Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Can any engineer speak to whether this is actually progress, or even necessary? It seems like every time something goes wrong, Elon "invents" a way to do it better.
I'm old enough to remember rescue subs, battery swaps, brain implants that will cure autism, factories spitting out factories, solar shingles, truck carriers, one-hour body shop service, tunnels at a fraction of the cost, the ability to identify squeaks in your car with your phone, robots assembling cars so fast they need a strobe light to be seen...
You might have equally big tanks on Earth, under equal pressures, but it will be more cost-effective to just increase the material used on the shell of the tank to solve your problems. Whereas in space, every kg that can theoretically be removed from the launch vehicle is worth investing in, even if it raises the cost of engineering and materials.
So yes it seems reasonable to me that these are groundbreaking challenges.
Isn't weld strength something engineers would know/understand in advance, though? How would it come as a surprise that the welds would fail under pressure?
It seems strange to me that Musk could be spending so much time working on Starship, and somehow a "badly designed, badly built, and badly checked" rocket makes it to the platform and explodes.
They probably designed their tolerances assuming perfect welds and then didn't have them.
This sounds like terrible engineering practice.
It is more an issue of quality control and inspection routines.
Is it even possible to discuss anything Elon Musk anymore without 100% praise of his engineering prowess? Every single comment gets down-voted into oblivion, with very few replies. And, due to the "cool off", this prevents any balanced discourse.
So it has to be as thin and fragile as possible but no thinner. That makes it very hard to get right, and the welds have to be done to very fine tolerances on thin material, you could say it is rocket science.
I understand. But the stresses that materials and welds can withstand are not unknown variables. We're talking about a pressurized tank here. You aren't going to build a rocket (designed to carry people) that has tolerances so tight that it's touch and go whether it explodes as soon as it's pressurized.
If you stretch the definition of "tank" and "on Earth" then modern pressurized airliner cabins definitely qualify.
It's a good reference point, even if there are some key differences worth mentioning.
First up, an airliner fuselage is specced for tens of thousands of pressure cycles; needs to sustain the wear & tear, accumulated stress, and distortion. The rocket needs to handle maybe a dozen pressure cycles at most, and it is feasible to only handle one cycle for first few experimental vehicles.
Secondly, the airliner fuselage has much more complex shape, due to conflicting needs for aerodynamics, attachment of wings & control surfaces, etc.. This, together with varying materials and large openings concentrates stresses in key points. The rocket tank is as close to a big dumb uniform pipe as you can get. Even better, a rocket may rely on internal pressure for structural rigidity, while airliner needs to handle depressurization.
Lastly, the Starship is designed to survive re-entry, thus heat resistance is a major concern there; not anymore for an airliner ever since the Concorde SSTO got retired.
The compounding importance of mass is one factor here, but only half the story. The other half is how SpaceX' quick iterations and ability to retire vehicles early allows ample room to experiment and also to shave off safety factors.
In the more mundane aerospace engineering mass is quite important, but the manufacturing, servicing, longevity etc. are pretty important considerations too. A typical airplane is designed for manufacture of some 200 ... 2000 units and to remain in use for 1 ... 3 decades. This, together with the usual requirement for human flight ratings, ends up dictating rather high safety margins for designs.
Contrast that with SpaceX' vehicles which are supposed to perform a dozen unmanned flights each at most, and where one-way mission of a vehicle is a perfectly feasible strategy for testing while still making decent revenue.
Quick iterations get shit done in aerospace. Among historical examples, that's how MacCready's Gossamer Albatross[1] record-breaker came to be, where other teams failed.
--
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacCready_Gossamer_Albatross
> The current process for building a pressure dome takes about a week; 1 or 2 days to tack up and fit steel sheets, 4 days to weld the sheets together, and 1 to 2 days for X-ray inspections and repairs.
> [...]
> The knuckle seamer looks something like a giant zipper that articulates over the front and back of a dome, like a taco shell around its filling. [...] Then, in about 10 minutes, an automated torch will trace down the length of the curve, providing a precise weld. Following this, the dome is rotated to bring the next seam into view.
> [...]
> With this new X-ray machine, SpaceX hopes to compress a process that can take a day down to a few hours.
So the new machines reduce the amount of time needed to weld and inspect a pressure dome from several days to several hours. I'm certainly no expert, but that seems like a pretty big deal to me.
No, they probably can't. It would be really weird for an outside engineer to have a better insight on this than the engineers from the actual rocket company.
That's feasible due to the requirements being narrow and specific, and also well understood by a team close to the team building those machines.
Contrast that with expensive & slow-to-build machines available on the general market, where the requirements are broad, under-specified, and always shifting.
Yeah, we seem to have strayed a bit too much towards the turn-key end of the spectrum.
IMO both have their rightful place on an open market. The problem with managing building from blocks is that it requires innovation for end results, and, as the saying goes, "Innovation is hard to schedule" (with apologies to Dan Fylstra).
Meanwhile I'm working at an advertising company.
That's a funny way to spell Google.
I hope more entrepreneurs follow Elon's steps.
"Just iterate, baby"
"I’ve spoken with plenty of the earliest engineers who worked at SpaceX, and almost all of them have noted that Musk tackles the hardest engineering problems first. For Mars, there will be so many logistical things to make it all work, from power on the surface to scratching out a living to adapting to its extreme climate. But Musk believes that the initial, hardest step is building a reusable, orbital Starship to get people and tons of stuff to Mars. So he is focused on that.
He knows he won’t get Starship right at first. He employs some of the smartest engineers on this planet, and they’re still, in many ways, fumbling toward solutions for the extremely hard problem of getting a super-large vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well into orbit—then to land it and fly it again. Musk has come to believe the only way to realistically achieve this is through trial and error, by iterating closer and closer to the right design."
Why does it need to be super-large? To simulate gravity?
In space vehicles, that means everything gets really, really big.
Launch vehicles tend to scale payload capacity at a greater rate than dry mass. So a small launch vehicle like RocketLab's Electron might have a wet mass of 12,000kg at launch and an LEO payload capacity of 225kg (225/12000 ~ 1.8% payload), the SpaceX Falcon9 has a wet mass of 550,000kg and an LEO payload capacity of 22,800kg (22800/550000 ~ 4.1% payload).
