The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon.
Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial.
Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
It's pretty trivial. Put mass in between you and space. It's already been researched to death and we have many years worth of data about the subject.
Seems like you quite confident. So go on. Expand on that a bit... its trivial after all.
You will teleport all that mass to ELO? Or use tracker beam to capture asteroid and space mine it to smelt shielding.
I am super curious how you solve it trivially.
edit: You downvote but dont explain this trivial solution. Am I asking too much? Calling someone out to explain something is offensive or something?
Folks on Mars is still quite a ways away. Not impossible or pointless by any means but it will require significant advancements in many domains before we can really do it safely.
As an aside, this is why the original Moon missions used simple aluminum. One of the typical angles people who don't think we landed on the Moon used is that to safely get through the Van Allen Belts we would have needed massive lead shielding on the craft, when in reality it was shielded by a pretty thin layer of aluminum, precisely to minimize secondary radiation. If you put that thick lead shielding on the craft that people intuitively think you'd need, it very well could have killed the astronauts.
And every ton you take increases fuel cost.
Currently you need what 10-20 trips to fuel for moon. How many trips would you need to fuel trip to mars? You would need a fucking conveyor belt of starship to prep the mission. Who is going to pay for it? And why?
Just because the materials for shielding/tools are simple it doesnt make the solution simple.
On the water topic, here's [2] a very readable little writeup on the mass inputs required for longterm space missions. Water makes up the overwhelming majority of your requirements. Starship, in its current form, can carry 150 tons. And that will be substantially increased once the tech is stabilized. A sizable chunk of that storage, for Mars missions, will be water. Also, the big threat is not the persistent ambient radiation, but infrequent extremely high energy bursts from solar weather.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget#Delta-vs_betwee...
[2] - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190027563/downloads/20...
Mars has essentially infinite CO2 and hydrogen. So this means we can produce essentially infinite methane and water. In fact you can carry out electrolysis on some of the produced hydrogen and feed it back into the system. This leaves you with a final excess product of methane, oxygen, and water. The Starship's engines, uncoincidentally, run on oxygen + methane. So we can locally produce basically limitless amounts of water, oxygen, and rocket fuel on Mars.
Of course this begs the question of what we do initially. And like all long distance colonization efforts, you're not sending just a single ship, but rather a small group. Those other ships are carrying additional critical supplies, including fuel. Upon landing those ships can also be used as shelters until something more permanent can be constructed. And the extra fuel provides a means of getting back to Earth if necessary while giving you a big window of time to start establishing basic local infrastructure including energy and methane production.
The permanent dwellings and really whole infrastructure would be underground. Lack of atmo and magnetic field basically forces you to dig down. Limited resources - rudimentary food and water. More less bunker life
On top of that 0% prospect of return. Essentially you are doomed to penal colony for the rest of your life.
I find it hard to believe anyone would want to sign up to that. And the people who would are absolutely people who should not be sent there.
And what happens if earth decides supporting mars outpost is pointless, you want alex jones types create conspiracies that colony is fake and its a tax payer scam? What would that do to minds of those stuck on mars?
And the Mars program is not being publicly funded in any way, shape, or fashion. If it was - we would have likely colonized Mars decades ago. Werner von Braun - the man responsible for the success of the Apollo program already had workably viable plans drawn up for Mars before we even set foot on the Moon. The government's decision to defacto cancel the space program is what led to his very premature retirement. But I do think rapidly aiming for the basics of self sustainability will be important nonetheless. Fortunately Mars is almost set up like a video game in that most of everything we need to survive is somewhat serendipitously present.
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As for what people want to do. It's funny, because I feel the exact opposite. I simply cannot understand people who have no desire to adventurize, explore, and see all that this universe has to offer in what little time we have on this Earth. It's probably why I'm an American yet find myself living half way around the world. And I would be the first to sign up for a mission to Mars as well. It'd certainly be a rather difficult life, but what more could be more desirable than spending the rest of your years laying the foundation for our children and our childrens' children, so that one day people coming to Mars would simply be just a holiday. And perhaps they then will then be the ones laying the foundation on Europa, or perhaps destinations that we can't even realistically imagine today.
