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Comment by zizee | Hacker News Reader

No one has seemed to have mentioned it yet, but the game changer of Starship will be full reusability of both the first and second stage of the rocket. Falcon 9's reusability of the first stage was a huge step towards making access to space a lot cheaper. If SpaceX can realize full reusability with Starship it will enable things like large scale moon bases, space hotels and mars colonization. They still have a lot of challenges ahead of them, but today's hop takes us that much closer to the future of space as presented in films like 2001 A Space Odyssey.

The future is exciting!

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> game changer

Absolutely, and the quantitative analysis is just stunning.

In 2018 all of humanity launched a total of 111 payloads into space (out of 114 attempts). At around 5t per launch, that would be 555 tons.

Starship is supposed to have a payload to LEO of > 100 tons. So 5-6 launches would handle all of that, by weight.

But SpaceX says their goal is to fly these up to 3 times a day. So let's assume they can do this 300 days a year, that would be 900 launches per year. If they have a half dozen in operation, that would be 5400 launches per year. Of 100 tons each, or 540 kilotons. That's 1000x what the whole planet launched in 2018!

In other words, the entire current launch capacity of the whole planet is 0.1% of the capacity of a fleet of 6 active Starships.

And they're building an assembly line for them.

"Game changer" is absolutely right, but doesn't really convey the magnitude of the change. It's truly astounding.

Indeed these numbers are impressive, but can it even be done?

Is it even possible both in terms of climate change/overall environmental impact, and in terms of how much methane (fuel) we actually have.

Elon Musk's vision is getting 1 million people to Mars (if I remember correctly) within this century. 100 per starship will require 10000 launches. Distributed over 70 years, that's about 1300 Martian voyages per year.

So approximately 3 per day. Each of those launches, however will require launches of refuelling tanks (is it 6 each?)... So we are talking 19 launches per day just _people_ going to Mars!!!

Sorry, but isn't that completely impossible!??

Not just for the required fuel and environmental impact, but also given how often they just postpone basic launches due to weather.

> we are talking 19 launches per day […] isn't that completely impossible!??

The US uses over 20 million barrels of petroleum every single day. We have 44,000 airline flights every day.

I think 19 starship flights won’t even move the needle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship says a starship uses 3,400,000 kg (first stage) + 1,200,000 kg = 4,600,000 kg of propellant, both methane + liquid oxygen.

Let’s guess making the fuel takes 5,000,000 kg of oil (corrections welcome. I guess that’s a reasonable estimate. Less than 100% of fuel is methane, but the specific energy of methane is about 20% higher than that of oil, and creating liquid oxygen takes energy, too)

Multiply by 19 gives you 95,000,000 kg, or about 700,000 barrels. That’s 3% of the oil usage in the USA.

And that excludes construction, maintenance, and ground operations.

⇒ I think it would move the needle, more so given that we should work hard on getting that number down.

Why count oil as the energy source for liquefying oxygen? Why not PV? Why not use natural gas instead of cracking oil?

Also, separate point: Starship return flight to Mars requires large-scale manufacture of methane from atmospheric CO2, using solar (or technically nuclear, but I don’t see that happening in this case).

It’s the only way of getting back — their tanks are empty when they finish landing on Mars — but it works fine here too.

> corrections welcome.

Methane is not made from oil. It's either directly pumped out of the ground as natural gas, or collected from organic decay processes. Methane is more carbon-efficient, as it has almost 2x more hydrogen per carbon compared to longer hydrocarbon fuels, and most of the energy in the molecule is in the hydrogen, to the tune of 40% more energy per ton of CO2. One ton of methane burnt produces ~2.7 tons of CO2 (and 2.2 tons of water), compared to one ton of octane producing 3.1 tons of CO2 (and 1.4 tons of water).

Of the propellant in the rocket, less than a quarter is methane, and more than 3/4ths are LOX. The stoichiometric ratio would be ~1:4 (by mass), but for various reasons most rocket engines are more fuel-efficient when burning fuel-rich, so the real ratio is probably somewhere between 1:3.6 to 1:3.8. The energy cost of producing LOX is really, really low, less than 1% of the energy content of similar mass of methane. Also, this process is done with electricity, and is very amenable to intermittent production. (So the CO2 impact is effectively zero).

Coming from the other direction, according to the department of energy, the US yearly CO2 emissions from all anthropogenic sources are ~6.7B tons of CO2 equivalents, while the launch of a single SS/SH produces about 2700 tons. If you were launching a thousand of them every year, they would account for 0.04% of emissions.

Methane can be synthesized from CO2 and hydrogen. Going this route could potentially make the rocket fuel carbon negative, since the rocket will carry some of the carbon outside the atmosphere. Supply is basically unlimited as long as we have CO2 and water.

Currently we postpone many launches due to an abundance of caution. As spaceflight gets more routine we will increase our risk tolerance and launch in worse weather.

> Sorry, but isn't that completely impossible!??

> Not just for the required fuel and environmental impact, but also given how often they just postpone basic launches due to weather.

The environmental impact of a rocket launch is roughly in the same category of the environmental impact of a airliner doing a single long-distance trip. (I did this calculation for F9, SS/SH would be higher but not more than two orders of magnitude higher.) Pre-covid, there were approximately 100 000 airliner flights a day. You do the math.

And that's before we consider that they are fueled with methane, and that there are sources of methane that are potentially not just GHG-neutral, but GHG-negative. (Collecting agricultural methane emissions and burning them is dramatically better than releasing them directly.)

