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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).
Nah, he just didn't mention fine print in the release form where you certify that you understand that your DNA will be denatured by interplanetary radiation and in fact that it's an integral part of the experience you're seeking.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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,
That all sounds familiar. I think Monty Python foreshadowed a conversation between Kim Jong-il and his son:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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!
There is no evidence whatsoever that NK has done that. That is just Western propaganda.
It is? I must have missed it. I thought it was just something from a bad movie plot.
When is the last time any sovereign state leader has routinely executed people for failure?
Or any propaganda has said so?
Found Kim Jong-un.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
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 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
I've heard about that, but does anybody know about the time / money required to contami^b^b^b^b^b heat Mars enough to sustain plants?
Jules Verne, eat your heart out.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
I was thinking about that when I was wondering what possible reason there would be to expend insane amounts of fuel to get to Mars in 30 days.
Buzz Aldrin worked out the easiest way to get to Mars in a reasonable timeframe but that's quite a few months of getting zapped.
Despite all the silly bits the Japanese Anime from a few years ago "Planetes" explored the issue well. With a thriving moon colony, a lot of activity in orbit and all the technology to enable that there was still the situation where older astronauts were almost certain to die of cancer before retirement.
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 try to solve the exploding rocket issue first before we start sending people to Mars, kk, Elon?
wooden ships used to sink and people navigated off into the see with a primitive, but effective, bit of metal and a compass. Let's not stop progress because a few things have and will go wrong.
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"?
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
Mars is an easier place to build a base than the Moon. You send the people to Mars, they build the infrastructure and refuel the ship, then they send the ship back. Meanwhile, they start producing drinkable water, breathable air, and food, all things that can theoretically be done there. When the next people show up, the ground has been broken, and the second wave can get started helping out, while the first wave start pumping the fuel (from the system they built the first time round) into the ship to get it heading back as soon as the second wavers are unloaded. People can be, and will be, kept busy building, colonising and terraforming.
The Moon, on the other hand, is a rock. You can't produce air, you have to bring your own water etc. Production of the basic essentials for human survival is impractical, if not outright impossible; the best you can hope for is efficient recycling, which isn't helpful for a growing colony. Once you've built the shelter (entirely from things you brought with you) and plugged in your recycling systems (which you brought with you), you're done; wait for the next shipment of supplies to arrive. When the next wave arrive, they're going to be setting up their new base, but it's not like you're going to have made any supplies to help them out.
So the Moon is closer, sure, but without a way to easily produce the things you need (not forgetting refueling the ship to return it), the only advantages it has over Mars are a shorter travel time to Earth, and less gravity to fight as you leave. Basically, it seems a heck of a lot easier to build a base on Mars than the Moon... even if the commute is a pain.
Why people?
Because you don't have a colony without people, by definition.
Is he going to use to keep 100 people confined in a restricted space for 80 days from tearing out each others throats?
Go to Mars? Easy. Live with other people for 12 weeks? That's hard.
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.
So you didn't have to strain yourself to think of an Earth-side example where this worked. I imagine it'll work for a Mars voyage for similar reasons.
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?
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.
The problem is not making an atmosphere in Mars (we are sure capable of doing that)
The problem is preventing the sun to blow it away again.
Mars does not have a (strong enough) magnetic field to protect de atmosphere and surface from the radiation
Unfortunately, to do that you'll probably need to either bombard the planet with asteroids rich in atmospheric components, or build massive soil-processing infrastructure to release them into the air - Earth's atmosphere masses about 5x10^18kg, and even with Mars's having 1/4 the surface area to cover, 10^18 kg still amounts to 2.5 million kg of air for every person currently on Earth. You're going to need some serious infrastructure to deliver that kind of tonnage, and Earth is a long way away.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
You're not a fan of history are you? Or basic research? Hint: much of this planet is populated by people who either moved there - or their ancestors did (some of whom were sailors who didn't want to go home - that's why they got on the ship). And if you had been able to read original source you'd know that: return trips should be possible; no one said it was going to be a prison colony (trade?).
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.
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 thought it was a Monty Python sketch, only with rockets instead of castles.
Well, first we'll have to calculate just how many cannabis brownies will be needed to last 100 people for 80 days...
And where are you getting "one way" or "survival of the fittest" from? The current plan is to re-use the transport ships many times, with free return passage to anyone who wants it on the returning ships. And colonizing a new world is likely to be a deeply cooperative endeavor - humanity hasn't been particularly "survival of the fittest" since we started pre-chewing food for our elders.
--- 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.
While sending 80 peeps to Mars is cool, what are they going to do while they are there?
