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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."
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.
Why should we use price signals to determine knowledge and technology advancement? That kind of thinking led the government to stop investing in alternative fuel research when the price of oil dropped to $10/barrel in the 1990s. That is precisely the time government should have been funding more research into alternative fuels, as a hedge against market groupthink.
The government is not a business and should create money for the General Welfare (as the private sector creates money on the order of tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars a year, for personal profit).
Scarcity thinking applied to money throttles progress.
Yeah, and I'm not sure a Mars program that might give people the idea that we'll be able to pick up and move to some other planet once we trash this one is a good use of resources. It sends a bad message.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Are you kidding? I can't help but picture the MST3K characters ribbing it the whole time.
The main character is a "scientist" who doesn't use a single scientific term, instead using 50s pop-sci-fi style terms like "Oxygenator". I mean, here we have a botanist on Mars who doesn't even know the word "regolith" or understand why you'd have solar panels tilted at a particular angle. But don't worry, the book is full of such award-winning prose as phrases like "My asshole is doing as much to keep me alive as my brain". Seriously, it reads like a 13 year old boy.
But that's minor compared to how on pretty much every page we have Weir demonstrating his complete lack of knowledge of even the most basic aspects of every field of science he covers. Here, let's just pull up a random one:
High school chemistry, anyone? (Morbo Voice) Stoichiometry Does Not Work That Way! Weir again and again mixes up volume, mass, and moles. (For anyone not seeing it yet: hydrazine is 1,021g/cm^3, hydrogen makes up 12,5% of the mass, or 0,128 g/cm^3; water under STP conditions is 1 g/cm^3 and hydrogen makes up 11% of its mass, or 0,11 g/cm^3. 1 liter of hydrazine gives you 1,16 liters of water under STP conditions, not 2).
Here, let's grab another one of these from just a couple pages earlier:
Brilliant - not only do we have him once again confusing volume and moles, but we also have "liquid CO2", meaning that for some reason on a planet where a mere shiny bucket will hold frozen CO2 indefinitely, they've decided for no apparent reason to store it as a superfluid in heavy pressurized tanks at dozens to hundreds of atmospheres and elevated temperatures.
Oh, here's a great one: at one point he starts a diary entry by noting that he's now hiding out in a rover because he screwed up and didn't notice that his hydrogen levels in his habitat were climbing and his oxygen levels were dropping over the course of many days until he checked a meter. How much? The hydrogen went up to 64% and the oxygen levels to 9%. Really, the high squeaky voice didn't clue you in? The anoxic unconsciousness didn't clue you in? *Facepalm* Did this guy not get *anyone* to proofread?
The most mind-bogglingly glaringly bad stuff is of course the plants. As we all know, the sun is an incredibly energetic source. Look at the light in your living room for a few seconds. Notice how you're not blind. Now try it with the sun. Yeah, there's a bit of a difference. WIth the sun high overhead on a clear day the ground on Earth receives about 1000 W/m^2 of light energy. Now picture the brightest CFL you can find on the market - maybe one of those giant 40-watters? To match the light output of the noon sun would take 150 to 200 of them per square meter. Even taking into account angles, night, clouds, etc, it's a ton of energy. To grow the couple hundred meters of potatoes to feed a person? Well, you do the math.
So how does our hero plan to grow his plants? Here's Wier's entire justification
That's it. That's his entire justification on how he plans to provide enough light for his potatoes - normal interior lighting powered by a little solar farm on a dusty planet that receives half the light of Earth. Not even normal yields of potatoes, but super yields of potatoes! In regolith that he does nothing to remove the perchlorates or salts from (never min
What about the Ant People? They owe us money.