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Elon Musk Scales Up His Ambitions, Considering Going 'Well Beyond' Mars (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: For most of its 14-year existence, SpaceX has focused on designing and developing the hardware that will lead to its ultimate goal: colonizing Mars. These plans have remained largely secret from the general public, as company founder Elon Musk has dropped only the barest of hints. But that is expected to change on Sept. 27, during a session at the International Astronautical Congress, when Musk details some of these plans for the first time in a public forum. However, on the eve of the meeting, Musk dropped a surprise on Twitter. The workhorse spacecraft that will carry approximately 100 tons of cargo or 100 people to the surface of Mars, which until now has been popularly known as the Mars Colonial Transporter, can't be called that, Musk said. "Turns out MCT can go well beyond Mars, so will need a new name..." he tweeted on Friday evening. By Saturday evening he had a new name dubbing the spacecraft the "Interplanetary Transport System," or ITS. Mars, it turns out, isn't the solar system's only marginally habitable world for would-be new world colonists. The Moon, Venus, the asteroid Ceres, and outer Solar System moons Titan and Callisto all have some advantages that could allow for colonies to subsist. However, Mars has generally been the preferred destination -- due to its relative proximity to Earth, a thin atmosphere, and sources of water ice. Musk now seems to be suggesting that some of these more distant destinations, especially moons around Jupiter and Saturn, might be reachable with the Interplanetary Transport System.
ITS...
The ELF = Explodes on Launchpad in Florida
And he delivers real stuff that (mostly) works.
This is the kind of person we need as POTUS, not a choice between a couple of cynical, under-performing outrageous liars.
Yes, because it makes so much sense to start talking about colonizing Titan when we have not shown the ability or determination to colonize even the closest viable object.
Lunar colonization makes much more sense as a starting point than Martian colonization, but that isn't compelling enough to get funding. Now that people are getting bored of Mars (without even getting there to discover a whole new level of boredom), he needs to buff his bluff to maintain any level of interest.
He must be stopped at all costs!
I bet Musk loves the fictional Weyland-Yutani.
I'm a really big fan of SpaceX and a lot of the other things that Musk is doing. He's helping solve global warming with Tesla and SolarCity not just with his own companies but by pushing other companies to follow. The Falcon 9 is as of right now the cheapest rocket for medium sized payloads even without reuse (they aren't launching by themselves the very small payloads, and until the Falcon Heavy is setup they won't have the ability to launch the largest satellites). That number will go down even further if/when reuse is successful (and honestly I was very skeptical initially about reuse when they were just starting with the Falcon 1). However, this sort of statement worries me a lot, especially in the context of the recent AMOS-6 disaster where they lost a rocket on the ground and destroyed the satellite in the process http://spacenews.com/analysis-disaster-on-the-launchpad-implications-for-spacex-and-the-industry/. We need to colonize other worlds, simply as a backup plan for serious disasters on Earth, but it would seem a lot better if they focused on systems just for Mars and didn't jump out so far ahead as to aim at other bodies (as cool as that is). I worry that they are proceeding too fast, and that if they fail, it may not be for a very long time until anyone else tries anything similar.
While I'm totally on board with trying to visit other parts of our solar system, here's the bit I don't quite get. Who exactly is going to pay for these trips to Mars or wherever else? Despite their general success I don't see SpaceX being able to fund it themselves any time soon and there is no obvious economic return from such a trip given that at this point it is purely exploratory in nature. The only institution with enough money and no need for a profit is the government so how does he propose to get the government to pay for it OR where is the ROI on the trip for any would be private investors?
I don't ask this question to be snarky but it's a pretty important question and I think it's being glossed over at this point. I don't have any problem with tax dollars being used for this kind of exploration but some parts of our congress are pretty against raising the taxes that would be necessary to pay for a trip like this. NASA doesn't have the budget at this point nor do they have a congressional mandate to support what Mr. Musk is proposing. And I just don't see private sponsors with deep enough pockets to fund the trip stepping up to the plate.
Elon Musk is a complete idiot.
A complete idiot who has made the first practical rocket with a recoverable first stage which is likely going to shortly go into use, has made successful electric cars which have pushed other companies into making similar autos. He may be overly ambitious here (and I suspect he is), but whatever his failings, he isn't an idiot.
First, Mars, then Proxima Centauri (I heard the weather is nice there, at this time of year) ...or wherever.