As for weather, it is possible to launch rockets in very bad weather, for example the Russians frequently launch in literal blizzards where no winged aircraft could fly. It's just that ability to fly in inclement weather is something you need to design for -- rocket bodies are generally not strong against transverse loads, and this is made worse by having a high fineness ratio. SS/SH, being much more stubby than most current American rockets, will be much less impacted by weather than them.

Emissions calculation for Starship:

- each starship burns 4600 tons of methalox fuel

- the mixture ratio of the propellent is 78% O2 and 22% CH4 [1]

- that means that each 100 tons of methalox results in 53.6 tons of CO2 and 2.5 tons of CH4

- generally in the climate science it is accepted that one ton of CH4 is equivalent to 25 tons of CO2

- overall, each 100 tons of propellent will produce 116 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions

- a single launch of 4600 tons propellent will result in 5.34 kT CO2 emissions

- if we get to 5000 launches per year we end up with about 25 MT of CO2-equivalent emissions

- the current worldwide level of emissions is 45 GT CO2-equivalent as of 2017 [2]

- that means 5000 launches will increase our global emissions by 0.06%

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1258580078218412033

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...

This doesn’t take into account that the methane used in fuelling can be extracted from the atmosphere and that much of the fuel / oxidizer mixture actually is removed from Earth entirely.

> the propellent is O2 and CH4 [1]

> that results in CO2 and CH4

The chemical reaction of O2 + CH4 -> CO2 + CH4 does not compute.

More likely is the reaction 2 O2 + CH4 -> CO2 + 2 H2O.

So no methane emissions, that's the actual fuel. Only CO2 (and water) emissions.

Sorry, I skipped some steps in my calculation.

The chemical reaction is indeed CH4 + 2 O2 -> CO2 + 2 H2O. So, for each 16 grams of CH4 you get 64 grams of O2, that's a stoichiometric mass ratio of 1:4.

The fuel ratio for the Raptor engine is 22:78, according to Elon Musk's tweet. So, for each 100 g of propellant mixture you get 19.5 g of CH4 to burn using 78 g of O2 and you are left with 2.5 g unburned CH4.

I simply neglected the H2O resultant from the reaction because, while H2O is a very potent greenhouse gas, it has a fast cycle in nature (rain, etc). Also, I have no idea how to account for it as a greenhouse gas.

From what I've heard there is a significant fraction of carbon monoxide in the exhaust, so there will be a lot less CH4 in the exhaust than you have calculated. CO is only a weak greenhouse gas.

That is very interesting. Do you happen to have a link? I'm not doubting you, I think you are right, but a link that goes into this type of detail would be a very interesting one to read.

I probably heard that here: https://everydayastronaut.com/rocket-pollution/

Otherwise it would have been in a comment on an Eric Berger Ars Technica article.

Perhaps a stupid and naive question, but is there even the demand to lift that much mass into orbit? I may just be lacking in imagination.

Obviously most of that mass would have to leave orbit in order for it not to end up looking like an LA freeway in rush hour.

edit: i guess propellant/fuel would be one of the heaviest and important payloads we would need to get up there.

starlink/oneweb/similar constellations, assuming US folks really hate comcast as much as they say on the intertubes. these are up to 12k sats with very short (couple years?) life time, so regular flights will be necessary to keep the fleet at desired capacity. this beast can lift i-don't-even-know-how-many hundreds of birds in one go.

One Starlink satellite is apparently 250 kg at this time. They currently get sent up using Falcon 9, which can lift 15t to LEO when reusable, so that checks out.

At 100t, that would be 400 a pop.

With out current capabilities space only offers intangible services to earth (not to discount them as they are still profitable markets). With the step change in capacity we can start talking about getting equipment into space to bootstrap making it physically productive for earth.

We can start looking at the infrastructure that makes moon or asteroid mining for fuel possible. 'Cheap' fuel in space is the dream because it means asteroid 'mining' for materials that get returned to earth can be profitable (massively profitable to the point of dwarfing any investment currently made).

But the amazing side effect is suddenly we also have materials in space that like the fuel now costs orders of magnitude less than if we were sending it up. It'll becomes viable to build more infrastructure in space and so (perhaps ironically) there will be more demand to get materials from earth to space.

> demand to lift that much mass into orbit?

Well, 1 million people ain't going to get to Mars by themselves[1].

But once you have that sort of capacity, at those sorts of prices, many things that are now unthinkable become very possible and possibly useful.

Asteroid mining has been mentioned. Putting huge telescopes into orbit or the Lagrange points. How about a nice and big radio-telescope on the far side of the moon, where there is no EM interference. Or maybe even further out? How about some very, very long baseline-interferometry[2]?

Put manufacturing in space. There appear to be some useful materials that can only be made in low-gravity environments, but currently the Price is not Right™[3]. Bezos wants to put large space habitats into orbit instead [4]

Others have mentioned Starlink, with up to 12000 satellites. Nowadays they're talking about 42K satellites.[5]

Space-based solar power might become feasible[6]. Maybe put up a sunshade[7] to control global warming.

How about some manned deep-space probes? Maybe with some Vasimir rockets[8], a nuclear reactor and lots of reaction mass.

We are so conditioned to think that anything space has to be small, super-lightweight and super-high-performance/expensive that it's really kind of hard to think about the consequences of those constraints no longer applying.

And of course tourism, like the already-announced circumlunar flight[9], space habitats etc.

Think big!

[1] https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/elon-musk-mars-colonization (or just google it)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_manufacturing#Materials_...

[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-proposes-floating...

