Elon Musk Probably Won't Be the First Martian 169
pacopico writes: In a new biography on him, Elon Musk goes into gory details on his plans for colonizing Mars. The author of the book subsequently decided to run those plans by Andy Weir, the author of The Martian. Weir's book is famous for its technical acumen around getting to and from The Red Planet. His conclusion is that Musk's technology, which includes the biggest rocket ever built, is feasible — but that Musk will not be the first man on Mars. The interview also hits on the future of NASA and what we need to get to Mars. Good stuff. Weir says, "My estimate is that this will happen in 2050. NASA is saying more like 2035, but I don't have faith in Congress to fund them."
Neither could anyone else on Earth (Score:2)
>> Elon Musk Probably Won't Be the First Martian
Neither could anyone else on Earth if there once was (or still is) life on Mars.
Of course not (Score:5, Insightful)
Ray Walston
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Well he gets my vote, he is My Faviorite Martian.
Little does we know... (Score:5, Funny)
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Is his real name Valentine Michael Smith?
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Is his real name Valentine Michael Smith?
I grok that.
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Thou art god, I am god. All that groks is god.
-- RAH
Re:Little does we know... (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you kidding? I can't help but picture the MST3K characters ribbing it the whole time.
The main character is a "scientist" who doesn't use a single scientific term, instead using 50s pop-sci-fi style terms like "Oxygenator". I mean, here we have a botanist on Mars who doesn't even know the word "regolith" or understand why you'd have solar panels tilted at a particular angle. But don't worry, the book is full of such award-winning prose as phrases like "My asshole is doing as much to keep me alive as my brain". Seriously, it reads like a 13 year old boy.
But that's minor compared to how on pretty much every page we have Weir demonstrating his complete lack of knowledge of even the most basic aspects of every field of science he covers. Here, let's just pull up a random one:
High school chemistry, anyone? (Morbo Voice) Stoichiometry Does Not Work That Way! Weir again and again mixes up volume, mass, and moles. (For anyone not seeing it yet: hydrazine is 1,021g/cm^3, hydrogen makes up 12,5% of the mass, or 0,128 g/cm^3; water under STP conditions is 1 g/cm^3 and hydrogen makes up 11% of its mass, or 0,11 g/cm^3. 1 liter of hydrazine gives you 1,16 liters of water under STP conditions, not 2).
Here, let's grab another one of these from just a couple pages earlier:
Brilliant - not only do we have him once again confusing volume and moles, but we also have "liquid CO2", meaning that for some reason on a planet where a mere shiny bucket will hold frozen CO2 indefinitely, they've decided for no apparent reason to store it as a superfluid in heavy pressurized tanks at dozens to hundreds of atmospheres and elevated temperatures.
Oh, here's a great one: at one point he starts a diary entry by noting that he's now hiding out in a rover because he screwed up and didn't notice that his hydrogen levels in his habitat were climbing and his oxygen levels were dropping over the course of many days until he checked a meter. How much? The hydrogen went up to 64% and the oxygen levels to 9%. Really, the high squeaky voice didn't clue you in? The anoxic unconsciousness didn't clue you in? *Facepalm* Did this guy not get *anyone* to proofread?
The most mind-bogglingly glaringly bad stuff is of course the plants. As we all know, the sun is an incredibly energetic source. Look at the light in your living room for a few seconds. Notice how you're not blind. Now try it with the sun. Yeah, there's a bit of a difference. WIth the sun high overhead on a clear day the ground on Earth receives about 1000 W/m^2 of light energy. Now picture the brightest CFL you can find on the market - maybe one of those giant 40-watters? To match the light output of the noon sun would take 150 to 200 of them per square meter. Even taking into account angles, night, clouds, etc, it's a ton of energy. To grow the couple hundred meters of potatoes to feed a person? Well, you do the math.