They can play martian-G video games; just like as said in the summary zero-G video games while waiting for refuel. Ridding ourselves of fossil fuels is one thing.. colonizing mars? please... if you want to save life on earth.. build some meteor dodging apparatus so we can avoid dinosaur's fate. Mars expansion can surely wait
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?
Indeed, however they did get considerable help from others in designing fairly and producing fairly "simple" stuff.
Throwing stuff into space; yeah, they can kinda do. Making sure a nuke explodes over Washington and not somewhere in China?
Not so much...
North Korea is what the rest of the planet would label an entirely different thing.
Wait, you're saying they're not a Democratic Peoples Republic?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
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.
Depends. If it's you with 79 women?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
APK that is you.
Still don't get out much? Good.
Can't be APK it's not just going on about host files.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
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.
Indeed. But part of the problem is that SpaceX wants to simultaneously be taken seriously as a reliable delivery service, and push the bounds for rapid, radical cost reduction. Even rockets blowing up on the test stand or failing during experimental landings comes across as bad press for them - even if they expect to have low odds of success. I've seen way too many comments and articles along the lines of "OMG, SpaceX crashed a landing, how can you think about sending up astronauts with a company that unreliable?", when the concept of "fail until you get it right" was always the plan with those landings.
If I were to start a rocket company it'd be in two parts. The first would be something like "Crazy Karen's Discount Rocket Emporium", and would go for a total Kerbal vibe, down to crudely spraypainted "This Way Up" notes on the side of stages, duct tape holding things in place on test stands, any interviews given in totally unprofessional clothing, etc. The sort of company that you'd be more surprised when things work than when they fail. The other would be your standard stuffy boring professional institution and would have a partnership with the kerbal-esque company, making clear that they acquire "promising but immature" technology from the other side, then invest their engineering resources on turning it into a refined and reliable experience for their launch service customers. All of the risky research efforts would be done by the first side.
It's effectively the same thing, but it'd make the delineation that all rocketry companies strive for explicit. You move fastest by taking risks rather than trying to avoid all failures, but you try to insulate the risk-taking side from the actual experience you offer paying consumers as much as you realistically can.
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.
Well, it's a bit dangerous, but the performance is indeed incredible...
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.
You just know that they're going to get to Mars and then, and only then, discover that they forgot to include a ladder ;)
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.
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.
If you're not onboard with SpaceX's not-at-all-secret long-term strategy, you shouldn't invest in SpaceX.
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.
Despite how Elon phrased it, "water" isn't abundant on Mars. Rock-hard, gritty, perchlorate-contaminated, hexavalent chromium-contaminated clay-brine permafrost ? Yes. "Water"? No.
Mining isn't an easy thing even here on Earth - a maintenance-prone task that runs through lots of consumables - let alone on Mars where you have to choose between horrible throughput for remote operation, or local operation with astronomical local labour costs. A number of Mars in-situ proposals have outright done away with the water side of the equation, opting to harvest CO2 from the atmosphere locally (splitting to CO and O2 in a SOFC, like MOXIE on Mars 2020), but shipping in the hydrogen to avoid the need for mining. Most of the mass of fuels like methane is the carbon, not the hydrogen.
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.
We really don't know if Mars' gravity is "enough" like Earth's to avoid wasting. We certainly hope it is, but we don't know that.
Venus on the other hand, at 0.9g....
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.
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.
You're not a fan of history are you? Or basic research? Hint: much of this planet is populated by people who either moved there - or their ancestors did
Indeed, literally all of this planet that's not in Africa was populated by immigrants.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
APK that is you.
Still don't get out much? Good.
Can't be APK it's not just going on about host files.
Plus it's written in normal English.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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?
Make a fucking base on the moon first. Use the moon to figure out how to do it,
The conditions on the moon and Mars are so different that the lessons learned on the moon would be mostly irrelevant to Mars.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
They are different, but that wouldn't mean the experience would be so different that they wouldn't learn something. Life support, psychology, and society problems would all be similar even if the physical environment is different.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Is this "Ark A" or "Ark B"?
We don't have the technology to pull that off successfully yet. We do have the technology to send rockets full of people there however.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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
Why do people automatically think of planets as only existing at their surface? Yes, the environment at Venus's surface is hell. But in the cloudtops (specifically the middle cloud layer), it's the closest place in the solar system to Earth outside of Earth. Earthlike gravity, temperature, pressure, sunlight levels, and a radiation shielding equivalent to having several meters of water overhead. Yes, there is some (sparse) sulfuric acid mist, like a bad smog/vog, but then again, skin contact with Martian dust will also burn you (due to its oxidizing salts it's been described as similar to handling lye), and probably a lot faster. You can't breathe either of them, but the water won't boil out of your skin on Venus. It might well be possible (although inadvisable) to be outside in Venus with nothing more than a full face mask; contact dermatitis at those sort of H2SO4 levels will happen eventually, but not quickly. You could actually feel an alien breeze on your skin. In any case, no pressure suit is needed.