This just tends to mean that, very generally and with exceptions, larger vehicles can get mass into space with less fuel.
Rocket efficiency scales infinitely with size.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
What am I missing here -- I'm sure I'm overlooking something.
¹ Superlinear because tank mass scales with a lower exponent than tank volume.
I'm confused here. How are they not both cubic?
On the other hand, ten fuel tanks will mass more than a single fuel tank with ten times the volume.
The R7 rocket
- mostly to avoid engine ignition in flight & due to having a lot of nozzles you need to fit on a rocket
- this was then kept for Soyuz even after an additional stage has been added that is started in flight
- Soyuz 2V uses a more efficient engine & uses only the central stage
The proton Rocket
- the central tank has the maximum diameter you can ship via rail from the factory to Baykonur
- by mounting smaller tanks around it that are shipped separately you can avoid building an overly long rocket, that could be fragile and unstable
Saturn 1/1B
- basically a stop gap using existing Jupiter and Redstone rocket tankage tooling
- strap 8 Redstone tanks around 1 Jupiter tank and you get the S-I first stage
Delta IV Heavy/Falcon Heavy
- you have a rocket that can launch by itself with smaller payload or by strapping 3 first stages together can launch a bigger payload
- better economies of scale as you can doe more with a single rocket design instead of maintaining 2 separate one (big and small)
- in Falcon Heavy case you can also save all the first stages from more demanding trajectories where you would otherwise have to expend the regular F9 first stage
OTRAG
- make dirt cheap and as simple as possible standardized "rocket tubes"
- strap a lot of them together
- fire and jettison in the right order to achieve orbit (check your staging! ;-) )
Poorly for the current market using a FH makes sense, but to break to another level, building one big rocket is better. Both the US Saturn 5 and the Soviet N1 were big single tube vehicles.
But bigger rockets can get closer to that theoretical optimum because some dead weight components remain fixed-size and because some masses scale with surface instead of volume. Rockets can scale better than linearly with size, but they will never exceed the rocket equation.
The rocket is already 90+% propellant (fuel & oxydizer), with the few percent left being the engines, structure and payload. So if you want the rocket to have a meaningful payload, it needs to be big.
For example the Falcon 9 weights 350 tons and can place 22 tons to low earth orbit (LEO). So about 6% of initial launcher weight ends up in orbit.
If you want to place the 100+ tons estimated for a reasonable Mars trip, your launcher will be either huge or you will need to do a lot of launches and assemble your ship in orbit with all the overhed that requires.
Starship also aims to be fully reusable, which will eat to your payload yet again but provides a huge benefit of not throwing away any part of your rocket, just burning a lot of propellant, which is dirt cheap compared to rocket hardware (estimates say about 5% of conventional rocket launch is fuel, the less is hardware that you normally simply crash into the ocean after use).
So in short - big payload -> big rocket. Reusable rocket with big payload -> humungous rocket that is really really cheap to operate.
The best example being Korolev, possibly the greatest rocket designer in history (certainly up there with Von Braun and Xuesen, and in my opinion more impressive), who died because he was sent to the Gulags by a bitter politician (this is an incredibly short edit of the full story, but that is a factual statement).
Korolev built working rockets the US said were theoretically impossible, and he did it because he couldn't afford to build the rockets the way the US were doing it. So he got resourceful.
Had he not died in 1966, I suspect the Soviets would have beat the US to putting a man on the moon.
I'm not familiar with that history, but I'm quite familiar with Corporate America. One thing I've seen is that when Engineering is great, it gives the company great momentum and allows the Management/"Business"/Strategy/etc functions to lag and get lazy. Good Engineering momentum essentially produces enough residual value for others to leech off from.
It's more of a stereotype to hate on "management" and is lazy thinking.
I'd be happy to learn more if you can point me towards some sources.
I highly recommend Kotkin's books. You can jump into the second, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 if you want to learn more about him as a leader.
Quote from here: https://www.esa.int/About_Us/ESA_history/50_years_of_humans_...
> On 23 March 1938, Valentin Glushko was arrested. To reduce his charges he denounced Korolev, which resulted in his arrest on 7 June and a sentence of ten years forced labour. From that day on, the two men were bitterly opposed to each other.
So as you can see he was not sent to gulag out of spite by Stalin but out of envy and professional competition by his fellow rocket engineer.
While in gulag he was not tortured or sent to gold mines. He and other scientists continued their work in relatively comfortable conditions in so called "sharashka": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka
I'm not saying that Stalin was a saint or a winged seraph. But definitely he was anyone but an idiot.
Also Korolev did not died because he was sent to the Gulags. He died from a chronic disease from which he started suffering long before he was imprisoned.
My understanding is Korolev's health greatly declined because of his time while imprisoned, and had he never had to endure it he likely would have lived much longer.
> They are depicted as complete morons by the western propaganda - it's true. But propaganda and reality are two completely different things.
They were not idiots, but their intensives didn't align with the goals of the engineers.
The engineers would have big problems if they spaceship doesn't work. The politicians are not idiots, its simply that they don't have the same goals as the engineers so the politicians seem like idiots to engineers.
> Had he not died in 1966, I suspect the Soviets would have beat the US to putting a man on the moon.
This is an false take. Many people have looked at this and it simply doesn't hold up. The resources they were investing was not big enough and having korolev couldn't have solved all the many problems they would have still faced.
They had some great engine technology but its a long way from there to the moon.
> “A high production rate solves many ills,” he said. “If you have a high production rate, you have a high iteration rate. For pretty much any technology whatsoever, the progress is a function of how many iterations do you have, and how much progress do you make between each iteration. If you have a high production rate then you have many iterations. You can make progress from one to the next.”
The science, then, lies in identifying the hardest problems. The art lies in identifying people who can solve these problems.
Because space is hard and expensive, when designing payloads, they also have to be over-engineered to make sure you're getting the most out of your ride, which then makes the rockets over-engineered and expensive to make sure they don't blow up carrying the precious cargo. It's a positive feedback loop. So we end up with incredible telescopes like Hubble or James Webb, but it's literally a once-in-a-generation event. There's no tolerance for failure, so budgets and timelines ballon.
