SpaceX: Making Life Multiplanetary [video]
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- Government/intragovernment contracts to cleanup space debris.
- Government/Private satellite launches.
- Earth to earth transportation which Elon announced on Instagram that the cost would be comparable to an economy fare. https://www.instagram.com/p/BZnVfWxgdLe/
- Transporting gear for ESA's moon base plan http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Ministerial_Council_2016/Moon_Vi....
- Transporting Government/Private equipment to Mars.
This is very much a realistic business approach compared to last year's vision presentation.
The original space shuttle had a 40% vehicular failure rate. The SpaceX Shuttle need to have commercial airline rates of failure and reusability. That's a big step up.
You know the way we still have 80 column terminals because punch cards had 80 units?
The decisions SpaceX make now are going to become space-faring standards for decades if not centuries to come.
SpaceX also figured out that vertical landing had many advantages compared to a plane.
Building anything for the US government that's big enough and has potential military applications is virtually inviting them (and the large project procurement morass they bring) to become involved.
Could you please give some insights / sources?
False. It's not outstandingly good news, not if we want to become multi-planetary in short order. We need to get to better than commercial airliner standards quickly.
Musk's stated goal is $500k/ticket to Mars.
It's a shorter trip, so perhaps ~5x as many passengers in the same volume (i.e. 500 total; cf. a380 which seats 850).
It takes five (?) orbital refuel trips for the martian journey, but we'd need none of those. Depending on how much less than a full tank the passenger vehicle needs (payload could be smaller; the ship would also not reach fully orbital velocity), the fuel cost would be between 1/5 and 1/10 the Mars fuel cost.
So that would bring the cost down to between $10 and $20k/ticket, within reach of business travelers.
If maximum the number of flight cycles per vehicle is greater for Earth-to-Earth trips than for Mars, then that could further reduce the ticket cost. It's unclear to me which direction that number would go-- Earth's atmosphere is much thicker on re-entry, though the velocities will be much lower than an interplanetary re-entry. Since aerodynamic drag goes as the cube of velocity but only linearly with density, I'm guessing the speed would matter far more. That would imply much better lifetime on Earth.
So if the E2E fuselage gets (conservatively) only 2x as many flight cycles as a Mars trip, that could bring down the per-seat cost to $5k-- now getting close to the cost of an ordinary international ticket. Of course this is all assuming that Musk's baseline of $500k to Mars is reasonable.
Would be curious to hear from some rocket engineers about these guesses at the numbers/efficiency.
Not accounted for is amortized development cost for E2E-only vehicles, as well as all the infrastructure and ground support at the destinations.
Edit: If you wanted to be less conservative, you could pack in 1000 people instead of 500 (0.5x ticket price multiplier), or use a different source for the Mars ticket price (0.4x), which would bring it to $1k.
I'm not entirely sure how serious SpaceX are about their E2E idea anyway, I took it as more of a "hey, isn't this neat? totally physically possible and practical too." I imagine it would take a long time to scale up to that point though, probably decades(?) after the Moon/Mars.
[1] https://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unc...
Non coastal cities have a problem...
In any case it takes care of most nimby as it's to far away for the neighbors to care. So reasonable, in that aspect.
Of course ITAR, fear of nuclear strikes etc... general FAA/EASA regulations remain issues for this business plan.
Weather will also be an issue. Flights rarely get canceled for weather issues. But transferring from a ferry onto a barge at high sea in bad wind seems like an non fun experience in a three piece suit.
yes you are right, I wasn't factoring in the fact that currently airline travel requires you to travel to an airport which is usually very far from the city centre.
I suspect putting the spaceport at sea is mainly a security issue. Failing to reach the landing pad is certainly less catastrophic on water than on the ground.
And that would actually be better than aircraft, there isn't such thing as a water landing there it's called crashing in the ocean.
You also want your rocket to land in an uninhabited area, in case something goes terribly bad. Sea makes much sense in this regard.
An extremely aggressive and impressive timeline.
By telling the world that they'll be ready to fly in five years, they're making a statement that other organisations/companies that want to get involved with this effort need to start working on developing the other parts right now.
