Slashdot Mirror
Elon Musk Probably Won't Be the First Martian
pacopico writes: In a new biography on him, Elon Musk goes into gory details on his plans for colonizing Mars. The author of the book subsequently decided to run those plans by Andy Weir, the author of The Martian. Weir's book is famous for its technical acumen around getting to and from The Red Planet. His conclusion is that Musk's technology, which includes the biggest rocket ever built, is feasible — but that Musk will not be the first man on Mars. The interview also hits on the future of NASA and what we need to get to Mars. Good stuff. Weir says, "My estimate is that this will happen in 2050. NASA is saying more like 2035, but I don't have faith in Congress to fund them."
He's from somewhere in Andromeda you fools. Don't rustle his feathers too much, we're still tapping him for his cool alien secrets.
>> Elon Musk Probably Won't Be the First Martian
Neither could anyone else on Earth if there once was (or still is) life on Mars.
Ray Walston
Elon Musk is already a Martian. He's just trying to get back home.
In order to claim to be a martian you need to adopt the local culture... Cold, dead, and lifeless... By this standard I've no doubt we'll all be martians some day.
My estimate is that this will happen in 2050. NASA is saying more like 2035, but I don’t have faith in Congress to fund them.
I, in fact, hope that NASA does not fund a manned mission to Mars. Spending billions of dollars to send people to Mars so they can hide in a hole in the ground praying that the next re-supply mission will get through is a complete waste. Anything useful a human can do on Mars can be done by a robot for much less money and loss of life.
People born today will be too old to be part of the astronaut class that goes anywhere other than LEO.
Just like how the sitting president never traveled far from US borders (Until safe aircraft and a Radio communication infrastructure). A CEO of a large global corporation, really doesn't have the time to leave on an extended multi-year adventure.
A 20 minute data Lag for a modern CEO could cause major business issues.
Also the fact when it is ready Musk will be an old man, not really fit for such an adventure.
Sadly I will be too old to travel to mars in my lifetime. Who has nearly less responsibility as Musk.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
but I dont have faith in Congress to fund them.
Then you have no one to blame but yourself. Congress can't approve or even discuss meaningful tax and funding increases to NASA because lobbyists and networks of nonprofits like ALEC work around the clock to justify gutting it and other programs meaningful and important to advancing mankind. These nonprofits get their cash and impetus from people like you, and others whom for which taxation at any level is simply outrageous and not to be tolerated.
You're one man, Elon. Organized systems like NASA are designed to circumvent the single point of failure. Once you shuffle off this mortal coil, your estate will likely take great pains to eliminate this whimsical space travel endeavor of yours and instead re-invest the money into something like oil or war machines, focusing solely on their own profit. If you want to help, if your dream is space and not some aggrandized ego stroke, then you fund nasa and make mars a reality for everyone.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Let China blow a wad of money* on it. I'd rather see our money spent on an unmanned Titan boat probe, an unmanned Europa submarine, and an extra-solar (alien) planet atmosphere spectragraph "artificial eclipsing" telescope.
Approx 10% of the cost, but 5x the science, 30% of the same Wow factor (more if plant life found), and a failure would be only 3% as embarrassing as a dead Marsnaut. A friggen bargain to both Ferengi's and Vulcans: logic and greed favor the bots.
* That they get from lopsided "trade" with us
Table-ized A.I.
As much as I would love to colonize Mars, it would be a lot easier to colonize the Moon. In both cases you need a pressure suit and you're going to be hit by lots of radiation. You'll be spending most of your time underground in both cases. And it's cheaper to get more stuff to the Moon to help people to survive.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Great book, but riddled with technical errors and very amateur writing. According to him, even more technical errors were corrected by interested experts prior to publication. I really appreciated these qualities in a make believe novel. I don't understand why he is suddenly worthy of consulting about Mars travel.
If Elon Musk identifies himself as a martian, who are we to judge? If gender is no longer based on chromosomes and race is no longer based on ancestry, then why should one's planetary identity be based on planetary origin?
We need him here, inventing/funding useful stuff.
The cycling orbit space habitat mentioned in the article is almost the answer. You add to it asteroid mining from nearby orbits. That gives you radiation shielding and a source of fuel, oxygen, food, etc. Now you can send lots of people to Mars without having to use a big rocket each time.
