Huge Mars Colony Eyed by SpaceX Founder Elon Musk

When I've heard Elon talk about this before, his idea is that people interested in moving to Mars would actually sell their house and Earthly possessions in order to pay for the ride. They won't be needing all that junk anymore anyway. Once you're prepared to sell all of your assets, then having a net worth of $500k is essentially the same as being able to afford $500k.

Well there actually are ways of making money on Mars, even though they rely on the wealth of the Earth until Mars actually has an economy. Mainly advertising. I can imagine a human on Mars having a "blog" that would be fairly captivating to a lot of humans. Those humans could see advertising and the price would probably fall around American Super Bowl levels. Think about it, having 1/2 Billion humans checking up on one person on mars is actually pretty reasonable. Those same eyeballs can hear a message and that message can be sold to the highest bidder, making the whole venture a success. Similar to how past adventurers would sell their stories upon return to cities.

That's just one possible job. Never mind the actual work that needs to be done by humans on Mars. Those people would be paid by humans on Earth. Just like astronauts of today. If I was a rich man I would certainly pay a human on Mars to explore.

He's only expecting 1 in 100,000 to make the trip.

He never said that most fortysomethings had $500k lying around. He said most fortysomethings in developed economies -could- pull the money together (to me, that implies if they really put their mind to it). He's only assuming that 1 in 100,000 -will- do it. Sure we could quibble about just exactly how hard for a given person to pull the money together, but I don't think there's a lot of argument that 1 in 100,000 would be able to do it.

I think he's envisioning this as a one-way trip: $500k for a house in California OR settle down on Mars. In that case, it's actually an affordable price tag. Even if EM realizes his reusable rockets, I imagine the primary purpose would be for transporting supplies, etc. rather than frequently shuttling people Earth <---> Mars.

Just think of immigrants from the early 1900's who uprooted their entire families and got on a boat to America. That was a one-way journey in most cases until international travel became more affordable and more commonplace. Interplanetary travel, when it happens, will likely take the same pattern.

He addressed that in a recent interview.

The Moon has far less water than Mars. No CO2. And it has a 28 day rotation cycle, which makes growing plants much more difficult. Mars has water, plentiful CO2, and a day that's only about 40 minutes longer than Earth's. This makes growing plants on Mars much, much easier.

Rather than a base moon or mars or any planet, why not a space colony with pluggable units using a standard plug-in architecture to exchange energy, supplies etc. (Similar to an API). There is no main unit, similar to a P2P structure, and units can be stacked together to make huge colonies. Each cluster of units may move in an upfront known trajectory in the habitable zone of the Sun. The whole idea is that space startups may create newer units based on new ideas; and that way we may explore the space quicker.

Very likely, it will be an underground world first. That will shield most of the radiation there.

I think your numbers are significantly off. A flight from NYC to London gives the passengers roughly a chest x-ray worth of exposure, meaning the pilots get 100-200 a year worth.

Settlements would likely involve radiation shielding - buildings underground, teleoperation, etc.

Radiation dangers on Mars missions are often exaggerated.

In Mars orbit, we have data that indicates approx. 22 milirads a day. It should be a fair bit less on the surface. That gives the colonists about 3 years of unshielded radiation exposure till they hit the radiation max that NASA recommends (remember, they should be shielded somewhat though)

There is also a decent amount of recent evidence that chronic radiation exposure in this quantity is no where as near as dangerous as a concentrated burst.

We already know that we can make bricks out of Martian soil. Build arched and domed buildings out of those and bury them with lots of Martian soil. This gives you radiation-proof buildings that can also be pressurized. Combine this with local teleoperation, you can stretch the 2-3 year long habitation span to a 15 to 20 year working span, followed by retirement to indoor underground habitations.

We don't need to solve the gravitation issue. People are spending long term time in the ISS and with proper training it's not bad.

My impression is that while emulating gravity with a rotating reference frame is certainly possible, the things holding that approach back are engineering realities. In order to minimize the "gravity" gradient felt over the length of a human standing up, the radius of your spacecraft needs to be quite large.

If you are lifting that sort of mass already, your time is probably better spent lifting several tons or water that would be used to fill a double hull, providing protection from radiation. Then you can give your crew a few rubber bands and count on some minimal muscle loss. (We have kept people in space and reasonably healthy for the several months getting to Mars would take, but that is in LEO where radiation is much less of an issue).

A trip to Mars at modern speeds is about 7-8 months, but this is quite variable. You could get there in about 2 months if you went really fast, but no such propulsion system currently exists to my knowledge. However, we are talking about propulsion systems as they will exist in 15-20 years, so perhaps something like 4-6 months is a reasonable estimate of trip duration.

Edit: There's that famous "40 days to Mars" study from a while ago about theoretical new rockets: http://www.space.com/8009-rocket-engine-reach-mars-40-days.h...

How does one study the effect of non-standard gravities on early development? What effects did you discover?

If that we're a wish, it would be in adequately specified. For example, it includes being tossed broken from the wreckage in a torn spacesuit and dying while your dissolved gasses boil your blood.