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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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?...
Potatoes.
Have you not read the book or seen the movie?
So basically, like Donald Trump, but with better follow-through?
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
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.
I'd agree that large numbers of colonists would be problematic. There is no way to generate income, because Mars has no industry, no supply chain, no primary industry, no financial sector, no plausible services industry, and no chance of being able to trade with the Earth. Economically, it's a basket case. It will costs millions of dollars to transport a colonist there - money which, presumably they will need to find themselves, which means they will be heavily in debt.
Which then means after the initial flights, nobody is going to preference Mars over Earth, with all of it's abundant opportunities.
Here's a fun thing from 16 years back you can still play with today:
http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/mars.html
It can be used to roughly look at aerobraking and other things in Mars air. Even turning is a challenge.
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"?
The problem is that people are squishy and don't stay perfectly still, so you have to constantly make small course corrections.
That is nonsense. By the law of conservation of momentum, people moving around inside the ship cannot meaningfully alter the course of the ship as a whole during free-fall. During engine burns, the minute shifts in the vessel's centre of mass caused by people's movements will be easily compensated for by the powerful engines - especially since those people will probably be strapped into seats for safety reasons, anyway.
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...
While Mars' atmosphere is indeed too thin to actually land using only parachutes, it is plenty thick enough for aerobraking to be useful. A significant amount of rocket fuel will be required to stop at the end, but much less than would be required if there were no atmosphere at all.
Just putting a manned spaceship into orbit of Mars would probably take more fuel than landing. ... The gravity means that your window of angle of entry is that much smaller where Mars will actually capture you into orbit.
The ship is designed to aerobrake into orbit, and won't use much fuel in the process. Landing will require much more. This is because atmospheric drag scales (to first order) as the square of airspeed. Thus, even a very thin atmosphere can provide tons of drag at interplanetary (hypersonic) speeds, though it will offer almost none during the final phase of landing as the airspeed falls toward zero.
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
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...
It's a bad summary; there is no breeding required to make the numbers work. I watched Musk's talk, and it's really 50 fleets not 50 ships. Groups of about 200 ships will leave at about the same time for reasons of orbital mechanics and safety.
[50 fleets] * [200 ships per fleet] * [100 people per ship] = [1 million people]
Either way, the larger problem is figuring out how to move enough equipment and supplies to keep the colonists alive; it's doubtful that even one million people is anywhere close to enough to produce a self-sustaining ultra-high-tech society in a super-hostile environment as Musk envisions.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
A magnetosphere is rather premature, don't you think? We'd need to build an atmosphere first - and if we can accomplish that in less than several thousand years, then, maintaining it against the slow loss to the solar wind should be child's play.
Meanwhile, building and maintaining long-term artificial ecosystems should provide a great deal of knowledge that will be useful as we navigate the drastic climate changes Earth will likely be undergoing over the next few centuries. As yet, we've only seriously attempted the experiment twice, at small scale, in the form of the Biosphere 2 experiments.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
How much wealth are we talking about? If it's enough, I'll be happy to build a "spacecraft" powered by a state of the art ANFO engine, put you in it and "launch" it. I'll need the money up front, of course.
New to this game of scamming people are we?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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
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.
but its not science and it won't advance us.
How so? It's exploring a new planet! We have many hypothesis on how humans can colonize Mars (if it's possible). This is proving one of those hypothesis.
Furthermore, it advances the human race by making it an interplanetary species. Which is in the title of Musk's presentation. Being an interplanetary species makes humans harder to become extinct, and prevents our progress from being lost during a global crisis.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Muffley:Well, I, I would hate to have to decide...who stays up and...who goes down.
Dr. Strangelove: Well, that would not be necessary, Mr. President. It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. Ha, ha. But ah, with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present Gross National Product within say, twenty years.
Muffley: But look here doctor, wouldn't this nucleus of survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they'd, well, envy the dead and not want to go on living?
Dr. Strangelove: No, sir...excuse me...When they go down into the mine, everyone would still be alive. There would be no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead! [involuntarily gives the Nazi salute and forces it down with his other hand]Ahhh!
Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious...service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Russian Ambassador: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.
No, the rovers have not been gem prospecting. But the data that they've recovered would be useful for doing so. There's a lot of heavy hydrothermal veining near curiosity for example (primarily gypsum, but it's a good start!). What I wouldn't give to be there with a rover with good range...
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.