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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."
Ray Walston
Elon Musk is already a Martian. He's just trying to get back home.
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.
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.
And with much less public excitement and inspirational value. Another robot on Mars will not be widely seen as a major step forward in our exploration of the solar system, a man on Mars will be.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The problem with orbital mining is that it depends on the presence of orbital manufacturing. And orbital manufacturing depends on the existence of raw material. There is a chicken and egg problem unless you're willing to try to safely deorbit many tons of material every year, which is a terrifying prospect. It doesn't really make sense until we're building some sort of enormous space station or space ship in orbit and the launch costs exceed the eye popping costs of starting up an orbital mining/refining/manufacturing industry.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
Your comparison is way off. Sending people to Mars will have little or no effect on the lives of people on Earth. Researching alternate fuels would have an impact. The two are nowhere similar.
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).
The private sector does not create money. It converts resources, be that natural resources or people resources, into money. Other that devaluing all money by printing it governments do not create money. I see no "General Welfare" in wasting billion on sending people to die in a hole on another planet when there are cheaper and better alternatives.
Scarcity thinking applied to money throttles progress.
Scarcity of money is a fact of life. If it wasn't we would all me living in mansions and never working. We need to spend our limited money where it will do the most good. Tell me how sending people to Mars will help progress on Earth better than sending robots to Mars. "Because it is cool" is not a valid reason to send people to Mars.
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.
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.
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.