SpaceX CEO Elon Musk Predicts People On Mars In 9 Years (cnn.com)

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says his company should be able to land humans on Mars in nine years from now. "If things go according to plan, we should be able to -- we should be able to -- launch people in 2024, with arrival in 2025," Musk said. "That's the game plan," he added. CNN Money reports: Musk said he's planning to share an architectural plan for the colonization of Mars at a conference in September. The tech conference audience was enthralled by Musk's comments. He told interviewers Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg that plotting travel throughout the Solar System, and "ultimately other star systems," provides the kind of inspiration that makes life worth living.

Comments

Why the political ending?

[garcia]

From the article:

Much closer to home, Musk was also asked about the U.S. presidential election, a topic on which he was noticeably less animated.

Without saying anything about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton specifically, he said, "I don't think it's the finest moment in our democracy."

I wish there was more context given here. Does he feel this way because of their stance on space exploration/funding/etc or simply because he doesn't like their other political stances?

If it is indeed, the latter, if it's going to be included in an article, I really wish they had dug in deeper and published his response, rather than just including Hillary and Trump in the article for their SEO value.

Re:Why the political ending?

[Anonymous Coward]

Elon Musk, God Emperor of Mars, doesn't really see Earth politics as all that important.

Re:Why the political ending?

[Obfuscant]

or simply because he doesn't like their other political stances?

People don't make statements like that when they simply disagree with the candidates. They make such patently absurd statements when they have an emotional reaction to them.

Or they are trying to pander to those who have emotional reactions by pretending to feel the same way. Note carefully that by not saying which of the two he's talking about, both sides can assume he's talking about "the other nitwit" in the race and feel a sudden kinship or connection with him. It's playing politics for commercial success. "I feel better paying a huge amount of money for a Tesla because Elon Musk feels about X the same way I do..." He now has a tie to both Trump haters and Hillary haters.

And he's wrong. When the people act in electing someone, it is a good day for democracy. It's when the person who takes office is not the elected one that it's not the "finest moment in our democracy". And even on a bad democracy day, it's better than what many other people have to live with.

Re:Why the political ending?

[AmiMoJo]

He's saying that the choices are so bad, people will emigrate to Mars at the earliest opportunity. First person there gets to be king/queen.

Re:Why the political ending?

[mspohr]

Don't forget Trump's "university" fraud lawsuit.

Re:Why the political ending?

[CrimsonAvenger]

If you don't vote, you don't get to complain about how other people voted

First Amendment. Yes, in fact I DO get to complain about how other people voted. Just as I can complain right now about the candidates, in spite of being neither Rep nor Dem and so skipped the whole primary vote thing.

Re:Why the political ending?

[Archangel Michael]

Don't forget the legacy of Sanders' wife on that other university. But since that was pie in the sky progressive logic that failed there, we'll ignore it. Besides, Bernie had nothing to do with it (being his wife and all that). Of course, Bernie's wife, Hillary's Husband are off limits, but Trumps Wife is fair game.

No, I am not voting for Trump, just pointing out that hypocrisy abounds in this election cycle.

Re:Why the political ending?

[Archangel Michael]

1) I do vote, so my condemnation of the two major parties are fully justified on that alone
2) Even if I didn't vote, because I refuse to vote for lessor of two evils, doesn't mean I can't complain (1st Amendment)
3) Even if the first two don't apply, Liberty requires me being able to have my own mind, and be able to voice it. This is a HUMAN right.

Now, the people who say "You can't complain because of ________" are tyrants, pure and simple. They need to be confronted as such, in exactly those very terms. To the GP, "YOU ARE A TYRANT!". Just because they don't have power (yet) doesn't make it any less of a tyranny. Tyranny of one is still tyranny.

Re:Why the political ending?

[Kierthos]

Please. He's clearly the Fabricator-General of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

It's not implausible. It's actually very likely.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's implausible. This morning we learned that Apple has released the first preview of Swift 3.0. This is an important step in getting to Mars. After all, software will be crucial for any manned mission there, just like software was crucial to landing humans on the Moon. Swift is just the sort of language that's needed in order to write the complex and critical software needed for such a mission. So now that the software probably won't be an issue, it's just a matter of getting the rocketry and landing hardware figured out. If we could do it in the 1960s, we can do it again today.

I predict....

[CastrTroy]

If this is true, I predict we'll have dead bodies on Mars in 9 years and 6 months. I don't for a second doubt we could get people there in a decade, but getting them back is a whole different story. As is keeping them supplied with needed items if they plan to stay there. the ISS currently gets a resupply mission about once every 3 months. The longest it's ever gone has been 128 days without a resupply. To do the return flight, you basically have to wait three months for the planets to line up properly. So the people will have to be up there (in orbit or on the surface) for a significant period of time.