More details:
The Earth-Mars space is full of small asteroids. 12,750 have been found so far. Some of them will be a small delta-V (velocity change) from a transfer orbit that goes from Earth to Mars and back. So you send a space tug ahead of time to one of them, grab a few hundred tons of rock, and move it to the desired orbit. Later you launch a crew habitat surrounded by empty storage lockers. You stuff the rock into the lockers, and now you have radiation shielding for the crew.
On the repeating trip to Mars, your crew in transit can process the rock to extract water, oxygen, carbon, and other useful items. This is both supplies for the transit crew, and forward supplies to deliver to Phobos. If you run low on raw rock, you send your space tug out to fetch some more. Eventually they can install a greenhouse and start growing their own food too.
Eventually you carry a habitat module to Phobos, and repeat the mining operation, because Phobos is a great big asteroid. Build up enough fuel and supplies, and send a lander down to the surface. Compared to bringing everything from Earth with a Big Fucking Rocket, this is way way cheaper.
True. Much in the way ISS saps $3 billion from the NASA budget and over $100 billion over its lifetime, with nothing to so, except bolstering Vladimir Putin.
...when he decides it is in his interest to found Replicant Inc.
when we're too cheapskate to maintain our existing infrastructure.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Mars is a waste of time. Better to learn how to live in space.
We need dirt cheap rocket launches, and the willingness to allow a few sacrifices of lives along the way. That's what holds the space program back these days - insistence of everything being perfectly safe. If we want to make significant progress in a reasonable time span, you need to take a few risks. Just ask the people who colonized the New World. If the people who run NASA were in charge back then, we'd still be trying to figure out how to make the Santa Maria hurricane-proof.
He never got to the moon, but he found a way to make the trip profitable--thereby assuring that *someone* would go.
By the time the technical problems were solved and commercial tickets were available, he was too frail to make the trip.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I'd rather see our money spent on an unmanned Titan boat probe, an unmanned Europa submarine, and an extra-solar (alien) planet atmosphere spectragraph "artificial eclipsing" telescope.
Those are all great things but it doesn't have to be an either/or thing. I'm not at all against robotic exploration but our country could easily fund both manned and robotic missions for a tiny fraction of what we spend on defense. I sigh every time I think about how much science and technology development we could fund with the absurd amount of money the US puts into its military.
Approx 10% of the cost, but 5x the science, 30% of the same Wow factor (more if plant life found), and a failure would be only 3% as embarrassing as a dead Marsnaut.
Certainly cheaper for specific tasks. I completely disagree that you'll get 5X the science. You'll just get different science. One advantage of human spaceflight is that you get science on human biology and technologies to support it which you will not get with robotic missions. That's not to imply the science from the robotic missions is less valuable - just different.
As for "30% of the wow factor"? Not a chance. Less than 1% of the wow factor. There is no robotic exploration mission you could possibly design that would gather even a fraction of a percent of the attention that a manned mission to Mars would get. It's not even close no matter how valuable the robotic mission might be scientifically.
If you are talking about a huge rocket, and providing a massive amount of fuel anyway - then why not make use of that to provide constant thrust the entire journey? You can use thrust most of the way to accelerate, then turn around and use the thrust to decelerate. It uses more fuel but it solves the gravity issue.
You don't even have to provide 1G, just 0.4G or so to acclimate the people to Martian gravity - you could probably get away with less really as long as the people exercised regularly.
It's also a much more "natural" gravity than centripetal force and so will not make as many people sick.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Kerbal space program says you need a REALLY big rocket (or a new propulsive technology) to do that.
I could not find a colonist to ask. There appears to have been a 100% fatality rate among colonists of the New World.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
from http://www.projectrho.com/publ...
quote:
I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
end quote.
mfwright@batnet.com
We need dirt cheap rocket launches, and the willingness to allow a few sacrifices of lives along the way
I don't think that's really the fastest way - the blocking problem seems to be radiation killing you on the journey. There are risks of the form "20% of the ships won't make it" that people might be willing to take, but barriers of the form "no one can make it alive, or at least not healthy enough to do anything once there" aren't about risk taking.
We need cheap fuel in orbit more than anything else. The ability to send very heavy payloads to Mars would go a long way towards the current blocking issues. I'm not sure "dirt cheap" rocket launches to orbit will ever be cheap enough for this scale. However, dragging a CHON asteroid into orbit and building a robotic fuel processor on it would make fuel quite cheap (and if we can solve the latter problem, the problem of how to move a CHON asteroid is solved too).
