That is an understatement. "People" have talked about a Moon colony for a long time. Even before there were Moon landings.
The primary difference is that a Moon colony doesn't have a billionaire propagandist.
Talk is cheap. People are working on Mars.
When is the Mars launch? What's the schedule? It's 100% vaporware.
Methane engines and atmosphere-agnostic propulsive recovery are far from vapourware. It’s not a launch schedule. But that’s a straw man requirement for “working on” something.
It's not a straw man when you don't trust the word and good faith of a modern day "Music Man".
Then don’t.
Do you dispute that those technologies exist, and were developed by people dreaming of colonising Mars? The “when is the Mars launch” standard for “working on” something is a straw man because, by that definition, nobody is working on fusion energy or Alzheimer’s disease.
You're talking about rocket technology. I already said, "If the goal was simply to visit Mars, that might be viable." The question is a permanent, self-sustaining Mars colony, where the biggest problem is not "Methane engines" but rather breathing oxygen, drinking water, eating food, not getting irradiated, not getting poisoned, not having circulatory problems, reproducing, and surviving in general.
> people dreaming of colonising Mars
Interesting that you use the word "dreaming".
Get in line, plus the benefit of time machines is that you don't need to wait for them to be developed.
Intentionally. Hackers dream. I have a background in aerospace engineering. That doesn’t mean I know how to solve the problems of permanent habitation. But it gives me a sense of where the edges are, and while some problems are super difficult (toxicity) others are wildly exaggerated (radiation) and none are blocking. Moreover, many of the processes we’ll need to develop have obvious counterparts on Earth, most interestingly, energy and fuel generation.
The author of the article wants an annual JWST or Cassini. I’d love that. But we aren’t getting it. De-funding Mars means going back to a post-Apollo NASA budget.
I'm sure they've got some engineering schematics for some of those things or re-warmed NASA papers about those topics floating around. But talking about Martian colonies without talking about the things that would just keep a couple of people alive is just bullshitting.
You're serious about an endeavor when you want to talk about the boring aspects of it. Talking up the exciting aspects is just bullshitting.
Agreed. Most of the serious work on establishing visits is at NASA. But getting there and back sustainably is a big part of the problem. To borrow another comment’s analogy, we’re not going to establish a permanent presence (whether with a rotating cast of astronauts or permanent population) with the astrophysical equivalent of triremes.
Not only is Starship not currently flying but there's been no demonstrations of their in-orbit refueling, not even between two Dragon capsules. There's also been no demonstration of in-orbit engine reignition. No demonstration of multiple engine reignitions. These are all necessary components of any Starship mission. Starship must always have fuel for landing as there's no capability for it to do an unpowered landing.
This means without an in-orbit refueling its payload lift is massively compromised. It also doesn't have the fuel to get out of LEO without refueling.
Starship is currently making tiny baby steps towards launching while people talk it up like it's doing regularly scheduled launches. There are a lot of major unknowns in the Starship mission profile and there's no guarantee it can or will work as advertised. Even if it technically works the idea there's going to be daily launches is currently a pipe dream.
Not in the slightest. SpaceX's proposed Starship design has known mass and envelope limits. All of the required support systems can be designed with those limits (or subset thereof) as part of the constraints. In fact now is the best time to start designing those because it can inform design criteria or mission profiles for Starship. Having those as handwave-y unknowns while talking about colonies is just absurd.
A manned landing on Mars requires they have months worth of reliable support infrastructure available. None of that is just going to appear. It all needs to be built and landed with or before humans. It needs to be repairable with tools on hand. It must power on an be functional on Day 1. You're not serious about landing people on Mars let alone building a colony without talking about the "boring" infrastructure that will keep everyone alive.
Hell, as it stands it isn't even clear if initial vehicles will need auxiliary thrusters to avoid digging up a hole upon landing. Even NASA seems to be uncertain about that one.
So yes, it is ridiculous to argue that they aren't serious about setting up a colony based on what they're doing right now.
Beyond that though, they're working on the spacesuits (granted, they're so early into that they're nowhere near ones usable on Mars) and they have demonstrated the ability to perform some amount of important maintenance on the Starship vehicles without needing machinery that isn't easy to bring along.
It doesn't. The Martian environment sets the limits on everything else. You could drag the entire Earth over next to Mars, and people still couldn't live there.
The irony is that the hypothetical "What if the Earth became uninhabitable?" is effectively the same as "What if the Earth became just like Mars?"