1", and then go home.

Elon is overreaching with this.

No, he's reaching. Something I wish more people would do even though they may fail.

Long live the oligarchy (and how sad is it that is our best hope?)

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people are willing to go and stay - that Mars One reality show thing was doing the same thing and they had 1000's of serious applicants. I'd be willing to go without a defined return plan, I'm perfectly willing to be the first human to die on Mars, I'm sure I'm not the only person either.

And just because there is no defined return plan now, that doesn't mean in 10, 15, 20 years after you get there that might not be regular trips both directions every 2 years that would allow you to return if you wanted to.

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[Jesrad]

We should send robots first, to set up infrastructure

I would get 100% behind a plan to come up with robots able to semi-autonomously build up infrastructure. Let's try and get this done and working on plain ol'Earth first.

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[Herder Of Code]

We could probably already do this, it just wouldnt be cost effective. Good old humans are pretty cheap :)

Daily Elon Musk article

[Gothmolly]

This guy farts, and Slashdot editors fawn all over him. Does he own Dice or something?

If Only...

[organgtool]

If only there was an organization who could work with SpaceX towards this goal. This organization would have to be goal-driven rather than profit-driven. Years ago, that would have been NASA, but we had to gut their funding because they're not as essential as blowing up people of other religions on the other side of the planet nor do NASA's endeavors bring back a big enough return on investment.

The whole thing is really a shame. If we hadn't already gone to the moon and attempted to do so today, the mission would get no support. Everyone would be asking why we were doing it and what would we be getting for our money. Looking back, those missions created over 400,000 jobs in engineering and created advances in propulsion, computer software and hardware, materials and mechanical engineering, insulation, navigation, etc. The discoveries made during this period set up the U.S. for decades of prosperity greater than anyone imagined before the mission. Now we're stuck in a society where nobody wants to do anything unless there will be some kind of return almost immediately. Keep challenging people's notions of our limits and fighting against the mindsets of small-minded short-term investors, Elon. You've already proven them wrong with Tesla Motors and if anyone can get us to Mars at this point, it's you.

Re:If Only...

[werepants]

I agree with the sentiment of your post, but there actually wasn't widespread support for the Apollo program back when it was happening. The public level of support for NASA hasn't actually changed much throughout the years (outside of a couple of blips associated with the Space Shuttle failures). What happens instead is that support is lukewarm while a program is alive and costing money, and then once it has accomplished what it's set out to do everybody looks back on it with pride and admiration. The positive sentiment that accompanies the Apollo program is specifically because it is in the past, not because opinions are any different now.

I think it's something like the fair weather friend syndrome. Once something is paid for and you know it has been successful, it is easy to be supportive of it. Things in the future that have yet to be paid for and might fail, not so much.

I remember when Mars was unspoiled wilderness...

[Thud457]

hopefully the colonists will be able to avoid bringing dysentery with them.

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[ShanghaiBill]

I'm perfectly willing to be the first human to die on Mars, I'm sure I'm not the only person either.

You are not the only one. Elon Musk has said that he wants to die on Mars.

He has an inconsistent funding story

[Anonymous Coward]

Going public and going to Mars don't make sense together.

Going to the New World was definitely a profitable venture,
      but not on any timescale our investment system can handle.

Going to Mars offers a whole new world of potential,
      but the payback would be some number of generations in the future.

Altruism, competition, and curiosity are funding models that work over those timescales.
Profit is not.

Mr. Musk is a great guy with a wonderful vision, but I think he needs a better long term story before he will see any significant external funding model except based on faith.

ps, I still think the first missions should be folks in Mars orbit controlling robots on the surface with low latency links.

DÃf©jÃf vu

[Elder Entropist]

Sending them to space is totally not a viable means to compensate for population growth on Earth. The cost for each person is so astronomically high we couldn't afford to send more than a handful of people. The way to get population under control on any planet is to get people to have less kids.

And for the same reason, the only viable way to grow a population on a colony past a bare minimum is to get them to have more kids.

Re:DÃf©jÃf vu

[Elder Entropist]

Completely true. And all of the uninhabited area of Earth (Arctic Lands, Antarctica, Sahara and other deserts, Siberia, etc) is far, far nicer than Mars for humans to live in.

The only way humans....