This is a low-tech "bigger hammer" solution for everything but the robotics aspect. Viewed as simply a robotics engineering problem, it doesn't seem that far-fetched: automatic mining of a soft surface, and repairs on a refinery that can make usable fuel from messy inputs (doesn't have to be great, high-purity fuel, as we'll have a remarkable quantity of it already in orbit).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We need dirt cheap rocket launches, and the willingness to allow a few sacrifices of lives along the way
I don't think that's really the fastest way
Dirt cheap rocket launches gives you cheap fuel in orbit. It also gives you dirt cheap rockets. Dirt cheap fuel + dirt cheap rockets = rapid technological advancement
If we were able to create anywhere near 1G constant thrust, we could be going to other solar systems instead of Mars.
This space intentionally left blank
If you are talking about a huge rocket, and providing a massive amount of fuel anyway - then why not make use of that to provide constant thrust the entire journey? You can use thrust most of the way to accelerate, then turn around and use the thrust to decelerate. It uses more fuel but it solves the gravity issue.
You don't even have to provide 1G, just 0.4G or so to acclimate the people to Martian gravity - you could probably get away with less really as long as the people exercised regularly.
It's also a much more "natural" gravity than centripetal force and so will not make as many people sick.
Because that would require even more fuel and an even bigger rocket.
This should be commons sense but the longer you run the motor the more fuel it consumes.
Sorry, it's just never going to be "cheap" to lift thousands of tons of fuel into orbit. Lifting bulk raw materials into high orbit is just silly - the bulk raw materials are already up there, and landing a payload on an asteroid isn't science fiction any more. The robotics would break new ground, but that's a 1-time research costs with immediate commercial benefits.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Leonardo da Vinci was. Way too late.
Because that would require even more fuel and an even bigger rocket.
This should be commons sense but the longer you run the motor the more fuel it consumes.
Yes, I already mentioned that it's predicated on them having a massive amount of fuel.
You (and apparently a few others) see only the problems but you ignore that it would also get you somewhere faster (depending how you did it), so that balances out the extra fuel to some extent.
It also offsets the extra cost through a much simpler spaceship design, not having to have some complex rotating portion of the spaceship that cannot fail (or has to have redundancy built in).
You also only need to provide fuel for a one way trip, or if you plan on coming back don't worry about providing enough thrust for gravity on the return trip.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We need Epstein Drive to explore and colonize Solar system.
Kerbal space program says you need a REALLY big rocket
The article itself mentions they are working on the BFR (nod to Doom, Big Fucking Rocket).
Presumably the actual rocket engineers at SpaceX can also run Kerbal...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wouldn't you have to been born there? It is not a place where you can get citizenship so you can not be granted the status of Martian. It would have to be old school, be born on the soil of Mars to become a Martian. (No, bringing some Martian dust to earth and placing it under your birthing wife does NOT count!)
Being conservative, it costs less than 25c/kg of energy to place something into orbit. One megaton of whatever would cost $250,000 to put into orbit. Being even more conservative and adding in a multiplication fudge factor of 100 (you have to place the container as well as efficiency losses) raises that number to $25million, orders of magnitude less expensive than the development of an asteroid mining colony.
That's a bizarre way of looking at the problem.
Sure, the fuel cost is a pretty trivial part of rocketry today, though it's more for high orbit. I believe LOX/Hydorgen fuel is about $10K/ton. That may be a NASA markup cost, I suspect it's rather cheaper for the Russians and Chinese, but still this stuff isn't like jet fuel - it's takes a considerable multiple of the energy of the fuel to make the fuel. It'll never be the sub-$1000/ton price of jet fuel.
You need about 60 tons of fuel to get 1 ton of payload into high orbit IIRC (if we're building anything interplanetary, you're paying that fuel cost one way or the other), so just the fuel costs alone (of lifting the "payload fuel") are about $600K/ton conservatively, but maybe half that cost on the cheap.
Current high orbit payload costs are about $18-36M/ton. SpaceX is shooting for 10% of that, and that certainly seems technically possible, but far into the land of diminishing returns. It seems quite fair to call $1M/ton "dirt cheap" (even if we somehow one day reach half that, it's not changing the game much).
So you're still looking at around $1B for each 1000 tons of fuel in high orbit.
ders of magnitude less expensive than the development of an asteroid mining colony.
