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Elon Musk Proposes Spaceship That Can Send 100 People To Mars In 80 Days (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveiled the Mars vehicle -- the spaceship his company plans to build to transport the first colonists to Mars. It will have a diameter of 17 meters. The plan is to send about 100 people per trip, though Musk wants to ultimately take 200 or more per flight to make the cost cheaper per person. The trip can take as little as 80 days or as many as 150 depending on the year. The hope is that the transport time will be only 30 days "in the more distant future." The rocket booster will have a diameter of 12 meters and the stack height will be 122 meters. The spaceship should hold a cargo of up to 450 tons depending on how many refills can be done with the tanker. As rumored, the Mars vehicle will be reusable and the spaceship will refuel in orbit. The trip will work like this: First, the spaceship will launch out of Pad 39A, which is under development right now at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. At liftoff, the booster will have 127,800 kilonewtons of thrust, or 28,730,000 pounds of thrust. Then, the spaceship and booster separate. The spaceship heads to orbit, while the booster heads back to Earth, coming back within about 20 minutes. Back on Earth, the booster lands on a launch mount and a propellant tanker is loaded onto the booster. The entire unit -- now filled with fuel -- lifts off again. It joins with the spaceship, which is then refueled in orbit. The propellant tankers will go up anywhere from three to five times to fill the tanks of the spaceship. The spaceship finally departs for Mars. To make the trip more attractive for its crew members, Musk promises that it'll be "really fun" with zero-G games, movies, cabins, games, a restaurant. Once it reaches Mars, the vehicle will land on the surface, using its rocket engines to lower itself gently down to the ground. The spaceship's passengers will use the vehicle, as well as cargo and hardware that's already been shipped over to Mars, to set up a long-term colony. At the rate of 20 to 50 total Mars trips, it will take anywhere from 40 to 100 years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilization with one million people on Mars, says Musk.
Let's try to solve the exploding rocket issue first before we start sending people to Mars, kk, Elon?
He's missing the part where you get a bunch of people to send you money for the fake chance to die on Mars. Where is his reality show that will fund everything?
http://www.mars-one.com/
With his own money, cool! That's very kind of him we totally accept.
No? He wants to spend someone else's money? Then no, the money is still better spent on other branches of science, sending people to a dead rock to try to see if they can survive is fine for a Bear Gryllis episode, but its not science and it won't advance us.
This is just the Musk personality cult + astroturf army, if Nasa can't get the go ahead to send people to mars for no reason, get Musk to 'inspire' his promoters to let him do it. And so what if people die, they'll have signed the EULA.
What is with all these Summary's that don't have a single paragraph break?
They are easy to do.
(N/T)
You Must Construct Additional Pylons!
You manage to do both. Sounds like Mars is your kinda place.
No word in the article about return trips to Earth. For a small pioneer colony that makes total sense to me, but when you talk about setting up a 1-million strong kind of colony, or even just the minimum of 4,000 (40 flights with 100 folk on board) you'll have to consider return trips as well. Cannibalizing your own space ships doesn't sound like too good an idea for that (though staying in orbit at both Earth and Mars, does).
Trump U
"Donner, party of 1"
With how difficult space travel is, and how badly the best laid plans can go wrong, at least they won't run out of food for a few months worst case.
I think he's being a bit optimistic. Living conditions in Mars are closest to Antarctica on earth, and if you read about life in McMurdo Station it isn't pleasant. Additionally you can read about the large amount of supplies that are required every year to keep the base going.
We will get to Mars eventually, maybe even sooner than some people think, but a permanent colony is more than 30 years away.
Buy a Tesla
> only 7 deatrhs on the space shuttle and it got shitcanned.
14, dumbass.
While sending 80 peeps to Mars is cool, what are they going to do while they are there? I mean, it's cool and all, but we are getting a head of our selves. We don't have a base on the moon, we don't have a base on Mars. We don't have a way to build them, because we haven't even bothered with that stage. I'm down for people going to Mars, but I more down to hear about how we are doing the small steps needed to get to the point in time first.