What if you knew you could get a cheap ride anywhere anytime? Why not mass-produce slightly lower quality telescopes instead of these masterpieces. The JWST's successor is LUVOIR, slated for sometime in the 2040s (!!), why not build a dozens JWST-like telescopes and use interferometry to build giant telescopes larger than the earth with higher light-gathering ability than even ground-based telescopes? This is the technique used by Event Horizon Telescope to capture the first picture of a black hole last year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...
That's exactly the premise of Starlink. SpaceX know they can launch those things 100x cheaper (1000x ?) than ever before in history, so they're churning them out and throwing them up. Even though the ones going up right now aren't "finished" it doesn't matter, because replacing them with new and better ones is so cheap.
Purpose is so hard to come by now because we all don't know what we want. When we do know, we're constantly unsure about it.
Such a clear goal makes it easy to have greater purpose that you don't second guess.
This isn't a scheme to get rich, a zero sum political movement, or a narcissistic artistic endeavor. It's pretty unique there.
There's that whole danger of a cult of personality but the project is bearing fruit.
This statement resonates deeply with me.
Whenever I meet someone new or that I might be interested in dating I ask "What are you doing with your life?" or "What are you striving for?" and I find the extreme majority of people don't have an answer beyond "I just go to a job I don't really like"
It seems very few people are seriously driven and motivated and living a life where they're pushing hard to achieve something great.
There's nothing wrong with wanting a life that free. In fact it's oftentimes admirable. Especially at times when I'm wound so tight I feel like I could pop.
If you're choosing a partner based solely on whether they want to be the next Elon Musk or not, you're doing yourself a serious disservice.
And if you really ask those questions to every potential date, you should stop, because dude, wtf?
Not speaking about (or judging!) anyone individually, but because if none of us did, we'd still be living in caves. Or, more likely, be extinct.
The reason all of us are having this conversation now is because many people before us had purpose and built something
Of course we need people driven to move society forward. But there is a stigma in modern society it seems around people who are perfectly happy being who they are and not "striving to be great". And that's ridiculous.
The previous poster asks all his potential dates, with what seems to be a fairly heavy helping of disdain for the "wrong answer", what their plan to change the world is.
Why does it matter? You go change the world. Let your spouse or your friends or your colleagues be content with not changing the world and just be happy living in it.
And that something may very well be as broad a goal as "do your very best, everyday".
Sure, you can't force people to see the world through that same lens, but you can certainly pick partners based on traits which you admire, ambition / grit presumably being one of such traits.
So you be you, previous poster. Just don't look down on others who don't want to change the world.
Wow, I think you really misunderstood me. I'm not saying anyone has to do anything, I just said it's really inspiring to see people that are passionate, and are driven and motivated about something. And I want people like that in my life.
I'm not saying I want an Elon Musk for a partner, I'm saying it's inspiring, and I'm drawn to people that actually have a purpose and a reason to get out of bed, and they're striving for something. Maybe it's take a month off to ski tour around Mt. Logan this spring. Maybe it's sail around the Northwest passage, or maybe it's learning a new language. Maybe it's getting up early every day to do Yoga.
Anything, really.
I'm just saying I feel like a lot of people these days have nothing that they're striving for. They just go to work, and go home, and aren't even particularly happy about it. If you asked them what the point is they don't even have an answer. If you ask them what they will have achieved in 5 or 10 years, they have nothing. They're not even trying to do anything.
> Especially at times when I'm wound so tight I feel like I could pop.
It's a mistake to think that to be driven and passionate and motivated about something also means you have to be wound tightly. I've never spent time with anyone that is wound tightly, and I can't imagine how difficult that would be.
EDIT: Replying to your comment lower down - I absolutely DO NOT ever ask anyone what their plan to change the world is, and I never said anything like that above. I ask them what they're passionate about, and what they're striving towards. That doesn't have to be change the world.
Not that my opinion matters, but I think those are fantastic goals to strive for. If it's making you happy to challenge yourself, go for it!
THAT is exactly the purpose I'm talking about vs. someone that doesn't try at anything and doesn't have any idea what they'd like to do, or achieve, or improve in the next 10 years.
> I hope that I can find something in my career that fuels a burning desire like some of the SpaceX employees
I've accepted I won't find that kind of career, so I to do it in my outside life (like you are!)
I'm throughly uninspired... As a friend of mine once said: "progress when you're going the wrong direction, is turning around".
The idea that we'll settle Mars while the Earth burns in borderline sinister. It reminds me of the elite outpost from Kingsman (the movie).
We have a planet that is in dire need of this kind of motivated action, and yet Elon would rather be distracted by this dream.
Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the "cool" factor of expanding to other planets. I too enjoy a good science fiction story. Who wouldn't want to escape the problems we've inherited, and proliferated.
But escapism solves nothing for "us", and it's foolish to think Mars is anything else. If we as humans can't live on Earth responsibly, we frankly don't deserve to exist at all.
(Perhaps we should pull a Titan A.E., and preserve some DNA in the vast wasteland of space. Just in case an alien species decides to give us another go)
there are plenty of reasons humanity should be multi-planetary other than escaping climate change.
I suspect any reasons you'll come up with are all still less urgent than the needs of our Earth.
I've heard the argument about learning to control the climate through taraforming (or whatever you want to call it), but I'm completely unconvinced that is an efficient method.
I'd be willing to be convinced otherwise, but I'm very skeptical.
Space & Solar System is big and has a lot of resources, much much more than what is available in on a terrestrial planet.
Asteroids, supervolcanoes etc.
We did for a long time though, except for relatively recently. And Mars won't be able to live without Earth for a long time so it isn't really escapism as you paint it.
I don't think we deserve to disappear completely, but if we don't reverse climate change, we'll have a ton of loss of life but not likely total extinction except for some astronauts. That's probably "enough" as far as galactic justice goes. I'm always a little disappointed in this argument though because it's climate change that we should be judged by, rather than massive deaths from human made conflicts throughout history. Surely there's lots of previous events that qualify for "we don't deserve to exist at all".
