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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.
During the question and answer period after his announcement he said that if someone got there and changed their minds, they could return on the return trip of the spaceship. The intention is to reuse the ships so the will be coming back to be refitted and relaunched to be used again.
He also stated that one of the qualifications to go is that you have to be able to answer YES to the question, are you prepared to die - he expects it to be VERY dangerous.
I respect his ambition and his vision.
Actually they do:
Hydroponics in Antarctica is as unique as the continent itself. The extreme environmental conditions found here make the process of growing food a formidable challenge. Four months of solid daylight, four months of total darkness, and unpredictable winds and temperature changes present a unique growing situation. One cannot simply build a glasshouse, set up a system, and expect tasty produce to grow!
The McMurdo
The McMurdo "Bucket" Hydroponics
However, at McMurdo Station on Ross Island (and to a much lesser degree at the South Pole Station), successful harvests are achieved on a daily basis. The 649 square foot greenhouse at McMurdo can generate a monthly average 250 lbs of produce during peak cycles. Varieties include lettuce greens, spinach, arugula, chard, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and herbs. The harvest is ample enough to provide a winter community of up to 230 people a salad once every 4 days, plus lots of fresh herbs, veggies, and fruit for the galley chefs to incorporate into their menus. During summer, however, community population can reach numbers of over 1000 people. During this time, the greenhouse simply acts as a supplement to the fresh food flown into the base from New Zealand. One of the greatest year-round benefits, however, is the fact that the greenhouse is the only source of lush, live plants, colorful flowers, and warm, humid air. Many community members frequent this environment for this reason alone!
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.
Blah blah blah blah blah...perfectly average, actually. 5.66% of failures worldwide in the last six years.
Ezekiel 23:20
There's not much water on the moon, and no CO2 - but plenty of both on Mars. Add power and you can make methane fuel for the return trip (and for refueling trips further out). Plus you need water for drinking & hydroponics, oxygen for breathing, CO2 for your greenhouse, hydrogen for fuel cells - much harder to be self-sustaining for any long term on the moon.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Mars has icecaps estimated to contain about 3 million cubic km of water ice, roughly 1/3 as much water as exists as liquid fresh water on Earth. There may also be useful amounts of subsurface liquid water - that's one of those as yet unresolved features we've found tantalizing hints about.
It also has copious amounts of almost laboratory-pure CO2 freely delivered everywhere on the planet. Between the two, you've got most of the bulk ingredients necessary to build biomass.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I agree, but it's Elon's money.
No, it's not. At this stage, it's his investors' money (he's never done anything without heavy subsidies). To actually launch, it will be the taxpayers' money. If he's talking about a fleet of ships convoying together, he's talking hundreds of billions of dollars - per trip. That's not, was never, could never be, Elon's money.