Somewhere in between, if time allows, I'm sure a lot of people are interested to see a working Hyperloop.
By the way. How comes it's "March" for the month, but "Mars" for the planet and the god ?
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
How about we get to Mars and get the Model 3 out in 2018 and then we'll talk stretch goals?
The entire basis of this article is a few tweets, I wouldn't equate a few random comments, even from the head of a number of related companies as a full fledged ambition. Though even if the MCT/ITS is primarily intended for Mars transit (assuming its ever built) its nice to think that they're considering other destinations as well in the planning stages. One of the larger problems historically in the space industry is that too many craft/satellites/rockets are designed for a very narrow, often single use, purpose. That failing is on its way out in the launch industry, is possibly being changed in the satellite industry but still exists pretty heavily in the science probe area.
Radiation, anyone? Have wondered about it since the 60's. Continue to here very little (not nothing) about it in the teens.
We've yet to even land a human being on Mars, and Musk is talking about how his spacecraft will take people well beyond Mars -- to where, one of Jupiter's moons? That's nearly a two-year journey, and we haven't even figured out how to return people to Earth from Mars... so basically it's a suicide mission.
Let's take one step at a time, especially considering that one of Musk's rockets just reminded us that space travel is hard.
His self driving cars can't see a street sweeper right in front of it... **crash**... driver dead.... His satellite booster explodes on the pad and he blames a possible UFO ...
And I trust this guy with Interplanetary travel.... rrrrrright.....
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Sorry to break this to you "Master5000" but you haven't come up with jack shit in your entire lifetime. I know you will keep posting shit and whining because that is all you have and it is heartbreaking. It truly is.
Can you even build a... wheel?
NASA went to the moon on a massive budget. A major part of SpaceX's goals is to *reduce* the cost of space travel. And they aren't aiming at the moon primarily because there aren't enough resources on the moon to easily have a self-sustaining colony.
He may be overly ambitious here (and I suspect he is), but whatever his failings, he isn't an idiot.
I think he's more of an idiot savant - gifted in some ways, a little wacky in others. Like that whole "pretty sure the universe is a computer simulation" thing. He has lots of money, some good ideas, and a knack for hiring smart people. Keep in mind that *they're* really the ones who build the rockets and cars.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I hope he's developing some parallel plans. First, how to head off the Belter/Earth war? The Belter fringe made a real mess dropping some rocks into Earth's gravity well.
What's his plan for spin-stabilizing Ceres?
All targets suggested by the Kerbal Space Program to be sure. After all Earth orbit is halfway to anywhere.
The argument that there's a high probability we live in a simulation has been seriously discussed by philosophers such as Nick Bostrom. See http://www.simulation-argument.com/. I disagree with the argument but it isn't by itself a wacky idea or one we should dismiss out of hand.
1) Concerning the crash in China, it's not even known if autopilot was on. Most of these "Autopilot did it!" stories have turned out to be people just trying to find someone/something else to blame for their accidents.
2) Musk did not "blame a possible UFO", that was part of the media's silly season about the disaster. He simply tweeted that they're not ruling anything out in the investigation, and reporters put two and two together and got negative six hundred twenty three. On the same note, Musk did not ask twitter to "solve the accident for them" as also was reported; SpaceX put out a request for footage of the event from anyone who may have filmed it. The context was in relation to a sound heard before the incident, so it sounds like the motive is to triangulate the sound to see if it was near the pad or not.
"You abandoned me! You abandoned my hatred!" "I... I have cuttlefish..."
I was wrong about Space Nutters. I really apologize. I now realize I was wrong when I said that you guys aren't going to Mars. It seems that Mars is easily reachable, and their current Mars spaceship has over-performed and is capable of going BEYOND Mars. This is really exciting because we now know we will be able to populate the galaxy.
It seems logical if one vehicle can make it to Mars then, unlike airplanes, it is possible to link a train of such vehicles together and move on across even more vast distances. No air resistances changes how difficult such a challenge would be.
If you can return a rocket stage to earth and land then it would seem possible to use it a few times at good profit and then instead of returning it to earth work out a way to park it in orbit for later use in a wagon train type space mission.
If the emdrive thrust turns out to work then things go even faster if you have an affordable way to get to orbit in the first place.
"Hey kids! Look over there.