Make a fucking base on the moon first. Use the moon to figure out how to do it, so when we do decide to send people to Mars, we'll have experience with keeping peeps alive on other planets (or not earthly objects). But until then, I don't give a fuck about a space bus that can take 80 or over 9000 people.
Be seeing you...
with Passepartout?
The games start out as zero-G laser tag, with the winners moving on to a grueling regimen of real-time strategy games...
So are we sending lawyers, or members of government?
I come here for the love
dark they are, and golden-eyed.
When China can bomb us with rock from Earth moon base, our flag on Mars is relic of past, dead USA
Hahahaha,,so true,,love it
Doing some maths... sending 200 people per trip, and 50 trips, means 10k people sent there. Assuming half are women, and each woman has 5 children, there'd then be 35k people. Assume every 20 years each new generation also has 5 children. It'd take 80 years for the population to reach a population of 977k, minus those who died in those 80 years. That said, why would a million people be needed or even desirable? Large numbers of manual laborers won't be required due to the large amount of advanced machinery that'll be involved in any work occurring on Mars. New tech and heavy automation will be required for nearly everything; Uncle Joe's 200-year-old farming traditions won't cut it. There's also the issue of the large number of people born on Mars having never been to Earth and wanting to go there... and not coming back. They didn't sign up for a dangerous frontier life like their ancestors did, so one can't use the "they volunteered fully knowing the risks" excuse for how dangerous it is.
Sending even 100 people is pointless unless it's been proven that a handful of people can survive there. Experiments have been done in the Arctic, but it's still in some doubt given the different environments.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
14 deaths. Only 7 of those were deatrhs.
finally musk has lost all his marbles.
Not really. This is nothing new. Elon doesn't have a filter between his brain and his mouth. He thinks out loud. He spews a constant stream of idea and opinions. But he has made enough of his crazy ideas actually work that it would be foolish to dismiss anything he says.
I stand corrected. :)
Golgafrincham
Additionally you can read about the large amount of supplies that are required every year to keep the base going.
True but that is because nobody on an antarctic base spends their time trying to grow things (unless that is part of their science project). If you have everyone on the base dedicating all their time to growing food, finding resources, making repairs etc. you will probably need far fewer resources to support the base. This is impractical in Antarctica because it is cheaper to ship the food there than to support even more people living there who try to grow food themselves.
However I do agree that this proposal seems rather optimistic but the task is so amazingly hard that I expect that any Mars colonization mission will always appear overly optimistic until one actually succeeds.
we should transform the atomosphere into something livable first. Introduce large amounts of heat-absorbing gas (such as CO_2) that will melt the ice and simultaneously prevent it from evaporating to create a reservoir of liquid water. Then introduce photosynthetic organisms/plants (genetically modified?) so that oxygen is introduced. After that, implement a process similar to natural succession growth (how forests form from abandoned land etc) to gradually support large mammals while increasing or balancig oxygen content at a percentage to Earth. Then, we can talk about raising human food sources, and eventually let humans live there without having to dig holes in the ground or wear stupid suits.
...only the twist is that thanks to time dilation while Fogg thought it only took 80 days it actually took 81 in solar system's reference frame so he actually lost the bet.
So, 1 million people on mars.
With the perchlorate soil, what exactly will they be eating? Earth Takeout?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
to put the space ship into orbit. And then to land it. It would use a lot less fuel.
If your goal is self-sufficient colonizing of mars then starting by designing space buses to send (unskilled according to TFA) people to mars reflects a depressing lack of planning and vision.
So basically, like Donald Trump, but with better follow-through?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I like to think Mr. Musk could accomplish this in his lifetime. However a statue containing his ashes could be sitting on mars a few hundred years after his death. I wish him luck with his plans.