Who said "colony"? Are a bunch of robots a "colony" now? Have we already "colonized" mars? The tech development from current vehicle automation and manufacturing automation to fully automated mining is of course non-trivial, but it's probably on the order of the several billion it would take to capture an asteroid and lift many tons of robots to high orbit, and there's certainly a market for fully automated mining here on Earth (and better autonomous vehicle programming, and better industrial automation in general).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
A large international effort means large international politics, and you would not be able to be the United States at that table and say, "OK, here's what's going to happen. We need $500 billion among the countries at this table to make a manned mission happen. We'll put in $200 billion, you'll put in whatever. And then what's going to happen is all you guys give the money to us, and we'll turn around and give it to SpaceX to do it all.â No. They're just not going to do that. Each one of these countries is going to want their own businesses to be doing it, right?
That sounds like a typical clusterfuck not a serious attempt at a manned journey to Mars. If employing local business is a higher priority than a competently run mission, then I don't see how it's going to happen. It's not something you throw together in a few years. That makes such a trip well beyond the planning horizon for most politicians and business leaders these days. You'll just have a lot of people going after half a trillion dollars rather than focus on making the mission happen.
He won't even be my favorite martian.
Tie yourself to an anchor + throw yourself overboard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I really think Elon Musk is a person who brilliance will advance technology for the World. That is if he can make at least one or two of his ideals actually make money. Real money, not money from selling carbon credits, or getting cash flow infusions from investors who believe in his ideals. No real marketing and selling at a profit kind of ideals. From what has been said in investment circles, Musk has not a infinite amount of time to make money.
I just dont know if he was the first.
For real there is an entire planet outside of the Israeli controlled West bubble. My money is on the Russian Federation. There could be yet another Novgorod on Mars real soon.
I got interested again in space exploration and development way back in 1977 when I read a book by physicist Gerard K. O'Neill titled The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. That book laid out a case for building large rotating space stations -- called space colonies -- that could be as large as 5 miles long and 2 miles in diameter. By rotating them, it would feel -- roughly -- like Earth normal gravity inside. With a properly created biosphere inside, it would seem like living on Earth. What would the people in these colonies do to benefit people on Earth? One big idea was building space based solar power stations that would power the Earth cleanly and cheaply.
As the years progressed, I learned that such things, if possible, are far in the future. One group I joined was the L5 Society. Back in the early 1980s a common saying was "L5 by '95." We were young and very optimistic. I now sometimes say "L5 by '95 -- 2495." Since the 1980s we have learned we have much to learn about creating independent biospheres. Some of the Mars crowd is working on that. I think that is a good thing -- but it will take a long time.
Could people on Mars -- assuming they could get there -- do anything to benefit people on Earth as much as this? I and others doubt it -- at least in the near term future. Terraform Mars? Please.
All Dressed Up For Mars and Nowhere To Go by Elmo Keep goes into the problems with sending humans to Mars in far more detail than I can do in a short Slashdot post.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
http://www.facebook.com/groups/ElonMusk
I could not find a colonist to ask. There appears to have been a 100% fatality rate among colonists of the New World.
Our ancestors left Mars many millennium ago for good reason and colonised Earth which was lush and capable of supporting various life forms. The riverbeds founds on Mars are evidence of a severe climatic change which turned the once thriving planet into a desert wasteland. Scientists, of all people, should be well-aware of the truth yet they remain silent or promote a colonisation plan with no hope of sustaining life beyond a few years at best.
It would of course not make fuel cheap until we can learn to mine cheaply in space. And we're not even 1% to that stage. You have to pretty much relearn how to do everything you take for granted on Earth in space. Look at Philae just attempting to softly touch down at very low speeds - it had four different ways to try to stop it from bouncing (shock absorbers, ice screws, harpoon, counter-force rocket), and it still bounced way off and ended up in some rocks somewhere. And you're picturing setting up a whole refinery there? Yes, some day. But that day is not close.
The radiation issue is a big one that a lot of people downplay (they forget that the only reason the Apollo astronauts got away with as little shielding as they did was that their missions were on the order of a week or so long - and even still, they would have been in bad shape if a solar storm had hit. As it was they reported seeing regular flashes of light from cosmic rays impacting their retinas.