No not on Tesla's finances or on safety concerns about the stuff we're making now.
Look over there to my new pie-in-the-sky idea."
And when the whole Musk empire finally goes bankrupt it will all have been a big conspiracy against progress.
Nothing to do with big ideas bumping against harsh reality.
Space Y
NASA never had a reusable first stage, and they certainly never have been able to offer launches at the price SpaceX is asking. And in the near future, NASA will likely hitch rides to the ISS on SpaceX vehicles. And before the Model S came along, electrical vehicles were considered to be impractical and/or ugly affairs. The Model S made EV's objects of desire, and managed to convert even some petrolheads who did not want to believe that EV's could ever hope to offer an exciting drive. None of this happened because of sweeping, fundamental inventions, but of incremental improvements and making the right combinations of technology in the right places. That's what a visionary does, by the way: they are not inventors, but rather make use of what's already there, and invest in taking the last steps to make possible the almost-possible.
As for the exploding rocket... the fact that it blew up before it started (or was even fueled) could be good news for Musk; it means the accident didn't happen because of a fundamental issue with the design, it could be a problem with the supporting equipment or the fueling procedure.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Bank of America some time back released a report with similar speculation that we are in a simulation. "Simulation" probably isn't accurate but as a model it may actually be useful for us to adopt this view at least for the next few hundred years
http://www.businessinsider.com...
What exactly does 'solving global warming' mean?
THE REAL issue is where is the cure for cancer? Where is the FUSION POWER? Where is clean energy production? How do we care and feed for 7 billion people?
That argument is completely moronic. There are endless numbers of problems yet to be solved. You solve the ones that you have the means and ability to solve and hope others work on the rest. You don't have to pick one and all the others can bugger off. The notion that we shouldn't try to go to space because we haven't solved every conceivable problem on Earth is idiotic and short sighted. Trying to go to space HAS solved a lot of terrestrial problems. The value of satellites alone justifies everything we've done in space 100 fold and those same satellites help to some degree with every single problem you just mentioned. Most estimates of the value of the space program indicate it has in the worst possible case somewhere between a 3-8X return on every dollar spent. The only shocking thing is that we are too short sighted to spend more on the space program and related research.
And asking Elon Musk "where is clean energy production" is a pretty stupid question given the particular ventures he's involved in.
These problems should come before billionaires playing model rockets.
"Playing model rockets"? Weird, last I checked SpaceX was a real business carrying real cargo and doing something genuinely useful in driving down the cost to orbit. What have you done with your life that was anywhere close to as valuable to the human race?
Ceres is large enough to have marginal gravity, but more importantly, it's a giant ball of ice. Since it only has marginal gravity, less than that of the Moon even, makes it very easy to get on and off of it with hardly any fuel. In fact, even though it's past the orbit of Mars, the fuel budget to do a manned trip (and safe return) is only 20% more than that of a moon mission. Mainly due to the tiny tiny gravity well.
moox. for a new generation.
The argument that there's a high probability we live in a simulation has been seriously discussed by philosophers such as Nick Bostrom.
Just because some people have "seriously discussed" an idea doesn't make the idea a credible one. The whole "we are in a simulation" is just a modern repackaging of philosophical questions that have been discussed in some cases literally for centuries.
I disagree with the argument but it isn't by itself a wacky idea or one we should dismiss out of hand.
Oh it's a pretty wacky idea but to date the evidence to support it is for all practical purposes nonexistent. Find a way to make the concept falsifiable and then it will become worth discussing. As it stands it is as much a waste of time as wondering if god exists.
He has lots of money, some good ideas, and a knack for hiring smart people. Keep in mind that *they're* really the ones who build the rockets and cars.
Gifted engineers are pumped out of top schools all the time. Nobody is pumping out entrepreneurs to attract them and harness their talents for far fetched ideas like Mars rockets, or even reusable orbital rockets. There is more than one kind of smarts.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
What exactly does 'solving global warming' mean?
NAZI space mirrors to block out the Sun
Mr Burns is philanthropist. You little people are just too stupid to understand his genius.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
But you can see here why Musk is a successful and important tech entrepreneur. He didn't set out to make an electric car because it made economic or technical sense; he set out to do that because he wanted one.