Not to mention that normal Earth air is a lifting gas on Venus. Or that H2SO4 is more of a resource than a hindrance (there's no shortage of plastics that tolerate it well, it's easy to adsorb, and it's easy to thermally decompose into water, oxygen, and SO2, as well as being one of the most important industrial acids; most of the other major industrial acids are also available straight from the atmosphere, in lesser quantities)
Access to the surface is more difficult than on Mars, but not impossible. Surface probes thusfar have used what humans would need to use to survive: the simple combination of insulation and thermal inertia. Probes have survived for over 2 hours in that manner, and it's possible to engineer to even greater survival times. These were in the lowlands as well, where the air is hotter and thicker than in the highlands. Soft suits would not be viable; as the environment most resembles deep sea diving, you need hard suits. Hard suits were actually prototyped by NASA for use with Apollo, and worked quite well (they're less restrictive to movement than soft suits); however they went with soft suits because they were lighter. One neat thing about operation near Venus's surface is that flight is very easy. Any manned suit at the surface would almost certainly be paired with a bellows balloon, which is an metallic accordion-like adjustable-lift system (which has already been prototyped and tested in Venus surface conditions)
All of that said, there's not really any good reason to put people on the surface, as you can teleoperate dredges for mining the surface (operated from the cloud deck) without any meaningful delay.
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.
You're going to find this difficult to understand, but please try. Elon Musk is talking about the future. He probably expects that they will have solved current problems by the time this becomes a thing.
You catch all that? Read it a few more times - out loud if necessary. Maybe you'll get there in the end.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
It is? I must have missed it. I thought it was just something from a bad movie plot. When is the last time any sovereign state leader has routinely executed people for failure? Or any propaganda has said so?
Does intentional failure count? Maybe like leaking data about certain Email? : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .
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
You just know that they're going to get to Mars and then, and only then, discover that they forgot to include a ladder ;)
It's OK: they'll just drop the 40 feet to the surface, land on their helmet, ragdoll down a hill, and stand up about 10 seconds later.
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.
Define soon.
I've never seen APK come out with dumbass /pol/ shit like that. Also, it's missing the crazy/intricate formatting.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
NK imprisons the condemned and up to three generations of their direct family members,
How do you know? Do you have first hand knowledge, or are you just regurgitating the propaganda that your government has been spoon feeding you? Most of these stories come from defectors who have a strong incentive to lie and embellish. If everything defectors said was true, there would have been a WMD in every Iraqi backyard.
subjecting them to hard labor for life for political disloyalty.
Engineering errors are not "political disloyalty". There is no evidence that NK punishes people for honest mistakes.
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.
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.
They were scientists, he is a huckster.
...for a huckster, he's put a remarkable number of actual satellites in actual orbit, not to mention nearly cracking the booster recovery problem. Now, I know that's not exactly rocket science... oh, hang on, yes it is.
I guess he has scientists on the payroll to do the math while he drums up the money: or has he ever claimed he designs all the rockets himself?
True, the guy has a reality distortion field of 2.83 Jobs but, then, Apple ended up pioneering (which isn't the same as inventing) half of the worthwhile things in the modern personal computer industry without Steve knowing which end of a soldering iron was hot.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
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".
Do you have family members there that you are trying to save, or are you simply a third rate comedy troll account?
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.
Well, the water is pretty much literally right there to be picked up - cutting ice is a fairly well developed technology that shouldn't be heavily impacted by doing it in vacuum. And CO2 is even easier - it's everywhere, and existing vacuum pumps will have no problems collecting and concentrating it.
As for converting it to biomass - plants are extremely adept at converting water and CO2 into oxygen and biomass. And microbial ones like algae can reproduce exponentially over very short timescales, allowing you expand production just as fast as you can build greenhouses and collect the necessary trace elements.
You talk as though there's something magically more difficult about using mature technologies just because you're on another planet. Once you're inside an artificial pressurized habitat, the only immediate differences from being on Earth will be the strength of gravity, and the view out the windows.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
There's no way in hell he will ever get enough investors to build a fleet of Mars transports without government - taxpayer - money. If you believe otherwise, I have a bridge for sale, real cheap.