[Elder Entropist]

Frankly, the only sustainable way to colonize Mars is to terraform it. It's doable, if expensive, in only a few hundred years. Having colonies there beforehand, however, would be counterproductive since you'd likely need to bombard it with comets to up the volatiles.

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[simstick]

"that Mars One reality show thing was doing the same thing"
They ARE doing the same thing. http://www.mars-one.com/news/p...
and I think I read that Space-X was one of the transport choices which is probably where he is getting his timeline.

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[Enigma2175]

There is no good reason to bring anything, or anyone, back to Earth.

A sample return would be valuable. Even if we have geologists (or aresologists) on-site, we will probably be able to do a better analysis on Earth.

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[Anonymous Coward]

A sample return makes sense, unless you want to lug a portable lab for every conceivable test to Mars. People return doesn't make sense.

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[Drethon]

Sure but sucky as they are, Microsoft still has a lot more software available than Apple.

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[Drethon]

Yes but the ships sending them out there aren't, and humans usually require more massive ships.

Perspective

[sjbe]

You forget that SpaceX has brought launch costs down by a significant factor already...

I haven't forgotten that at all. However you seem to have forgotten that quite a bit of SpaceX's funding comes from NASA these days. They aren't doing what they are doing as a charity. There is no direct profit motive or compelling business case to be made for a Mars trip. It's pure research and expensive research at that. It's not at all inconceivable that the price tag for a Mars mission might be well over $1 Trillion. Even if you drop that by an order of magnitude or more it's still a ludicrous amount of money. You are NOT going to crowd source a project with a price tag that big. There either has to be a profit motive or there has to be one or more motivated nation states involved when you get to that sort of expense. We're not talking about a Kickstarter campaign here.

Considering as well that LEO is half way to anywhere (in terms of delta v) and the costs that are working out, I don't think it is at all unrealistic.

LEO is nowhere close to halfway to Mars, literally or figuratively. Thinking that just getting to LEO means you're mostly there is naive. There are enormous engineering challenges regarding that sort of long distance space flight we have barely begun to address. If something goes wrong in LEO you can either send up a resupply or evacuate. Not possible on a Mars mission. The level of radiation hardening and reliability required is significantly higher. We have no way to shield passengers from radiation once they leave the Earth's magnetic field. We do not have the sort of artificial gravity systems necessary to keep explorers from breaking every bone in their body on arrival. We do not have the food, fuel, or water systems developed for a trip of that duration and magnitude. We don't have a human rated lander or return system. Etc, etc. The cost to address those issues will be in the many, many billions of dollars.

Don't get me wrong. I absolutely think we should be working on getting humans on Mars. But I think claims that we are going to do it in 12 years without a crash government program to fund it is naive wishing.

Re:Perspective

[werepants]

I haven't forgotten that at all. However you seem to have forgotten that quite a bit of SpaceX's funding comes from NASA these days. They aren't doing what they are doing as a charity. There is no direct profit motive or compelling business case to be made for a Mars trip. It's pure research and expensive research at that. It's not at all inconceivable that the price tag for a Mars mission might be well over $1 Trillion. Even if you drop that by an order of magnitude or more it's still a ludicrous amount of money. You are NOT going to crowd source a project with a price tag that big. There either has to be a profit motive or there has to be one or more motivated nation states involved when you get to that sort of expense. We're not talking about a Kickstarter campaign here.

Some of the money is from NASA's commercial crew, etc, but that is a few launches a year. Have you actually looked at SpaceX's launch manifest? They are booked solid through 2017 or so, with a variety of customers. They have set a target to capture 50% of the launch market for Falcon 9 class vehicles and they are well on their way to doing so. What's more, the lower costs they are providing are bringing a lot of previously unprofitable business models out of the woodwork, which become viable as soon as launch costs head downwards. Google's whole Teledesic v2 initiative is enabled by this, and that's hundreds of satellites. Lower costs are changing things, and we can't make the old assumptions any more.

LEO is nowhere close to halfway to Mars, literally or figuratively. Thinking that just getting to LEO means you're mostly there is naive.

My initial statement was in terms of delta v. LEO from Kennedy Space Center takes ~10 km/s of delta v. Mars from LEO is ~ 5 km/s. So, indeed, you are about 2/3rds of the way to Mars capture once you have reached LEO, in terms of the propulsion required. There are other difficulties, but we know fairly well how to keep humans alive in space for long durations thanks to the ISS (on the scale of many months which will be required for a Mars transfer), and there's good reason to believe that transferring from space to Mars will be less difficult for the body than space to Earth.