Which is to some degree a load of crap. Yes I know he has claimed that and for the most part I think that claim is largely nonsense. People set out to do all sorts of things but they don't actually happen unless there is an actual path to success. You'll notice that Elon Musk has yet to start a company that is truly clean sheet. People built financial software before he did. People built rockets before he did. People built electric cars before he did. He was in a position to improve on what had come before but make no mistake that none of his businesses were started without a path to profitability. He knew from day one that it was feasible to build an electric car. What he didn't know was whether he could build a viable electric car business. If all he wanted was an electric car he could have done that in his garage in his spare time.
Pure engineers and MBA types don't advance the state of technology.
Some do, most don't. You could say that about every single profession out there. Even among those who are trying to advance technology most fail at it. The biggest reason is that the key to success in most cases is being able to manage people and get them to do something collectively. Advancing human knowledge is rarely a solo endeavor so your argument that particular types of individuals often fail is a flawed argument because you could say that about most people in most professions most of the time and it would be equally true. This includes most entrepreneurs.
Mars is at the bottom of a fairly deep gravity well and has a very thin atmosphere. This makes landing on Mars is challenging. The atmosphere is thick enough to cause problems but not thick enough for useful aerobreaking. Getting useful loads down to the ground is a a technically challenging problem, and getting back into orbit is just difficult enough to be annoyingly expensive.
The Moon, Ceres, Titan, Callisto, all are easier to land and take-off from than Mars, and since you can land and take-off with much less fuel there's a lot more useful payload capacity to work with. I guess that if you can get a human live to Mars, Titan and Callisto are equally possible.
I'm not convinced by Venus though, unless someone really thinks cloud-cities can be made to work.
Let's figure out that pad explosion before we start selling tickets to Titan.
Despite the tech advancement this moron can't make his cars not catch fire...
In case you hadn't noticed, every other type of vehicle on the planet is powered with a liquid of such explosive force that merely igniting the fumes inside a vessel can be enough to blow steel apart. In other words, there's not a single auto manufacturer on this planet who can make a fire-proof/explosive-proof vehicle.
Tesla modified their design to include a titanium plate to prevent a rupture of fuel cells after a single incident. That's a far cry from pretty much every other manufacturer who likes to legally refute that there's even a fucking problem to address after the first dozen deaths occur due to a defect.
And you can try and dismiss his "tech advancement" all you want. Bottom line is there's not a single vendor who's made an electric vehicle that matches a Tesla. If you can't see that as visionary, you're blind.
A major part of SpaceX's goals is to *reduce* the cost of space travel.
Worth mentioning they've succeeded......costs of launching a satellite have dropped by an order of magnitude or two.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So the circle-jerk can stop.
You're a fucking moron. Gas-powered cars catch on fire all the time; they just don't make the news because it's so common. What have you done that's so noteworthy, anyway?
Yeah, how is it that a single private business can't achieve what it took one of the richest countries on the planet a nationwide effort on a larger scale than the Manhattan Project, and cost over $110B, inflation adjusted, with every single player in aerospace engineering working on different aspects of it?
What a moron!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
People who never accomplish anything, but sit around throw insults at people trying to...
Can you imagine the outcry if NASA had lost a shuttle on the pad in a similar accident? SpaceX is a joke.
Just make sure he leaves Europa alone. Don't want to upset the monoliths.
1) Concerning the crash in China, it's not even known if autopilot was on.
Funny, Elon has no problem confirming within hours that telemetry proves autopilot was off when a crash happens.
Is it "ITS" or "IT'S"?
South African's are certainly not idiots. It's just that their intelligence solely revolves around concocting new scams and schemes to separate stupid people form their money. Don't forget that Musk was a significant part of PayPal. It's clear you've never actually been to South Africa, much less have any real contact with the local residents. Go there, live there, work there for a length of time. Then you'll see Musk for what he really is.
Bigger and bigger as Elon's finances get smaller and smaller.
For Musk, this isn't just a *theory*: it's fairly obvious he's using the cheat system. ;)
:::The Spear in the heart of the Other is the Spear in the heart of You; You are He - Surak of Vulcan:::
all these worlds are yours except europa attempt no landing there use them together use them in peace
"as a model it may actually be useful for us to adopt this view at least for the next few hundred years"
Not really.
The negative aspect of embracing this idea is that ramifications of bad decisions suddenly no longer matter.
Wipe out half the world's biodiversity due to AGW? Doesn't matter, those animals were just simulated... etc...