[5] https://observer.com/2019/10/spacex-elon-musk-starlink-satel...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magn...

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DearMoon_project

I read once that with a 100m telescope, we can image continents on exoplanets. We could construct a 100m segmented telescope in orbit, if only we had sufficient launches to get all the segments up, and sufficient capacity to send the assembly robots / astronauts. Today's tech, launch limited.

Here's a writeup: https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/internal_resources/1375/

In general, once you get to LEO, you're half way to anywhere ... That is, getting to low earth orbit is half the battle. Spacex will remove that battle for everyone, making space expansion and exploration 2x easier.

My dream is earth-orbiting shipyards for outer planet missions and interstellar missions. There's nothing stopping us but will.

Another significant thing is that Starship is designed to be mass manufactured at a relatively low cost. SpaceX can crank out thousands of Starships, fly them to Mars and build a million people colony. Starship is truly a game changer!

Can you recommend resources for reading more about the long term plans of Starship?

Not the parent poster, but there is

[0] Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species / Elon's original presentation from IAC 2016 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8

[1] Starship Update / 2019 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOpMrVnjYeY

Yep, and in addition to both of these, Starship is also designed:

* to be fueled / ignited such that it can be refueled in-situ on Mars & then launched back to Earth, without advanced rocket fuels or the TEA-TEB chemical igniter.

* to be able to refuel from another Starship in-orbit

The combination of all of this, if they pull it off, will be the ability to send truly massive payloads to Mars, faster and cheaper than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago.

To me it does really show the benefit of taking a systematic approach, working backwards from the goal "get to Mars and stay" in a resource-constrained environment. They've very strategically targeted the technology/engineering required to bring the costs down to something reasonable, while NASA's approach for 50 years has basically been versions of "can you give us one trillion dollars?" (or "we can put a couple humans on Mars for 3 days for $100 billion")

Today's Starship hop is getting very near the nail in the coffin for SLS. I still have some concerns about their crazy re-entry flip, but the speed SpaceX is moving is leaving everyone else in the dust.

Also, since its mostly made from steel, it will be fairly simple (as far as rockets go) to conduct repairs, you just need a welding rod or two. This is important for early stage bases where you don't have the equipment/materials to make carbon fiber or exotic aluminum alloy replacement parts.

Given how much difficulty they've had with welds and materials to date, is it really feasible to conduct in-situ repairs without a ton of advanced equipment?

That's what I was thinking. At the very least, they'll either have to come up with some very fancy welding rod matrials, or train their welders in some interesting techniques. Reminds me of the difficulties in welding aluminum.

I feel the same way. Likely not to start but over time I think they would build up capability. I wonder how lesser gravity on Mars would help/hurt their efforts. Easier to heft heavy gear up high?

I'm also thinking on the flip side, say a Starship somehow gets irreparably damaged getting to Mars (but successfully gets there). With some basic gear they should be able to part it out and re-use the steel.

Like for a new door on all the Cybertrucks rollin' around up there. /s

The idea of using parts of the landing unit for materials to build local structures and machines is not new. Probably, with proper planning and construction of the lander unit parts, it can be facilitated.

But you have to plan for another mission to pick up the crew, unless you're on the Moon where you could use an electromagnetic catapult to achieve orbit, and then slowly ascend to the rocket that would take you home.

I didn't know that. Sure, it doesn't sound like a revolutionary idea, and I'm not surprised at all its been thought of. I was basing it on the assumption there are people there already who aren't leaving. With a colony on Mars/Moon it surely becomes more useful to have a vast amount of steel to reuse than some crazy alloy.

Electromagnetic catapult, huh. Sounds fun as hell.

The difficulty is making it light and strong. If you're doing an emergency patch repair on a small area you could sacrifice some cargo and use much thicker material and more welds to be sure it will hold. It wouldn't be easy but is much easier than the initial build.

Most importantly, you mostly need it light to escape Earth's atmosphere. (And somewhat to have enough fuel.)

On Mars, Moon or in space this constraint is reduced.

The difficulty is making a weld that doesn't weaken or anneal the parent metal through heat induced material changes.

Welding thick to thin is nontrivial because of the different heat input required in each substrate. You tend to burn through the thin part.

Patching may be possible but thick patches don't make things any easier.

It probably depends on what needs repairs. Repairs around the fuel tanks will be difficult as they would not readily have the equipment to purge the tanks of the fuel/oxidizer. Anything that is bulk structural is likely to be repairable to some extent.

I would not be surprised if part of the reason for building these in a tent is so they can gain experience for building/repairing these rockets with as little infrastructure as possible.

Still it's much easier to work with, compared to titamium, to say nothing of carbon fiber composites or silica-fiber tiles like the Space Shuttles used.

That is, something you can have a fair chance of fixing while in orbit or on Moon or Mars.

I wish I could invest into SpaceX. Such a slam-dunk rarely presents itself, and an opportunity to change the world for the better _while also making money_ is rarer still.

It seems you could buy a stake in a number of publicly traded companies and funds that themselves own a stake. Seems like Google and Fidelity each own about 4% of SpaceX, maybe Fidelity is offering it as a component of some fund?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Ownership,_funding_and_...

Google at least is a bad option. You won't actually get any value representation, any exposure, due to their extreme market cap.

Most likely close to 0% of the SpaceX ownership stake is represented in Google's stock. Let's assume though for the sake of argument that some large part is, say $1.3 billion of the stake is represented (3% of $44 billion). That's equal to about 1.3% of Google's market cap (~$1t).

