Musk revises Mars ambitions
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
They were the first to achieve re-usability of the first stage of an orbital class rocket, the first to prove out supersonic retro-propulsion and the first private company to re-fly a spacecraft (the Dragon Capsule). Given that, it seems like they should be given the benefit of the doubt when they say they are going to do something.
Getting into Mars is solvable technological problem. Colonizing Mars is more economical and sociological problem than technological problem.
Everyday living in high-tech place where everything is safety critical (like in a nuclear submarine or ISS) is extremely expensive. Productivity would have to be beyond everything that has ever existed for that becoming possibility.
If Elon Musk can crack Mars colonization economy, he has also invented something that can be used to drop F-35 fighter, nuclear submarine and aircraft carrier maintenance costs to level where they are negligible.
There is always counterarguments that are based on post-scarcity economy. I accept that argument. But we get faster into Mars if we first develop post-scarcity economy here on earth first. Then those who want to leave just move there. Those who want to go Mars now are thinking it wrong.
--- EDIT:
In case I didn't make myself clear, I believe that Musk can get into Mars in his lifetime. There can be small research station and we can explore little.
But it will be a money sink. We will do some research and then leave and probably it takes another 50 years until someone visits in person again.
All the science fiction thing humans have achieved, microchips, computers, mobile phones, commercial air travel increase productivity and there is massive demand for them. Combined R&D over decades can be trillions and it's profitable. Interplanetary space travel is going nowhere fast because there is no profit motive. Getting into orbit is profitable business and that's what SpaceX is doing.
However consider this. He's discussing replacing a good chunk of the airline industry. Per https://aviationbenefits.org/economic-growth/value-to-the-ec... the airline industry is worth around $600 billion per year. Suppose that he captures $100 billion of that. With about $10 billion profit per year.
He's just paid for the Mars colony 5 times over. And he WASN'T planning on colonizing Mars as a charity!
It only sounds crazy. The numbers actually can add up.
This is so very true. We can do it for Science, and for fun, but not much else.
For SpaceX, there are people who will spend $500k or $200k on a ticket to go to Mars. If SpaceX can get us there for less than that, there's profit there too. There are enough people for moving there alone to be a profitable venture.
Many billionaires on Earth are now spending their fortunes investing in ways to make profits in space. Don't bet against them.
However, things change when speaking of an economically self-sustaining base; and eventually a base theoretically capable of full-self sustenance (not dying in case there was a transport disruption or Earth itself suffered a disaster). This simplifies the funding discussion to start up costs and r.o.i.
In that case, humanitarian-utilitarian arguments such as expanding the Human civilization to other planets (Musk's call for making life multiplanetary), backing up life, etc. also start making a little more sense (if the colony isn't self-sustaining all of those points are moot).
Is that feasible? Certainly not today, but perhaps in 50 years?
I mean, a civilization doesn't actually need that much to sustain itself. The basic needs are (a) energy, and (b) materials. Obviously Mars receives Solar power (about 45% as much as Earth per m^2), and it has materials (all basic industrial elements are present in the crust).
The question is, can we start an industry on Mars that is efficient enough today such that the cost of producing and maintain infrastructure (solar panels, mining equipment) is lower than the output from the products? If your solar panel gives 10MJ during it's lifetime, you need to use at most 10MJ (used in mining and manufacturing) to produce it. That's an engineering analysis, and I'm it will be eventually feasible. It also improves with economies of scale.
This is in my opinion the wrong question, and the answer is unequivocally no. People will not go to mars to make their fortune, at least initially, they will go for research, for glory and because they can. In centuries to come the answer will be yes, but not on any reasonable timescale. People will move there anyway.
I agree that maybe a handful might go there because they can. But very soon you need to start producing enough to at least keep yourself alive. So much that I believe we ought to start developing those technologies (which takes time) before other steps.
We can probably fabricate regolith-lookalikes on Earth and start doing basic chemical and industrial engineering for pretty cheap, much cheaper than the billions you need for a mission.
Colonising mars will be a money sink in the way that colonising the new world was - many will die, some will get rich eventually, the original investors will lose everything.
I think that's the core of the objections. At least mine, anyway.
If that stuff is really a problem, start a colony in Antarctica. It'd be much easier to achieve livable conditions there than Mars, and your life support won't be tens of millions of miles away.