With respect to the radiation risk, I will copy something I posted in another reply:

This is a solvable problem. The serious danger to life (as in, kill you before you get to Mars) comes from unpredictable solar activity, and you handle that by storing your fuel, water, and other significant mass behind you (pointed towards the sun). The remainder of the threat comes from galactic cosmic radiation, and this is a predictable, low-level dose. We don't understand the impact of these long term low dose rates very well though... the projected cancer risk depends on the veracity of the Linear No Threshold model, and we've got good reasons to believe that this isn't telling the whole story. It very well might be the case that low levels of background radiation don't have a detectable impact on cancer rates. The fact that Colorado experiences higher constant radiation due to uranium in the soil and lower atmospheric shielding means that the residents experience more radiation than the rest of the US, yet Colorado's average lifespan is longer.

So, GCR might have an impact, it might not. Even assuming that LNT is accurate, though, the risk is still potentially tolerable. Suppose it doubles your cancer risk - there's still a good chance that heart disease is still the dominant factor in your lifespan, not to mention the considerable risk of launch and reentry. We shouldn't make radiation more of an issue than is warranted - if you've got a 1% chance of dying on launch/reentry, it doesn't make sense to call off a mission because it gives you a .5% chance of dying in the next 20 years from cancer. You're inconsistently allowing one type of risk and disallowing another.

One suggestion I've se

I think of Elon Musk like Leonardo Da Vinci

[Anonymous Coward]

He has more ideas than he can execute but still does incredible things. I expect the Mars mission twelve years after his vacuum tunnel train in California. I appreciate his a long range vision. Efficient solar cells are a vital part of the energy budget for the delta V of interplanetary civilization. I support a Human presence on Mars. I don't expect it in my life time. We may have caught up to Leonardo Da Vinci but we have a ways to go to catch up to Asimov.

If you send Obama and his crew up there then

[mtthwbrnd]

I will chip in for some petrol.

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[Teancum]

You are not the only one. Elon Musk has said that he wants to die on Mars.

More specifically, he wants to retire on Mars and live there for awhile. Dying on Mars is comparatively easy in contrast.

No profit in going to Mars.

[penguinoid]

Pretty much all the profit in colonizing Mars is going to be Martian land and resources, which can't be shipped back to Earth. Sure, eventually it will mean a whole world's worth of research and information-related production, but those can be done cheaper and more immediately on Earth. I think we're better off building a lunar colony first, since it can be saved from disaster more easily, and can serve as a launchpad for low-gravity spaceship engineering/refueling. Or an asteroid, for similar reasons.

Re:No profit in going to Mars.

[Areyoukiddingme]

I think we're better off building a lunar colony first, since it can be saved from disaster more easily, and can serve as a launchpad for low-gravity spaceship engineering/refueling.

I agree. The gravity is even lower, but otherwise conditions are effectively similar, since the Mars atmosphere is so thin. Ping times are a helluva lot lower too.

But we don't have as much money as Elon Musk, so no one listens to us.

bad idea is bad

[Anonymous Coward]

More rovers please. Space is not safe. Stay on earth, humans.

Re:Science Fiction

[mfh]

Visiting/emmigrating to a martian colony would be a 'real reason' to go to Mars; so that's what we need to build.

Isn't that self-affirming fallacy?

Earth is not Mars.

[DerekLyons]

Space-X is looking at routinely landing stages on rocket power. That, I think, accounts for how to land the vehicles.

Um, no. Not even close.
 
SpaceX's terrestrial landings rely on Earth's relatively thick lower atmosphere and the fact that (nearly) empty booster stages are very "fluffy" (I.E. have a very low density for their size). The first condition does not obtain on Mars and thus renders the second irrelevant.

Re:Earth is not Mars.

[jo_ham]

Gravity is also only 40% of Earth's on average, which helps to negate some of those downsides.

Re:Earth is not Mars.

[DerekLyons]

All gravity being lower accomplishes is turning an insanely incredibly difficult problem into merely an insanely seriously difficult problem - one we do not currently now how to solve.

And that's the bottom line - we're missing most of the key technologies needed to land a man on Mars. If Musk intends to do so, he's got a very expensive R&D program on his hands and no clear source of funding with which to pay for it.