There've been a number of proposals for how to deal with shielding. One is to build a mini-magnetosphere around the spacecraft; my last reading on the subject was that it would be a realistic way to deflect most solar radiation but not GCR. You still really need physical shielding (which is a complex topic... beta and gamma are blocked by heavy metals far better than they are by light materials, but neutrons need to be moderated down to be stopped effectively, which means light, high scattering cross section elements like hydrogen; heavy ions tend to multiply high energy neutrons. And to make matters worse, forms of radiation switch around - betas kick off gammas due to bremmstrahlung, gammas can kick off photoneutrons or betas, betas can kick off neutrons too, neutron capture kicks off gammas, transmuted elements decay releasing gamma, beta, positrons, alphas, sometimes neutrons... It's really tough.
Most proposals call for using fuel, water, oxygen, etc as part (but not all) of the shielding - it's particularly good against neutrons, as all of these things are generally composed of CHON, all of which are good moderators (especially the hydrogen). A common proposal is to have the heaviest shielding around the beds, as you get better bang for your kilogram that way. I've pondered a more advanced version of that, having significantly more fuel / water / etc tankage space than you need (the extra mass would be part of your shielding anyway, so it's not really a "penalty") and having a computer system intelligently pump it around to where people are at any given point in time and where the sun is / what the current solar radiation flux is / etc. I wouldn't be surprised if you could cut the radiation dose to less than half in that manner, possibly a lot less. You'd need durable, reliable pumps, of course.
What about the Ant People? They owe us money.
Nobody of course is requiring rockets to be our long-term future. I have a soft spot for the Loftstrom loop concept, for example (aka, a track that holds itself up via the centrifugal force of a rapidly spinning rotor magnetically suspended in a vacuum inside it). Way more efficient and high throughput than a space elevator and requiring no unobtanium.
What about the Ant People? They owe us money.
I'm pretty skeptical of that concept (for geopolitical reasons if nothing else), but yeah, it at least seems possible. Space elevators don't just require the unobtanium cable, but a counterweight made of pure handwavium to avoid energy stored as oscillations in the cable from building up to catastrophic levels over time.
But I do take the idea of robotic asteroid mining in high orbit seriously (at least for fuel, a nickel-iron asteroid is something else), as there's so much ongoing, related, high-budget research happening today for military, industrial, and commercial robotics.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In practice, it is. The current political climate will not fund both well.
Political climates change. Our ambition to explore should not. Just because we struggle to get funding right now is no reason to throw human spaceflight under the bus.
That's incremental knowledge and we don't have to go to Mars to get most of the same thing.
Most science is incremental knowledge. And you DO have to go to Mars to know how human biology on Mars would work. Furthermore the research required to learn how to keep a human alive and healthy for a trip to Mars requires investment in a human mission to Mars.
When Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter in 1979, the news-stand publication covers were full of images of the swirling red spot, the pizza-like Io, and its spewing volcanoes. I saw those pics all over the place.
I saw the pictures as well. By the time Voyager II went by it was less of a deal. It was NOTHING like the press that Apollo 11 received. Nothing like the Mercury program. Not even close.
An ocean/lake sunset on Titan via a boat-probe could have a similar effect. Or discovering the spectrum of plant life around a distant planet; it would ignite the public's imagination.
Discovery of life on another world would be massive news. Probably the biggest news imaginable. It would cause massive debate and really shake some philosophies. But that discovery won't really make people care about the robots themselves. Robotic exploration is scientifically useful but really only fascinating to people like you and me. Most people will really only care and be inspired if there is a human being doing the exploration. I think you are greatly overestimating how fascinating science is to the general population. The reason we have so much trouble getting funding is precisely because of this fact.
On a side note, another problem with Mars is that we don't know the biological contamination risk in either direction. Infecting/seeding either one with the others' life is very difficult to avoid.
And what is your point? That we shouldn't bother because it might be risky? Heck we can (and possibly have) contaminate other worlds with microbes from our robotic probes. Even the best efforts at cleaning them are imperfect and for some probes we simply don't even bother. At some point you have to accept the risk if you want to learn more.
You can't troll someone who spent a career in aerospace, and has written a book on space systems engineering [ http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... ] when it comes to space systems design. You especially can't troll me when you are
an anonymous coward, and I have the same user name here as on Wikibooks, and can thus prove I wrote that book. Now go away, or I
shall taunt you a second time.
From the pictures when I learnt the man existed to the current guy in media, I see only the name remained, so now there must be a bio and maybe even final failures to forget the issue and eventually another Made in China. But I may be wrong, of course, Australians may as well be Chinese by now, for all that matters.
Will be Winston Niles Rumfoord.