I'm all for exploring a dead planet but where's the water coming from? Race contingency is a good thing but maybe we should try setting up a colony >in space first.
I wish this effort all the best, but I think we're going to find that life without stable ecosystems or a magnetosphere is not going to be easy. We take much for granted here on Earth, and though the technology may allow us to land some people there, I predict that living healthy lives with a stable local food supply is going to take a lot more than the rocket scientists are counting on. Biochemistry and ecology have vastly more complex open systems to deal with, but that's what we come from.
Better send automated manufacturing there and let the robots get some things right first before the colonists land.
If you're going to Mars at all anyway messing around with just a few people means certain death for all. With enough people you have redundancy in skill and ability, a lot of pure manual labor on tap if required, and lots more of a drive to make the community continue. In think the timeframe is pretty realistic to be honest and the goal not very out of reach. Think of where we were technologically forty years ago, across many fields of science...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Less sniffing.
Jules Verne, eat your heart out.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Is he going to use to keep 100 people confined in a restricted space for 80 days from tearing out each others throats? This only works on submarines since the sailors all want to go home one day but ad it stands Mars is a one way, survival of the fittest voyage.
First, they need to send emergency rations for 3 years, then they can send people.
Otherwise they could send a Soylent Green manufacturing plant and lots of lawyers and telephone cleaners...
Just putting a manned spaceship into orbit of Mars would probably take more fuel than landing. Putting satellites into orbit is already quite hard, due to the gravity being basically 1/3rd of Earths. The problem is that people are squishy and don't stay perfectly still, so you have to constantly make small course corrections. The more people, the bigger the problem. The gravity means that your window of angle of entry is that much smaller where Mars will actually capture you into orbit.
Then there is the aerobraking! At sea level Mars has 0.6% the pressure of Earth. This is why they crash probes into Mars instead of trying to land them. Parachutes won't work with the weight of rovers and what the humans will be coming down in is much heavier than rovers. It just takes more time to slow down, what's the problem with that? True you could take more time to slow down, but the problem is either you are going to be too high up and just plummet to your death, or you are going to have to come in at an angle where you crash land, and people are squishy and their bodies don't like crash landings. The different between gravity and viscosity make anything in between very difficult. There is also the problem that people need to eat, pee and poop, thus things move around and well death ensues.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
TFS says "booster will have 127,800 kilonewtons of thrust, or 28,730,000 pounds of thrust"
Yes, there's more detail than the previous /. on this topic. But it's easy to get mired in detail while forgetting, you know, the forest for the trees.
So while others discuss/dispute the details; the people with a larger vision ask "Is this a reasonable proposition?" And the answer is ... we will have to wait and see. It is futile to speculate at this very early stage, especially for those of us who are not experts in the appropriate sciences. Please constrain yourselves to your particular expertise.
Take a moment to consider whether any of us have any authority regarding this proposition. Is this not just another provocation for mental masturbation? Is it Slashdot clickbait?
...omphaloskepsis often...
As with anything huge, it's better to aim for the higher goal so that if you fail you've still accomplished something worthwhile. If they try and fail at this, Moon will be a piece of cake. Another issue with Moon is that you can't make fuel there. That's kinda bad, because it means you have to take enough with you.
Let's assume that with a decent design, efficient management and commercial flair the cost of a Mars mission is about the same - per journey: take-off to landing.
Let's also assume that for every populated launch, there is another that just carries supplies. The cost for 100 people to the red planet is about $1Bn - $10m per head. Now, I am sure there are plenty of people who would pay that amount. There are also many more that we (as the occupants of Earth) would be willing to raise the capital to send them - whether they want to go or not.
But to sustain $20Bn or more investment for 40 - 100 years before you have a viable colony needs more financing than one single internet outfit can provide - there are only so many millionaires who would be willing to walk away from their lives here on Earth. That kind of investment would only come from a nation or a religion.