It's certainly the same mindset people leaving the luxuries of the Old World had when setting out for the New World. The Old World was richly developed and full of culture, life, and civilization. Going to the New World entailed a voyage, as long as 4 months, and one which was quite frequently deadly. All to get to a completely undeveloped chunk of land full of oft unfriendly natives, new diseases, and all sorts of great ways to die in the middle of nowhere. And that's if you survived the voyage across to begin with, which many didn't. In many ways, we have it easier.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran#Radioactivity
Return from Moon Surface to Earth ∆V: 2.44+0.68+0.14+0.68+1.73 = 5.7 km/s
Earth to Mars Surface ∆V: 9.4+2.44+0.68+0.09+0.39+0.67+.034+0.40+0.70+3.8 = 18.6 km/s
Return from Mars Surface to Earth ∆V: 2.44+0.68+0.09+0.39+0.67+.034+0.40+0.70+3.8 = 9.2 km/s
Yes, it's more, but it's really not _that_ big of an engineering stretch.
Poor choice of words in this context :)
Simple idea, hard to execute.
> The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon.
From an energy perspective its not that much more complex.
And from a living perspective, yes it is an order of magnitude, but guess what, the ship is also an order of magnitude bigger. Meaning that for a small crew you have enough space for training rooms, labs, living quarters and medical facilities and so on.
> Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial.
That's mostly wrong. The cosmic radiation isn't much of a problem.
The only issue is the solar radiation. And solar radiation is very low most of the time. That can be measured and if its detected, the crew can go into a radiation shelter for a while.
But its not like if they are exposed to solar radiation for a few minutes, they will grow cancers instantly.
> Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
No. the plan is to send robotic ships first to deploy infrastructure. The atmosphere has useful stuff in it. And then you need to get water from the ice. With water and the atmosphere you can make rocket fuel and other useful materials, such as drinking water, plastics and so on.
Of course that requires development of methods to gather water and of course development of chemical or biological reactors to transform the material. We are pretty sure we can build that stuff technically speaking.
The other big issue is energy to run these processes. We either need a shit ton of solar or a deploy-able nuclear reactors.
Then you wait until the earth comes back around and fly back. And hopefully other people are arriving again. So you can continuously have an occupied base that you are building up over time.
The whole point of what SpaceX is trying to build is a railroad to Mars. The opposite of flags and footprints.
> From an energy perspective its not that much more complex.
As in what exactly? Its not much more complex because you have to 'burn to moon' and 'burn to mars' which is pretty much the same because you need energy to do both??
Here, have a look at required deltaV. https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of...
how is this 'From an energy perspective its not that much more complex.'?
>And from a living perspective, yes it is an order of magnitude, but guess what, the ship is also an order of magnitude bigger. Meaning that for a small crew you have enough space for training rooms, labs, living quarters and medical facilities and so on.
What ship?!? Labs, medical facilities wtf r u smoking.
https://www.humanmars.net/2021/01/cutaway-schematic-of-space...
here is spaceX graphics? Are you talking about facilities for an ant farm?
And why dont you mention how many fueling launches you need to go to the moon in an essentially 'space liferaft' vs an actual spaceship needed to get to mars?? hm?
> No. the plan is to send robotic ships first to deploy infrastructure. The atmosphere has useful stuff in it. And then you need to get water from the ice. With water and the atmosphere you can make rocket fuel and other useful materials, such as drinking water, plastics and so on.
How? Just how is that infrastructure going to get there deploy itself and... it boggles my mind how you handwave the solutions to colonising a fucking planet.
Sure mate, you played minecraft and all you need is a crafting table on mars and whabang infrastructure poof icewater mining and puryfing faclities "shazam* and your farm is ready! So easy, who thought.
> The whole point of what SpaceX is trying to build is a railroad to Mars. The opposite of flags and footprints.
