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Comment by gigglesupstairs | Hacker News Reader

Manned missions are not in fact on the horizon. At all.

I guess we have different notions of what the horizon is. For me is "in my lifetime". To put it in context: I watched the first Moon landing on TV as a child, so I'm used to wait.

If you are old enough to have watched the moon landings on TV, my bet is that we will not see a manned mars mission in your lifetime. (I have my doubts it will happen in the next 40 years.)

Do you accept the bet to be paid in person? :)

You all are focusing on labeling the time to humans in Mars. But how about the time to completely discard that life exists now in Mars? How much time would it take to design, build and send a mission of this nature?

It's the ratio of the two times that matters.

It's funny how much things change over a decade, yet it never feels like anything is happening on a day by day, or even year by year basis. Just imagine going back 10 years in time and trying to describe to yourself what the next 10 years holds. You'd probably think yourself crazy! But to the point, in 2011 the US passed a law banning China from participating in the not-so-international ISS. The arguments given were that China had nothing to offer, and implicitly - that they'd just steal everything. Today, just slightly more than a decade later - they have one of the most advanced space programs on the planet, have built, launched, and manned their own space station, executed sample return missions from the Moon (the first since 1976!), and more.

What would you have thought the odds of that in 2011? And all of these things are the sort of stuff that is happening in just a decade. The world is changing extremely quickly (even if it often doesn't feel like it), and space tech is one of the fastest advancing industries right now. I think the best window into the future is the past. Look at the trajectory we're on, not necessarily just the US - but the whole world. It's a good one, at least as far as space goes.

Here's an NPR article from 2011:

> The country is now due to launch Tiangong-1, the first module of its own space station, possibly before the end of September this year. This will dock with an unmanned spaceship, Shenzhou-8, in China's first ever in-orbit docking attempt. Next year, two or three astronauts will be sent into space for the first manned docking.

> Beijing hopes to put a rover on the moon by 2013, and then a man on the moon, as well as opening its own space station by around 2020. But its ambitions could be greater still than those being publicly announced.

> "What we have seen again in reporting, as opposed to official documents, seems to be a group of Skylab-type Tiangong stations to be followed by a Chinese version of the International Space Station, which would suggest that China is aiming for a long-term human presence in [inner] Earth orbit," says Dean Cheng, an expert in China's space program at the Heritage Foundation. "Given past Chinese history — which is that their missions always last longer, weigh more, achieve more [than U.S. missions] — it is quite likely that the Chinese would try to set up some kind of longer-term presence on the moon, measured in weeks or maybe months."

https://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137815962/china-seeks-to-carv...

I don't think it's a very common understanding that on the horizon covers a span of 50+ years. It doesn't conform to any definitions I can think of, I'd hate to wait for a payrise that's "on the horizon" in your world.

I watched the moon landings as a child. I don't expect to see humans set foot on the moon again in my lifetime. I do however expect to see opportunists suckling on the fatted pork barrel here on earth up until my expiry date. Mars is a realistically unobtainable goal but certainly a lot of people will be gainfully employed not getting there.

There will be people on the Moon within the next 10 years. Both Chinese and American.

Sending humans to Mars is completely doable with chemical rockets. Just a matter of investing enough money. If SpaceX is successful with further development of Starship they can very likely send people to Mars by 2040.

Why? I can understand the pessimism about bigger goals (like colonizing Mars), even I may not agree with it, but a man on the Moon? Even if one thinks the entire US Public system is dysfunctional, SpaceX is actively pursuing such a goal and advancing space tech at a rate faster than any time in our history, excepting perhaps that magical ~1959-1969 window.

And even if you have doubts about private industry, then there's China. They have all the motivation, capability, risk tolerance, funding, and more necessary. They have the stated goal of putting astronauts on the Moon by 2030, and there's no reason to think they won't succeed. They've been nailing their space goals in both terms of success and timeline. And if we look a bit more optimistically there are all sorts of third parties that would like to get back in the game, or newcomers looking to find their own place in it.

Well, neither are vertical landing re-usable rockets, a rocket twice the thrust of saturn V, or a mass market electric car.

With Raptor 3 Starship will pass _three_ times the thrust of Saturn V! It's absolutely nutty.

You're in for a wild surprise then. I almost envy that.

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