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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.
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.
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).
Let's try to solve the exploding rocket issue first before we start sending people to Mars, kk, Elon?
That is not the best strategy. It is better to push forward, take risks, and fail fast. You learn more from your failures than from your successes.
Look at North Korea, a poor impoverished country that has made huge strides by developing in fast cycles without worrying too much about failures. Their first rockets either blew up on the launch pad or shortly after liftoff. The world laughed. Yet they were ready to try again just a month or two later. That one blew up too, but it went further. Now, a few years later, they can put satellites in orbit, and they will soon have the technology for ICBMs that can reach North America. Nobody is laughing anymore.
So basically, like Donald Trump, but with better follow-through?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
But the question still remains: If you can build a colony on Mars, why not build a colony on the Moon? It has all the same cache of living under a dome to protect you from vacuum and radiation, doesn't take nearly as long to get there, and is close enough to earth that it's actually feasible have an evacuation plan. Also, you don't have to worry about sand storms gunking up your solar panels, and you get more annual insolation, generally, due to the closer orbit.
Um, no? You guys sound more and more like cult members every day.
Meh, limited trade with Earth is certainly in the cards; the question of "how limited" depends on a lot of factors, but particularly their return launch costs. Even simple "Martian rock", sold as collectables or decorative stone, in small quantities could fetch tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. Collectables markets and luxury goods markets ("Oh, the foyer in your palace is granite from Tuscany? How quaint - my foyer is from Mars") are very real things. But one order of magnitude difference in return prices equates to multiple orders of magnitude difference in the size of the market. Likewise, what exactly is available will also affect the value. A brittle sandstone for example isn't going to get the same market for the same price as big chunks of agate. We don't know what all will be found on Mars, but the presence of hydrothermal systems is encouraging; they're associated with quartz, calcite, chalcedony (agate, onyx, etc), zeolites, opal, etc. The jewelry market would be excellent to be able to break into, in terms of the scale versus what they pay per kilogram.
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.
In terms of mining, I'm curious about mineral concentrations on Mars. On Earth billions of years of geologic, hydrologic and biologic processes have concentrated minerals for us to mine. What about a geologically dead world like Mars? Same thing with people talking about asteroid mining. Yes, there's millions of tons of platinum on that there asteroid. There's an atom of it over there, an atom over there, an atom over there...
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.