So how does our hero plan to grow his plants? Here's Wier's entire justification
That's it. That's his entire justification on how he plans to provide enough light for his potatoes - normal interior lighting powered by a little solar farm on a dusty planet that receives half the light of Earth. Not even normal yields of potatoes, but super yields of potatoes! In regolith that he does nothing to remove the perchlorates or salts from (never min
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The main character is a "scientist" who doesn't use a single scientific term, instead using 50s pop-sci-fi style terms like "Oxygenator".
<snip>
Uuuh. That was a great rant about a book I never want to read. But the GGP was referring to Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Not... whatever that was.
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Nothing wrong with a piece of fiction with laughably bad science on almost every page. If someone gets a kick out of the book, then it's met its purpose. But when the author gets treated as a "Mars expert" due to his his "hard sci fi" novel, that's where I start having a problem.
Musk is a busy man. (Score:4, Insightful)
Just like how the sitting president never traveled far from US borders (Until safe aircraft and a Radio communication infrastructure). A CEO of a large global corporation, really doesn't have the time to leave on an extended multi-year adventure.
A 20 minute data Lag for a modern CEO could cause major business issues.
Also the fact when it is ready Musk will be an old man, not really fit for such an adventure.
Sadly I will be too old to travel to mars in my lifetime. Who has nearly less responsibility as Musk.
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Elon has said many times that he won't go to Mars until SpaceX is running regular flights to the red planet. He says the same thing about taking SpaceX public.
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If the CEO needs to make real time minute by minute decisions he's not doing his job.
So what if he's old ? What's the risk, that he'll die ? Life is ultimately a one way trip and at that point in his life he doesn't have that many trips left, might as well make it a big one.
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He cannot do his job with a 40+ minute lag time in communication, assuming he can get the bandwidth he needs.
Age is an issue. This isn't going to be a vacation cruise. You will need to work while the ship is getting there. If you are too old to be effective, he will only be in the way, and what do you do with the body if he did die.
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and what do you do with the body if he did die.
Tie a rope to it and tie it off to the ship? Give him a viking space funeral? Attach a rocket to his ass and shoot him towards Pluto?
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what do you do with the body if he did die
Soylent Green. Fertilizer. What else would you have us do with it? Current burial practices in Western society are ridiculous.
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A multibillion dollar corporation that requires the CEO on call every minute of every day is filled with complete incompetents on every level. I can't even imagine a decision that requires the CEO to be available 24/7 - if nothing else, running the decision past the legal department gives enough padding that the CEO will have hours, if not days to make any decision....
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Well that explains why a lot of Stupid decisions made from major corporations.
There is an attempt of trying to try to get duel CEO for companies so they are not oncall all the time.
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He's said he wants to retire to Mars, not to work there. Low gravity and a more controlled environment where it's quite possible nobody will have the flu could be good for the elderly.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:oh such a disconnect (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to help, if your dream is space and not some aggrandized ego stroke, then you fund nasa and make mars a reality for everyone.
I got curious so I looked. I know fact checking isn't cool, but really, you couldn't be bothered? Elon Musk's net worth is about $14 billion give or take. NASA's budget for just this year is $17 billion. Mind explaining how he's going to "fund nasa" as you put it when his entire net worth won't fully fund one year?
The problem is that the public doesn't want money spent on NASA "until we fix our problems here". That day will never, ever come. There will always be "problems here". To give you an example, a guy I know at work who likes SciFi and is pretty smart doesn't want to see NASA get even the $17 billion they get now per year because he thinks the money needs to be spent here on those problems that need to be solved. There are a lot more people like him than me who think that NASA needs even more money than $17 billion.
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or Microsoft when Bill gates left
I think everyone can agree the company went to shit for awhile under Blamer.
Let China do it (Score:5, Interesting)
Let China blow a wad of money* on it. I'd rather see our money spent on an unmanned Titan boat probe, an unmanned Europa submarine, and an extra-solar (alien) planet atmosphere spectragraph "artificial eclipsing" telescope.
Approx 10% of the cost, but 5x the science, 30% of the same Wow factor (more if plant life found), and a failure would be only 3% as embarrassing as a dead Marsnaut. A friggen bargain to both Ferengi's and Vulcans: logic and greed favor the bots.
