Still, I have to point out and ask, what the hell is the financial incentive for SpaceX to go to Mars? This is still a private business, with investors! What money will be made from this?
Another early revenue stream will be science done and paid for by governments, universities, etc. There will eventually be a Martian economy, and SpaceX will be well-suited to earning money from the colonies [2]. There will be lots of ways to make lots of money if you have a thriving Mars colony with millions of people moving there and a constant supply of materials going both directions.
[1]: So that's people that will be able to afford to go in 20 years and who also want to move to Mars.
[2]: How much value has America created since it was a colony? Sure, Britain didn't actually earn that money itself since there was a war over it - but establishing colonies in "new worlds" does seem like it could be a very profitable venture.
Knowing you'll be confined to a closed space for years (assuming no return capabilities on the initial mission), even the awesome research you'd be doing will probably start to look very bleak.
Just send robots and control them from Earth...
> Just send robots and control them from Earth...
This idea makes me feel isolated and sad. What a dystopian future that would be, with everybody sitting on a single planet at risk of disease, nuclear war, asteroid impacts, global-scale climate change, all without a care, while you look into your VR headset and see the realistic landscapes of other planets. So sad :(
I'll take Mars any day over that. And I'm also confident that return trips will be frequent if anyone wants to leave - that's the whole point of reusable rockets, afterall.
>What a dystopian future that would be, with everybody sitting on a single planet at risk of disease, nuclear war, asteroid impacts, global-scale climate change, all without a care, while you look into your VR headset and see the realistic landscapes of other planets.
Have you done any reading on the habitability of Mars? I will guarantee that once you truly comprehend what life on Mars will entail, you will be BEGGING for the luxuries of disease, nuclear war, climate change, and all the other great things that life on Earth bring.
Mars is a brutal, senseless struggle against a guaranteed DEATH.
I recommend going to live in Antartica first, and see how long you can last there. Followed by building a capsule on top of Everest. Then by living in the ISS. Then by living on the Moon. ONLY THEN, would you have any idea of what Mars living will be like.
But alas, even then it will be far, FAR more challenging than living on the Moon. The transit time between the Earth and the Moon is childish compared to Earth and Mars. Once you're on Mars, there will be no coming back for a LONG time.
I'll take my VR tour of Mars any day, thank you.
You would get resupply missions once every 2 years [0] instead of 10 times a year, but in general they share most of the downsides but Mars has soil, gravity and an atmosphere.
When things go south on Mars, you die.
Supporting the survival of six people on the ISS also costs billions of dollars a year. Even if you cut launch costs by a factor of 10, it's still going to be north of a billion dollars. Supporting the survival of a viable colony on Mars would bankrupt the world twice over.
Once you've got enough people and supplies, you can build farms, which means less food needs to be shipped out, freeing capacity for other goods. Presumably a lot of the infrastructure will be shipped out long before people are, so all they need to do is collect things from the supply drops, then assemble and expand.
Get the Mars colony to self sufficiency and the cost to Earth will trend to zero.
Fixed that for you.
Inside the core of the Earth seems as bad or worse.
For some that desolation is part of the appeal. For others the challenges. For others the opportunity to be pioneers.
Finding volunteers for colonisation won't be a problem.
Just thinking about some small things, such as going swimming, or riding a bicycle on a path through the woods. Or hiking / camping, or driving a sports car along a twisty mountain road.
Which sounds fine until you remember you'll have a ping in the realm of 4-24 minutes. And you thought you had trouble matchmaking in some games now...
Honestly the VR scenario here isn't so bad and you get exercise from it too :)
What young rich kid wouldn't want to play video games and colonize a new planet?!
Besides, Musk can offer free trips back trivially. [see WaitButWhy's extraordinarily long post about SpaceX]
I don't know the details of what he suggested, but, when we talk about 'families' I think most parents would hesitate to subject their children to the rigors and risks of an early-stage Mars colony, even thought they might be keen themselves. Retirees, the childless, and people without plans to have kids soon would be a safer bet for early colonists
The comparison to America is terrible, if you ask me. If the american continent was looking anything like Mars, people would have never settled there and the value you're talking about would be very close to zero.
If seems dishonest to me to compare mars with the American continent, especially considering that if we want to compare mars with the discovery of a whole continent, there is one that looks much more like mars : Antarctica. There is no record whatsoever of any long-term human occupation there. That has to prove that humans tend to dislike living in cold deserts.