Whatever you do never buy a stock on that kind of premise. Risking the other 98.7% of your capital to get a meaningless piece of something else (which is already a big something else at a $44b market cap). If SpaceX doubles in value, you'll never notice it (you put $1,473 into Google, SpaceX doubles, max scenario you might make $20). It may be one of the worst reasons to ever buy a giant like Google. People commonly make this mistake when buying Berkshire Hathaway or certain other conglomerates, thinking they're getting a 1-to-1 direct exposure to the Berkshire portfolio (among their equity holdings, only a few matter at all, as with the Apple holding at $110b). I often see it pitched as a form of bonus diversification. Cash and equity holdings on the balance sheets of public companies are essentially never represented at full value in the market cap. The larger the company and the smaller the asset in question, the more likely it is to have something more toward zero representation.

I don't get the Berkshire Hathaway analogy. If you buy that stock, in what way are you not getting "1-to-1 direct exposure to the Berkshire portfolio"? You're owning the same investments Warren Buffet owns, in the same proportions, to within a rounding error.

It would be a mistake to invest in BH because, say, you're really bullish on Dairy Queen, but that doesn't seem like the mistake you're describing.

Math check -- I think Google's SpaceX ownership stake would be closer to 0.13% of Google's value, not 1.3%. Is that what you meant?

> * (or "we can put a couple humans on Mars for 3 days for $100 billion")*

Is there actually a NASA proposal like that? As far as I know, orbital dynamics don't allow for this. One has to wait for a Hohmann transfer orbit window to return home.

There are faster transfer opportunities, but not 3 days. But I think he way saying 3 days of surface ops. Which is still an exaggeration. I think the NASA reference mission is 30 days?

I had a peek at the Mars Design Reference Architecture 5.0 [1], and under "trajectory options" they talk about two classes of missions.

"Opposition class missions" stay on the surface for 30 to 90 days. "Conjunction class missions" stay for 500 days or more.

That confirms the 30 days that you mentioned as a reasonable minimum.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/373665main_NASA-SP-2009-566.pdf

There is a "short stay" option, where you return on the same synod. This requires a higher-energy transfer, involving Venus on at least one leg, to get there early enough to hit the return window and also have enough time to actually do something on the surface. Apparently you can get up to 90 days in some situations, but 30 is more likely, out of a total elapsed mission time of 400-650 days.

https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/mars/marsprof.html

Of course, this in in the "resource-constrained" mode of thinking. If you allow for giant vehicles with on-orbit refilling, SpaceX-style, you just spend a bunch of energy to get there fast instead of monkeying around with Venus.

To be fair to NASA, they would never have been allowed to pursue a Starship-like strategy. Look at the Space Shuttle, which had all kinds of requirements ladled on top of the program, such as DoD requirements.

Remember, NASA was the one that added the DOD requirements. To increase their budget, they lobbied congress to cancel the Air Force space program to make it a captive customer of the Shuttle.

You write that as if it is a done deal. Mars' atmosphere is roughly .5% of that of Earth and almost exclusively CO2. Temperature ranges are well out of what they are on Earth. It is hard for technology to survive there, it is impossible for people to survive there until there has been an unbelievable investment in infrastructure.

If you think there will be a million people colony on Mars in your lifetime than you are not in touch with the physics of this kind of endeavor. All of our GDP for the next 50 years pooled together would likely not be enough to pull off a feat like that. The scale we're talking about here is too large to even contemplate.

10 people in a shitty little dome, maybe. Right up to the moment they die because of some small mishap.

To get a sense of the difficulty, imagine sending a million people to the South Pole to set up a self-sustaining colony. That would be much more than 1000 times easier than establishing such a base on Mars.

I’ve often said the same thing. South Pole and underwater cities would be easier than mars or even moon colony. As much as I want the later to happen- I think 1 million people on Mars or Moon will require something that makes them more appealing than even the worst Earth locations. That has to be something pretty drastic. Elon says motivation will be “it’d be cool”. I don’t think that is enough motivation. Still, I’d rather have the capability developed than not, and hopefully those motivations present themselves without being too dire (like a comet heading our way)

A science outpost, specifically as a place to put telescopes, seems the most compelling. The rest of the population would then grow along side the science outpost to service it (food, transportation, etc.) A looong time until a million people, though.

Why would you put a telescope in a gravity well though?

Would it not be easier to build large structures in orbit or at one of the Lagrange points?

There's been some really interesting ideas for a new generation of telescopes that Starship's cargo capacity could enable. Telescopes on the far side of the moon are the classic example. They'd be shielded from the sun for 14 days out of 28, permanently shielded from Earth, and still have all the advantages of being in a vacuum. Gravitational-wave telescopes on the geologically-stable lunar surface are another interesting idea.

But I think my favourite idea is infrared scopes in the polar craters, some of the coldest places in the solar system. You don't need a complicated JWST-style extendable sun shield or limited helium supply. You are limited in terms of direction, but that's not a bad tradeoff.

Africa was in Europe's back yard yet when they got the opportunity they colonized the Americas. Colonizing a formerly unexplored place where nobody has yet laid claim has a lot of appeal (and this time we (probably) don't have to kill/displace the natives to do it).

Europeans were kept out of Africa by disease.

I'd rather say the Europeans were kept out of Africa because of nowhere near European levels of valuable resources (think farmland, wood) other than slaves for centuries. Diamonds and uranium are a recent thing.

I always heard it was a logistic issue more than anything else? Getting from Europe to the Americas and then back in a sailing vessel is easier than getting to Africa's East coast and back.