If the schedule ends up being more like 2028 for the first flight, they stand a much better chance at flying the right stuff there.
And the trick is, the more people he can convince of that, the better chances we have the Mars colony will happen.
I expect we'll see them spinning back up on the immediate future. :)
For manned missions, you're more interested in the least '∆t' (time spent traveling) since crew sanity/health is more important than fuel. (Yes, astronauts are exceptional and willing to endure a lot of discomfort, but the less time they have to spend in a small tin can, the better.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porkchop_plot
[2] http://www.amssolarempire.com/Programs/porkchop_plot.png
The other reasons to go to Mars that he has mentioned before are (arguably) valid.
This man might be the most inspirational voice in our lifetime.
Especially the intercontinental transport part. That is a real business use-case, potentially very lucrative. I also suspect that could get quite a few more billionaires excited (after all they spend a lot of time in private jets and I'm sure they'd like to cut that time off) which could help raising more investment.
I don't believe there is much to do on mars or the moon, not much that would make economical sense anyway. But intercontinental transport? That could work.
If they can get that infrastructure heavily subsidised, then perhaps it's a different story. That said, I can't see many cities that would be willing to invest in this, except perhaps the ultra-rich ones, like Dubai.
Imagine getting this built for New York or London. I can't.
Edit: I don't mean to sound so negative; I actually think the rest of the talk was super positive in that it feels realistic - it's just the inter-continental travel bit that gave me pause.
I think you misunderstood him. Musk doesn't plan on founding a mars colony. He plans on giving a solid business plan for a big, fully reusable rocket capable of transporting hundreds of people. He believes transportation is the main obstacle to people building a city on mars.
> Fly to most places on Earth in under 30 mins and anywhere in under 60. Cost per seat should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft. Forgot to mention that.
1. You can't leave your seat. Very high seat density.
2. No restrooms.
3. No food or any other services.
4. Very few (if any) cabin staff.
5. Fully automated flight; perhaps no pilot.
6. More reliable flight schedule; only a small bit of earth's weather on either side of the flight matters.
Personally, I'd put up with a lot if the whole flight was <40 minutes.
On the other hand, the vomit. So much vomit. :(
Almost certainly no pilot.
Cool stuff.
Lets put E2E propellant requirements for the BFR/Booster and the ITS at 10 times that of the martian transfer that would put the CH4 costs of the trip to less than $6500.... At 100 times that it would be about $65,000.
That will still be much cheaper than the most fuel efficient jets we have like the A380 and the 787-9 with the fuel costs of a 15 hour flight being in the range of 150-200,000$ depending on the aircraft.
The ticket is worth much more than economy!
Earth to earth flights would be sub-orbital though, so no opportunity for extra orbits.
If he can get the cost down to US $10 million per trip, that's US $12K per person.
Of course this level of reusability and reliability has never been achieved before, but the whole thing depends on it.
I suppose the reentry speed on mars is much higher, since it happens at the end of an interplanetary trip.
Falcon 9 presently lands completely without any heat shield, because it just uses it's engines to reduce velocity until they are not needed. In principle, you can always replace heat shields with fuel like this.
Mars trips need to bleed velocity aerodynamically because the craft cannot bring enough fuel. Presumably a sub-orbital hop on Earth can save enough fuel to act as the brakes.
On earth you just need to survive, the speed is primarily reduced with the engines.
Makes him feel more authentic. Like an engineer talking about his stuff, not a marketing guy
The SLS specifically was designed to build a coalition between NASA centers who were involved with the SpaceShuttle, a group of large influential companies who produce the core components for the Shuttle and the SLS and a group of senators who are well located to defend these private and NASA jobs in their state.
Together the bureaucracy, business and the political can enforce this utterly foolish project to continue. This goes for both SLS and Orion, two of the biggest pork projects in US space history.
If you don't want the space agency to be controlled by corporations not owned by Musk you can do something about it via the many channels that exist for that explicit purpose.
With a corporation I can just not use their product, they don't get my money and beyond that I don't really care what goals they have in space.
> If you don't want the space agency to be controlled by corporations not owned by Musk you can do something about it via the many channels that exist for that explicit purpose.