Also, there's no bail out plan. Once you are half way there, if something goes wrong, too bad. You basically have to carry out the mission. With a moon mission you can always skip the landing and return right away like they did with Apollo 13. But with Mars, you have to wait for the planets to be in the right spot so you that you can actually take a short path home. If the planets are in the wrong position, the trip could take a whole lot longer.

Re:I predict....

[Robotbeat]

Nothing in what you just said suggests why you think the mission will certainly end in death. That's a bold prediction, and not one anyone can make.

For some stupid reason, many people seems to conflate "some risk of a bad thing happening" to "it's a certainty that the bad thing WILL happen and will happen to everyone every single time." It's how NASA's 3% cancer risk from space radiation from a Mars mission becomes "your organs will be boiled! and it's impossible because you'll die during the mission from space radiation." This is just dumb. Space radiation isn't even as bad as smoking, and except for well-characterized and easily mitigated problems with acute doses (the biggest risk is if you have electronics which can't withstand the radiation and so fail, but that's easily engineered away), you're not going to die during the mission at all.

The first Shuttle flight, for instance, had a, I don't know, 10% chance of failure. It worked, because if you have a 10% chance of something happening, that means that you also have a 90% chance of it not happening.

I predict that getting to the surface of Mars in 9 years is much more realistic technologically today than getting to the Moon in 1969 (just 7 years after JFK's 1962 Rice University moon speech) was.

And the first flight probably won't kill anyone.

Re:I predict....

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Preferably ALL of them.

Re:I predict....

[wbr1]

And how many dead bodies did we litter the bottom of the ocean with exploring it? Exploration is risky stuff. You mitigate what you can, but you are doomed to failure if you never start.

Re:I predict....

[Megane]

1) Launch supplies to Mars every 3 months.

Nice idea, except that orbital mechanics makes this more difficult than it sounds. Over a two year period, the low energy trajectory varies from 6 months to 18 months. (And when you get there, this flips the other way unless you stay on Mars for a year!) Not to mention, how do you deliver supplies "every 3 months" to a spacecraft that takes 6 months to get to Mars? I guess you could launch them ahead of time on trajectories where the crew module or Mars would catch up later.

The fuel factory is the basic principle of the Mars Direct plan. Launch a first unmanned mission, then let it manufacture fuel for a year. Unless it fails, launch a manned mission two years after the first with another fuel factory, then repeat every two years.

Re:I predict....

[werepants]

The ISS hasn't gone an extended period without resupply because it wasn't designed to and there's no reason to. So that's an invalid datapoint with respect to what mission duration modern technology can achieve.

Admittedly, the astronauts will be more cut off from support or bailout options than on previous missions, but that can be remedied with a conservative mission profile. For instance, have a fully-fueled and checked out return vehicle (or better yet, multiple) and contingency supplies ready to go at Mars before the astronauts even leave Earth. This mission is far less dangerous than sailing voyages that were commonplace in the 1800's. We will never have a 100% guarantee of success, but if humans should never do anything risky, we should never do anything at all that involves leaving the house.

A reasonable estimate will show that the risk of death associated with a trip to Mars is about the same as or less than the risk from being a smoker. If we have no problem allowing people to make that choice with their lives, why can't we tolerate that same risk for a far more worthwhile cause?

Re:I predict....

[CrimsonAvenger]

Also, there's no bail out plan. Once you are half way there, if something goes wrong, too bad. You basically have to carry out the mission.

The phrase "Earth Return Trajectory" is probably what you were searching for. In the case of an Earth-Mars trip, you inject the spacecraft into a two year orbit that, left to itself, comes back to Earth. Requires more reaction mass than a Hohmann Transfer, but it has a (reasonably) fail-safe element.

Note that an Earth Return Trajectory uses more reaction mass to put itself into Mars orbit also, so it's definitely non-trivial. Severall km/s extra deltaV (in the vicinity of 2000 m/s between the Earth departure burn and the Mars arrival burn), which will require a lot of extra reaction mass....

Things left unsaid

[Nidi62]

Notice Musk just said landing people on Mars. He never said anything about whether they would be livingwhen they got there.....

Stupid predictions

[110010001000]

This is almost as dumb as Bill Gates predicting AI will take over. We are no closer to AI than we were 40 years ago, and no closer to putting people on Mars than we were 40 years ago either. It may not even be physically possible to create an AI or live on Mars.