Do we need another eccentric billionaire but for climate change though? Sure, bring it on.
I'm making a dramatic argument against large scale efforts to inhabit other planets, while ours is in a dire state.
You'll have to convince or force people to change their priorities. First is probably not possible, due to the slow moving nature of the threat, second has its own drawbacks as well.
Human effort isn't completely fungible. There is no guarantee that all of the people working incredibly hard at SpaceX would switch to work on whatever problem you want them to.
I will not support such efforts, and I feel quite comfortable being a detractor as well.
Who are you to tell me what to judge?! This argument gets you nowhere with me.
They dream of Mars as it is exciting and will lead to new knowledge, understanding, and meaning.
What? You see a motivated person with the resources and drive to pursue his dream and you're upset that he's not putting his vision aside to pursue what you think is important? Musk doesn't owe you anything.
I disagree strongly.
Progress in the wrong direction still teaches you things, and it means you're moving and you've overcome the inertia of doing nothing, which is half the battle.
Failure isn't trying and not reaching your goal. Failure is never trying.
Yes, learn from your mistakes. No, don't actively go in the wrong direction.
Now you're talking about if you need to consider any moral implications of the activity you're undertaking, which is a whole different discussion.
Obviously if it's a horrible moral choice (i.e. Hitler) then sure, it's best if nothing is done.
In the very vast majority of cases ( build a better car, spaceship, software, grow better food, get fitter, learn a new language, help our community, be a better friend, etc. etc.), then doing something is much, much preferable to not even trying.
"Morality (noun): principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior."
I encourage you to think more deeply about your argument. I struggle to agree that the "very vast majority of cases" are positive.
It sounds to me like you are sensitive to apathy and/or nihilism. I can understand that, especially these days, but just because it feels like nothing is being done doesn't mean things can't get worse.
Sorry, I'm a bit of a cynic these days.
He owns SolarCity, a solar panel company, Tesla, an electric car and battery company, and Boring Company, an attempt at creating a transportation system that mandates the use of EV.
The fact that all of this technology will benefit human existence on Mars should go ahead and show you how developing technology in order to survive a situation far more dire than Earth's, in a sustainable way, might also help us better survive our situation on Earth.
I'm just reacting strongly to this Mars madness. That is all.
Defending this project by saying its leader is also compassionate toward other goals isn't compelling to me.
That can be said about anything - why do you buy board games or watch sport events every night or learn to play piano - you should be saving the planet ffs...
But this is larger, as it seems to imply an escape from the problems of the Earth in a new world. A dream that will never become a reality.
Either we fix the Earth or we parish. There is no salvation in the stars, and no second coming of Christ.
But the elephant in the room that Musk appears to be ignoring is the life sciences side of things. Only 12 humans have sortied outside the Van Allen belts (which protect us from the deep space radiation environment). Nobody has spent more than 18 consecutive months in space or reduced gravity, and we know there are biological changes that affect astronauts. The same goes triple for the plants and bacteria and fungi (never mind animals) we depend on for agriculture, and a closed-loop agricultural system and air plant is implicit in Musk's goal of a self-sufficient colony on Mars. We haven't even repeated the (failed) Biosphere 2 experiment.
We need the giant payload capacity before we can test the life sciences problems in a realistic manner (small and ferociously expensive lab experiments on the ISS are useful but fail Musk's iteration test because the lead time for running one is measured in years if not decades).
So we won't know if a Mars colony is even possible until some time after Musk builds the ships to put one there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
> The O'Neill cylinder (also called an O'Neill colony) is a space settlement concept proposed by American physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in his 1976 book "The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space". O'Neill proposed the colonization of space for the 21st century, using materials extracted from the Moon and later from asteroids.
> An O'Neill cylinder would consist of two counter-rotating cylinders. The cylinders would rotate in opposite directions in order to cancel out any gyroscopic effects that would otherwise make it difficult to keep them aimed toward the Sun. Each would be 5 miles (8.0 km) in diameter and 20 miles (32 km) long, connected at each end by a rod via a bearing system. They would rotate so as to provide artificial gravity via centrifugal force on their inner surfaces.
On the other hand, he didn't have modern CAD back in the early 1970s. So in principle we can come up with something better.
The biggest problem is exposure to cosmic radiation -- L5 is way outside the Van Allen belts and high energy cosmic rays take roughly a metre of water to attenuate, or magnetic fields of 10-20 Tesla strength around the spacecraft. Which is a lot of mass (or a ridiculously strong magnetic field).
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays
- - - -
I have a vague idea that a kind of spittle bug foam design made from bubbles of various diameters nested to provide redundancy might work well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spittle_bug#Spittlebug_nymphs
It's could be simple, flexible, easy to construct or modify, and resilient to impacts. I'm not an engineer or scientist though.
- - - -
A tangent, if I may...
I think we need more near-term hard sci-fi set in the future that e.g. Musk's space trucks are about to enable, to get more people excited and involved.
I've been trawling through Netflix and cable recently looking for inspiring, even-slightly-realistic sci-fi and it's a barren desert out there. There are a handful of shows that aren't bad, and I've heard good things about "Black Mirror". One the other hand, I watched a clip of "Star Trek: Discovery" the other day and had a minor apoplexy. It's more like a cartoon than the actual cartoon.
In contrast, I have a "100 Sci-Fi Movies" DVD set that my sister got me for Christmas one year, and a lot of the older black & white sci-fi movies are practically documentaries for space exploration and colonization. Sure there are silly aliens and such, but the technology and settings are realistic (at least compared to e.g. Star Trek or Star Wars.)
I think some concrete visions of what it might actually be like to attempt to build and live on a moonbase or Mars colony would inspire people to want to really do it.
You raise a good point IMO in re: viability of space. In the limit it may turn out that humans can't live anywhere but on or near the surface of Earth. What is certain is that living in space will suck for many years, or likely decades. It will be like living in a mine, but there are more things that can kill you and you're much much further from fresh air and safe ground. And I suspect living on Mars would suck anyway just due to the ~0.4G surface gravity. At least on the Moon you can go home (in a few days rather than lots of months) or fly like a bird under your own power if your cave is big enough. ("The Menace from Earth", Heinlein; "Welcome to Moonbase", Bova)
But even if we can't live there it's still really useful and important to go: micro-gravity manufacturing; robotic asteroid mining; science...