Like what channels? Writing a congressmen?
You vote every couple of years on a small group of people and those people are responsible for lots of things, not just space. So when you vote space is a small priority and most people care more about other issues.
NASA needs to given more independence and change the process of NASA budgeting. ESA does a lot better in many ways because they have a longer planning cycles. NASA should use more competitive contracting like they did for Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo.
These changes require evolutionary and sometimes revolutionary change and this is happening a little in NASA now. The Shuttle group has already lost out, the SLS is defensive effort.
The best thing we can do is point out how bad the current system is and oppose the pork projects. Moral outrage compared with workable efficient solutions that save money have the ability to potentially form alternative coalition.
Additionally with the entire flight being automated, what happens if the software gets taken over in space and they just drop it like a rock onto a city? The damage would be catastrophic. We need Elon to invest in city wide force field technology too it would seem.
In space. I don't think it would survive that in the lower atmosphere. And a lot of danger comes from the fuel, not the kinetic energy.
OTOH, what if terrorists gain access to that system?...
You have to gather the people, check them in and clear them during internation flights. Then you have to load everybody on a boat, ship them to the platform X miles into sea, unload them, take them up the big tower, letting them board and settle and depending on how predicatable this is, wait for clearance to take off.
Now is the short flight.
And afterwards we can do the entire thing in reverse.
Some things might be a bit more optimized, like perform customs, safety instructions etc during the boat trip. But the entire trip from arriving at the sea/space-port until leaving it at the destination would probably be making this a diminishing returns and only really interesting for the extremely long flights.
- Get everybody on a boat in NYC harbor with ferry level security (i.e. not much)
- As the boat is travelling to the platform, perform the more thorough check in, any security scans, etc. Everyone simultaneously straps down in their seats, last minute toilet runs etc.
- Slot the passenger capsule into the rocket like a cartridge and take-off immediately at arrival. Plot twist: the capsule was on the boat. Passengers might not even get to see the rocket.
If this were to happen I would imagine it to not be a capsule, but simply entire rows of chairs.
The main killer would still be the whole transit between the harbor and the rocket, but this could probably shave about half an hour.
That's not saying there is no market for something like this, but for anything but the longest flights it's going to be a very specific kind of customer.
I would love to know what their plans are, since shielding is heavy. [2] seems to suggest electromagnetic deflection as viable (which would be insanely cool, and could probably reuse SpaceX's cryogenics work for superconductors).
Also, a quick search didn't turn up much on the anisotropy of interplanetary radiation, but I wonder how much a reduction would be achieved by angling the crewless area of the ship towards the solar wind (which I think Musk had touched on in an earlier talk).
[0]: http://www.srl.caltech.edu/ACE/ASC/DATA/bibliography/ICRC200... [1]: https://xkcd.com/radiation/ [2]: https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~d76205x/research/shieldin...
EDIT: Of course these sorts of talks are really exciting! This is just one more in a laundry list of crazy-cool engineering problems that have to be/are being solved.
We know enough to get started and we will have to figure the rest as we go along.
I disappointingly see F is for Falcon, but still I really like the lack of marketing in the name.
Plus I like the parallel with Roald Dahl's BFG.
[0]: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-...
So it seems a bit premature to concern yourself with interplanetary ambitions before we are even sure if we can maintain our own planet (which is, and will remain for an extremely long time, the only place for autonomous life in space that humanity has).
Then again, maybe I'm nitpicking since it's not like Musk demands the whole world to commit its resources to his ideas. If he wants to play around with adventurous Mars trips that's fine.
Edit: Of course I'm also aware that Musk is still using his money better than many other wealthy people, so more power to him. This comment was mostly about space exploration vs. sustainable life on earth, all other things being equal.
Regardless of which path we take, the immediate technological prerequisite is the same: an economical way to send Earth payloads to space, i.e. a fully and rapidly reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle. That's what SpaceX is developing.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2016-06-dutch-crops-grown-mars-soil.ht... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
- a submarine
- the middle of Death Valley
- the middle of Antarctica
- the (completely lifeless) top of mount Fuji
Living in a Mars colony would be a combination of all these experiences.
