Comment by inaros | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inaros | Hacker News Reader

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We are not in a meeting at SpaceX trying to please Elon. I dont think you realize what you are up against...Do you know what radiation does to humans?

For example Suni Williams went to the ISS and got stuck for 9 months. Come back white haired, with bone loss, muscle wasting, and vision damage. She retired from NASA within months. And the ISS is inside Earth magnetosphere...

FYI Mars has no magnetic field and almost no atmosphere. The Curiosity radiation detector measured the following:

Mars surface: 0.67 mSv/day (that is about 70x Earth surface)

In Deep space transit: 1.8 mSv/day

for example the ISS in low Earth orbit: 0.5–1.0 mSv/day

Even with VERY optimistic 3 month transits you are looking at a total for an astronaut of about 700 mSv if you have 450 to 500 day surface stay . That is well over NASA entire career radiation limit for astronauts in a single trip. A major solar particle event could add hundreds more in hours...

And if you say they would live underground, then you have sent humans 225 million km to live in a bunker...Every EVA would accumulate 0.67 mSv/day with zero medical infrastructure...And by the way aluminum shielding on the Martian surface actually increases dose due to secondary neutron production, you need meters of regolith or water to make a real difference. Meanwhile, Curiosity has radiation hardened hardware, and after 13 years is still going.

Send lots of robots...

SpaceX already shifted to focus on a Moon base and away from Mars.

The original plan was to send a few self-financed Starships to Mars as a first step which sounded reasonable as an experiment.

Nothing wrong with dreaming about solving hard problems like radiation and how to manage logistics at such a distance. Even if a human base ends up not making sense most of that stuff would still support a robotic base doing most of the exploration, with some temporary human visitors helping set things up.

>> SpaceX already shifted to focus on a Moon base and away from Mars.

Oh boy….beyond Falcon 9 that is just a great but conventional rocket...SpaceX so called revolutionary Starship program is nothing more than a parade of explosions. Just in 2025 they had three upper stages exploding mid flight, one blew up on the launchpad during a static fire test in June, and a V3 booster crumpled during pressure testing in November. After 11 test flights... Starship has never once delivered a single gram of payload to orbit….Not one….Think about that for a minute.

Now NASA made Starship the sole critical path for returning the US to the Moon. The Artemis III lunar landing requires Starship HLS to work, which requires orbital refueling…

Something that has never been done with cryogenic propellants by anyone, ever... and requires roughly 12 to 14 tanker flights to fill a depot before each Moon mission. NASA own safety panel visited Starbase in 2025 and concluded Starship HLS could be years late.

The propellant transfer demo, originally scheduled for March 2025, has been delayed over a year. The critical design review keeps slipping. As a result, NASA just downgraded Artemis III from a Moon landing to a low Earth orbit docking test, pushing the actual landing to Artemis IV in 2028, and nobody seriously believes that date either...

And who is overseeing all this? Jared Isaacman that is Musk personal astronaut buddy, who flew twice on SpaceX missions, whose company Shift4 processes Starlink payments, whose deal with SpaceX exceeds $50 million... and who was literally recommended to Trump by Musk. Isaacman even publicly criticized NASA for giving Blue Origin a backup lander contract! meaning he wanted SpaceX to be the ONLY option...

As for the Moon pivot... what actually happened? In January 2025, Musk said: “No, we're going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.” ….Twelve months later, after a year of Starship explosions and with an IPO approaching, suddenly it's “Moon first.” ...This is damage control. Any competent NASA plan would never have put a single unproven company, with a rocket that cannot reach orbit, on the sole critical path for a return to the Moon.

More of this. Blathering on about Starship development phase, with its completely expected and normal failures. All concerned because there's "something that hasn't been done before" involved.

Falcon 9 did lots of things "never done before", but.. well, that's OK because with hindsight it's all sensible.

What I'm seeing here is, and now it appears to me in the prior post possibly, is that someone you don't like(Musk) is resulting in this negativity.

It is entirely possible to dislike someone's history, or personality, or politics, whilst at the same time not denigrating their successes. Or attempting to derail their technical work.

NASA has been losing delivery dates forever. Other private sector suppliers have as well. Making a big deal out of this specific instance, seems strange.

No, I'm not endorsing the current administration. But neither am I the prior. After all, everything was late with the prior admin too.

Sometimes? It's not about politics.

You might enjoy A City On Mars by the Wienersmiths. There's a lot to consider that you are glossing over.

We are not in a meeting at SpaceX trying to please Elon

What are you even talking about? I assure you, before Elon was known to anyone but his mother, Mars has been a dream for countless humans. I find it... repugnant, to have my dream presumed to be someone else's.

If we took the attitude you're taking here, we'd never leave home. Explore. Expand our sciences, our capabilities, our experience.

I find it astonishing that so many in the compute field, find technical issues, then immediately proclaim impossibility predicated upon the weird concept that there is no improvements or advancements possible.

This and other issues, are technical issues to be solved, not just to go to Mars, but to go to the rest of the solar system, to go to other solar systems. And yes, humans should do this. Yes, we should do this.

You may say "how?", with perhaps a smug look on your face, as if my specific knowledge predicates a conclusion on the solution. Nonsense. This is the part of 'economic activity' and 'scientific advancement' I spoke about. Every aspect of space flight has been accompanied with vast improvements in our knowledge to achieve the task at hand. This will be no different, we will solve it, whether by materials science, or generation of a magnetic field, or whatever is required. We'll find a solve, we'll do it, and that's that.

Again, rebuttles of "well describe precisely how" or "that makes no sense, magnetic field?!" are senseless here. You may as well go to 1634, and sound proud and decry how it is impossible to breath in space, how can someone possibly live without air! Of course our materials science improved, we can make viable space suits, our capacity to store compressed gases, filter CO2, and on and on all improved. And now, it seems as child's play.

So such grabbing at the impossible is absurd to me.

Instead, try grasping at the possible.

And know that humans, a great number of them want to make the journey. And yes, we should not stand in their way. Good grief, more humans die from car crashes a day in any major US city, than have every died in space.

More humans die being tangled in bedsheets, in a week, than have ever died in space.

Driving a car is a necessity for some, but to throw concern up about the death of humans, who are literally expanding our species capabilities and scientific knowledge, is extremely short sighted.

I urge you, recant this belief. These ways.

Join us on this side of the line. The side that sees challenges as opportunities, not as liabilities.

>> I find it astonishing that so many in the compute field, find technical issues, then immediately proclaim impossibility predicated upon the weird concept that there is no improvements or advancements possible.

Just because we had a man on the Moon, does not mean we can have a man on the Sun...

Did you even looked at the radiation argument or the soil composition?

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