Re:Earth is not Mars.

[david_thornley]

Look, the atmosphere is too thin to brake anything, so any sort of soft landing will have to be on the rockets. Space-X is working on getting that reliable here, and moving it to Mars conditions is going to be easier than coming up with something entirely new.

Re:Earth is not Mars.

[jo_ham]

So we drop the cargo down with a sky crane/inflatable combination/retro rocket system then land the crew with something like the LEM.

It's not like we don't have experience landing small, rocket-powred craft on airless low-gravity environments, and that was 40 years ago.

We put Curiosity down onto the surface intact using a sky crane flown remotely (with automatic systems handling key bits due to time delay). It's not like we can't land car-sized objects on Mars already.

But no, that sort of "we can't possibly do it" thinking is exactly what we need in space exploration. Keep it up.

Re: robot infrastructure

[DanielRavenNest]

That's exactly the project we are working on. Automated self-expanding production from a starter kit.

Book: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S...

Project site: http://www.seed-factory.org/

Space systems book that led to the project: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S...

I'm about to put an offer on a 2.67 acre R&D location near Atlanta. Things like solar furnaces and greenhouses require some outdoor space for testing. We plan to work with the local "Maker" community and Georgia Tech to bootstrap the "self-expansion" tech. The project is open source, and we welcome people in other areas helping or doing parallel work. However since this project involves some big hardware, we need to be physically close to the people we will be working with, at least until we can be replicating starter kits and sending them out to people elsewhere.

Re:Economics

[DanielRavenNest]

The economics of robots and machine tools that make more of themselves invalidates the humans are cheap idea. In theory your starter factory can grow exponentially, leading to ever-higher production from a fixed original investment. Preliminary estimates give a 3 year doubling time (time for the equipment set to make it's own mass of new equipment). That's a 26% compound growth rate, which an excellent return on investment. So you would maximize the automated tasks, and just use humans for the tasks that are too hard to automate.

Re: NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you not heard of Mars One?

Re:Science Fiction

[Rob Riggs]

You're right that there needs to be a 'real reason', but we can say the same thing about, say, Australia.

Are you suggesting a Martian penal colony? I don't see that ending well for anyone.

Funding

[whereiswaldo]

We need to make life multiplanetary - exactly my thinking. Where can I direct a donation to this effort? It's an investment in the future that I'm concerned about, not getting a monetary return.

Wrong again.

[DerekLyons]

Look, the atmosphere is too thin to brake anything, so any sort of soft landing will have to be on the rockets.

Look, Mar's gravity is too high to propulsively brake to landing. Period. That's why every soft landing there to date has used a mix of aerodynamic and propulsive braking.
 

Space-X is working on getting that reliable here, and moving it to Mars conditions is going to be easier than coming up with something entirely new.

The problem isn't reliability, it's the enormous amount of fuel required for any non-trivial payload. There's a reason why every soft landing on Mars to date has required a combination of chutes and propulsion. But the bigger the vehicle, the bigger the chutes must be - and for a manned lander the chutes have to be big enough that they're not even on the ragged edge of possibility, they're practically science fiction. We simply don't know how to make supersonic chutes the size of a football field and deploy them in brief window available without tangling them all to hell and back.

Re: robot infrastructure

[Jesrad]

Indeed, this is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. Thank you for the links !

One way ticket to the Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

> put the first human boots on Mars well before the 2020s are over

That's no big deal and could have been done in the 1980s by USA or USSR. The big feat is putting people on Mars and bringing them back, alive and hopefully healthy. That's where obstacles arise: fuel, cosmic radiation, loss of bone mass from zero or low gravity, Mars dust problems, long term reliability of manned space hardware, etc.

Anyhow, Mars having only 38% the gravity of Earth is not interesting for the long term survivial of the human race, because those who survive there would not be humans after a few genetrations, but a new species. You can create atmosphere, water, useful materials on any barren planet, given sufficient effort, but you can't create gravity.

That is why all effort should focus on the survey and possible terraforming of Venus, which has 88% of the Earth's gravity. Its rotational speed needs to be cranked up, it needs a magnetic field and the orbital track should be modified if possible (planet dragged to the Earth's orbit but opposite side of the Sun). That needs stellar-engineering level of capabilities, but then we would have a true 2nd Earth.