Who is going to pay for all of it, and why would you do it in a first place? Cuz you are not setting up a colony, you are setting up the most expensive treehouse.
According to that chart:
Moon landing ∆V: 9.4+2.44+0.68+0.14+0.68+1.73 = 15.1 km/s
Mars landing ∆V: 9.4+2.44+0.68+0.09+0.39+0.67+.034+0.40+0.70+3.8 = 18.6 km/s
So in actual reality with Starships design they are quite close.
I guess ChatGPT is pretty good.
Just because you listened to podcast doesn't mean you know what you are talking about. Cuz your arguments are clearly all hype a surface knowledge.
The biggest chunk of deltaV there is the LEO
Removing it makes trip to mars 160% more expensive. And "Areobreaking" is already counted in the trip to mars.
You also conveniently forget about the fact that mars spaceship will be much heavier. And while deltaV doesn't change the amount of fuel to achieve it does. Significantly.
Not to mention the 8.5 months transfer will have damaging effect on the body. We already did a study on impact of prolonged space stay. Whats the impact on humans living in 3.7m/s2 ?? How would fetus develop in such environment.
But lets sweep this under the rag, it will be solved soon (tm)
Its very convenient to overlook actual small details that dont fit a narrative. But in space Yes-man run out of air really quickly.
I am done with this thread as you are just stubborn kid parroting same old bs hype people produce to justify their existence.
Factually speaking my argument is correct by how most humans view this answer. But you have to poke holes in it because you knew it was correct. Its fucking ridiculous to say 'excluding LEO' then its incorrect. That might be relevant if we started from LEO but we don't. Self owned.
Lets remember what you said:
> The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon.
So my response correcting that is simply appropriate and correct, its certainty not 'multitude' orders of magnitude more complex. Specifically when talking about a one way trip.
Its easy to see how people who haven't study the subject wouldn't think how small the difference is energy wise is reading your statement. And the longer habitation is well within what we have been able to do for decades. So neither qualifies with 'orders of magnitude'. And that includes the Starship would be heavier argument.
So the simply reality is your statement was flat out wrong.
Then your other statement about radiation was fucking ridiculously wrong but you somehow refuse to acknowledge that.
Since you have no fucking leg to stand on regarding nuclear, you decided to move the goal post and find a new topic.
The actual studies you quote go against your argument, significant space time can be massively mitigated by training. As the Russian astronaut who is the world leading expert on the topic has demonstrated. One of the problem on ISS is that astronauts on ISS are incredibly busy and can't do that as much training as a Mars crew would have time for. For a Mars mission, where they don't get new instruments and experiments sent all the time, physical preparation for Mars, would be one of their primary activities.
We can't know for certain, but from everything we know, training at 3.7m/s2 should be more then sufficient with dedicated training. I always believed NASA should have invest in a rotation station so these effects can be studied better. But in the absence of that, we have to draw conclusion from micrografity research and that seems to indicate it will be fine.
> How would fetus develop in such environment.
Wow, just picking up the goal post and running down field. If we are at the point where we have to seriously think about this point I have already won the argument anyway.
> Its very convenient to overlook actual small details that dont fit a narrative.
I'm simply addressing your points, not laying out a comprehensive plan. I am refuting your points, not making points of my own. So claiming I'm ignoring points you haven't even brought up is dumb.
Are you seriously acting like those points you brought up somehow aren't thought about by SpaceX, NASA and co?
> I am done with this thread as you are just stubborn kid parroting same old bs hype people produce to justify their existence.
Funny how how the people at SpaceX, NASA, ESA and friends, who want to make this happen are 'bs hype people'. How NASA papers and simply math on the subject is 'bs hype'. Sorry for repeating that nonsense.
I didn't know you personally are an old veteran who did all the research on the objections yourself, right? You made your own orbital dynamics calculation. You calculated the mass difference and have clear assumption about the weight of different Starship version. You have detailed calculation on aerobraking efficiency of different vehicle and how that effects delta/V. You have personally looked at the data from decades of human health studies in microg.