I hope we can live in space, I want to colonize the galaxy. (The green galaxy on the cover of "The Millennial Project" book is one of the more compelling images I've personally ever seen. A photosynthesizing galaxy... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Coloni... )
But even if we can't go at all these rockets are really important!
But Musk, with his talk of a self-sufficient city, is clearly targeting the latter, and there are a whole lot of details we haven't worked out.
I wonder how starry-eyed Elon Musk really is in re: Mars colonization? I know for myself that it was hard to admit robots make more sense (at least at first).
"“I’ll probably be long dead before Mars becomes self-sustaining, but I’d like to at least be around to see a bunch of ships land on Mars,” Musk said."
The one's that follow will build several stops along the way. You will be able to stop, stay for a while, and move forward towards your journey.
Also Asteroid mining is going to be a thing. So economy, space labs and all.
So Musk is making the machine to make the machine. Musk has brought lessons learned from Tesla’s assembly line so workers do not burn out. They will work three 12-hour days and then have a four-day weekend. Then they’ll work four 12-hour shifts with a three-day weekend. Thus, with four shifts, the Boca Chica site can operate at full capacity 24 hours a day, seven days a week. SpaceX is throwing in hot meals every three to four hours, for free.
Rotating between three and FOUR-day weekends? Wow.
Maybe this problem can be solved, by changing the system, but unless you are in a situation where you can avoid competition, until the system is changed companies may have to do some degree of hard work to survive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Summary_of_First_and_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
If you want a cushy 9-5 job, just apply to the nice big corporation down the street. At the end of the day, you just go home and enjoy your comfy bunny slippers.
lol, you've found the nefarious element!
(It could be that I'm actually quoting from memory but, if so, it's not conscious.)
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-sta...
Of course I'm rooting for the Martian stuff because it's cool and may be accidentally useful (SpaceX already has been, really) and beats the fuck out of finding new ways to sell crap to people and the other garbage lots of other prominent companies do, but the goal isn't valuable per se, in my opinion.
But. Really. What's the threat model here?
Mars is meant to be a backup of humanity. OK. Against what threat? We can think of many, but a self-isolating base in the Antarctic would survive nearly all of them with better conditions than a Mars base.
Nuclear armageddon? Not much fallout over Antarctica and OK, you can't go outside of a while. Still better than Mars where you can't go outside ever.
Runaway global warming? The ice will melt but at a slow pace that leaves plenty of time for adaptation, the climate will become more hospitable at the poles rather than less, and at least you will have lots of fresh water. Unlike, say, on Mars.
Global pandemic? An Antarctic base can self isolate, no problem. Just lock the doors and let anyone who tries to reach you freeze to death. A serious Mars base would need some sort of border control policy too, if Musk had made it cheap to get there.
Massive asteroid strike? I guess it'd wreck the atmosphere but ... well, then you're no worse off than on Mars which doesn't have one to begin with. And you're much more likely to get nuked by a 'roid on Mars where there's no atmosphere to burn it up.
I dunno man. I'm trying to think of a problem that a serious Antarctic city couldn't solve and coming up blank. Short of Earth getting sucked into a black hole or something, what scenario is survivable on Mars that isn't at the poles?
The ones we don't even conceive off, or if we do, don't protect against at all.
A decent depth of water is very good protection against an awful lot of stuff, including almost anything Mars would be good for, and if you still love space, any technology we build to live deep in the ocean can probably be reused on Europa.
It's also, to bring it back to the 'iteration' discussion way way easier to iterate building underwater cities than building habitats on Mars.
It takes time for these things to sink in (apparently, despite e.g. the Chelyabinsk meteor, and all the craters, and how all the dinosaurs have wings now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Eart... )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid#History
> Although meteors have been known since ancient times, they were not known to be an astronomical phenomenon until early in the nineteenth century. Prior to that, they were seen in the West as an atmospheric phenomenon, like lightning, and were not connected with strange stories of rocks falling from the sky. In 1807, Yale University chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman investigated a meteorite that fell in Weston, Connecticut.[30] Silliman believed the meteor had a cosmic origin, but meteors did not attract much attention from astronomers until the spectacular meteor storm of November 1833.
If you want weekly updates about SpaceX's progress, and about space science and the space industry in general, I write a newsletter for just that purpose: https://orbitalindex.com
> There’s plenty of forgiveness if you pass me the buck. There is no forgiveness if you don’t.
Not to forget that he misses a ton of deadlines and constantly moves the goal posts. Helps in beating expectations.
Sorry for no references, writing from memory :) .
[1] Firing in Korolev's team was a whole 'nother story entirely. For example, Korolev used to fire people in the morning only to require them to work extra hard in the same afternoon. The team got used to this feature. In reality, nobody wanted to be fired - people saw the importance of their work.
That seems to be used when very strong + predictable welding is needed.
Not sure if it's generally used for 4mm thick material though.
So there's that. Maybe we can put a big dome around the whole thing like Planet Druidia.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-mission-reveals-spee...
> MAVEN measurements indicate that the solar wind strips away gas at a rate of about 100 grams (equivalent to roughly 1/4 pound) every second. "Like the theft of a few coins from a cash register every day, the loss becomes significant over time," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "We've seen that the atmospheric erosion increases significantly during solar storms, so we think the loss rate was much higher billions of years ago when the sun was young and more active.”
Technology has always been our way of expanding into spaces we're not otherwise evolved to cope with.
Mars requires more technology, but that's a matter of magnitude, not impossibility.
But you don't need to go to Siberia for Earth to be extremely difficult to survive in. Wherever you are, if you lack technology your chance of surviving is very low. Without clothing, housing, fire, tools it's very, very hard to survive anywhere on Earth.
The only reason life is so safe and pleasant right now on this planet is because we changed our environment to make it so.
If we were to survive on Mars, we would have to do the same. The advantage with Mars is that we wouldn't have to start from scratch.