If you somehow have the magic sauce to make Mars enjoyable, you could offer this experience in the middle of the desert as well. You could tackle real habitation problems on this planet.
Just building a couple school buses (ISS) to float around the Earth took hundreds of billions.
And to the "what about nuclear war on Earth" argument: are you going to build a lightbulb factory on Mars? Semiconductor fab? Smelter? No Mars colony would be self sufficient for a realllllly long time
EDIT: Earth 2 Earth is interesting, though I don't know how you solve the vomit problem. Or the "sometimes the rockets explode " problem.
Absolutely, but then just one of these things will dwarf the ISS all on it's own. The old equations of space exploration affordability are being rewritten.
As for people wanting to go, there's a permanent base at the south pole, the peak of Mount Fuji is often a churned up field of mud from all the visitors and Burning Man looks like a ton of fun. Ok so some of that is frivolous. I'm ambivalent about the idea of Martian cities in the next 30 years say, but who can really look further ahead than that?
There's nothing that seems un-achievable about BFR. It seems to me these things will be going to space, and the Moon, and Mars at a ludicrously low cost compared to previous space missions. The real question is what will we do with that capability? I'm guessing we are going to do something with it. Musk's graphics are explicitly aspirational, but we'll do something with these vehicles and its going to be a heck of a lot more than any other plans I've ever seen.
Even at a "ridiculously low" price of $500k, you're basically offering a mount Everest experience for people. Dangerous , uncomfortable, generally hard to do if you're not super free. A crazy adventure
Some people are interested, but you can't argue much for economy of scales when the total market of affordability is probably tiny.
Only 5000 people have ever climbed Mt Everest.
People want to go to Mars. People want to try and live there. Scientists want to go there and learn, and explore.
On the other hand, people know what to expect from the rock that is Mars. If Mars was an unknown and people would want to go there to discover what's there, then the analogy would be correct.
Of course, people will still go, but reaching a critical mass for an unnecessary settlement (at which point it might turn slightly more alluring for more immigrants) remains to be seen. But I guess what happens happens, we'll see.
Maybe if Mars is some sort of lawless territory it can become the libertarian haven some rich people want, and could trick some future slaves to get sent over there....
Neither of these statements are true. It's only a question of money, and money spent appropriately. Musk is demonstrating both of these.
As soon as we have a self-sustaining base on Mars, we're multi-planetary. There have been enough experiments to show that a man-made self-sustaining bio-sphere is possible. If Musk's timeline happens, this could be easily within a century, if not decades. To quote a phrase, 'necessity is the mother of invention'. It's likely that settling on Mars will drive the science and research that will solve these problems.
As for interstellar travel, that's well documented elsewhere on the web. It's doable, now, with current technology, without humans, but is massively expensive. And we don't know where to go. Once we do, it's just an engineering challenge for Musk V2 to solve.
I'm enjoying this, it's basically laying out goals that he's essentially saying 'hold us to this'.
Part of me thinks that the whole moon base thing was a pitch to legislators/NASA.
Would love to see these kinds of big picture roadmaps in other areas/industries. It's a shame so much of our possible progress is politicised.
Compared to F9, BFR is fatter and would have less trouble with high-altitude winds at launch.
Now landing weather, that's another thing.
If anyone else was saying this, was showing these graphics, you'd think it was just wish fulfillment; a fantasy. And I'm sure their timeline is a bit aggressive. But I fully believe the SpaceX team can do this.
This has made me feel inspired for the future almost more than anything else has in recent memory.
(For context, and to the doubters, I've been following SpaceX for a long time, through their many failures, and they've already revolutionized the space industry. They have a drive and a vision and they're just going for it. This isn't about profits for them, it's about pushing humanity forwards -- and if that sounds grand, it's because it is.)
Not Elon specifically, politics would only get in his way, but inspiring yet pragmatic visionaries... willing to make mistakes, challenge common beliefs, and build the future.
The problem....the ancient problem...is that the kinds of mental makeup that would be very good at running large organizations tend to also not WANT to do such things.
As in, it's not as marketable. It's doesn't seem like it's been a style of preparation for a pure sales/marketing kind of pitch.
Kind of interesting, in my opinion.