Which explains why Africa was colonized so much more successfully than (checks notes) ... Australia?

I'm interested in living on Mars. I'm not interested in living in Antarctica.

Massive domes to act as greenhouses, melting a couple miles of ice cover. Fossils and untapped resources. Antarctica could be a lot of fun to colonize.

Easier is a downside.

It would be smart to demonstrate ability to do thing A before attempting thing B that is 1000 times harder.

With any luck, things you learn actually doing A, and then A' that is 10 times harder, and then A'' that is 100 times harder, will all turn out to be useful, even necessary, in tackling B. Failure is always an option, but there is no point in choosing it at the outset.

Maybe SpaceX should practice colonizing in Antarctica. They could fly all their gear in on Starships and do a dress rehearsal.

True, but I'm not sure difficulty is as relevant if the motivation is there. You can't terraform the South Pole. Mars reopens the frontier whereas the South Pole is a dead end

The South Pole starts out way more terraformed than Mars can ever be. It has air, water, gravity, and is warmer. You can just put up domes and it's already way better than Mars. Mineral wealth is only a mile down, under the ice.

Under the sea starts out way more terraformed than Mars can ever be. It has water, gravity, and is warmer. Mineral wealth is right at hand.

The cloud tops of Venus start out way more terraformed than Mars can ever be. It has air pressure, gravity, water, carbon, sulfur, and shirtsleeve temperature.

What motivation does Mars provide that those don't?

If your goal is to be a multi-planet civilisation, neither Antarctica nor the oceans of Earth would work; also the layer of Venusian atmosphere that you’re describing is way too cold for there to be useful quantities of metals you could extract from the rain (unlike the lower layers, where mountain tops are frosted with metal: https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a11506/hea...).

The other option is the Moon, which has even less atmosphere and even bigger temperature swings than Mars.

Planets are for extreme primitives, anyway.

But the point was, if you haven't even proven you can settle a mildly challenging environment, your odds on an actually difficult one don't look good.

We know by demonstrations that we can make settlements in Antarctica and underwater, we just don’t have any reason to do more than science and military.

Venus, you could only settle by bringing in everything from outside unless and until you can convert the atmosphere in a large way into building materials — Mars at least you only need to convert it into fuel, because you can do at least some of your construction from rocks.

All the settlements on Antarctica are utterly dependent on enormous support frequently airlifted from outside. There have been no settlements underwater at all; little more than camping trips have been essayed.

On Venus, plastics, carbon fiber, water, buoyancy gas, and breathing air (I repeat myself) can be made directly from the air and clouds. Plastic and carbon fiber gives you building materials. Robots can gather minerals from the surface and deliver them by balloon to the cloud tops. Insolation provides abundant power, moreso than here; or, a lightweight, unshielded nuke plant may be suspended a mile or more below industrial plant, supported on its own balloon.

Mars will be much more unpleasant than Antarctica. We don't even know whether people can live for long in Mars gravity. We know that long weightlessness is quite harmful.

If you’re going to use that standard against nuclear submarines and deep-sea oil drilling, it is unreasonable to also say we can make those things from Venusian air. Yes, in a lab, sure — that’s proof of concept, far less than a camping trip, and roughly the same level as extraction of oxygen from rocks.

Although I’m also not expecting 1 million people on Mars in my lifetime, I think you’re assuming SpaceX never gets close to the Musk price goals.

You might be right to do that — I’m no rocket scientist — but the target price would get a million people there for $200 billion, not your $5 quadrillion.

Yes, I also expect the first few thousand to be in easily damaged domes. I also expect them to bring some of The Boring Company equipment with them, as it is part-owned by SpaceX and the stated raison d'être of TBC being pointless in a future of fully self-driving cars.

The other factor is that Musk has nothing better to spend his money on. With Tesla + SpaceX + Boring + Neuralink he'll likely be a trillionaire by the time Mars colonization is full swing. Even if the price was $2T instead of $200B, Musk might be able to fund most of this himself.

How are tunnels pointless in a future of self driving cars, the opposite is true, tunnels make even more sense when cars drive themselves.

Self driving cars done right will be able to do full speed while literally, not metaphorically, touching bumpers.

Traffic jams with human drivers happen spontaneously when the cars get close enough that overcompensation turns into a negative spiral.

So in the city of the future you gone have 1000s of self driving cars going full speed threw the city? It makes much more sense to open up the city for people and ban cars for the most part. Move the transportation under ground.

Please, millions.

The roads are already there, electric cars are quiet, road trains are even more efficient.

I am no fan of American city design, having half encircled Davis CA on foot, having found the suddenly-terminating sidewalks in Salt Lake City, and having walked the really boring route from San Jose railway station to the hotel in the top left corner of the Apple Maps icon.

(NYC is surprisingly pedestrian friendly though).

In Europe we are already trying to make more space for pedestrians specially around the city center. The value of the land above ground is incredible. Freeing up those spaces from cars makes sense and is incredibly nice.

I know, check my profile ;)

But:

1. Musk doesn’t live in Europe, he set up TBC while stuck in a traffic jam in Los Angeles.

2. Solid car trains moving at full speed (whatever that is for the road, 20 kph for residential or much higher than the current rules for highways) use less land area than any other traffic, so some lanes can become bicycle only or whatever.

3. They can “perfectly” obey traffic lights and give way to pedestrians

4. Raised walkways are cheaper than tunnels

I million people will be very hard.

But the first starship missions will drop 100 tons each to the surface of Mars at a cost of a few hundred million dollars each. And they will send dozens of Starships that first trip, building an camp with over a hundred explorers and scientists the first synod.

