What I mean by that is that we have it down well enough that the tech exceeds tolerances and can degrade gracefully.
You see this in some sci-fi where there are rust bucket old ships that work.
The sheer hostility of space kind of precludes the "she's a good ol' ship" trope. When your door doesn't shut on your pickup, you can bang on it a bit. When your door doesn't shut on your spacecraft, you've got a ship full of corpses that look like a blob fish brought up from the Marianas Trench.
The real problem are the storms, as a naked human you won't survive in an ocean storm any longer than in vacuum.
At least you are going to space in a sophisticated vessel full of redundant life support systems. People sailed the high seas in old, barely seaworthy wooden ships dangerously overloaded with cargo, which didn't even have a reliable way of determining where precisely they were, because no one could tell longitude at sea before the mid-1700s or so.
Until today, some jobs at sea are pretty dangerous. Being a fisherman in Alaskan waters is much more risky than being an (American, not Russian) soldier.
People still do it. Which convinces me that people will risk their lives going to Mars, and more than a few of them. Some people are just built that way.
Generations of explorers, many of whom lost their lives for no gain, indicate otherwise.
Let us make a thought experiment. Let's say that Musk, tomorrow, declares "we are now creating a list of future Mars colonists, reasonably healthy individuals under 70 can apply from anywhere in the world, please send us your resumes".
Would they get fewer than 10 million applicants? I'd rather guess 50 million or so. Of course, some of those are going to get cold feet the moment they receive their one-way flight ticket in mail, but quite a few won't.
By your hypothesis, there would be approximately zero applicants. I don't believe that.
Sure they do. There’s a queue at the top of Mount Everest despite regular deaths; a couple rich folk got squished to pulp in the Titanic submarine last year. The free solo guy climbs Yosemite for the fun of it.
Plenty of people still have that itch.
Now it’s a race every few years - Vendee Globe. Something like half do not finish.
Still remember that at one time moving faster than 15mph was considered insane and pushed the limits of materials and vehicle design. Same for high altitude flight, McMurdo station, deep ocean diving, etc.
In a lot of ways very deep ocean diving is harder than space. The pressure differentials are a lot worse.
The hard part about space is really launch and delta-V budgets.
The ISS leaks air on a daily basis.
A true space age will involve many ships that never enter atmosphere or land.
A scramjet power first stage for example could overcome the tyranny of the rocket equation (at least on earth).
The issue is orbital velocity is an absolutely bonkers high velocity. Nothing can even come close to that velocity in the atmosphere. The SR-71, fastest air-breathing aircraft ever flow topped out at around 1/9th of orbital velocity. Yes scramjets could certainly beat that speed, once they are developed but even if that doubles the speed of a SR-71 (which already was pushing the limits of heating) then you are still only doing 1/4th of the speed you need for orbit.
So you have a bit of a catch-22 situation - You can have plenty of oxygen for your engines all around you, or you can have the speed you need for orbit - But not both at the same time. Yes, a scramjet can reduce the amount of oxidizer required (by a lot) but to do this you need the extra weight of wings and everything else you need for proper aerodynamic flight.
Some of the newer missiles like the BrahMos are designed like this and have a ramjet powered second stage to save on oxidizer. It doesn't reach anywhere near orbital speed, but with this design, the shock cone takes the majority of the heating vs. the SR-71 where there were many exposed parts and materials.
Or even better - keep the current setup but have a ring of air breathing engines in the booster that work as long as they can.
There's a lot of stuff some extra engineering can do, given enough time and resources. For now, SpaceX is going for the biggest bang for the buck, and they have a very healthy aversion of complicated solutions. But in time, adding a few air breathing engines may become simple enough to be worth it.
At an abstract level, it's the same issue as with aerospikes, the idea has too many caveats, too much expense and not enough benefit to justify the relatively small improvements in efficiency.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6256/why-were-jet-...
The summary is that there isn't enough oxygen at the range of altitudes needed.
If there's cabin decompression on a plane, you get an oxygen mask and land safely in the nearest airport. If there's cabin decompression on a spacecraft, you're dead. If there's a problem with engines on a plane, you can still glide and land somewhere. If there's a problem with engines on a rocket, guess what, you're dead.
There are rust buckets flying out there without any issue. There's a guy on tiktok that bought a literal $200 plane and is documenting his work on it - and he started test flying it almost immediately.
I don't have enough experience in the field to tell myself if aviation tech is mature enough to be considered "rusty truck level", but we definitely have the data to know it.
Yes it's different from a car's requirements, no the concept is not different, rusty pickup just means different things.
And Star Trek doesn't have "good old rust-bucket" ships in it, but the whole premise of it is that they found a way to move faster than the speed of light.
Here are a few likely use cases: * in-space science * in-space R&D * in-space industry * mining small rocks (asteroids) in space * space-based power * military applications
Long-term, we may see terraforming planets and minor planets.