* That they get from lopsided "trade" with us
It's not an either/or thing (Score:2)
I'd rather see our money spent on an unmanned Titan boat probe, an unmanned Europa submarine, and an extra-solar (alien) planet atmosphere spectragraph "artificial eclipsing" telescope.
Those are all great things but it doesn't have to be an either/or thing. I'm not at all against robotic exploration but our country could easily fund both manned and robotic missions for a tiny fraction of what we spend on defense. I sigh every time I think about how much science and technology development we could fund with the absurd amount of money the US puts into its military.
Approx 10% of the cost, but 5x the science, 30% of the same Wow factor (more if plant life found), and a failure would be only 3% as embarrassing as a dead Marsnaut.
Certainly cheaper for specific tasks. I completely disagree that you'll get 5X the science. You'll just get different scienc
Goals and inspiration (Score:2)
In practice, it is. The current political climate will not fund both well.
Political climates change. Our ambition to explore should not. Just because we struggle to get funding right now is no reason to throw human spaceflight under the bus.
That's incremental knowledge and we don't have to go to Mars to get most of the same thing.
Most science is incremental knowledge. And you DO have to go to Mars to know how human biology on Mars would work. Furthermore the research required to learn how to keep a human alive and healthy for a trip to Mars requires investment in a human mission to Mars.
When Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter in 1979, the news-stand publication covers were full of images of the swirling red spot, the pizza-like Io, and its spewing volcanoes. I saw those pics all over the place.
I saw the pictures as well. By the time Voyager II went by it was less of a de
The Moon is the way to go (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's nice. And what will you do once you get there? Play some awesome networked FPS games?
The moon seems to have very little of use to us, moon dust is nasty sandpaper that sticks to everything and will probably give you silicosis of the lung, plus the lower gravity is worse for human bodies. (And if you say Helium-3 fusion, you are a complete and total space nutter idiot. We're not even near basic fusion yet, and He3 is not the easiest fuel to fuse.) It's a dead rock full of nothing but basalt. And even
Re:The Moon is the way to go (Score:4, Informative)
That's nice. And what will you do once you get there? Play some awesome networked FPS games?
I would like to build a Moon base with 2 goal, one as a base for astronomical observatories (radio, visible light, I think it would be a good place to try to detect gravity waves, test some dark matter detection theories) and it would be a good test of how viable it is to live on a very inhospitable world. Lessons learned from a Moon habitat will be useful for an eventual Mars habitat. I have no illusions about a Moon habitat being self sustaining over the long term.
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Why would you build a moonbase for a radiotelescope or gravity wave detector? What's the argument for dropping it into a gravity well (where it can be exposed to moonquakes and moon dust) and having people operate it when you can just have it unmanned and in space (Earth-Moon L2 for a radiotelescope, Earth-Sun L5 for a gravity wave detector) at orders of magnitude less cost and far greater effectiveness?
Every one of these sort of proposals just screams "I'm an excuse that was made up solely to give us a rea
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And if you say Helium-3 fusion, you are a complete and total space nutter idiot. We're not even near basic fusion yet, and He3 is not the easiest fuel to fuse.
I am a big proponent of harnessing fusion . . .using solar panels.
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The perchlorates might be poisonous to Earth life
Poison? Who cares?! It's a source of oxygen! 4 of them, in fact!
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We should colonize Jupiter by resurrecting the dead there.
Almost gets it... (Score:2)
The cycling orbit space habitat mentioned in the article is almost the answer. You add to it asteroid mining from nearby orbits. That gives you radiation shielding and a source of fuel, oxygen, food, etc. Now you can send lots of people to Mars without having to use a big rocket each time.
More details:
The Earth-Mars space is full of small asteroids. 12,750 have been found so far. Some of them will be a small delta-V (velocity change) from a transfer orbit that goes from Earth to Mars and back. So you
Re:Almost gets it... (Score:4, Insightful)
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> The problem with orbital mining is that it depends on the presence of orbital manufacturing.