Completely agreed that it's raw in a good way -- you can tell he really has technical detail down too, I noticed one of the times when a slide left too early he still knew the numbers that had been on it. Also he has an understated sense of humor ("mountain").
I also sometimes got the sense he genuinely was in awe at what he was seeing. Like it still took him by surprise. It was interesting to watch.
> It's not as crisp/polished as Jobs' presentations were
All this said, I wish there were a Jobs-like figure to sell SpaceX. I'm sure there are people who'd disagree with me on this, but I can only imagine how popular/well-known SpaceX would be if they had someone who could pitch to the general public. SpaceX keynotes could be tune-in television with the right person, but it'd have to be someone really tied to the company, I don't think you could hire someone to do this. It'd have to be authentic.
I think a lot of people feel the same way about Elon. He's not overpolished, rehearsed, or manipulative...it's just honest and unapologetic.
Going to space is fun and exciting. The future of space travel is going to be interesting, but it essential that when we imagine the future that we do so while recognizing the glaring problems of today.
So while your sentiment is fine in a vacuum, I don't think it fits on this thread, and it's certainly not a sound criticism against advancing space colonization. In fact, there's a sizable sentiment that this planet is beyond saving due to political failures, and colonizing other planets is the only way for our species to survive.
Why would our political failures not follow us to other planets that we colonize?
Progress is not made by politicians, it is made by engineers. If you want clean water for all humans, you should be supportive of discovering new stuff.
For example, for humans to survive in hostile environments on other planets we need to create new innovations and that creates a big incentive to figure out technological solutions to hard problems.
Turning salt water into drinkable water is one, this one is actually already solved and being implemented across different countries and if we can improve that and make it cheaper we will have solved the problem of water already.
It is very easy to forget that high-tech engineer is a species that only thrives in politically stable countries.
Standing on the shoulders of giants is not only about your predecessors that solved engineering problems so you can dive even deeper - it is also about society which found better ways over time for effective financing that allows science&engineering to happen.
Also please read (for example) about Samsung and Nokia - they were forced to change industries by politicians in their respective countries.
I disagree, a lot of nations became stable because of engineering solutions in the first place and also more scientifically literate. There is a ton of examples of this. The first telescope, as an example, thanks to Hans Lippershey and Galileo Galilei showed that the earth wasn't flat and removed some power from the church it also clearly made us see that the sun doesn't go around the earth so it showed that Copernicus was right all along. A big discovery that made people doubt the christian religion and change the political landscape forever.
All big scientific discoveries changed the societies in a big way and there is no going back. Scientific discoveries and technological innovation is the only thing that push a society forward.
No, man, that's simply not true. That's an incredibly technocratic view of the world.
Using the U.S. as an example, the (belated) end of slavery in the U.S. didn't come about from a scientific discovery or a technological innovation. Technics played a part in the exacerbation of the issues, but it was politics, culture, language, religion and "spirit" that ended state sponsored slavery. I think that was a decently large push forward for society.
Just ask the people that have a fulltime job but still cannot afford a place to live if slavery has ended. But sure, politics can change some things but in the end it doesn't change much.
To add to my point, politics may alter how we live but it doesn't bring anything new into the world. If we want to progress, we need to solve issues and take away the need for people to do stuff we don't want them to do. If you had todays farming equipment for example, there would never had been any slaves because one machine can do the job of hundreds of slaves. The machine doesn't have to be fed and managed, the machine doesn't fight back.
I believe we can solve any such problem with technological advancement and thus our money should be heavily invested there.
Who wants to live in a technologically sophisticated world if most of the spending goes to war, surveillance, bailing out rich bankers, healthcare insurance, and just housing, anyways?
What if you would reverse that? Don't you think we would be better off in every way possible?
As technology increases our suicide rate isn't really consistently declining. Our prison population has increased. Technology cant make those improvements alone. We need improvements in governance, culture and education for this to happen.
Technology can be used for good or bad. By itself, it is just a tool, it's up to us to decide if we are going to end up in a police state with constsnt surveillance and tyranny, colonize Mars, create weapons that can wipe out most of humanity, solve healthcare problems, etc.