Antarctica: breathable air, much warmer than Mars, more insolation, low light-speed lag, water.
Mid-ocean: much much warmer than Mars, high pressure, low light-speed lag, lots of water. No breathable atmosphere but some oxygen can be extracted.
Emi Koussi: hugely warmer than Mars, breathable atmosphere (at 10K feet), no significant water, low light-speed lag.
Build your domes in each of those locations, run them for ten years: then you have real data, plus emergency evac.
But people don't want to live there for a long time. They won't want to live on Mars for a long time either.
Name that fallacy?
Unfortunate typo there.
I expect that part may be an attempt to not get their hopes up. One of the things I learned as a child was that if someone told you something that you really wanted to be true, and you believed it, then when it turned out to not be true you felt really really horrible. So instead you disbelieve it, and when it turns out to not be true you feel satisfied that you knew it wasn't true. If it turns out to be true after all, then you are surprised (in a good way) and excited because its a great thing. Of the choices, disbelieving gives a better future emotional outcome.
That said, the older version of me has come to appreciate people who are sincere even if they aren't able to deliver on their promises. Elon is pushing the edge of space travel at a rate that is much more exciting than NASA and other governments were. As a result I can cheer him on in the hopes he will be successful without becoming so invested in that success that it would crush me if it didn't come to pass. As a kid I really believed NASA when they said we'd have a lunar colony in 2001 after the lunar landing in 1969, and their inability to come close to delivering was really painful[1].
The launch of Falcon Heavy is going to be a significant milestone for SpaceX. If they can pull it off, they will have proven they can tame the complexity of adding rockets in parallel to tune their mass fraction to space. No one has done that yet. And if they can recover a second stage, and do so in a way that they can re-use its engines at least, it will demonstrate that the economics of such an effort can be managed as well.
High hopes, realistic expectations.
[1] Yes, I know that if they had kept their funding they would have made better strides, and yes I know that isn't there fault. But neither reality mitigated the impact of NASA essentially "giving up" on the moon.
However, emotions aside, disbelief slows actions and hinders cooperation. I would rather my feelings be hurt then face the actual barriers disbelief provides.
It's the difference between saying, "Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars, wouldn't that be cool?" and "you're going to be living on Mars someday, better get ready". It's also the difference between saying, "self-driving cars would be great, let's try to make that happen" vs. "I'm not going to buy another car until I can get a self-driving one, that's how sure I am that this is imminent".
Really it's the difference between underpromising and overdelivering vs. overpromising and underdelivering. The people who are the most enthusiastic and vocally certain about the inevitability of these things in the near future are more of a threat to making those things happen than the people who are cautiously optimistic but skeptical about them.
IMO that's the reason to be skeptical- just to be realistic and to help the general population set their expectations appropriately. Nothing to do with bracing yourself for an emotional letdown. If overenthusiastic Mars/self-driving cars/AI people are vocal enough to convince the media and the general population about the near-term revolutionary inevitability of these things, then after a few years of those things not happening, the public will flip in the opposite direction. Then voila, no more tax breaks or research funding or other public support for those things, and they go from "might happen in my lifetime" to "will never happen in my lifetime" in reality, not just perception. Right now if you want to work on autonomous vehicles and know your stuff, then maybe there's a job or a grant for you someplace. If public opinion flips to "these people have been saying this stuff is just around the corner for 20 years, this has all been a waste of time and money", then boom, no more government assistance, no more venture capital, no more big companies spending lots of money on R&D for this stuff.
My default reaction is disbelief (I'd prefer skepticism) especially when someone is trying to sell something because that's their whole goal, they are selling you something.
Not to mention, if you are a US citizen you're already supporting him whether you want to or not through government funding.
Depends. Is that `someone` the future employee or investor that would otherwise have played a critical role in the company achieving this task?
My point is that disbelief can stop the right person from taking the right action the company needs.
It's the difference between the George Hotzes of the world and the people who actually do the boring hard work to push through obstacles and make things happen. A George Hotz is a person who doesn't know what they don't know, and therefore gets their inspired, genius projects completely derailed by trivially avoidable, trivially predictable stumbling blocks, because of their overconfidence and lack of intellectual maturity. A not-George Hotz is someone who is probably a lot more boring to watch on YouTube, but is equally inspired and passionate. They obsess over potential obstacles far more than they talk about how awesome their project is going to be when it's done, and how confident they are in its success.