It would also seem likely that some time after Musk got his operation running, there would be other operators entering the game. They would be setting up alternative colonies, for their own reasons and with their own goals in mind. It occurs to me that for a competing group, the simplest, least risky and cheapest route would be to NOT start up themselves, but to infiltrate or take over Musk's operation and then gain control of the colony (either by force, commercial shenanigans on Earth or indoctrination of the colonists) once it became self-sufficient.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Why people?
Because you don't have a colony without people, by definition.
Elon Musk is playing Kerbal in real life.
Admirable.
Doesn't it make more sense to test the building a colony on the Moon where it is easier to fix problems and send help?
... wouldn't you rather be sucking on a great big nigger cock?
80 people crammed into 17 meter diameter tin can for 80-150 days. It could easily happen
it's just a diversion from the tesla lawsuit, hyperbust and rocket explosion..
like come one. who the fuck cares if musk announces another popular mechanics article? FRIGGIN NOBODY.
and that's what this is at this point: ITS A POPULAR MECHANICS ARTICLE grade announcement. just announce flying cars at the same time.
I wasn't part of the last generation who had the privilege to see mankind set their foot on the moon. It's going to be a wonderful moment if I ever get to see this happen during my life time, and damn it really seems like there is a genuine push to make it happen!
where do i go to waste my money on this dopey scheme
Winner of the 2016 Broken Logic Award! and runner up for Moron of the Century.
You can go back to cursing Discovery Channel, mailing your packets of man-love to Donnie Dumbf, cheering Fox News, and praying for opposing thumbs now.
What about bankers?
Unregulated, they will be able to make Mars the most prosperous place in the galaxy by trading the assets there between themselves for ever increasing amounts of money. The freedom to create new complex derivative schemes without pesky oversight, will eliminate risk from the Mars economy, heralding a new dawn of prosperity and growth in the value of the assets that presently lie dormant there. New forms of high frequency trading will further boost liquidity, increasing investment and economic stability.
Before you know it, Mars will go from a worthless planet full of rocks, to one where those same rocks are worth trillions, and all without a single rock needing to be overturned. That, my friend, is the sort of true innovation that has built the West into the current powerhouse it is.
A ship for 100 people is to small, Congress has 435 members. And you don't want to send them to Mars, anyway.
We know little (so-far) about Trump's follow-through.
And I'm pretty sure we *don't want to* know more. Really not.
and then politics change on Earth (Trump Jr. Jr. takes over and says "them martian foreigners gonna build a wall and pay for it" or... finally Jihad wins and they say Qur'an doesn't approve of leaving Earth or... whatever the fuck).
What now? They are 100% dependent on deliveries form Earth. It's going to take (optimistically) yet another 50-100 years until they are kinda autonomous, the first semiconductor foundry is still 75 years away. Now? Starve?
It would have been done a long time ago. It isn't, and it will never happen. Ever.
You guys are like excitable 8 year olds that are being taken to see a mall Santa Claus. You've got your list of improbable things that you *wish* are true.
I was thinking of booking myself on this. But even though I'll be getting the chance to stand on another planet, the trip sounds really boring. 80 days without access to a good restaurant and the latest Hollywood blockbuster? Who's going to put themselves through that kind of hardship?
That's convinced me. Sign me up!!!
There's already people prepared to spend 100k on a suborbital flight. I imagine a few orbital joyrides would be a great shakedown, and there would be plenty of people prepared to pay upward of 500k for a week long luxury cruise in low Earth orbit. That would raise funds to develop the full interplanetary infrastructure.
Yes, a 30 day transit does reduce the radiation amount - unless it runs into a CME.
There is nothing in that crew section for radiation shielding...
Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
You're right. A 7.2% failure rate is horrible. (The Delta IV has a 3% failure rate, the Atlas V only 1.5% and the Ariane V a 2.3% rate. Only the Proton is worse, at 13% but that's since 1965.)
