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!
* 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.
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
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.
Electromagnetic catapult, huh. Sounds fun as hell.
On Mars, Moon or in space this constraint is reduced.
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.
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.
That is, something you can have a fair chance of fixing while in orbit or on Moon or Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Ownership,_funding_and_...
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would it not be easier to build large structures in orbit or at one of the Lagrange points?
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.
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.
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?
The other option is the Moon, which has even less atmosphere and even bigger temperature swings than Mars.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Traffic jams with human drivers happen spontaneously when the cars get close enough that overcompensation turns into a negative spiral.
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).
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
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.
... 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.
[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