1) he became spaceX lead because no serious engineer would join beside the team he assembled
2) falcon1 failed 3 times, 4th attempt was their last one before folding
I'm not fond of everything Musk, but he achieved something deep and qualitative.
Also, even if the end smelled like fund-me marketing, the first half was genuinely simple and factual (of course considering it's hindsight).
Not saying what SpaceX achieved isn't impressive, it just needs some context.
* re-usability of the first stage of an
orbital class rocket,
* the first to prove out supersonic retro-propulsion
* and the first private company to re-fly a
spacecraft (the Dragon Capsule).
With luck, next month they will be the first company ever to launch and recover a rocket with 27 engines in the first stage.
They are also the first company to launch two rockets into orbit in a single weekend.
So at what point would SpaceX's achievements become "impressive" for you without having to add context?
>> * the first to prove out supersonic retro-propulsion
> Here the key is supersonic retro-propulsion. They really were the first people to light up a rocket engine facing the 'wrong' way of a supersonic spacecraft. NASA's interplanetary systems have all used parachutes to get into the sub-sonic regime before firing retro-rockets. Neither retro-propulsion in orbit (nominally a vacuum) or on the Moon count as supersonic.
All retropulsive landings are rockets facing the "wrong" way. That's true on Mars, the Moon, or Earth.
By the semantics of your argument, neither does the Falcon 9 experience supersonic retropulsive landing, since the only time it fires at supersonic speeds is in the near vacuum state of the upper atmosphere. The descent down to Earth is a guided free-fall and the last step happens at subsonic speeds.
On Mars, terminal velocity for a probe is supersonic, so the parachute stage is required to reach subsonic speeds. It basically replaces the guided free-fall of the Falcon 9 rocket, and make things harder, not easier. It should be pointed out that the full process of landing on Mars involves an insane Rube Goldberg contraption of heat shield, parachutes, retropulsive rockets, airbags, and sometimes a skyscrane. Claiming that what SpaceX is doing is a harder problem than this is simply wrong.
Finally, the Delta Clipper did pretty much exactly what the Falcon 9 did, and so did Blue Origin with their New Shepard rocket. So the concept in its near entirety was well-known for a while.
> They are also the first company to launch two rockets into orbit in a single weekend.
Not from the same launchpad. Many organizations have launched rockets nearly back-to-back, some even from the same launchpad.
> So at what point would SpaceX's achievements become "impressive" for you without having to add context?
Not really what was being argued here. Certainly, what SpaceX has done is impressive with or without context. But the claim that they are magically beyond everyone else is just wrong. Looking at their achievements in context shows their limitations, and that they are not exactly the "first to X" where X is something someone else has long figured out but the poster is unaware.
Attaining orbit required 20 times the energy that spaceship one's flight did - it's why landing airplanes is trivial, and landing rockets is so hard.
Besides, everything SpaceX has done is sustainable in the sense that it helps them make money, either commercially or through a government contract. There's no commercial market for Mars, and a government contract would have to be so large large enough I doubt there would be enough political support.
There is a saying "Nullius in verba" (On the word of no one). Take nobody's word, take their proof. It is a founding principle in science and engineering. It isn't that we should give them the benefit of the doubt, we should give NO ONE the benefit of the doubt.
> I don't understand why people are so quick to dismiss SpaceX's ambitions as unrealistic.
We're taught to be extremely skeptical in the scientific community, and I'd say that the rocket community is more skeptical than the general engineering community.
Another factor, is that their prices are not as low as they advertise. And then there is the amount of re-usability they expect. I'm not saying it is impossible, it is just ambitious. So the community is more in a "we'll wait and see. But we are watching very closely".
Here is just a small list:
- What food will people eat on Mars?
- What space suits will they all use?
- Who will train all the astronauts to go there?
- Who will build the habitats?
- Who is building the equipment to make fuel on mars? How much will this cost?
This is far from a fully researched plan. Look, I really hope it happens and I'm seriously rooting for SpaceX, but there is much more to figure out and plan to make this a reality.
That being said you would have to bootstrap something to get to that point but step one we have to get to Mars before we can even think about those things. That is what musk is trying to do even though it is nearsighted if you think about the long term.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/23/16188658/elon-musk-reveal...