They will have thousands of tons of equipment and supplies, and their habitats will have multiple redundancies and be easily repaired.

Mars is far easier to survive on than the Moon, for example. The temperature ranges are far milder, Mars reaches 70 degrees Fahrenheit at its equator during the day. The day is the same length as ours. There is adequate solar for power, tons of water, and a plethora of other easily accessible resources from CO2 to Iron.

TBM FTW.

This is a very key point.

The Falcon 9 isn’t cheap because of reuse (yet). It’s cheap because of mass manufacturing. The Rs-25 engine costs over $100m each, Ariansoace Vulcains around $20M, typical large rocket engines over $10M.

SoaceX Merlin costs about $200,000 each to make. The Raptor will be close to that. Thats why SpaceX can pursue the large number of redundant smaller engines design strategy so successfully.

Reuse has lowered Falcon 9 costs internally, and increased its private discounts, but not it’s public pricing. When the cost benefits of reuse finally cascade through public pricing and through the entire stack with Starship, you have a SuperHeavy launch system putting 150 tons in orbit even cheaper than a single Falcon 9 launch.

For comparison, the Shuttle was over $40,000 per pound to Orbit. The SLS will be around $10,000/lb to orbit if you don’t count developmental costs at least 3x that.

The Falcon 9 is $1,500/lb to orbit, and Falcon Heavy $1,100/lb to orbit. Starship will lift more payload to orbit than the SLS, and 4x as much as the Shuttle, for between $100 and $300 per pound.

> Reuse has lowered Falcon 9 costs internally, and increased its private discounts, but not it’s public pricing

It's not just a discount - it is the reversed equivalent of banks charging interest for a loan due to failure risk. Private customers getting discounts accept the increased risk that some re-used part fails. Essentially SpaceX has managed to have their r&d subsidized by paying customers instead of having to borrow money, launch dummy payloads and pay the money back.

> mass manufactured at a relatively low cost.

... which also explains Tesla, mass production of Earth-faring machines is one way to prepare for mass production of space-faring machines (and battery tech is going to be important for living in space). When you look at Musk's ventures, they really all end at Mars.

The Boring company. Develop tech to drill deep tunnels on Mars? Electric cars and batteries cause you will need that on Mars? Even the Cybertruck looks like something destined for Mars.

And a Starlink network would mean an instant global Martian internet.

Future of space as presented in shows like the Expanse. controlled by trillionaires and their companies and powerful people in governments all killing each other over space rocks. We're a long way from Star Trek, that's going to take a more fundamental advance not at all related to technology.

For Star Trek we just need SpaceX + UBI!

The Expanse also has UBI on earth. With it, most people still lack opportunity and live a rather destitute, powerless life.

Seems like a pretty good perdition of our future, really. UBI recipients with no labor of value to offer won't have power to change their government for long.

It's unfortunate that the authoritarian future of Star Trek probably wouldn't lead to paradise. Or at least, that's how our culture's view of the future has changed.

Both fictions are a product of their time. I still wish we had the optimism of Star Trek now.

In The Expanse, the main reason for complaint from earthers seems to be caused by overpopulation which leads to difficulty in obtaining realestate and the benefits that landownership brings.

If UBI was implemented as in The Expanse (food, shelter, and meds are free), I would expect the population of the earth to plummet. The UBI would allow for more people to pursue learning and educating others. It has been shown that when people feel safe from threat of violence and starvation, and when they are more educated, the desire to breed decreases.

On the flip side, perhaps knowing that you are off the hook for paying for the expense of many children would increase the desire to reproduce?

Was it really shown? Is there a single country that did not replace stress of violence and starvation with economic stress? Do we have at least one larger example of what would happen if the general population was rich?

> Do we have at least one larger example of what would happen if the general population was rich?

We have birth rate comparison between "first world" and "third world" countries plus migration experience studies (basically, even one generation after migration from a poor to a rich country, there is a massive drop in birth rate, and after something like 3 generations the birth rate is equal to the rest of the country).

Additionally, there is a noticeable drop in birth rates when a whole country gets richer.

What country are you talking about? I don't know a single one where the majority does not feel financially stressed with too many children. (usually more than 3, but even 2 is too much for a lot of people, in many countries for the majority, probably including the United States).

The simple explanation for these numbers is that rural children are economically useful, while urban children are a burden.

Star Trek's society is collectivist (as all societies are, to a degree), but is it authoritarian?

I suspect that summarizing collectivism as authoritarian is like summarizing libertarianism as selfish: they go well together, but you can also get one without the other.

I don't know Star Trek very well, but as a utopia I guess they imagine a form of collectivism that largely preserves individual freedom? Of course most of the show centers on Starfleet, an authoritarian organisation like any military, which doesn't tell much about the whole society.

Anything said about libertarianism is necessarily hypothetical, because it has never happened. If it ever did, it would instantly dissolve into something certain to be very unpleasant for almost everyone.

Hmm. Are you sure you understand libertarianism? I’m also unsure of your claim here about “libertarianism” dissolving into something unpleasant. Unpleasant in what way? Why would it “dissolve”?

It happened in the United States before the first world war, and continued for a few decades after that. Pretty long time to be called "immediately". While it was unpleasant from our current POV, it was way better than anything else at that time, and didn't end because it dissolved, but because the world wars needed funding.

I see that you are not up on the Sherman Antitrust Act. Go ahead, I'll wait.

