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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.
No need for return trips when all the passengers are killed by radiation on the flight out.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
Fair enough. But I don't think we want to adopt their policy of facing a firing squad for failure.
There is no evidence whatsoever that NK has done that. That is just Western propaganda. They have deliberately chosen a "fail fast" strategy, and that doesn't work if you shoot your best engineers. Sure, Kim shoots people for political disloyalty, but that is an entirely different thing.
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.
No, no, you misunderstand. The purpose is to get them off of Earth, where they can't do any more damage. To that end, I would propose that the first mission include the entire United States Senate. As much as I'd like to start with the House, they won't fit, but we can divide them up across subsequent missions.....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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
You're comparing the last ten years of a programme that had 30 years of development with the first ten years of a different one. How is that useful?
They're going on Ark B.
- Chuq
Sending even 100 people is pointless unless it's been proven that a handful of people can survive there. .
Sending a handful of people, and 1 of them passes away due to whatever, you've lost 20% of your workforce, and significant skills, which is likely to destroy the sustainability of your colony.
While I see your point I believe that there are bigger issues to solve first. The technology is easy compared to many of the non-technological issues that caused colonization efforts to fail before. Take as examples many failed colonies from the age of sail to more recent efforts to create new nations on artificial structures like islands or "floating cities". What caused many of them to fail were not technology but issues like people having disputes over property rights, people not doing their "fair share" of the work to maintain the colony, how crimes are dealt with, taxation disputes, and so forth.
These "soft science" problems in fields like psychology, economics, law, and so forth are (to me at least) bigger questions than "hard science" problems like building a big enough rocket, being able to grow veggies, or creating enough oxygen for people to breathe.
I've thought about how these issues might be solved and considered writing a story basically proposing solutions. You propose sending robots to Mars first to build things for the colonists. What I have to ask is, who owns what the robots build? That might not seem like a big problem at first but for the people on Mars it might be a matter of who lives and dies. I can just imagine a person hoarding valuable items, or even valuable data, and causing problems. Valuable data like how to repair an important item can be a means to declare ownership of something. If one of these robots sent to Mars to build things for the colonists breaks then what? Can a person on Mars then declare ownership of the robot, and therefore anything it builds in the future, by repairing it? Would ownership have to be shared in some way and in what proportion?
I believe that solving the problems on how to live on Mars is more than just what biochemistry and ecology can answer. We can send robots but we'll also have to send lawyers.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I respect his ambition and his vision.
Instead of the ambition to send people in giant ships to Mars, how about the ambition to fix the God damned space ships he's got now that regularly fail to get into LEO?
If he's half the genius you are, with even a tenth of the success rate - it's possible he's thought of that. He may even, what's that word? Planned it.
Real life - it'll get you every time. I guess that's why it's an anathema to you, that and ever checking your facts.
As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps."
But their absence would not mean no tourist dollars. Tourists don't avoid Versailles because the French got rid of their monarchy.
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.
Such nonsense. Do you think Mars is "habitable"? Even global warming + nuclear war wouldn't make Earth as uninhabitable as Mars is.
"I didnâ(TM)t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps."
But was he selling those first 1,000 bulb variations at US$50M to paying customers?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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