That is not a Mars rated space suit for living and working on Mars. Not even NASA has one ready yet. (They are working on it though)
It really doesn't matter how brilliant he is or how successful he is with SpaceX's plans. No amount of human brilliance can circumvent the fact that mars has 38% of Earth's gravity.
I fear that this will prove an insurmountable barrier. If living in that environment renders you unable to survive in Earth gravity due to the strain on your heart, and it will take hundreds of years to make Mars be like Earth, who is going to want to live in that land of barren nothing for centuries, unable to visit the lush homeworld?
When they land the first two BFRs on Mars, I think we will see enough people willing and have the means to build a colony. Until then, it would be hard to get people to commit the needed capital.
Private industry sits on a tremendous amount liquid wealth. And because of income inequality, it's actually principally controlled by a relatively small number of people.
In other words, not only is private industry capable of financing a Mars mission, the reality is that private financing may be the _only_ realistic option.
For any skeptic wondering how Musk is able to "sucker" so many investors, this is why--there's just a god-awful amount of private money looking for even the most meager gains.
Note that the Federal Reserve's QE2 amounted to only $2 trillion, less than 1% of global financial assets. If you think quantitative easing has led to an asset bubble, think again. Or rather, think bigger. Whatever you think, just realize that we're living in a brave new word with wealth beyond what anybody can scarcely imagine even today. Few people, if any, understand either the possibilities or systemic risks. The magnitude of things, and the speed with which it evolved, is mind boggling.
SpaceX odds for going to Mars are, however, better than anyone else's.
NASA, for example, has done that multiple times.
So why exactly are SpaceX odds better (@ succeeding)?
That rocket landing to the platform flying backwards looks awesome but I don't think it significantly increases their odds for Mars flight. Will they fly there backwards with a similar platform waiting?
As for what SpaceX (and OrbitalATK) does better, look at the cost of ISS cargo deliveries, and then read about the history of Constellation and Ares.
So far SpaceX delivers, and unlike every other player out there, going to Mars is their core mission. So yes they odds are much better than anyone else's, even if by the virtue of none remotely competent pursuing it at all.
Otherwise sending a drone to plant a plaque on Mars has certainly been possible for SpaceX for some years now.
I'm always astounded that apparently we still can't say fuck lest some bogeyman (real or imaginary) jump out and make you regret it.
It's a fucking word. For fuck's sake. I mean, at the point where it's used more often as garnish in it's various adverb and noun forms than it's original verb form, you know, to fuck, how bad can it really be and why do we need to penalize the usage so?
Now watch this get auto-depressed by HN's incendiary comment detection filters.
Edit: If you see this reach the top, please downvote or unvote. I'm interested in this topic, but it doesn't deserve to overshadow real discussion about the submission.
Fake examples:
> It took me forever to find a good font for my webcomic that wasn't comic sans.
I'm astounded that apparently we can't use a perfects good font, lest some bogeyman jump out and make you regret it.
It's a font! For Microsoft Bob's sake. How bad can it really be and why do we need to penalize the usage so?
> John Smith, 56, was arrested for indecent exposure in a playground while laughing maniacally.
I'm astounded that apparently we can't show our entire bodies in public lest some bogeyman jump out and make you regret it.
It's a body part. I mean, it's how all other animals live - how bad can it really be and why do we need to penalize the usage so?
> Riots ensue as it is leaked that all Burger King meat has been human meat, this whole time.
I'm astounded that apparently we can't eat human meat lest some bogeyman jump out and make you regret it.
It's meat! For meat's sake. I mean, at the point where a human is dead, why can't we eat the meat? How bad can it really be and why do we need to penalize the usage so?
1: http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/31/politics/anthony-scaramucci/in...
2: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/07/27/anthony-scaramucc...
3: http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/anthony-scaramucci-steve-ba...
Is it such a bad thing to ty to empathize with others and avoid offending when it's clear that an action or speech probably will? Maybe it's because these days speech is often read by potentially millions of people. And, in those cases, it's almost impossible to not offend someone. So, since it's probably impossible to not offend someone, one might as well just let loose and not worry if you offend everyone? Is that the logic - to avoid overthinking and cognitive overload?
To be clear, I'm talking about news articles accurately referencing and representing what they are reporting. I'm not sure how you can get more contextually appropriate than that. I'm not talking about how professional communication should use swearing because it's fun. I'm talking about how they feel the need to go out of their way to not accurately represent the name of what they are talking about or the actual words that are the cause of the news itself.