Antarctica is cold year around, lacks food, lacks sun light for half a year. Almost no one wants to live permanently in Antarctica.
Mars has all of the Antarctica problems, almost zero sun light, lack of air, lack of water, radiation, toxic soil, low gravity, extreme remoteness.
It may be theoretically possible for a colony on Mars to survive, but it remains to be seen if enough people would do it in practice.
I mean, that's at least in part because you can't on a legal level. There's no private property rights and any of the Antarctic Treaty participants has the right to enter and inspect any installation on the continent. It's a set of research stations, not a colony.
Siberia has other problems similar to Mars. Water is frozen, so you have to melt it (as on Mars). Growing seasons are short (similar to the sunlight issue, which we've solved on Earth with grow lights...).
Focusing on the "Mars has more things to solve" thing continues to ignore the point.
I would like to know if solutions are feasible or even wanted.
Hypothetical Antarctic colony could simply ignore Antarctic Treaty. Did anyone seriously try?
Mars frozen water is likely not directly drinkable after melting. After all, martian soil seems to be toxic.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/spaceweather/ind...
I expect that designs for 'permanently underground/inside' cities would need to include some high-ceiling park-like areas with some bright UV lights, and other considerations, but that sort of thing seems pretty doable. Whether it would be enough to maintain a population's mental heath I guess would need to be seen, but generally speaking I think humans are a pretty adaptable bunch...
Definitely doable. But then there's no longer any special appeal to living on Mars, as opposed to: living in rotating space habitats among the asteroids.
If we reformulate Musk's goal as being: "Create off-site backups of human civilization", then I think asteroid mining & space habitats have a better shot at bootstrapping this process than colonizing Mars.
Once we are leveled up this way in resources and technology, building settlements on Mars can be a side-effect of this outcome. Just like the burgeoning scientific outposts on Antarctica are a side-effect of our current civilization.
But rotating space habitats might not be as good at replacing gravity as some think. Even with the really-huge 'O'Niell cylinder' scale (8 kilometers diameter), coriolis effects would be noticeable. I suspect a number of industrial processes would be affected by it.
I expect some of the major industrial processes will still need/want to be done on a big pile of rock or sand, rather than in a more fragile object that inherently wants to explode and fling apart all the time :).
Now I’m working if making a very large current loop on the ground would double up as a launch/landing system where the planet itself is the reaction mass…
(Probably not; the chances are the requirements for safety and reaction are orders of magnitude different from each other).
Yet people now manage to survive the winter in Europe just fine using technology.
Mars and space settlement in general can be seen as yet another - more challenging - extension of this long term progress.
Also possibly in the future one could upgrade people themselves to make living in space easier.
Until we explain that in some kind of sane way that doesn’t just involve the earth being a crutch for raw materials, it all seems rather stupid to me.
Settling an earth-like planet? Sure! Seems logical. Mars? Not really.
We've almost plunged the world into nuclear holocaust a couple times before. India and Pakistan are at each other's throats, and rising ethnonationalist populism and climate change are threatening to strain these tensions further. This is a real risk.
The Starship is an iterative design with seventy years of engineering knowledge behind it. Keeping humans alive outside the Van Allen belts for a long duration and then on a completely inhospitable planet has very little engineering knowledge behind it.
Also to suggest a Mars colony is a contingency plan is ludicrous. In order for a Mars colony to be a human civilization contingency plan it would not only need to be self sustaining but self perpetuating. Otherwise a life ending event on Earth would just give the Mars colonists a few months to come to terms with their mortality. Then no kore humans.
There is nowhere in the solar system that can support humans in the way Earth can. In fact everywhere else is so hostile we need to take significant amounts of Earth with us just to not die immediately.
If you want to live in underground colonies have the Boring company build you tunnels here on Earth. At least when you need parts for the GECK you can go above ground with just a gas mask and rugged clothes instead of a bulky space suit.
Not really a reference, but related, http://socialsciences.cornell.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/02...
I'd presume that many of them are on-board in the first place because they're engaged by the idea.
If SpaceX didn't exist, how would they put food on the table?
It takes a great mix of super smarts and super stupid to work there.
all of the aerospace companies take wild advantage of it.
at least musk is actually doing something interesting with their obsession, and not just building bigger bombs.
I think that's pretty much accurate, and what I saw when I was at the Job Faire in Browning last month, most were surprised by how extensive my experience was before I applied to get there: I worked for one of Kimbal's companies, I did a short stint at the Mars Desert Research Station, and got to know the Director and was asked to come back under her on a crewed mission etc...
Most were there to dip there toes and see what it was all like, but some of us were kool-aid drinkers for sure.
I met a SpaceX engineer in S. OC at an inn/out years ago and struck up a chat and the way he spoke about it was inspiring; despite the commute, long hours, fears of possibly going bankrupt before every launch (this was before Falcon 9 was recoverable) he seemed very fulfilled: like this is what he was here to do.
I got to stay after hours and hang out with some the crew in Browning as they were having dinner-lunch and it was the same vibe--smiles everywhere and just a really warm and inviting environment as you knew you among similar 'crazies.' I'm not sure if its cult-like or not but it was one of those rare moments I've had in Life where people genuinely wouldn't want to be anywhere else than where they are.
Money can't really buy that, and that is probably why I'm so drawn to it. If you're there trying to have a cushy work-life balance in any Musk corp you're deluding yourself.
Thanks, I often wonder if this is healthy practice myself as it can be rather personally-abusive to be so mission-centric, but then I see the consequences of the alternative: consider how many people in the US alone consume psychotropic drugs just to cope with depression despite having access to so much of everything but being so inherently listless and distracted.
I won't bemoan about the pitfalls about the Human Condition, but I will say that despite the hardships and loss I still see this as a worthwhile endeavor and wish to be part of it all, especially when you understand the implications it may have for the Species if we get this right.
Which right now as we're seeing the blow-back of something significant (albeit minor in the grand scheme of outbreaks) like Coronavirus is really alarming.
I can definitely empathize with that, I'm happy with what's being achieved as well. Seing how SpaceX and Tesla are routinely achieving their goals and arguably change the world, I often can't get over the fact that the output of our civilization seems to hinge on the iron will of a few billionaires.