The 1890s demonstrated what a Libertarian regime would dissolve into, instantly: Absolute rule by the biggest dog. It has happened myriad times in human history, from all kinds of pre-conditions. We were lucky, 130 years ago, that the armed forces still believed in voting. Not sure they still do...

I think the star trek universe is highly democratic.

Trek is a mirror of Earth geopolitics from an American perspective in whichever year the show was written.

TOS-TNG: Klingons were Soviet-Russian, Romans were Chinese, the Federation was sexist (but much less so in TNG than in TOS) and pretended gay people didn’t even exist.

DS9: Lesbians and trans people exist, but only as exotic outsiders. Bajor feels inspired by Tibeten Buddhism and the final parts of the Northern Ireland Troubles.

VOY: ???

ENT: Nostalgia gone wrong followed by 9/11

DIS/PIC: Oh no Cold War enemies are a threat again / Oh no A.I.

IIRC, UBI in The Expanse is not really UBI, and more like minimum amount of services to keep you viable, and extreme scarcity of training.

There should really be no reason that people can't be trained or educated even if most of the skills are utterly useless in the face of automation.

Also The Expanse isn't facts.

But in some way it may still influence the future.

If the negative aspect of the future portrayed in the Expanse are culturally absorbed, then there is a strong possibility that the people dreaming of and building the future could see that as a road sign to help them avoid that future.

E.g. it makes the point that we would need to work out ways to create better habitats in space and to concentrate on making a workable biosphere where enough food can be cultivated and raised (yes, cows in space) to survive.

I find the tropes presented in fiction misleading or unlikely to reflect reality once further examined.

Misleading road signs about the future may be worse than no signs at all.

I’m glad that not everyone in human history has shared your bright outlook, otherwise we would still live in caves…

Could it be the case that a bright outlook leads people to overlook issues that need to be addressed. Maybe a more depressive (or realistic) disposition motivates people to enact change.

Let's look at this way, humanity needs to become multiplanetary species to prevent extinction if some sort of cataclysm happens on Earth: nuclear war; Yellowstone erupts, etc. Compared to that, any other problem seems insignificant.

Life will go on in other parts of the universe, and all life, no matter where they locate themselves, will have some kind of existential threat.

And it doesn't matter how many Dyson spheres are made, if humans aren't dedicated to improving the collective opportunity to live life without suffering, there's little real 'significance' to extending the project of humanity compared to any other life-form.

I’m sure you’re right, although I’m not convinced that anything like human consciousness will be reproduced, which is a shame.

> improving the collective opportunity to live life without suffering

You cannot eliminate suffering.

> Life will go on in other parts of the universe, and all life, no matter where they locate themselves, will have some kind of existential threat.

There's no guarantee or evidence that there is sentient life in the universe

> You cannot eliminate suffering.

!= improving the collective opportunity to live life without suffering

> There's no guarantee or evidence that there is sentient life in the universe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24067017

How do you know there is life in other parts of the universe?

Do you at least consider a possibility that life originated only once?

Let's say by chance we discover an oracle, that could reveal with perfect certainty whether life existed anywhere else in the universe. I wager, that if I made some non-trivial wager with any other reasonable (and educated) person holding this contrarian view, they would back down before the oracle revealed its answer.

This will sound weird, but I have no idea why anyone cares about the abstract "survival of human species". I care very deeply about the lives of people actually living here right now. But if Earth is wiped out, what does it matter that some humans are alive somewhere? Except of course that I'm glad for them that they didn't get killed. But we're talking about generations from now anyway, and there are more direct ways to stop people from dying here today.

Because it's not the end? I think we strive to continue on into the unknown.

Because it’s mostly a lie people tell themselves, similar to ‘I’m sure I am a good person’. How are you so sure?

There’s a lot of evidence that points to the fact that on a global scale, we can barely care about stuff geographically adjacent to us, or worse, socially (class) adjacent to us, but here we are claiming we care about generations beyond us.

Big old lie.

Because our code must live on.

There is the more generic idea of leaving a track in history, making sure one's offspring survives. If one of my descendants make it off-planet and thrives there once the Zombies attack/the meteor strikes/the nukes go off then my line will continue. I have no logic explanation for wanting to continue my bloodline, but I guess it's just a natural instinct.

The second reason to get off-world is the more far-fetched one, but assuming we can establish that other worlds are dead or sterile then we are free to customize it as we please without having to feel bad about it. In the long run we could leave Earth completely, allowing whomever comes next to develop freely without our intervention.

Because we are all genetically related, and humans, like most or all organisms, care about their genetic code surviving.

It may be not obvious (yet it should be if you think about it), but humans, in a very essential way, are not like most all organisms, and "genetic code surviving" is not our primary concern.

If there was a full scale nuclear war. And then the next week the Yellowstone super volcano erupted. And then the week after that an asteroid as big as the one that killed the dinosaurs hit Eurasia, earth would still be wildly more habitable that Mars.

And after a collision like the one that created the moon? How habitable during a gamma ray burst?

... and wha' if Earth jus' 'splodes one day... (takes another sip)

That's a bit too much, but we still have a few month left in 2020...

I hate this argument. There is no foreseeable disaster that would make Earth less habitable than any other solar system body. Even if every nuke we have was detonated, it would still be orders of magnitude easier to survive on what remains of Earth than to live in Mars.

I'm not saying there are no existential risks at all, but being on other planets would not make us any more likely to survive to them than to simply being very well isolated on Earth (which would cost 1000x less).

Developing space technology already has all sorts of benefits and it doesn't need this poor argument in its favor.