It's like people being offended if my last name is "babcock" because it has "cock" in it. At some point it switches from one party making an effort to present themselves civilly to the other party being uncivil by taking umbrage over small, inconsequential items. In this case, news agencies are apparently so worried over the latter that journalism suffers (we'll call the article in question here journalism, and leave the Scaramucci news articles out of it to prevent muddying the issue...). I think that's a real shame.
Down the slippery slope to trigger words and microagressions.
> A bathing suit is not considered appropriate at a wedding.
> Emoji is not considered appropriate at a funeral.
> White pants are not considered appropriate after Labor Day.
> Swearing is not considered appropriate in certain styles of journalism.
All of these, when viewed at a low enough level of abstraction (we're all just atoms!) make no sense. But that doesn't mean we should do away with them all.
News agencies do not sell clarity and accuracy, they sell advertising views. Enough of the suppliers of advertising views will stop supplying that good for news agencies to sell if they encounter a “fuck”, even in a context where it wouldn't earn an FCC fine, that news agencies have a clear economic incentive to avoid the word.
The problem is ultimately those people that care that the word is used, but not why or how.
To me that feels like something society is struggling with lately. People looking for something to belong to, and attaching themselves to groups and causes without fully understanding the cause. Promoting civility is good. Condemning certain words in all contexts is not about civility. It's about proving you belong.
I'm not in the least bit offended by swearing and swear liberally amongst friends, but curse words (taboo words) do exist, and some people are bothered by them. It's not an expensive courtesy to just not swear to strangers, so why not extend that courtesy?
I'm a big believer in the right to offend, but that doesn't mean we should do so needlessly.
If the actual name is Big Fucking Rocket, maybe that's what media should report.
But if Musk says "Big Fucking Rocket" on stage, TV news can't quote him. That's counterproductive to his goals, but using a heavy implication both allows him a broader audience and lets every adult know they've got the 'cheeky' name for it.
In that context, it makes sense to avoid using swear words in more professional settings if you want to avoid giving the audience the associated emotional reaction; it's distracting at best and offensive at worst, and it's easier just to find another way to communicate which word was meant.
There's a lot of words that require some sort of care in their use lest some of the potential connotations carried offend or don't communicate intended meaning.
You might not care about this word -- or, more likely, you care very much about its use, otherwise you wouldn't be fucking talking about it like fucking pedant who is so fucking proud of his fucking adolescent pretensions of having thought about language -- but you probably care about some words and how their varied and overloaded use can affect communication.
(There's a much more diplomatic way I could have my little apositive screed up in the last paragraph. That's part of the point.)
So for the most part I would say "either swear or don't", but if you are going to play that game, you need to be better at it, and call it something like "a big functional rocket" or "a big futuristic rocket", which is plausible, and then remain completely straight-faced, forever, never admitting in public or private there could be any other meaning for the acronym, ever. Leave historians a hundred years from now guessing.
"Wink wink, I'm not cussing!!!" is just another version of "I'm not touching you!!!".
You just picked out one example. That defies my definition of generally?
Also, loanwords like fakku are a legitimate part of the language. The katakana script is used almost exclusively for them and many sentences have them, spoken and written.
F does stand for fun. A lot of it. It's really down to attitude.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
[1]: Some sources have estimated that, adjusted for inflation, the East India Company would have had an equivalent market cap of $7.6 trillion.
If we can't occupy the Moon, why should we shoot for colonizing Mars?
Some of the reasons:
* No atmosphere, no source for Oxygen and Carbon * 28 day night/day cycle, hard to keep your base power over the 14 day night * Unclear if water can be found * Lower gravity
Potentially this means that way more resources would have to be brought in from the outside than on Mars.
(If this is really the case remains to be seen. But the idea that the Moon is closer, therefor it's easier has to be at least challenged)
I'm not very confident about ESA's ambitions either, they don't have a very good track record of achieving ambitious projects such as this one.
What would you use on the Moon to make the Methane?
Mars has a more terrestrially-similar gravity level.
Mars has way more solar power.
Ceres is basically vacuum, can't aerobrake. And its gravity well is so small you also can't take advantage of the Oberth effect.
