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SpaceX's Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA's Manned Exploration Programs (marketwatch.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Entrepreneur Elon Musk's announcement late last month accelerating plans for manned flights to Mars ratchets up political and public relations pressure on NASA's efforts to reach the same goal. With Musk publicly laying out a much faster schedule than NASA -- while contending his vision is less expensive and could be financed primarily with private funds -- a debate unlike any before is shaping up over the direction of U.S. space policy. Industry officials and space experts consider the proposal by Musk's Space Exploration to land people on the red planet around the middle of the next decade extremely optimistic. Some supporters concede the deadline appears ambitious even for reaching the moon, while Musk himself acknowledged some of his projected dates are merely "aspirational." But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration doesn't envision getting astronauts to Mars until at least a decade later, a timeline NASA is finding increasingly hard to defend in the face of criticism that it is too slow.
Is a lonely number.
Two can be as bad as one It's the loneliest number since the number one.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
In what world does NASA have less access to money than SpaceX?
The problem is that government agencies waste money. If you don't believe it, go work for any city, county, state or federal agency in the USA. Keep a critical eye out for waste and inefficiency. In less than 3 months, you will see why NASA cannot keep up with the private sector. If you cannot see it after 3 months, then you are a perfect fit. Enjoy your new job.
He says astronauts are going to be heroes and will die with honor.
Tesla cars don't exist? Solar roofs? If that's all vapor then it is truly spectacular vapor.
Manned spaceflight produces very little science, and most of it is science about how humans live in space.
But it's not really true. Congress need to stop telling NASA to waste billions of dollars a year building rockets that will cost billions of dollars per launch and have no funded payloads. Then NASA could afford to do something useful.
Question: How many CENTURIES will it take for a Mars colony to stop needing massive subsidies from Earth? We need a discussion on who is going to pay the many Trillions of dollars needed to support this.
Nobody can answer that question. We don't have a functional transport method, we don't know the complications of living on Mars, we don't know the feasibility of using local resources which is why we need to do experiments. Perhaps we send a greenhouse and it'll over-perform massively like the Mars rovers and become a semi-permanent food supply. Perhaps it'll die and the astronauts will have to eat MREs until they can return home. There's a theory we can produce methane fuel using the CO2 in the atmosphere, initially with hydrogen from earth, later possibly with water ice and so on.
That said, I don't think anyone has a business plan for any exportable resource so it's probably a net negative for a very long time. But how big of a cost, that's a pretty open question. And it's a bit like putting the cart before the horse, we'll expand the Mars presence if the costs make it feasible. For now nobody's talking about a presence bigger than that we can just get up and leave, if we start having so many people on Mars that pulling the plug is non-trivial that's way into the future.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
NASA for decades has been primarily a program to send pork back to all 50 states, by using cost-plus contracts and making sure that as many congress-critters as possible can point to jobs they brought to their district. One report put ARES/SLS spending at $19B to date, and Orion at $13B to date. So we've spent nearly half the adjusted cost of the Apollo program with no hardware in flight yet. And the same report puts NASA overhead at 72% of Orion cost. NASA isn't really trying to return us to space as much as they're trying to run a jobs and pork program. Now I love NASA, have since I was a kid. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize an out of control government program thats been taken over by MBAs and politicians.
Many spare parts would just be fabbed on-site. 3D printing (and the next gen of multi-material micro/nano-scale assembly) is robust enough to cover a lot and related cutting/milling/grinding/shaping/finishing equipment is ripe for a generational improvement and consolidation. It's probably one of the most important techs that will come out of a mars colony project and key to short term survival.
But for all that you need feed stock. Raw iron, steel, gold, carbon, and so on. Sourcing those locally is the second major challenge and key to medium-long term survival.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.