Every comment of this nature overlooks the challenge of politics and territory. Any significant social experiment is basically impossible on Earth because every space and person is claimed property by an existing state.

Mars would also offer cultural redundancy. Also, sometimes people choose to do things brcause they are hard.

> Every comment of this nature overlooks the challenge of politics and territory

If I were a betting person, I'm not sure I'd go all-in on a CEO-Emperor-King of Mars over existing nation-states on Terra

Is that a bet on a basically functional society, or a bet on which place is better to live in for individual?

Well, there is the question of whether we will ever have the possibility of developing this technology again.

I see no immediate risks to life on Earth, and considering we're quite hard to get rid of, I suspect the human race will be here for quite some time yet. The ability to do a large-scale settlement on other planetary bodies on the other hand, might go away considerably sooner, and who knows if/when we will be able to do it again if we ever end up in a situation where it might be needed.

Regardless, there are other reasons, as you say. For one, space-based manufacturing would allow us to increase the standard of living on Earth without having to worry about things like CO2 levels and pollution. If we start commercializing space then I expect colonization to follow as a natural result of that and we won't have to worry about the more philosophical side.

It's not a matter of Earth becoming uninhabitable. You're right that it would take a lot to do that, though it is possible with a large enough asteroid or some unexpectedly fast acting runaway greenhouse effect. The problem is of human civilization continuing at its current level and continuing to advance. Any number of small disasters could set us back hundreds if not thousands of years. We have direct evidence and record of this happening multiple times throughout human history so we know it can and probably will happen. That's why we need a self-sustaining society elsewhere, preferably far enough away to resist whatever disaster causes Earth to fall.

The fact is, and it may sound like a paradox, that, for more than one reason, it is the humans themselves that is the biggest danger to their own existence in the long term.

But only if you already developed technology needed to survive on mars and have an industrial base not touched by those nukes.

Having a self-sustaining outpost somewhere other than earth is valuable not only for its own sake, but also due to the developed technology and industry and infrastructure implied by its existence.

If tomorrow you suddenly need a huge fleet of fully reusable ships for some reason, the right time to start working on them was 20 years ago, or as soon as basic science and technology level allow.

There are also political risks (we are all too close to each other).

Yes, there is interesting research in evolutionary reasons for human depression, and its role in giving people needed tunnel vision to focus on the self.

Of course, this machinery can be medically disrupted by toxins and genetics (air pollution has an impact for example, lead ions, etc.), but there is a ‘healthy’ reason for depression (similarly there is a ‘healthy’ reason for ‘scabs’ and physical wound healing).

Most people in the modern era with ‘healthy’ depression are medicating away the effect (you will be shocked if you look into the rates of antidepressant usage in France for example), and this diversion can inadvertently prolong the depression as would be expected (e.g. dealing with symptoms and not cause).

Lots of interesting research in this area.

tl;dr yes, depression and depressive thoughts are useful for humans in certain cases, which is why we have them

If let free to roam intellectually without hinderment, I think such a viewpoint leads to nihilistic cynicism, not constructive action.

Which isn’t to say a tempering perspective isn’t at all helpful, I just think in the absence of all optimism (& hope), there’s no room for constructive change

To illustrate, your viewpoint seems consistent with the statement: “There can be no great progress, no humanity taking root among the stars unless led by monstrous men.”

I hope you don’t consider this a straw argument, but it’s worth considering. To believe that statement is to either believe that a “good” future is necessarily one of stagnation and extinction (whether in 1000 years or 500 million years) OR to excuse the actions of monstrous men. A pessimistic, cynical perspective means no counter-movement, no inclusive cooperative with the goal of space settlement. This isn’t exactly motivating.

(And to be clear, from the perspective of history, I do not consider Elon—definitely not perfect—to be monstrous. Neither is SpaceX the work of one man. Gwynne Shotwell is as much the leader of SpaceX as Elon is—although you wouldn’t know it by reading headlines as she doesn’t care for the spotlight—plus thousands of passionate workers (who are co-owners) who believe in this vision and many of whom would be pushing for it even without Elon’s leadership.)

I'd prefer corporate warfare in the Asteroid belt over international conflicts in Earth.

Regardless, unless we manage to come up with a new system that actually works, chances are that commercialization of space is one of the few ways for us to establish a presence off this planet.

Many of the colonies that make up the US and Canada were at one time controlled by the rich elite of the time. A few hundred years and they rebel to the point nobody even remembers them.

I'm not sure why your statement is in the past tense.

That's actually the backstory of The Expanse. Earth colonized Mars, Mars eventually rebelled, and the resulting Mars-Earth competition to colonize the rest of the solar system drives much of the story.

I recently read the screenplay to 2001.

An interesting thing mentioned in the script, but not shown in the film, is that all of the images of beautiful space ships in the early sequence of the film are in fact space-based nuclear missile launchers, and that there are 27 nuclear nations with space weapons.

I sometimes imagine what an alien visitor would think about us if they came to our planet and saw that we had such destructive technology, pointed at _ourselves_.

Any sources for this? Wikipedia seems to state there are no known operative orbital nuclear weapons systems: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_weapon#Space-to-Earth_...

They mean missiles on earth just as we have today, not space based ones.

The poster is describing the future imagined by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in 1968, not reality.

We ended up with a lot fewer nukes, and a lot less space. (Also fewer trippy alien wormholes.)

They might see their own past.

It seems likely that all species that make it to space might have similar pressures because they have a similar environment.

See convergent evolution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution

That is, if they exist at all. Maybe we all converge to the great filter.

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