Elon Musk (and SpaceX as his tool) is just an extremely illustrative example of this, because we can directly see what our space capabilities and ambitions would look like without him.
I wish there was a Musk-like figure focused on transhumanism, but sadly it may genuinely be too early for that in my lifetime. Or not. And that's the frustrating thing: we wouldn't know until one appears.
I know this sounds like I'm writing a love letter, but it's really not meant that way. I would rather live in a civilization that has its own momentum and a better-distributed capacity for achievement, as opposed to putting my hope for the future on a few tenuous human pivot points and their whims.
There is, his name is Elon Musk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuralink
Unfortunately, the science and technology involved is nowhere near ready for a Starship-style push to be feasible. That's not even mentioning the legal environment.
Let’s hypothesise sufficient brain scans. I think even that is a way off yet?
Is a backup of your mind protected by the right to avoid self-incrimination? What about the minds of your pets?
Does a backup need to be punished (e.g. prison) if the person it is made from is punished? What if the offence occurred after the backup was made?
If the mind state is running rather than offline cold-storage, how many votes do all the copies get? What if they’re allowed to diverge?
If you memorise something and then get backed up, is that copyright infringement?
If a mind can run on silicon for less than the cost of food to keep a human healthy, can anyone other than the foremost mind in their respective field ever be employed?
If someone is backed up then the original is killed by someone who knows they were backed up, is that murder or the equivalent of a serious assault that causes a small duration of amnesia?
So, given that, here's my question: is it not well known, ahead of time, that's the environment? How many people are truly surprised once they hire on?
I've been a long-time fan of most of Musk's work, acknowledging that the man is deeply flawed.
Yet even though I personally believe in most of what Musk wants to accomplish, I will never work at any of his companies, even though I'm quite qualified for several roles in each.
I believe in the mission, but my personal and family time is even more important to me.
Note that all of the above is, roughly, talking about salaried/technical/management positions, and not, roughly, about hourly.
The word "Starship" means specifically that the ship is capable of traveling between stars. At a minimum, it should travel from it's home star to the nearest neighboring star.
What we're talking about here are "Spaceships". -- The only way I can lighten up and enjoy the name Starship in this context is to assume it's being used ironically... like someone who's named their cat "Dog".
https://science.howstuffworks.com/10-fictional-spacecraft-we...
Well, it would be capable. Just very-very slow.
1) we are plain in the middle of a mass extinction event, expected to get much worst in a decade or two. Wouldn’t it be good to solve that first?
2) we need a 4th industrial revolution to survive global warming as a civilization. Wouldn’t be better to fix that first? (No, electric cars won’t suffice)
3) is it really necessary to spoil astronomy/night sky to finance one’s dream? (No, vantablack won’t solve the issue)
4) our technology presently rely on mining 100+ elements. Does anyone here believe one can mine all of those on an a planet that misses an atmosphere? Using Earth ressources for a “colony” seems a dubious idea.
5) has anyone an idea of the CO2 equivalent cost of bringing one person to mars?
6) there is growing evidence that there is life in the Martian underground. Should we take the risk of destroying another biosphere?
I don't see why we can't do both. Maybe if you come up with an actionable plan you can start your own company like Elon and tackle that problem.
2) we need a 4th industrial revolution to survive global warming as a civilization. Wouldn’t be better to fix that first? (No, electric cars won’t suffice)
No electric cars won't suffice, but they are a start. As is an increase in nuclear, and renewables in areas it makes sense. Again I don't see how this detracts, especially looking at Elon's other ventures. Maybe you can create a company that tackles the concrete problem, that's a big one.
3) is it really necessary to spoil astronomy/night sky to finance one’s dream? (No, vantablack won’t solve the issue)
That's subjective and you don't know if it can be solved or not, seems they are working on it. Why do you think a non-reflective coating won't work?
4) our technology presently rely on mining 100+ elements. Does anyone here believe one can mine all of those on an a planet that misses an atmosphere? Using Earth ressources for a “colony” seems a dubious idea.
We don't have to mine all of them at first. Look where we started here on Earth, from scratch.
5) has anyone an idea of the CO2 equivalent cost of bringing one person to mars?
I'm sure it's negligible relatively. Was that rhetorical or do you have a number?
6) there is growing evidence that there is life in the Martian underground. Should we take the risk of destroying another biosphere?
Are you talking about the ice found? The martian biosphere is already destroyed, terraforming it would bring life to the surface and if there is life it's underground and must be pretty hardy.
Making a steel or glass plate requires a lot of industrial capability and a capable supply chain to say nothing of raw materials. Both are cheap on Earth because we've built that infrastructure over the past two hundred years. That infrastructure was relatively easy to construct because the workers could wear overalls and hard hats rather than space suits. Taking a lunch break doesn't mean disrobing and piling into a pressure vessel.
Go camping for a weekend in the desert or in the snow sometime. Consider all the crap you need to take with you to not die of exposure or thirst. In those environments where you've got air for free and usually water if you know where to look, you've still got a fair bit of equipment. If you forget anything or lose it you could end up seriously injured or even dead. That's somewhere that's lousy with breathable atmosphere, protection from most ionizing solar radiation, and an average temperature high enough your lungs won't freeze.
Surviving inhospitable environments on Earth requires effort and technology. Surviving outside of Earth is several orders of magnitude more difficult. Thriving outside of Earth is more orders of magnitude beyond mere survival.
If we want to survive as a race in the long long term, we have to start colonizing at some point.
I just don't see why you're so pessimistic. Let these people go after their dream.
These people propose solutions for the wealthy. They are BTW ruining my dream of seeing more stars than satellites in the sky. (I’m a material scientist, coatings won’t work)
Therefore I heavily disagree with you: short term survival requires protecting our life support systems here on earth, namely climate and biodiversity (the Earth-System).
I am also very disappointed that people use the word “colonisation” so often, a brief look at history support my doubts.
I don’t mind exploring the solar system when the above issues are fixed, but this has to be done in a scientific way, I.e. exploration, not for a blind colonialist purpose.