Not to come off as an apologist but my opinion when it comes to rockets is that if one isn't blowing some of them up then they probably aren't trying to push any technological or economic boundaries. I would actually be disappointed in them if they weren't experiencing some setbacks because that would mean they weren't trying as hard as they could. Rockets are complicated and there are a lot of things that can go wrong. They push the limits of our engineering capabilities. If you don't step over the line from time to time your pace of learning is going to be slow because you don't know where our limits are anymore. Doing the same safe already proven things everyone else has done will result in slow or no progress.
We should only send people who are ridiculously good looking. Then in a thousand years from now it would be an awesome sex tourism destination.
Progress advances non-linearly, and fastest when someone with a vision leads.
Vision still needs funding. The biggest obstacle to getting to Mars is probably not a technical one. I suspect we could resolve enough of the technical issues within a relatively sort time span to get some boots on Mars with sufficient motivation at least for a brief visit. The biggest problem is one of funding. No private enterprise is going to fund an exploratory trip like this because there is no reasonable likelihood of return on investment. I just don't see how this thing gets built any time soon even if it is technologically feasible.
The only organization with enough money and no need for a financial return is the government. There is no evidence that there is any appetite in the US government to go to Mars and really the US is the only country currently with the technology to make it happen in the near future. (China, Russia or the EU might eventually but aren't there today) I don't see the US government getting interested unless it becomes a national pride thing kind of like the Cold War. We didn't go to the moon for science. We went to the moon to beat the Soviets. The only way I see it happening is if we get into another space race with the Chinese or the Russians and that seems improbable at the moment.
I love Elon Musk's optimistic approach to big problems. I really do hope he can get it done. I just have my doubts that some of his proposals are realistic in time frame he proposes given the economic realities of the situation. Maybe he has a plan to make it happen but so far I've seen scant evidence of one.
Somebody clearly has lost his marbles.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
While sending 80 peeps to Mars is cool, what are they going to do while they are there?
You have literally an entire planet to explore and you can't figure out what they are going to do when they get there? That's the easiest question to answer imaginable. The only real question is where to start. There are serious problems with actually getting there but what to do if we do get there is a question that answers itself.
getting a rocket 3-5x the size of saturn V's into orbit ?? hahaha
In the immortal slashdot phrase, it's just an engineering problem.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Not only that, but many trips were in confined spaces with a limited number of people. Example: Jamestown was originally settled by sending 104 people on a 144 day voyage in ships with 8m beams and 20-25m decks.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
What will the Minimum Wage be on Mars? How will we be sure that the person who mines is paid a fair wage?
Is this "Ark A" or "Ark B"?
Phileas Fogg to sign up for the 80 day trip to Mars.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Making a base on the moon is dangerous, it could lead to many problems. For example, people might start sending their nuclear waste there which could lead to them exploding and taking the moon off orbit. Or people of Earth could start taking advantage of people on the moon until the latter get pissed and start throwing rocks to the earth.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
... the first hundred people will die in a horrible explosion before the rocket even lifts off :-)
You don't push technological or economic boundaries with other people's $50M satellites.
Yes you do. There is always a risk of failure when you put something on a rocket. Anyone who promises they can do it with 100% reliability is either lying or delusional. The satellite owners knew that when they signed the launch contract. You make contingency plans in case the rocket blows up and get insurance. If the risk of blowing up is higher more money should change hands but nothing fundamentally changes about the risks. There is no launch system with a perfect success rate and more than a hand full of launches nor is there likely to be one any time soon.
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world."
Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
Getting tired of Elon 'proposing' things that aren't even remotely grounded in possibility? There is s HUGE difference between him and the people behind the original space programs. They were scientists, he is a huckster. Whatever, dude.
Being prudent with other people's money is nowhere near equivalent to promising 100% reliability.
Who is being imprudent? The company who owns the satellite is or should be fully aware of the risks involved. The company who build the rocket has an obligation to disclose any known or reasonably foreseeable risks. As long as those two things happen and both parties are ok with the risk involved with it then there is no problem. Nobody is being taken advantage of here. One side pays the other a risk adjusted fee for launch services with the full understanding that the launch may fail. If the satellite owner isn't comfortable with the level of risk being taken then they shouldn't sign the contract.