Re:Stupid predictions

[AmiMoJo]

We are no closer to AI than we were 40 years ago

I don't recall computers 40 years ago being able to beat grand masters at chess or dominate gameshows by answering natural language questions. Practical, useful AIs are available on demand to anyone with a phone these days. Sure, they aren't pure artificial brain types, but they are capable of viewing and understanding the world.

no closer to putting people on Mars than we were 40 years ago either

Except perhaps for all the practice we have had at living in space for long periods of time, developing lighter and more agile space suits, getting many more countries on-board, that sort of thing. Oh, and the small fact that we have explored Mars in much greater detail, from satellites and from rovers, which is a precursor to landing there just as exploring the moon was.

Re:Stupid predictions

[110010001000]

AI is not chess playing programs or Go playing programs. Ridiculous.

Re:Stupid predictions

[swillden]

AI is not chess playing programs or Go playing programs. Ridiculous.

So what is? Seriously, can you answer that question?

People have tried for a long time to define what artificial intelligence is/will be. Turing defined it as a chatbot, essentially. Whether or not the Turing test has been passed is a question for debate, but if it hasn't it will be pretty soon. For a long time many people used chess as the gold standard. When that was beaten, Go looked like a good tool to measure AI.

So far, the skeptical definition of AI seems to be "Whatever a human can do that a computer can't yet do".

Re:And this is news how?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

And who cares what religious idiots say in 2016?

One way ticket?

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

That's what I foresee with the current technology.

Jokes aside, do we have to send human beings to Mars? What about sending robots first to build at least partially self-sustaining habitats? What about finding ways to protect people from the cosmic radiation during at least three years (x2) long journey to and from the planet? What about ways of bringing them back? What about the storage of supplies, more importantly food, for six years and the mass of a rocket? What about the loss of muscles and bones mass? Last time I checked currently we have no means of creating artificial gravity in space.

Dozens of very hard to resolve question and somehow Elon claims we'll have them resolved by 2024. Unbelievable.

Re:One way ticket?

[turbidostato]

"We aren't ever going to live anywhere else but the Earth. We evolved on Earth."

We aren't ever going to live anywhere else but East Africa. We evolved on East Africa.

Re:One way ticket?

[110010001000]

I knew some fool would post this. Here is a hint: East Africa is a LOT like West Africa. Antartica is also a LOT LIKE East Africa compared to Mars.

Re:One way ticket?

[Lab Rat Jason]

Then your point is lacking... because when something isn't routine, it's only a matter of time until it is, and the only way to make going to mars routine is to do it first in a non-routine condition, and do it so often that it becomes routine. People flying in airplanes used to not exist... then it was novel... then it was routine. Antarctica is a piece of cake compared to space, you realize that, right? And people have been successfully living in space for a while now.

Are there dangers on mars? Yes. Are people willing to face those dangers to achieve something important to them? Yes. There has always been two kinds of people in this world: Those who value discovery above human life, and those who value human life above discovery. You are obviously in the latter group. I'm also in the latter group... but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate someone who has the vision and huevos to try.

Re:One way ticket?

[Kierthos]

We don't know that yet. Yes, someone who stays on Mars for a substantial amount of time will have physiological changes in response to the lower gravity, similar to what the astronauts who are on the ISS go through in micro-gravity.

But those ISS personnel are up there for months at a stretch, and it didn't automatically kill them. (To note, Scott Kelly was up there for almost a full year, and he's been back on Earth since March 1st. We're still studying the effects on his health.

Are there physiological changes due to differences in gravity? Yes. Can they be ameliorated? To an extent. Can they be ignored. No. Are they automatically fatal? No.

Now, clearly, if someone lives on Mars (or the Moon) for years, well, they longer they live there, the less likely they're going to be able to return to Earth due to those changes.

No, it's not a solved set of problems yet. But that's a far cry from just flat out saying they're an unsolvable set of problems.

Re:Maybe, but not likely to be NASA

[aicrules]

Which is why Elon Musk is saying it. He plans on his company, SpaceX, being the one to send people to Mars, not NASA.

Re:So?

[bill_mcgonigle]

You land, radio back, confirm that it's a desolate wasteland with no liquid water and no signs of life, and wait a few months until the supplies run out and you starve/asphyxiate.

Somebody should let Musk know about this. It'll be terrible for marketing.

Re:Uh!

[Anonymous Coward]

BS!

I don't think the article said live, intact people...

Re:First Mars inhabitants

[NotInHere]

He can be the president of an ENTIRE planet.

Re:It's not implausible. It's actually very likely

[Austerity Empowers]

You got modded down for this, but this is actually the sort of visionary thinking that I have come to expect from top executives.

Re:Uh!

[AK Marc]

Potatoes on Mars is the first major step to french fries on Mars.