I've read some papers on the subject, and it really depends on what sort of mineral you're talking about. Mars lacks or is deficient in, as you note, a lot of the processes on Earth that concentrate ores, making certain types of ores deficient. However, there are some types of ore deposits that it's expected to be rich in. A good example is bolide deposits, like the Sudbury deposit on Earth. There a large impactor created a basin which is rich in nickel, copper, and precious metals. It's not that the precious metals came from the impactor - it's that by liquefying a large chunk of the crust, it allows it to separate out into layers. Mars is struck more often by large bolides and the resulting basins are more slowly eroded, so such deposits are predicted to be notably richer on mars.
A problem with mining on Mars however is... well, mining. Overburden problems are likely to be even worse on Mars than on Earth, and I'm sure you've seen what lengths people go through to get rid of overburden. Doing that with equipment light enough to ship to Mars and keep operating? Anything but an easy task. Now, surely there's some deposits in some places that, with good prospecting effort, are low overburden and easy to mine. But then you hit the other problem which is... not everything is found in the same place, and many things distinctly aren't. And furthermore, once you build in a particular place, you're pretty much locked in there. So how do you get everything from point A to point B? Aircraft can work on Mars, but their payload capacities are terrible compared to their size, and you have to make them very fragile. Over a few hundred kilometers, your best bet is probably "mountain roads", aka you plow aside the rocks and dirt as best you can, and accept that you're going to get low throughput/high maintenance hauling over such bad roads. Over longer distances? Honestly, your best bet (in the foreseeable future) is rockets, as expensive as they are. In the long term you can talk durable cross-planet roads, high speed rail, railguns, etc. But those sorts of things aren't practical in the near term - they represent too much embodied mass, power, and/or and labour.
It's not an easy challenge
Site selection is going to be critical. The goal in the near future shouldn't be 100% independence, because that's not realistic. It should be, "what's the highest percentage of this import mass that we can eliminate?" Pick those low-hanging, high-demand fruits first.
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.
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
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.
That's true. I think Elon's not so much concerned with this moment.... he's playing the odds that such a situation will arise in the next couple of decades. When the time comes, SpaceX will be have the best vehicle for getting people to Mars.
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!
How do you prove ice or CO2 "viable"? They're either there, or they're not - every molecule is identical to every other (aside from slight isotope variations). And we know they're there. Distillation might be required to remove hazardous impurities from the ice, but atmospheric analysis already shows the CO2 to already be over 95% pure (okay, not laboratory pure, my memory apparently slipped in an extra 9), with the rest being mostly nitrogen and argon, with about 0.1% oxygen and carbon monoxide, and slight traces of other substances.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Which explains why we routinely test novel medicinal compounds on prisoners, and unsuspecting civilians, amirite?
No, we don't do that ... but if we did, we would almost certainly make faster medical progress.
After all, we want to take risks and fail fast - so what if we kill a bunch of people by doing so?!
Number of people known to have been killed or harmed by NK's space program: 0.
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.
Hydrogen does not have to be shipped as a liquid or gas (more to the point, it wouldn't persist as a liquid without a significant cooling system). By mass, water is 13% hydrogen, hydrazine is 14% hydrogen, polyethylene is 17% hydrogen, lithium borohydride is 18% hydrogen, ammonia is 22% hydrogen, and methane is 34% hydrogen. Most of those compounds (and others) are useful to have on a ship regardless. And any sort of effective radiation shielding is going to have to be hydrogen rich no matter what; there's nothing that moderates down neutrons to easy-to-capture energies anywhere near as well as hydrogen.
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.
Indeed, literally all of this planet that's not in Africa was populated by immigrants.
Many of whom spent more than 80 days in tighter, less salubrious quarters than will be available on Elon's theoretical Fleet - just so they could hotbed and live in cramped spaces while working long hours every day in shitty jobs. Put jobs, schools, running water that's drinkable, rooms with light switches, and food that's not toxic on Mars and huge numbers of people trying to flee war zones will queue up to move there.
Most will leave those shitty jobs as soon as they can scratch enough coin together to start a micro business. It's human nature to take enormous risks for opportunities like this.
Given the choice between 30 days in a container with a bucket, a few bottles of water, and barely enough room to scratch, before a high risk and gruelling hike across a border (that already has a freaking wall) - and an 80 day ride in a spaceship, I'd bet there would be literally a million people that would sign away the next 20 years income for the opportunity. Probably not on the first fleet, but definitely on the first fleet after messages return from those that arrived with the first fleet and are doing well. By the time the third fleet arrives the people that arrived on the first two fleets will be complaining about too many immigrants (and we need to make them pay for a wall).
If I were younger I'd go (I did plenty of risky things in my youth) - and I'm definitely not in danger of being blown up/imprisoned/robbed, or living precariously.
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.
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?