Now if unreasonable promises were made or the rocket maker lied about what they were doing then that is why we have a court system.
There is nothing on Mars to support the murderously naive idea of a "colony." Everything would have to come from Earth at great, increasing, and continuing expense. In return for what exactly? Billions to support ONE person on Mars. How much to support a million? But that just presupposes that it can work for argument purposes, which it cannot. We are the Earth, not Mars. They would die on the way to Mars or shortly after getting there. There is no separation possible. But, most importantly, the most fundamental of human rights is the right to be born, live, and die on the Earth. You may be able, as an adult, to give up your right to live and die on the Earth, but you can never willingly give up your right to be born here and so be able to consciously make the other two decisions. We need the United Nations to declare the fundamental human right to be born, live, and die on the Earth. Your parents do not have the right to strip from you the most fundamental of human rights.
E Proelio Veritas.
When Europeans colonized the New World, one of the main reasons was to take advantage of the wealth of natural resources. Another was to escape religious persecution. Those kind reasons do not exist for proposed Moon or Mars colonies.
The main reason to establish a colony on Mars is "because it's there". That is not a very good reason. A secondary reason is to scientifically study the history of Mars. Ok, that is a good one. But we would be better off developing a next generation of rovers and smart drones. It would be cheaper, effective, and would pay dividends at home in terms of spin off technology.
You've got a low enough /. ID number to be fully aware of the fact that salesmen and corporate executives lie on a distressingly regular basis.
Both parties here have adequate engineering horsepower to see through any silly promises made by a sales droid. There also are competitors for launch contracts who will be more than happy to point out any real or perceived flaws in the launch system of their competitors. Seriously, this is a transaction between two large companies that know exactly what they are getting into with a launch contract. Both are perfectly capable of evaluating the risks involved and coming to an agreement on price and delivery. Nobody is being taken advantage of here or if they are then they should have hired better people because the dollar amounts are large enough on both sides that there is no excuse.
If a company has a $50million satellite and they don't do their due diligence about the company they hire to launch it then shame on the them. Given that the launch contract is for tens of millions of dollars they should take their time and ask whatever questions they need answered to properly assess the risk. If the launch company lies then they have grounds to take them to court to recover their losses.
I mean, if you send 100 people and a return trip needs 160 days, you'll just get up about 200 per year. I think it's easier to start a revolution.
I watched the presentation. The most impressive part is the fact there is already functional prototype hardware for this thing. Not only is a Raptor engine being tested in Texas. There is also a full size fuel tank. Progress is being made.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
And Elon will soon be selling some swell red shirts in the pre-departure gift shop.
Shooting people across the solar system in tin cans will always be a losing proposition.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Have you and the company you work for ever been on the receiving end of a due diligence examination?
Both given and received. I'm both an engineer and a certified accountant. My day job is to run a manufacturing company. I deal with audits routinely, some of which are quite stringent. Both product and process audits. I've also been involved in quite a few M&A due diligence audits.
I have, and it permanently jaded me towards the value of due diligence.
Admittedly many audits are not well conducted or are conducted by people who don't know what they are doing. The worst are when there is a conflict of interest on the part of the auditor or when the auditor thinks they know what they are doing but doesn't. I've been through more than a few ISO-9000 and TS-16949 audits where the auditor was utterly clueless. I've also been through ones where the auditor was really good and actually helped us find problems even we didn't notice. I've also been through a huge number of PPAPs, tax audits, and even some FDA audits since some of the parts we make are for medical devices.
The real problem with Musk's plan is that merely by existing, it undermines the Senate (er Space) Launch System (SLS). It is true that SpaceX's liquid methane - oxygen combustion system is more efficient than the alternative SLS methods (throwing large barrels of pork overboard). However, Musk's system fails to achieve the main objective of the SLS, which is to propel congressional careers forward.