Mars' atmosphere shields you from the vast majority of solar radiation (so no risk of death from acute radiation poisoning), from all micrometeorites, and even a significant amount of galactic cosmic radiation. It also provides global access to gaseous CO2, nitrogen, argon, and even some water vapor.
Mars can be terraformed.
Two questions:
1) How exactly does this work, when the mean surface temperature on Mars is below freezing? [0] I don't know a lot of plants that can grow very well in below freezing temperatures with a ton of CO2. Evergreen trees come to mind, but you won't find too many of them above the arctic circle.
2) If we cannot even properly manage the atmosphere on our own planet, why do you think we'd fare any better on another planet?
To put it another way: why aren't we aggressively working to terraform Earth back into a usable state than talking about doing this on another planet where resources are much more limited and everything needs to be built locally or shipped in from another planet?
[0] https://www.space.com/16907-what-is-the-temperature-of-mars....
Mars is a barren desert almost a vacuum. But no one lives there, so political opposition is less of a problem in principle. Besides, I think we'll solve the Earth's problems, too. Hopefully doesn't require extreme geoengineering like Mars does, but that's possible.
The idea is you start a self-sustaining civilization on Mars /first/ that has sufficient industry to do terraforming on its own. It will have a strong cultural and political interest in doing so. The hard part is getting a self-sustaining civilization (a city of at least a million people).
Terraforming Mars would involve pumping super greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, warming the surface by reflecting sunlight from massive (but extremely thin) mirrors in orbit, modifying the surface albedo by placing dark colored dust on the poles, and perhaps more directly by continuous sequence of fusion pulses (think inertial confinement fusion) over the poles as Musk has previously suggested. This all would cause the regolith to outgas and increase the atmosphere's pressure which should lead to more warming. Might need to beef up its atmosphere further with external source of volatiles, like icy asteroids or comets. The impact would also liberate a lot of heat itself.
Obviously this is engineering on an extreme scale and long timeframes.
First off, in the 'backup' argument Mars isn't meant as a bomb shelter for the human species. It's a shelter for human civilization, which is a higher level and much more fragile thing. Think about the libraries of the Arab world, not "The Arabs have to exist or humanity could die out when Rome falls!"
The other argument is as a launchpad. Mars is halfway to anywhere in the same way low earth orbit is, but Mars comes with exploitable resources. In the future, we can debate whether those resources are better exploited by enormous robotic fleets and autonomous systems or with humans on site, but with current tech readiness levels nothing beats in-situ humans for adaptability. A strong Martian industrial base will produce huge returns for terrestrial society. From dense high-throughput communication networks to massive orbital manufacturing depots to idyllic ring-world habitats, everything we want to put in orbit is cheaper starting from Mars.
They're only just proving this out, but one of the theses behind Made in Space [0] is that there are all sorts of microscopic manufacturing processes - optical components and chips being the most obvious - which would benefit from manufacturing in an ambient gravity between 0-1g. Which you simply can't get on Earth.
The argument for space-based industry has to start with economics, where it's cheaper because it's closer to the raw materials (asteroids) or closer to the consumers (Mars, lunar, and orbital habitats). The elimination of dirty industry from Earth would only come about as a far-downstream side effect of a well-developed space economy that makes it cheaper for Amazon to drop a Kindle on your house from orbit that it would be to manufacture it in China.
* Human capability >> robotic capability
* Mars as a very long term "Backup Earth"
* If you can go to Mars with humans you can go to the Moon with humans as well.
* Human capable systems can also carry robots, the reverse is not always true.
1) If we can live on mars, we can live on whatever state earth would be in, even if it was mars-like.
2) If earth becomes unlivable, the exhaustion of resources would mean we'll never be able to get to mars in the first place.
Either way, I just don't see a mars colony happening as anything except a temporary experiment. It's a really hostile environment.
And in the case that "multi-planet species" is the goal, is there a better target? I'm not aware of one.
Yes. I don't see what concrete benefits we gain becoming such a species, and I doubt it's possible to send live humans to Mars, or suspend life there. This is the new alchemy.
By the actual definition of alchemy, sending living people to Mars can't qualify as such: we know for a scientific fact that it's possible. It's not even particularly challenging to successfully send (and land) living people there, it's extremely dangerous and risky to their well-being to do so. The idea is to not kill a lot of people in the process of attempting it.
Mars is also a more hospitable place; it has gravity, atmosphere, water, etc.. It's possible to create methane fuel on Mars.