Sorry I just didn't know that you were such a genius who hovers above us 'kids'. I humbly apologize and bow to you enlightened wisdom.
> What ship?!? Labs, medical facilities wtf r u smoking.
The Starship. SpaceX is currently building an interior for the Moon Lander together with NASA that will have those things.
For a small crew its totally possible to have this. Not sure what to tell you.
> And why dont you mention how many fueling launches you need to go to the moon in an essentially 'space liferaft' vs an actual spaceship needed to get to mars?? hm?
I don't even know what the fuck you are trying to say ...
Yes, it needs to be refuelled a number of time. So what?? hm?
Falcon 9 is literally launching every 5 days right now and it wasn't even designed with rapid reuse in mind.
> How? Just how is that infrastructure going to get there deploy itself and... it boggles my mind how you handwave the solutions to colonising a fucking planet.
I don't know why haters like you are so hung up with colonising. Colonising starts small. The solutions in the beginning wont be the solutions 50-100 years later. So criticising the current architecture with 'it can't do colonisation' is fucking stupid. Thanks captain obvious.
In the beginning its about establishing a research base that can be continously inhabited. If that can be achieved its fucking fantastic. And from there it grows or it doesn't.
And in terms of how. There are these things called wheels....
There are plenty of designs around for different aspects of the architecture. You haven't addressed any of them.
> Sure mate, you played minecraft and all you need is a crafting table on mars and whabang infrastructure poof icewater mining and puryfing faclities "shazam* and your farm is ready! So easy, who thought.
Those things would be built on earth. So your comment doesn't even fucking make sense.
Its not easy to do these things but you have not made any actual argument that its not possible or harder then other parts. Building the Raptor engine is hard, a lot harder then a device that takes oxygen out of the atmosphere. Building a device to collect water is hard, but a hell of a lot easier then building Starship.
You argument is basically just asserting things you don't know much about and then making childish insults.
Its funny how there are 10000s of really smart scientist and engineers that are working on different aspects of these problems and they all believe they can be overcome. But I am sure you are just so much smarter and more enlightened then all those people. Go stand in front off a mirror and pat yourself on the back buddy.
> Who is going to pay for all of it, and why would you do it in a first place? Cuz you are not setting up a colony, you are setting up the most expensive treehouse.
That's fantastic. I didn't know you were that optimistic. A continuously inhabited house on Mars would be absolutely fucking amazing. One might even say its a colony. Because, guess what, that's how colonies started.
Glad I could convince you.
I mean, I ask you a question and you straight up talk about something else... what else is there to say... you are like a politician on tv. Talks, talks, talks but doesn't say anything.
Its pointless arguing with parrot.
But I'm reading marketing. What you saying isn't even pamphlets or propaganda. Its just flat out fucking stupid.
It is until it suddenly isn't. Just because it's very far out still and any timelines mentioned are wrong, doesn't make it 'pure BS'. It very much has been the goal of SpaceX from the day it was founded to encourage human travel to Mars, and we're getting closer every day.
Pretty much, why do you think columbus set off? And he didn't even know if he'd actually find anything.
I don't understand your attitude and people like you, human beings have been explorers forever, and seem to value exploring even over survival potentially. I'd say it's pretty obviously evolutionarily coded into us. Maybe not you, but into many people.
In general, human-based space exploration makes 0 sense. We have robots that can do everything a human in a life-support suit can, and don't need to carry 100 times their mass just to not day on the way there and back. Doing a few experiments with humans in space, like we do on the ISS, is indeed worth it for exploring the unknown unknowns of biology. Maybe some day, far in the future after we have explored Mars with many hundreds of robots, it will even make sense to send a human there. But until then, it's just a waste of everything.
We’ve been mars-capable since Apollo. It’s a matter of will, which is a political function of cost, which is falling rapidly.
serious citation needed!
you cant make shit up. Apollo and saturn5 were nowhere near getting humans to mars. Not even close.
