Elon Musk: Future Round-Trip To Mars Could Cost Under $500,000 238
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from the BBC:
"Rocket entrepreneur Elon Musk believes he can get the cost of a round trip to Mars down to about half a million dollars. The SpaceX CEO says he has finally worked out how to do it, and told the BBC he would reveal further details later this year or early in 2013. ... 'My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars — this is very important — so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there,' he said. 'The whole system [must be] reusable — nothing is thrown away. That's very important because then you're just down to the cost of the propellant.' ... He conceded the figure was unlikely to be the opening price — rather, the cost of a ticket on a mature system that had been operating for about a decade. Nonetheless, Musk thought such an offering could be introduced in 10 years at best, and 15 at worst."
Of course (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything seems plausible, if you don't know what you are doing.
Re:Unbelievable (Score:4, Insightful)
Aside from the little detail of also sending enough supplies to sustain them on the trip and once they get there, and on any presumed return flight, yes.
Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything seems plausible, if you don't know what you are doing.
I've known some project managers who work along that principle.
Re:Fuel? (Score:5, Insightful)
Elon Musk did say that he wanted to retire by living on Mars, and wants to make sure that he isn't alone there either. Given his age and what he has accomplished so far, he might just make it too.
It sure is a whole lot more sane than spending $30 billion dollars for a rocket that is half as powerful as the Saturn V and costs twice as much per pound as the Space Shuttle designed by the incredibly talented engineering firm known as the United States Senate. Which future do you really want to live in?
Re:Once space elevators are built on both planets, (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the shuttle shows us that government procured hardware is the most expensive imaginable. After all, when assembling components for the shuttle, the order of business seemed to be 1. Find congressional district where reusable components could be built 2. build them there 3. figure out how to get the stuff where it actually needed to be in the first place. 4. Jobs! I mean Re-election! Er.....Profit!
Musk is almost certainly talking out of his ass. I'll plunk down 500 grand to go to mars right after my Phantom game console shows up. That being said, of all the people trying to make space flight more of a private endevour that it has been in the past, Musk has his name on the very short list of people in the "put up" rather than "shut up" category. He's putting real shit into real orbit, not not dragging tourists up for glorified X-15 flights (no slight to the Virgin / Scaled composites gang, but they're not doing heavy lift at the moment, but what they're doing is Steerman bi-plane rides on a much more awesome scale.)
Re:one word (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does it cost billions in order to travel to Mars? Explain that one then I might agree with you. If you are only suggesting it costs billions because the only way government bureaucrats have been able to figure out how to expand their empires to include a manned Mars mission is to ask for a trillion dollars from congress, then that is one approach.
The issue really is one of simply getting into low-Earth orbit cheaply. Drop that cost and getting to Mars can be done quite a bit cheaper. I don't know about a half million per seat, but it certainly could be done for less than a billion dollars a seat much less mutliples of a billion dollars. If mankind is ever going to get to Mars and doing anything realistic there, it simply must be cheaper.
The proof of this concept is simply letting Elon Musk have the legal ability to be able to try to do this, and to do so with his own money. Either he can get it done or not, but if idiots like you go around rewriting laws in Congress so people like him simply can't even try, we will never know if it is even possible. Space exploration is stagnating and the costs are escalating faster than inflation precisely because some groundhogs don't think there is any cheaper or easier way to get into space.
Re:Once space elevators are built on both planets, (Score:4, Insightful)
People seem to be saying this because the Space Shuttle was fantastically expensive. The problem with that is that where were a lot of poor decisions that went into the shuttle (the ceramic heat shield, and the solid boosters) that we don't have to repeat in every new reusable launch system. Even in the '90s with Venture Star NASA was trying to move away from those technologies because they knew they were expensive and not beneficial.
There's nothing wrong with looking at your failures, seeing where they went wrong, learning from them, and trying again. The result is by no means a foregone conclusion. Can you imagine if the Wright Brothers had said "people have been trying to build airplanes for a hundred years and no one's succeeded so we may as well not even try." It's absurd to think we should give up on reusable space craft simply because the Space Shuttle didn't save money. Especially since the things that made it too expensive are so obvious and fixable.
Re:Deja vu? Shuttle? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Space Shuttle suffered not from extreme abuse upon reentry, but rather from going through the bureaucratic grinding mill known as the United States Congress and the fact that it was envisioned to be "The One True Launcher" that would be used for everything and thus had to do everything possible in space and was built like a swiss army knife. It had to fly polar orbits, have cross-range ability to avoid "enemy" interception, carry a huge payload, and do all sort of other things that ate into its budget to meet the needs of every federal agency (not just NASA)...and that wasn't all. The cost of the orbiter started to go up because there were many early costs that were deferred until later because the bean counters felt they could go for a cheaper solution during the design stage and the early development that would end up costing more when it finally got to flight status. So many compromises were made on the Space Shuttle that frankly it ought to be a textbook example for how not to design a spacecraft and what happens when you let non-engineers become involved in key engineering decisions.
Seriously, don't use the Space Shuttle as an excuse for why reusable spacecraft fail. A much better design was with the "Crew return vehicle" that was designed and even had some metal bent, but never made it into space due to shifting priorities on the part of the U.S. Congress. That should say something too, where there hasn't been a single spacecraft designed by the NASA manned spaceflight program which has made it from the drawing boards to making an actual flight into space for over 40 years (the last one was the Space Shuttle). It hasn't been for a lack of ideas or even billions of dollars spent toward building something else, it is just that every time something is tried *something* goes wrong and the design is scrapped for the next better thing. That happened so many times that America doesn't even have a spacecraft any more for astronauts to use.