There are also more reasons for people to want to visit Mars that aren't motivated by becoming a multi-planetary species. For instance: science, tourism, entertainment (sports, movies, reality TV, whatever), and low-gravity benefits for people with mobility issues who would be stuck in a wheelchair in Earth gravity.
That isn't to say we can't or shouldn't go to Ceres as well.
1st result) Ceres - Non-profit organization in San Francisco, California
3rd result) Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Colonizing Mars is, by comparison, vastly cheaper in blood. Just not in treasure.
There are a number of reasons why he might give less-accurate predictions, like keeping mars in the public conversation.
Musk functions by a system of eventual correctness, with a time margin for error of perhaps between 3 and 20 years.
It can seem like a tremendous diversion with the potential to abdicate any urgent need to address our problems at home, operating under the assumption that we'll replace it. But that's obviously flawed thinking, since anything we find nearly habitable will always be a poor substitute for where we evolved to live.
I'm addressing this because I know someone will ask. Honestly my first reaction was to laugh, then I made sense of it.
Economically this does not make sense. Price points do not make sense for this, even from the most ambitious startups. You'd want to use a space plane.
BUT I still think it is a good idea. The reason being is that this is a quick way to get his technology to TRL 8/9 [1]. TRL 7-9 is the hardest progression in this scale. So I'm going to guess that Musk is going to make a loss on these flights because SpaceX needs to prove that the vehicle and related technology is flight ready. What better way then doing a bunch of flights close to home, where you can easily repair and monitor the vehicle? NASA is going to be extremely strict on them sending people to Mars. Earth and Moon are the way to go to show proof (even NASA is planning Moon mission before Mars).
Or I could be off base and this isn't what Musk is planning. But it is my hunch.
Source : https://www.instagram.com/p/BZnVfWxgdLe/?hl=en&taken-by=elon...
Let's try to estimate fuel costs, according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Syste...) propellant costs $168 per tonne, and the spaceship can hold 1950t of it, so assuming one full tank per trip, that's $328k for fuel.
The actual cost of the rocket is around $200M, assuming a service life of 1000 flights, that's a $200k amortized cost per flight.
Add a few hundred k for launchpad, personnel, administrative costs of various kinds, and you get in the $500k to $1M ballpark.
So on the back of the envelope it looks about break-even. Maybe there's a sufficient market of people willing to pay a premium for very fast travel to make this profitable.
I'm just saying that there are a lot of red flags and that one should be really skeptical.
Also, those flights would have to be extremely safe to get in the same ballpark as current commercial flights. I think that is needed to make this a ‘normal’ thing.
I would guess those earth-to-earth trips could make more sense for the military than for civilians. Yes, there is the problem of refueling your rocket near a war zone, and a risk of your rocket getting shot down, but the ability to very rapidly deploy specialized troops and/or materials may eventually be worth that, and the military might fund it even if they aren’t convinced the advantages will pan out.
It was the X Prize and Scaled Composits that broke the logjam with their "we can launch from anywhere with a runway" system, which combined with the failure of the shuttle system and lack of funding for NASA has forced them out of a stranglehold position to the point where they basically funded much of SpaceX's early work.
But don't under estimate the effect of the X Prize-- because Virgin Galactic can launch from anywhere, NASA and the politicians had to decide if they were going to lose access to the space tourism business.
They still were kinda silly-- at one point Richard Branson who funded Virgin Galactic was blocked from seeing the designs for the Virgin Galactic ship due to the fact that he is a "foreign national" and the work was considered a "national security" issue.
Also.. wouldnt a sun-shade providing drone with a water-ice container as ray shield always be superior?
This NASA page has more info on that subject: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/real-martians-how-to-pr...
In aircraft, cost per flight is roughly proportional to aircraft size, so "too big" can be indirectly a problem.
With rockets, the difference between fully/rapidly reusable and expendable (or even partially reusable) is so vast that "too big" is basically irrelevant.
In his presentation, Musk showed the expected per-flight costs. BFR would be cheaper /per flight/ than Falcon1. ...and if you dig into last year's presentation, the projected per-flight costs are lower even than Rocketlab's Electron. PER FLIGHT.
And in the end if the repeated flight is cheaper than a traditional rocket it will still pay off, as long as it flies enough missions to refinance its initial investment.
But then I'm not a rocket scientist.