It got us to moon with bare minimum. A weekend trip vs 6 months trip.
The scale up of needed resources is mind boggling. At every step. I mean pick any step and explain how Apollo could achieve it.
The gist of it is that the Saturn V has enough delta v to get to Mars, on the count of Mars having an atmosphere, which can be used for aerobraking.
Given the capability of reaching Mars with a Saturn V, the rest of the plan revolved around using Apollo hardware, with some modification, for both transport and habitats(re-use of empty stages featured prominently).
Ultimately even if we had hit some roadblock with martian soil or what have you, in an alternate timeline we could have at least sent uncrewed test flights to Mars and back.
You have roughly 40t at best for a craft that needs to land there.
quick google. astronauts need around 1.7kg of food per day, x3 crew, x(8x30) days is:
thats 1200 kg of food - one way - just to get there food.
And then you are doing to do what exactly?
> the rest of the plan revolved around using Apollo hardware, with some modification, for both transport and habitats(re-use of empty stages featured prominently).
This is basically handwaving problems away, massive problems.
The best I can agree is that a crewed fly-by could have been possible. But landing on mars would mean death sooner or later.
It's over 400 pages and contains some of the details you seem to be curious about.
What now? Will Elon stop? If Elon doesn’t stop, does that make you right?
Of course, building a "city" on Mars is well beyond our capabilities, so that will either not be attempted at all, or it will fail. Maybe by 2124, but more likely 2524.
"No point" here means "no reasonable goal". In this case reasonability is subjective - somebody sees obvious reasons why Mars colony could be useful for humanity, somebody doesn't. Pro arguments are science, learning how to live off another planet, certain insurance against planet-wide cataclysms, general progress in space engineering. There are contra arguments as well, but which are more important is also subjective - we don't have hard data or commonly accepted facts which would solve this arguments one way or another, so, to some, it's natural to investigate the matter further...
Elon's job is to massively accelerate that timeline.
Cuz probability of both are closer to each other that to probability of them being achievable.
Getting to mars would require a technological leap. Planes -> rockets kind of leap.
Currently we have yet to be able to get back to the moon.
Creating self sustained colony on earth would require some kind of technological miracle.
And it will not be enough to use few nukes to malt ice caps on mars.
And no, it's not a good plan against a nuclear war, Mars is far far far less hospitable than the Earth would be if we launched all of the nuclear weapons we have today. It's far more radioactive, dusty, cold, toxic, and everything.
Nobody is permitted to build permanent habitats in either of those areas, even though they might be feasible.
hahahah
Columbus set of because he wanted money, wealth for the crown. not because he was explorer.
Columbus, Vasco Da Gama, Cortez et al were not dreamers but entrepreneurs.
>> Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
Nobody (within reasonable definition of nobody) wants to go to Everest to die on top. Nobody wants to dive to Marianas trench to get crush to death.
Who would go to Mars without a way back?
For a reasonable chance of being forever immortalized as one of the first humans to step foot on another planet?
Granted, I myself will never get the opportunity so it’s easy for me to say “oh hell yes I’d sign up in a heartbeat”.
And that's before you start to think about a launch pad for the return mission. So you'd probably need to have launch a series of robots and factories to build this in advance. Maybe, but we haven't even come close to robots building something of that magnitude on Earth, let alone a planet that's quite different.
So, never say never, but it's a _long_ while off yet; long enough that social upheaval due to climate change will probably put a pause on any efforts for quite some time.
However, a steady dose of relativistic heavy nuclei is entirely different matter. Gun wound vs bulldozed over. Cells have mechanisms for repairing local damage, even in the cell nucleus. However, a fact heavy nucleus wrecks so much that the repair mechanisms have no chance - a cell that got hit simply dies (or, at least, is never going to be able to divide again). The damage is cumulative, does not get repaired.
In game parlance: Gammas reduces your HP (that can come back over time, if the hits do not occur too fast). Fast heavy nucleus reduces your max UP. You are doomed, given enough time.