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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

The Mars plans are medium-term, though, and they need many thousands of Starships+Boosters for that plan to work. In the short-term, SpaceX is 'behind' on launching Starlink, especially v2 which is needed to fulfill the promises of the network and be profitable (and v2 can only launch on Starship).

In the short term, they need hundreds of full stage rockets, and in the medium term, thousands. That's tens of thousands of engines needed in the next ~10 years. I don't think 1/day is fast enough and I'm sure they will increase that rate as soon as possible.

Also for testing, SpaceX doesn't want to be afraid of blowing up rockets and losing engines, so the first few hundred engines will likely not be reused.

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That plan will not work, as there is nothing that could possibly be gained by flying thousands of rockets to Mars: there is nothing worth having on Mars.

This is what baffles me about the current space-travel fetish. We know what's up there - basically nothing at all. Even if you go to another planet and mine for raw materials, bringing material back isn't even remotely economically feasible and is unlikely to become so in any of our lifetimes.

Going to space in the 1960s made sense from the perspective of scientific advancement, and let's be honest, showing off. Now, we realize that the world has serious problems - but the people with influence are decidedly un-serious and so would rather continue to show off instead of fixing the mess they helped to create.

> even remotely economically feasible

Depends on what exactly are you mining and whether it is possible to make fuel out there. And with launch cost falling drastically I expect to see this in my lifetime.

Why would you want to bring it back? There are literal gigatons of useful material 'up there', perfectly usable in-place (or anywhere that's not down a well) with low effort. Even with Starship, it's easier to use resources at the destination rather than boost them up.

Because we only care about resources to the extent that they are useful to us, and by definition we are down here and not up there.

Now, it's important to note that there are some wonderful research insights that could be gleaned by landing things on Mars, and also perhaps by using martian resources to launch things further away from Earth. None of these require 1000 rockets landing on Mars though.

Demand for manufactured goods on Mars is at an all-time high, but I fear still not enough to make the economics work.

This kind of thinking is so defeatist - why do anything at all then? And why is it the pro space people who need to stay on earth and save it, what about everyone else?

Human history is progress and this is progress.

“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale

Defeatist? Elon is the one wanting to give up on this planet and start from scratch.

> And why is it the pro space people who need to stay on earth and save it, what about everyone else?

If we limit "pro-space people" to the billionaires sucking up all the oxygen in the room with their dick-waving, the "why do they need to save it" is obvious - they have the money to make a positive difference. Failing that though, if Papa Musk wants to blast himself off to Mars and die of radiation sickness, he's welcome to do so.

Elon's main argument is to become a multi planetary species, he's not arguing leaving earth for good at all.

Money does not magically fix people however much you want to believe that.

People were talking about "the world's problems" in the 60s too. Fortunately we still went to the moon and inspired generations of people to quite literally reach for the stars. The idea that we could simply reallocate the relatively small number of resources currently used for spaceflight, and that would make some meaningful impact in the world's problems is silly. There will always be new problems on Earth to solve.

The resources are symbolic, but the messaging is terrible - "We fucked up this planet, but don't worry because Amazon and Tesla are going to ship us "lucky" people off to their interplanetary labour camps, for the survival of the species."

Only the naysayers message it that way though. And it’s pretty disingenuous messaging at that.

But I guess you made my point for me… your argument has nothing to do about actually fixing anything, it’s entirely about optics.

It's an off-planet ball of rock.

That's tremendously valuable, because it's off planet and out of our gravity well, so we can launch much bigger rockets (measured in interplanetary payload capacity) than we can from earth (though the moon itself may be better, depending on what we can get there).

Launch rockets where, and for what?

If you want to do science, then I wager it is better to do more of the work on Earth and head straight for your destination, avoiding the Mars gravity well entirely.

Huh? We do not know what is up there. That’s the whole point of exploration. We don’t even fully know what our planet has.

The world is and will always be a mess. That’s the nature of human being, we have different ideas, priorities, mindset. We can’t stop progress in an area just to fix some other areas. Besides, it is baffling that space is always singled out when it comes to fixing earth’s issues. Why not says, divert all resources of the video gaming industry to fixing climate; stopping all sporting competition, especially professional ones, for the same goal? That’s of course straw man and unrealistic argument, but space skeptics repeat the same argument on every single space discussion.

This is a matter of perspective.

Elon has said that his motivation is to make humanity a multi planetary species thereby lowering the risk of extinction (asteroid impact, nuclear war, pandemic, biological warfare, catastrophic climate change, what have you).

Personally, I suspect he might just be doing it because he's nerdy and likes the idea.

For all of us who may not agree with his motives, the technological innovation required to make such a project a reality will benefit all of us anyway; so, for my part, I hope that SpaceX/EM succeed in their goals.

> Elon has said that his motivation is to make humanity a multi planetary species thereby lowering the risk of extinction (asteroid impact, nuclear war, pandemic, biological warfare, catastrophic climate change, what have you).

None of those will leave the Earth even a millionth as inhospitable to life as Mars already is - so this motivation makes no logical sense.

Not to mention, with anything resembling current technology, any Mars colony will be highly dependent on Earth for a good few hundred years - there is no way to bootstrap a fully functioning high tech economy any quicker than that, and life on Mars would depend critically on the highest of high-tech (there is no way to live on Mars without computers, for example - so you would need to be able to build, supply and man advanced chip fabs on Mars before you could have a self-sufficient colony).

It also can't be forgotten that there is no proof that a human population can survive on Mars at all, given our current technology. For example, we have no way of knowing yet if humans could successfully reproduce and bear children healthy enough to reproduce themselves in such a low-G environment. We may require genetic engineering to actually be able to live on Mars (or at least human settlements might require huge centrifuges of some kind simulating high-G, which is way beyond our current abilities to do on a planet, or at least increases the costs thousand-fold).

If no one ever starts working on it, it will never be possible. Anything we can do beyond what our bodies allow on their own, someone had to work on.

Building 1000 rockets is not going to solve this problem though; and there are far easier experiments that can be done on mammals in low-G settings before "starting a colony" on Mars.

Not to mention, there are good reasons why the ancient Egyptians did not start work on a rocket program, even though they did want to fly.

Modern computer hardware doesn’t bring us the internet, among other technology advance, but for sure if nobody was working on it in the 1950s, 1960s there wouldn’t be the Internet we all so rely on today. Starships, a lot of them, are prerequisite if we want to have any significant presence in another planet.

> there are good reasons why the ancient Egyptians did not start work on a rocket program.

They didn’t have the required knowledge to do so. The rocket equation, after all, was only established a hundred years ago.

The problem of going to Mars is more or less solved. Advancing on the rocket front is not going to bring us one iota closer to knowing if humans can mate in very low gravity.

Also, computers are useful even if we didn't think of the Internet. 1000 space ships on their way to Mars are not very useful if we can't actually live on Mars.

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