Thus more work is needed to refine the concept.
Awwwww... little Musketeer is butthurt! You want me to send your mommy over to rub a little a aloe vera on your bum-bum?
You overestimate the value of new land, and there is a very restricted sense in which Mars can be considered "new land". GP is also wrong for different reasons.
There's a reason that the intelligence of rocket scientists is a byword. Their designs have to have very close tolerances and operate in extremes of environments that are both literally and figuratively beyond what can be found on Earth. The general idea is that you have to take a lot of the most explosive substances that you can find (usually corrosive and toxic as a bonus), put the absolute minimum amount of structural material around it, and then hope that when you make it explode, it does so in a controlled way.
Interesting related links: How NASA Brought the Monstrous F1 "Moon Rocket" back to life.
Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants [pdf].
The proposed rocket gives a thrust figure larger than that of the Saturn V rocket by a factor of ~3.6, or about nine times the Space Shuttle Solid Booster. As the Ars Technica article notes, "T]he power output of the Saturn first stage was 60 gigawatts. This happens to be very similar to the peak electricity demand of the United Kingdom." If anyone is under the impression that nothing can be learned constructing an engine three times more powerful, let them disabuse themselves of that notion. Directing and controlling forces of that magnitude is an awesome challenge, and if nothing else they're probably going to have to be pretty ingenious to find someplace to test it without destroying millions of windows.
In this case though, the value of the journey is mostly what we learn getting there. Mars is dead, and even if it were made of solid gold it would not be economical to retrieve it. Some few people may get to die on Mars, and God help us, there may eventually be some human born on that hellish world. We're not likely to be able to send enough people to have a self-sustaining colony, or a breeding population, and the only thing that we will get in return is new information. Mars may have some new physical surprises left for us, but it's probably pretty unlikely that we will learn anything of very great significance to us Terrans, and we can probably learn most of the same things (more slowly) using robots.
Going to Mars doesn't exactly open up the solar system to humanity, but it is an important step in that direction. Your political comments are nonsense, of course, but it's an interesting question whether we will ever have a good enough reason to colonize any extrasolar planets. Clearly now we lack the political will to go to Mars, but at some point it's going to be cheap enough that some nation-state will be able to find the motivation: the prestige of being first, if nothing else. In the long run, space elevators are merely a matter of materials science, which will drop the cost to LEO, and from there energetically speaking it's a short trip to the rest of the solar system. Even at that point though, the requirements to get to another world will be shall we say astronomically larger. (No, you don't get to propose violations of physical laws to get around this. If you don't understand why, go bother a physics professor.) It is difficult to imagine circumstances which would favor or enable the building of the kind of "generation ship" we would need to reach the stars.
The thing that Musk is not wrong about is that going to Mars is possible, and if our rockets today are not quite up to scratch, it's probably just a matter of time before we have sufficiently powerful ones. We have fuels which we know can do the job, and we're developing better ones, and scaling up a machine isn't going to be as hard as inventing it in the first place. Which is not to say it will be trivial but it will be possible. Probably they'll blow a lot of things up trying, but hey, welcome to rocke
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise a kid
From the last sentence of the intro: "At the rate of 20 to 50 total Mars trips, it will take anywhere from 40 to 100 years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilization with one million people on Mars."
What Musk actually said was that, with 100 people per vehicle, it would take 10,000 vehicle trips to move the 1 million people to Mars. Since Mars and Earth are in the proper launch window about every 2 years, there would be 20 to 50 launch windows in the 40-100 year period he is modeling. If you want to do 10,000 vehicle trips in 20 windows (40 years) you would need an average of 500 vehicles, all launching at roughly the same time at each launch window (this explains Musk's reference to the video sequence from Battlestar Galactica when all the shipsgo to light speed at once). If you had more vehicles or more passengers per vehicle, it could be done in fewer launch windows. The math is obvious but the intro seems to make it as confusing as possible.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Either you didn't find out what Musk presented regarding cost targets or you are being a troll. Which is it?