Re:Science Fiction

[dkf]

Are you suggesting a Martian penal colony? I don't see that ending well for anyone.

Better than a Lunar one I suppose.

How will he avoid contamination of Mars?

[Anonymous Coward]

The top three places in the solar system that we should not contaminate with Earth microbes, by international agreement are:

* Mars
* Europa
* Encladus.

This means it should be top priority for any Mars mission to show that you will not contaminate it with Earth life. Otherwise that would make study of Mars biology somewhere between hard and impossible. Since we can't totally sterilize any robots yet - they use a target probability of 1 in 10000 of contamination per mission (and in case of Mars that's been turned into guidelines without need to calculate probabilities because we know so little about habitability of Mars so far that the calculation is impossible).

After a hard crash on Mars, of a human habitat with hundreds of trillions of microbes, with the solar storms and ability of many microbes to create resistant dormant states - and many retaining extremophile capabilities - you'd surely declare Mars contaminated after that.

Any detection of life anywhere on Mars, your first guess would be, a colony established from spores spread from the human habitat crash site. And life could grow on Mars - just last year we got clear evidence of "warm seasonal flows" in the equatorial regions (previously found in a few rare spots in higher lattitudes) - and so far the only hypotheses for these are - some form of liquid, probably salty water on the surface.

What is his solution to this? We need to know, so that we can start to evaluate it, and look at it carefully to see if it works, and to find issues with it well in advance of his mission?

How does he comply with Planetary Protection?

[RobertWalker]

The top three places in the solar system that we should not contaminate with Earth microbes, by international agreement are:

* Mars
* Europa
* Encladus.


This means it should be top priority for any Mars mission to show that you will not contaminate it with Earth life. Otherwise that would make study of Mars biology somewhere between hard and impossible. Since we can't totally sterilize any robots yet - they use a target probability of 1 in 10000 of contamination per mission (and in case of Mars that's been turned into guidelines without need to calculate probabilities because we know so little about habitability of Mars so far that the calculation is impossible).

After a hard crash on Mars, of a human habitat with hundreds of trillions of microbes, with the solar storms and ability of many microbes to create resistant dormant states - and many retaining extremophile capabilities - you'd surely declare Mars contaminated after that.

Any detection of life anywhere on Mars, your first guess would be, a colony established from spores spread from the human habitat crash site. And life could grow on Mars - just last year we got clear evidence of "warm seasonal flows" in the equatorial regions (previously found in a few rare spots in higher lattitudes) - and so far the only hypotheses for these are - some form of liquid, probably salty water on the surface.

What is his solution to this? We need to know, so that we can start to evaluate it, and look at it carefully to see if it works, and to find issues with it well in advance of his mission?

Apples and oranges

[DerekLyons]

So we drop the cargo down with a sky crane/inflatable combination/retro rocket system then land the crew with something like the LEM.

Cool. Except we don't know how to land cargo of any useful size or a vehicle the size of the LEM. That's it, plain and simple - we don't know how. The key problem is the parachute, we don't know how to design or build one of sufficient size... let alone deploy it. And these are non-trivial problems. Parachutes were a major pacing item both for the MER rovers and for Curiosity due to the size and weight of the payloads....
 

But no, that sort of "we can't possibly do it" thinking is exactly what we need in space exploration. Keep it up.

I didn't say "we can't do it" you moron, I said "we don't know how to do it". Very different words with very different meanings.

Destroy or move PHOBOS moon

[Anonymous Coward]

Do whatever to colonize Mars, BUT make sure you nudge planet Phobos away from Martian Orbit. Make that your top priority, because very day you don't do that is a day that Martian Orbit WILL NOT remain on a steady axis. It only needs one moon, DEIMOS, to pull & tug on MARS and straighten out it's Axis. Once you do that a lot of the chaotic dust and snow storms will be a thing of the past. Give mars a stead orbit with ONE MOON (and add mass to that moon) and it'll straighten out & be more earth like. (Ref. One Moon Theory by Dr Robin Canup)

Re:NOT. GODDA. HAPPEN.

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but I think it's a step in the right direction - want to smother the electrical car industry before it has a chance to reach adolescence? Have each manufacturer release its own proprietary charging plug in the hopes that it will become the new "standard". You know, like we did with cellphones. Compulsory xkcd post: http://xkcd.com/927/