Alternatively, why be risk-averse with your investment choices? It doesn't matter don't you know, we live in a simulation!
Why do you think a *bank* made that announcement?
I don't have to: NASA lost two space shuttles with the loss of 14 lives.
I love the fact that he's at least thinking big, about using his $billions for big, long term stuff that sure, might make him piles of cash but would also seriously advance humanity.
OTOH, I'm just sort of afraid he's either not totally serious or tons of people are going to die going along with his ideas....not because of THEM (if they volunteer, that's their choice) but because it would then set such projects back so far they'll never happen.
-Styopa
Using paragraphs would help to spread the message. Oh, wait. Only gay nig.gers use paragraphs. So...yeah.
A major part of SpaceX's goals is to *reduce* the cost of space travel.
Worth mentioning they've succeeded......costs of launching a satellite have dropped by an order of magnitude or two.
Very misleading statements. Yes, the cost of launching satellites has been reducing over time. No SpaceX did not cause that to happen.
As it stands SpaceX is merely competitive with what other organizations already had years ago. Cost parity does not equate to success of the goal "Reduce the cost of space travel."
He hasn't done any of those things, his company has.
Electric cars are a fad.
Of course they aren't, read about Howard Hughes some time, or if you don't like reading, watch the film starring Di Caprio, it wasn't too bad.
We will one day live on every large rocky surface in the solar system... ... just not in Elon Musk's lifetime.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Meaning cost of dropping satellite?
Seriously, for any trip to go beyond mars, they MUST have nuclear power, and very likely nuclear engines.
Im guessing that he is looking multiples on these with NASA, along with Bigelow and Bezo.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not that I agree with embracing simulationism (or whatever you want to call it), but how would it not matter? Regardless of whether something is simulated or real, its relationship to us does not change, to us and our subjective experience its real. Just because a bullet in the matrix is a simulated bullet doesnt mean that it wont hurt when it hits you.
Turn the light off before you go, you jaapie shit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If we can get past facing ourselves first. Demonizing one another, moral posturing, etc. We live in a post-scarcity age in resources, but distribution and the stifling of new research has been holding us back from this great vision.
Our concept of self drives a latent sense of self-importance and self-identity. If I believe I am a special snowflake then I will go to great lengths to protect myself, nourish myself, and exist to the best of my ability. The prospect that I am nothing more than a simulated entity, regardless of how real it may seem, fundamentally devalues my own perceptions of my identity. Meditate on this a while, and you will see that the same concept is trivially extended to anything else in the universe, for if I do not value myself then I surely do not value you, or the whales, or the beetles that swarm and multiply upon the earth.
This is not new philosophy, but I lack the formal education to point you towards the exact philosophical classification or identify masters who espoused these views. Perhaps someone can help? Comments from those who identify as "real people" only please :)
I don't have to: NASA lost two space shuttles with the loss of 14 lives.
The also lost three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire caused by a fire on the pad.
I am a Statistician. One false move and you are a Statistic
"he tweeted on Friday evening".
That was a terrible accident. I know they were short on time and there was some justification for pushing ahead with the test, but you couldn't pay me a million dollars to get inside a pure O2 atmosphere. It kind of suggests how trusting the team was during the Apollo days: the astronauts had to trust everyone, and everyone had to trust everyone else to do their job properly and keep an eye out in case anything was amiss.
Attempt no landing there.
As the caption mentions, he's reading Excession by Iain Banks. ...way beyond Mars.
Pretty much just, 'windbag'. Whatever, Elon.
Elon should get the dick out of his ass and just work on getting in to orbit without exploding. The more he talks, the less impressed I am by his grand claims.
I would go colonize Mars ASAP if we had the chance. But I'm the exception. I mean other humans can't be bothered to live in places like Antarctica, the Sahara desert, or North Dakota. How do I expect that they are going to colonize Mars? They would go to Mars, declare it a desert and come back. Why aren't we all over the moon?
I don't live in Antarctica, but not cause I don't want to.
If I punch the wall it still hurts. It doesn't matter if its a simulation or not.
Just maybe, he should first set his sights on getting a craft three feet into the air before it blows up :-)
Then, and only then, should he consider aiming for the moons of the gas giants.
This post bought to you by the numbers pi and e, and the letter "schadenfreude".
Does anyone give a shit what an anonymous coward thinks? Duh......
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
How many light years is Venus?