But we also live in a time with least war and a lot less suffering in general. Technology may be a tool, but science is not. With science we can prove that x makes more people happy and reduces suicide rates and hence make that choice.
The issue is that science is not really that present in the chamber of politics. With a more science-heavy government investments would look a lot different.
I am not advocating for technology alone, basic science plays an equal or even more important role in shaping the society. Science has values and it is the only true values that exist. I would argue that with help of the scienctific method we can figure out what makes people happy and implement it politically. But the progress still starts with science.
You need to put that scientific method you are talking about to use. Are people really happier today than in 1950? Why is the suicide rate going up
The difficulty with your argument here is that tech has enormous potential to make life better, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it will. You may be interested in noting that this is a common idea: I've seen the popular science educators like Sagan, NDT, Nye all say this...
As an example, consider reformation: many attempts have been made at reforming the church, but the first successful one happened only after the printing press got widespread enough that the reformational thesis could spread around the Europe very quickly.
Or you could reasonably argue that the end of feudalism happened because of gunpowder and accessible firearms. Where previously a person had to train half of their life to be able to fight with an armoured knight, suddenly with firearms, anyone could become effective in the field in pretty much no time. This shifted power away from the local lords in a significant way.
There are plenty of similar examples you can find in all of history. You can probably shoot plenty of holes through them, too, but still, this for me sounds like a most plausible theory of social changes of the ones I heard.
That the Earth is not flat has been known since ancient times. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth.
With increased technology it was easily disproven.
My bad and thanks for correcting and enlightning me :)
>With increased technology comes more liberties for all.
...uhm. What? How? Examples? a line of thought? Gimme something here.
>Progress is not made by politicians, it is made by engineers.
Again, what? That's an overwhelmingly naive and narrow view of the world. JFK helped expedite aerospace research, as well as the NASA administrators who didn't do any engineering work but kept the agency running on track? They get no credit in the 'progress'?
Politicians were not partly responsible for the development of long range rocketry and nuclear fusion that came out of WWII?
It's strange to me that people are assuming that when I question the _kind_ of technological advancement being focused on that I'm critiquing _all_ technological advancement. I challenge you to find that critique in my words. Again, I would be most excited about a future where the _primary_ goal of the progress is the reduction of inequality. How can we talk about 'progress' without first talking about the rubric for progress itself? How are we (you) defining progress?
> ...uhm. What? How? Examples? a line of thought? Gimme something here.
Electricity, internet, radio, engines, cameras, etc.
> JFK helped expedite aerospace research, as well as the NASA administrators who didn't do any engineering work but kept the agency running on track? They get no credit in the 'progress'?
You're just enforcing my point, this is people who understand that we need technological progress in order for us to move forward as a society. Of course they are part of the progress, they help enable the progress to go faster.
> Again, I would be most excited about a future where the _primary_ goal of the progress is the reduction of inequality.
It is my belief that this will never happen, at least not untill we have progressed so far that everyones needs are met. Until then, there is no real incentive for people to reduce inequality. Just look at history, we've never been able to do this so far so there is no reason to belive that we suddently change our behavior.
I am defining progress as a lot of things, it can be the discovery of something new but it can also be an invention that benefits just a small number of people. In the long run, most new inventions will benefit everyone.
I agree wholeheartedly with that. Let's consider those people, and lets consider some other, mmm, how about Rwandans as well. Has electricity and the radio, cameras and engines increased the liberties of those people? I many cases a lot of those technologies have been used to remove liberties from those people, and sometimes to even kill them.
We have the technology now to meet everyone's need. Right now. We can produce enough food, we can build enough houses and supply everyone with enough calories. What technological things need to happen in order to distribute our resources accordingly? You'll probably say that's not a technological problem, at least not primarily, and I agree. This is the larger point I'm trying to get at and challenge others to address. I don't believe the most exciting future is one that requires enormous technological progress and when we focus on enormous technological progress for the sake of progress, rather than the sake of equality, well then we as a society continue to create a world the mirrors our goals: progress instead of equality.
>Until then, there is no real incentive for people to reduce inequality.
Sure there is, it's called compassion.