I do believe in this goal though as do others, you should respect other people's dreams, especially when it doesn't detract from yours.
I didn't say this was for short-term survival. This is for long-term survival, we still need to and we are tackling our own planet. Elon himself has disrupted many industries that were contributing to the destruction of this planet (auto, oil & gas)
If you want to help the planet, go help it, don't neg others.
The Starlink constellation, so far, is not respectful to people who want a clear sky for instance.
Regarding Mars, I don’t want to take your dreams back, I just think it has to be framed in a more global and long term context.
How do the feelings of a few astronomers trump connecting the rest of the world to the internet?
You're blowing things way out of proportion as well. You fell for all the aggressive attack campaigns. I've seen all the articles you've read, it's not a real issue.
> I just think it has to be framed in a more global and long term context.
What message from SpaceX did you take issue with exactly? I don't think anyone is suggesting we'll all be living on Mars in a few years.
I suggest you read this article:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.10952.pdf
As you can read there it will threaten our ability to detect dangerous objects. As well as other things.
We have optical fibers, common! Do you need to have Netflix in 8K on top of Kilimanjaro?
The issues I have with mars are:
1) the sheer scale of the project(s) (earth has limited ressources)
2) the lack of scientific framework
3) the arguments that it will be useful for survival
4) the very idea of people fleeing earth in time of major existential problems (climate & biodiversity)
So far it just looks to me like a holiday destination for the very rich. But glad if you can point me to some science that contradicts my view.
Everything people need to survive needs to be brought from Earth. Every aspect of life on Mars needs to be bootstrapped from absolutely nothing. There's no working models for any of that on Earth. That means it all needs to be designed, built, tested, and iterated upon before a single person boards a SpaceX Starship.
Even with Elon Musk's billions that is a vast expense. Even if it was all built, it's billions spent to send people to Mars to simply not die in case a nuclear war wiped out Earth.
It's not pessimistic to point this out, it's realistic. Dreaming about colonizing Mars and hand waving away every practical consideration is just fruitless fantasizing. It's not a plan. It doesn't actually move towards a colony anywhere.
The opportunity cost is billions of dollars and a lot of engineering effort not spent on solutions to more immediate problems that might benefit more people.
Musk talking about colonizing Mars is 90% PR for SpaceX and 10% ego stroking. If SpaceX could build a Starship a week to send people to Mars it would be Musk's friends and billionaires and millionaires. I doubt there's more than a car load of people that work at SpaceX that would be able to afford a Mars ticket. I can't fawn breathlessly over a billionaire describing his fantasy of leaving all us poors to rot on a planet his fellow billionaires ruined.
I really loved America's stunt of going to the Moon and I want a sequel.
Eventually I would like us to have some sort of habitat on Mars which I do not think is far-fetched. I believe SpaceX will spur this movement.
Just think of the “maintenance” problem. Equipments do fail eventually
Also, there are lots of people, humanity can walk and chew gum at the same time. On best of the days anyway.
I disagree with the vision. The best analogy I can think of right now is high school kids renting a hotel for a party and trashing it and then doing the same thing next week. That’s humanity right now.
There is no Planet B until we build a mutualistic relationship with the one that created us.
And yes when I say “there is no Planet B” I’m being vaguely spiritual. I believe Earth is a creature and somehow won’t allow one of its creations to explore the stars until that creation learns mutualism. But I’m also being pragmatic: A) colonialism was a big motivation in our last 2 world wars and we still have intense colonizer memes circulating through our societies B) we now have the means to destroy ourselves thoroughly C) Mars is the crown jewel of potential colonies right now.
Cheap and rapid space launch may allow us to put polluting industries where they belong: in space.
I agree that they’re parallel because the reality is that they’re both happening right now. I’m pointing out that there’s a huge risk in not figuring out A before B, which is that we’ll just be transporting our problems to a new planet (and if they succeed, then whoever controls Mars will be able to use their monopoly to exacerbate problems on Earth). Granted, the rocket sure is shiny, though... funny how that trick never fails ;)
> Perhaps the view from Mars will instil a renewed perspective on our dependence on Earth, and teach us lessons on ecological management via terraforming.
Or perhaps you’re in the equivalent of an “early internet” optimism phase around Mars exploration.
We have all the resources we need here. The research around mutualistic living (renewables, land use, food waste, etc) is making that clear. If we’re glorifying hard problems, then the real hard problem is figuring out how to get humanity to share our already abundant resources equitably and peacefully.
Once we solve that problem we will be ready for Mars.
And to be clear I share the dream of exploring the stars. But I can’t in good faith support that dream until we shift from a parasitic to a mutualistic relationship.
That’s not an option on settlements beyond Earth’s surface. There, you’re forced to live with every decision you make almost immediately, so if you’re wasteful or stupid it’s promptly going to bite you in the ass and potentially threaten the lives of everybody involved. You’re not given the option of fixing things later, you have to do the correct thing now, and I think that’s the type of environment it’s going to take for humanity to change its ways.
Maybe it's just the thing that tries to fill the volume. Because otherwise it's displaced by a different one that does it faster. You argue about "how fast" should it be so life won't starve itself, but I think everybody is familiar with this danger. Then we can approach it more formally: what time/speed/volume/survival probability we want, try to calculate it for different options and go from there.
This sounds like parasite logic to me. We can do better. The fact that I can even conceive thoughts of doing better is all the proof I need to know that we can do better. That’s what vision is about.
It also opens up huge amounts of clean energy resources.
Good point, thanks.
> It also opens up huge amounts of clean energy resources.
Sustainability research is making it clear that we already have an abundance of clean energy resources here on Earth. If Mars does indeed flood the market with cheap clean energy and makes clean energy the overwhelmingly obvious choice, then I agree that will be a net win. But the problem doesn’t appear to be a resource scarcity issue here on Earth so I’m unconvinced that the solution is more resources.
Also, what clean energy resources are you referring to specifically? We essentially need something that can be substituted into our existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Mars provides something like that?
My pleasure.
>>Also, what clean energy resources are you referring to specifically?
I am referring to solar energy via space-based solar panels. Economical solar energy would give us virtually unlimited energy resources.