By comparison, the american continent has been inhabited for thousands of years, and its discovery by Europeans has brought many extremely appreciated plants and animals.
What is there to bring from mars that there is not on Earth already? Apart from vast areas of rusted rocks and dust, not much, except perhaps for the possibility of fulfilling the fantasy of people who have read or watched too much science-fiction.
I mean, a settlement on mars can have value, but it will only be the value that you'll bring there. For instance if you build an hotel or casino there (as I personally believe tourism is one of the very few business models that make sense for mars), then the fact that it is on mars will not bring much more value than the intrinsic value of your hotel or casino itself.
This is actually true for most countries. America's economic strength lies in the fact that it creates software, micro-chips, manufactured goods, entertainment, etc.
Tell me, where in the ground do you dig up a micro-processor? Or a hollywood blockbuster? Or a Tesla Model S? Or the source code for google's search engine?
Economic value is primarily created by human activity. Once there is human activity on Mars there is the potential for economic value there. And once human activity on Mars is relatively self-sustaining, which we can achieve through building up the local industry combined with certain technological innovations, then that human activity will indeed provide things of net positive value to the rest of human civilization.
It seems so hard now, but in fifty or a hundred years we'll look back and it'll just seem normal and possibly even natural.
We tend to discount the truly incredible and jaw dropping amount of labor and ingenuity that has gone into building the prosaic world we see out the window every day. Even something like providing water to New York City is itself a herculean effort beyond the capability of even the entire human race only a few centuries ago. What we've done to network the world together digitally, to build engines of mass trade of manufactured goods across and between continents, to travel across land/sea/air from point to point with minimal overhead beyond the raw requirements imposed by the laws of physics, all of these things are awe inspiring creations when you give yourself the opportunity to look at them in whole. And many of them are vastly more difficult and in some cases more questionably of long term value than colonizing Mars.
[1] http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-at-mits-aeroast...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneWeb_satellite_constellation
[3] http://www.techinsider.io/elon-musks-spacex-is-backpedaling-...
There's nothing to start the process off on Mars. Mars is intractably expensive to get to in a way that America was not. It is expensive to live on in a way that America was not. It has no basic draw that can bring thousands of people there despite the cost.
People want to live on Mars, for lots of reasons. Mostly Mars colonization is about getting the activation energy lower than the latent resources available for doing it (which are substantial, make no mistake).
But absent any return on investment, the available resources today are orders of magnitude too small to make a go of it.
In any foreseeable world, any kind of substantial off-Earth human presence (more than say 200 people) is going to require a substantial practical value to justify it. Pure science or "just because it's there" or fulfilling the childhood sci-fi dreams of various people are not going to cut it. Which bums me out too! I have childhood sci-fi dreams.
If there's a path to large-scale (or even medium-scale) human presence off Earth, it's something like solar power generation or asteroid mining.
You are talking about current american economy that happened literally centuries later.
> Economic value is primarily created by human activity.
Precisely. If economic value depends on human activity and not on the location it takes place, then why spend hundreds of billions to do it somewhere else? What exactly can you do on mars that you coud not do on Earth for much less money?
What will you do if you're on Mars and the company that supplies you food, spare parts, and medical supplies goes out of business?
The Americas worked as colonies because they could become self sufficient in a very short period of time and had enormous quantities of valuable resources. The trees alone were priceless to the parent countries where every tree was spoken for. Even then some of the colonies failed.
What does Mars have that you couldn't obtain more cheaply on Earth?
Except, of course, that Mt Everest would be childs play compared to Mars.
With first stage reusability well on its way, and SpaceX being the only launch provider to have it, their margins for every launch are going to become huge.
You don't have to be a public company to be beholden to shareholders.
Long term there will probably be a significant monetary RoI from various projects and technological advancements along the way, as well as being able to sell people (and governments) tickets to space and to Mars. But the company is set up so that even if that doesn't work out getting to Mars will still happen.
The goal of the business is to increase profitability and cashflow, to allow SpaceX to build its Mars colony.
In more traditional terms that could equate to:
The goal of the business is to increase return for shareholders. The shareholder happens to want to use those profits to build a Mars colony.
The effect is that it can motivates staff, who want some greater purpose that just their own wealth.
The Moon on the other hand: it's orders of magnitude closer, and there's actual profit potential for tourism and possibly other things (producing fuel to deliver to low Earth orbit, for example).
Government contracts are often quite profitable, not to mention the technology and reputation gains SpaceX would realize from such a mission. I would expect investors to be thrilled with this announcement.