He clearly stated a goal of $200K per head based on orders of magnitude improvements, for the reasons he very clearly laid out.
How your post got to a score of three is a story all its own. Stop wasting everyones time.
Crazy - he's a psychotic ass, but somehow I'm kinda starting to like him.
Omigod, that's awesome! Yeah, I know you were tweaking my nose here, but SOMEBODY MOD THIS GUY UP!
If one ship can get there in 80 days, 10 ships could get there in 8 days.
Wouldn't it be much more logical to send the tanker up first, so it is ready when the people carrier follows? What if the tanker launch fails? Did nobody catch this obvious flaw in the sequence?
You know it's time for the next revolution when your rulers' names end with roman numerals.
Well if there were no elections and politicians were free to do what they wanted like business people, Trump and his supporters would have already funded and started to build that 'wall'.
Musk doesn't need to be elected, he just needs to convince investors of his plans. I don't know about you, but I've never trusted Musk, so I would never invest in any of his businesses. But that doesn't matter, if he manages to make electric cars affordable without subsidies and without letting the electricity costs rise exponentially, I'll be happy to be a potential customer. I would not complain about the missed opportunity to invest in his business when the prices for the shares were still low. I will simply admit I was wrong.
Trump has also popular ideas, but he still has to try to get elected as president to try to get his ideas through the senate.
But there is one problem though. Sending people to space with a private company makes them outlaws. Who will own the colonies on Mars? Will investors who stay on earth get a dividend? Will there be a government and/or an army/police force? Will it be the libertarian no government 'paradise' like 19th century 'Congo Free State'?
MICHEL ARDAN - FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON - Jules Verne
Substitute for your spherical shell a cylindro-conical projectile.
I shall go inside. Shall arrive by steamer Atlanta.
MICHEL ARDAN.
This is all well and good but Mars is not shielded from cosmic rays so what's the life expectancy?
Murphy was an optimist
You know what's interesting about your link? Look at the year with the most manned launches: 1985. NASA really was aggressively ramping up the Space Shuttle launch rate, to finally try to make good on the promise of reducing costs by amortizing the cost of the SLS over a large number of launches.
Loss of the Challenger (January 1986) put a stop to that, of course, and things never fully recovered. I expect we won't surpass the 1985 figure until SpaceX starts doing manned launches.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk continues to lay the groundwork to attempt the human colonization of Mars. Here’s a step-by-step guide to his plan:
STEP 1: Invent remaining 2,348 technologies needed to make trip possible
STEP 2: $10 billion appears
STEP 3: Cost of spaceship reduced by going with cheap Venetian plaster instead of more expensive marble
STEP 4: Before departing, voyagers visit doctor to receive all the CDC–recommended vaccines for trip to another celestial body
STEP 5: Tell poor people we’ll come back for them
STEP 6: Humanity runs away from all of its problems at 5,375 mph
STEP 7: Spaceship gets passed on left by reckless asteroid
STEP 8: Those not murdered by fellow passengers land safely on Mars three months later
STEP 9: Set up utilities and Wi-Fi
STEP 10: Apply for construction permits within notoriously byzantine bureaucracy of the Intergalactic Department of Buildings
STEP 11: Group photo
STEP 12: Build entire civilization from scratch
STEP 13: Future Mars population considers colonizing barren wasteland of Earth in last-ditch effort to save species
http://www.theonion.com/infographic/spacexs-plan-colonize-mars-54049
I can't see anything about how Space X will finance the setting up of the colony itself. Does the $200k per ticket include the 'luggage' like.... habitats? Greenhouses to grow food? A couple years of freeze dried noodles and protein bars, etc? Is it $200k per person of a certain average weight, and then $200k for any luggage of the same weight?