As for questioning the kind of technological advancement and the reactions to it, I think the defensive comments come from a combination of the following:
1. Questioning spending on space exploration in the topic about space exploration is like questioning the existence of football on a football match. You're talking to an audience who loves it and telling them that it takes resources away from More Important Things. Except that space is at the same time much more underfunded and much more important than football, baseball, basketball, movies, concerts, celebrity gossip and all the other stuff people like[1]. So it kind of feels unfair to single it out here.
2. Basic research is increasingly becoming underfunded. The funny thing about solving the world problems with technology is that, more often than not, what enables those technologies is pie-in-the-sky research with no expected immediate results. This doesn't fly well with the markets, and as countries increasingly treat science in the same way market economy does, the funding for long-term research is in ever greater jeopardy. Attacking space exploration through arguments of other more immediate problems is in a big way attacking basic research.
3. People need to dream about better future. Space exploration is somewhat unique that it captures and nourishes the imagination and hope for a better world.
4. We have enough resources to solve the more important problems like clean water and food for all. And yet they are not solved. Taking the meagre few $B from space research will most likely not help in solving those problems, but it will shut down space research.
--
[0] - Note that in that they're not unique - theoretically, a private institution with large amounts of resources can do the same thing too. Still, to date, it's usually governments that are willing to spend money on actual research.
[1] - Also, there's plenty of money in wasted military spending that could be taken first, even without reducing the actual military capabilities of a country.
How come this argument only gets dragged up when we’re talkign about space, but not when we’re talking about movies, holidays, computer games, etc. It just seems weirdly disproportionate.
How do you know that?
The slides were not in sync confusing the audience. Not knowing when to clap, made it really uncomfortable.
He seemed to just drop stuff randomly without a narrative thread. When he showed the BFR/ITS for the first time, he had a much clear threwline, even while rambling in between.
Giving speeches is more appropriate for his actual job.
He knows more about the rocket then probably anybody else.
He said that he spends about 80% of his SpaceX time as and engineer.
Also, and this was particularly true when we where in much more cramped quarters on the production side, I would run in Musk on occasion in my area and he knew way more about the intricacies of my work, and the equipment I was using, or complaining about, than I would have assumed considering all the things he's responsible for.
Fair enough, but that leads me to believe he needs to hire more engineers. He shouldn't need to be that hands-on, even if he wants to be.
I'd hazard that companies which achieve truly impressive things, often do so because of how decisions are made. You need benign (or not so benign) dictators right in the weeds with their teams. Put layers of bureaucracy between Elon and his engineers, turn him into a board-meeting CEO... and SpaceX would lose one of the fundamentals that makes it special.
He calms down when he starts talking about risk and it being the anniversary of a launch.
edit: Good and fun presentation regardless!
edit2: Thoughts:
- Maybe he feels in over his head. The timing when he relaxed seemed to coincide with talking about a previous experience that might have felt overwhelming at the time but paid off.
- Maybe he typically takes beta blockers or something for speeches and take them until late this time (the talk did start late)
- Maybe it's just random.
Any spacex watchers have thoughts on cause?
edit3: Definitely not a diss. Love Elon/SpaceX/the vision.
The talk was on the 9th anniversary of their first successful launch, which basically made SpaceX possible.
Clearly no gamers in the audience, I died.
I think the dreams of being multi-planetary are similar to buying doomsday bunkers in New Zealand. I see it as a desire to escape the problems of earth.
I would ask a question to Anjum Choudhary, "If there is a colony on Mars, and your ideology got hold of major countries on Earth, would you try to convert those on Mars?". I think the answer, undoubtedly would be yes.
Humanity has much to resolve on earth, if we go multi-planetary before we reconcile then all we would end up doing is make our problems multi-planetary.
Unless few people escape earth and destroy earth so that there won't be anyone following them. Equivalent to you first going into a safe bunker and then nuking the world, wait out the nuclear fallout to emerge. But then you would be pure evil.
I don't know if they have thought this through. On the scale of centuries, not quarter ends, all they are doing is working for those with higher rate of reproduction.
Living in fear of Islam (or LDS, or Branch Davidians) is a foolish way to evaluate a scientific/societal exploration project.
