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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."
Putting something like this in the hands of the 'shareholders' is a bad idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
You can extract hydrogen from the soil.
You can then mix it with oxygen to get water.
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.
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.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Ooh, the mob is at it again, this time they want to dump a body on mars.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
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)
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
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Most of Earth is underwater. Mars has only slightly smaller land area than Earth.
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.
When does he plan to get the first person from Mars back to Earth?
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.
Too bad Maris is toxic as fuck : http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
Anything but blankets.
Give us a gun big enough and we'll get you there in a few weeks.
H.G. Wells Aerospace
Anybody remember the Long Run Foundation from "Time for the Stars"? Because it sounds like that's what Elon needs.
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.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I would be pretty pissed off if I were to find myself on Mars all of a sudden with no explanation.
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.
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.
So that's why it's called the Red Planet!
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.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
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.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
hopefully the colonists will be able to avoid bringing dysentery with them.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
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.