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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.
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.
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?
Except the Moon is only a bit closer in terms of energy, and still too far away to evacuate anything more than a modest outpost unless you have a nice, slow, orderly catastrophe that allows you months or years to evacuate. You also have to deal with razor-sharp moon dust that, without the benefit of weathering, will make short work of moving parts and formerly airtight seals.
Mars also has far more accessible and abundant resources - a massive ice cap, potentially useful amounts of subsurface water, and all the CO2 you could want delivered to your doorstep. That and greenhouses can give you most of the raw materials needed to build and grow a colony, both in terms of biomass, and carbon and cellulose-based building materials - nanocellulose for example is translucent and airtight, with a strength comparable to aluminum, and can be produced from woody biomass with purely mechanical processing.
As for solar, the insolation on the Moon is more intense, but you'd need pretty huge batteries to hold you through the nights - they are almost fifteen Earth-days long after all. While Mars days are only 40 minutes longer than Earth's, conveniently within the range that most people's circadian rhythms can adapt to.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.