Yeah, the first ones to look at earth from outer space had an mind altering experience. I am sure the few who flew in first airplanes had similar story to tell, but now we complain about service while flying.
We would just get used to being in space, and keep doing what we do best, be humans and have conflict.
I want earth treated right, people on earth treated right, space escape will only bring out worst from people.
Secondly, I know I am speculating but IMO the reason Elon want to do this now may have something to do with emergence of singularity. I think he wants to have backup BEFORE we create artificial superintelligence which by median of estimates of AI researcher is to be believed around 2045.
I think having a backup of humanity would make world leaders to be more dangerous with their decision making, destroying earth in the process. Why, they have backup of humanity in outer space.
And after disaster on earth, they try to restore the backup and realize that restore is not going to work. Any DBA will tell you stories of failing restore and the dread that sets in when that happens, it does happen.
My worst fear is that in space we would realize that humans need a certain bacteria in our stomach to develop brain or to just be humans, and our last colony-wide anti-viral shot killed those bacteria's, and that bacteria only is found in cow's milk, cows that eat grass on earth. And then that's it, end of story.
I think the physics of space exploration can be worked out, biology is not going to be.
The successful projects are usually not the expensive once. Compare the cost of Commercial Cargo (1&2) and Commercial Crew to SLS/Orion is truly eye opening.
Why? This is not a government bureaucracy. People die in many places in private business. As long the company has high level of assurance that they will not get sued or regulated, I don't see how a failure could collapse the whole endeavor.
Are our efforts of colonizing space a detriment to our efforts to keep earth habitable?
Or, "Pale Blue Dot" from Voyager 1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Pale_Blu...
Space exploration has given us some of the most profoundly transformative new views of life on Earth, giving us a greater appreciation and a greater understanding of what Earth is, what its value is, and informing our relationship with Earth. Mars colonization will be no different, I suspect.
Not only will it help crystallize our self-conception of who we are and what we're about as a species, it will provide a greater clarity on what it means to create proper "living conditions" here on Earth. On Earth it's easy to take things for granted. Which sometimes means we also allow progress to stall because we perceive things as being just "good enough for now". A lot of that will change with Mars colonization, and for the better I think. On Mars they won't have clean air or clean water without putting in a tremendous amount of work to create them. Which they will do, of course, because the alternative is to live without them, which isn't reasonable. But consider life back here on Earth, where we take our air and water for granted. Where we can approach the issues of a lack of clean water or air in a lackadaisical manner, without it being the highest emergency priority. And that's true not only in the developing world (India or Sub-saharan Africa) but also in the midst of the developed world (the lead tainted water in Flint and elsewhere, Victoria, BC in Canada flushing its toilets directly into the Ocean, etc, etc.) And the way we treat environmental issues as something that our grandchildren might have to finally get around to sorting out, but not something to actually begin tackling right now today.
Imagine what it's like on Mars where the starting condition is a bare rock with zero trees, zero rivers, zero lakes. Will Martians plant forests, will they create lakes and rivers? Of course they will. That'll be one of the first things they begin doing. And those things will be precious treasures to them. Just as with air and water, that simple act will help remind us of the natural treasures we exploit and take for granted on Earth rather than preserve and cherish.
Additionally, the technologies developed on the path of Martian colonization will have immanent applicability to Earth. The BFR alone is a perfect example of that, suitable not just for Mars colonization but also for Earth satellite delivery, and point-to-point travel, among other functions. Colonists will pioneer a lot of new techniques and a lot of new technologies for their own unique needs. But I think we'll find that while those needs are unique, the advances they make will have a lot wider application. One thing that will be necessary on Mars is figuring out how to build stuff using a minimal base of machine tools and industrial infrastructure. That sort of cost/complexity reduction will be just as applicable on Earth. As will figuring out how to use advanced machine tools (CNC, 3D printers, laser/water cutters, etc.) to their maximum utility. Growing high yield crops sustainably. Achieving high efficiency of recycling. And on and on.
Having a civilization that can use resources from space will help earth as well.
Also weird to think about the long-term implications of Earth's resources leaving Earth permanently/irrecoverably.