I'm sorry, but that's a very confused statement. It is quite possible to build a space tug that mines rock from an asteroid, and delivers it to another orbit where it is needed. If the need is for radiation shielding, then no manufacturing steps are required. The more general flow of industry goes:
Extraction -> Raw Materials Processing -> Ready to Use Materials -> Parts Fabrication -> Assembly
Usin
Failed Troll (Score:2)
You can't troll someone who spent a career in aerospace, and has written a book on space systems engineering [ http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... [wikibooks.org] ] when it comes to space systems design. You especially can't troll me when you are
an anonymous coward, and I have the same user name here as on Wikibooks, and can thus prove I wrote that book. Now go away, or I
shall taunt you a second time.
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> No one's mining asteroids or setting up camp on Mars.
Half a dozen billionaires are trying to prove you wrong. How many companies have you started?
Elon may not make it to Mars but his clone will... (Score:2)
...when he decides it is in his interest to found Replicant Inc.
Alternative to providing gravity - constant thrust (Score:2)
If you are talking about a huge rocket, and providing a massive amount of fuel anyway - then why not make use of that to provide constant thrust the entire journey? You can use thrust most of the way to accelerate, then turn around and use the thrust to decelerate. It uses more fuel but it solves the gravity issue.
You don't even have to provide 1G, just 0.4G or so to acclimate the people to Martian gravity - you could probably get away with less really as long as the people exercised regularly.
It's also a
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If we were able to create anywhere near 1G constant thrust, we could be going to other solar systems instead of Mars.
Yes, of course (Score:2)
Because that would require even more fuel and an even bigger rocket.
This should be commons sense but the longer you run the motor the more fuel it consumes.
Yes, I already mentioned that it's predicated on them having a massive amount of fuel.
You (and apparently a few others) see only the problems but you ignore that it would also get you somewhere faster (depending how you did it), so that balances out the extra fuel to some extent.
It also offsets the extra cost through a much simpler spaceship design, not
Read the article - BFR (Score:2)
Kerbal space program says you need a REALLY big rocket
The article itself mentions they are working on the BFR (nod to Doom, Big Fucking Rocket).
Presumably the actual rocket engineers at SpaceX can also run Kerbal...
MacGuffinite? (Score:2)
quote:
I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanti
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> I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert
Nomadic herders have lived there for a long time. Lately they are building a massive copper and gold mine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So I expect there is a pretty big mining town to support the mine. You believe in Mars colonies now?
Duh (Score:2)
lot of talk (Score:2)
A large international effort means large international politics, and you would not be able to be the United States at that table and say, "OK, here's what's going to happen. We need $500 billion among the countries at this table to make a manned mission happen. We'll put in $200 billion, you'll put in whatever. And then what's going to happen is all you guys give the money to us, and we'll turn around and give it to SpaceX to do it all.â No. They're just not going to do that. Each one of these countries is going to want their own businesses to be doing it, right?
That sounds like a typical clusterfuck not a serious attempt at a manned journey to Mars. If employing local business is a higher priority than a competently run mission, then I don't see how it's going to happen. It's not something you throw together in a few years. That makes such a trip well beyond the planning
Not even (Score:2)
The Moon and Nearby Colonies First (Score:2)
I got interested again in space exploration and development way back in 1977 when I read a book by physicist Gerard K. O'Neill [ssi.org] titled The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. That book laid out a case for building large rotating space stations -- called space colonies -- that could be as large as 5 miles long and 2 miles in diameter. By rotating them, it would feel -- roughly -- like Earth normal gravity inside. With a properly created biosphere inside, it would seem like living on Earth. What would
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People born today will be too old to be part of the astronaut class that goes anywhere other than LEO.
Yeah, so many of us chose more exciting jobs because we'd be stuck in LEO if we decided to be astronauts instead. boooorrrrriiinngg. I mean, I guess I could do it, but I'd probably just end up changing careers in a few years anyway.
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We see the propulsion breakthroughs right now - there's a wide range of propulsion systems possible with current technology. Unfortunately, the turnaround on these sort of things is measured in decades (generally with a number well over "1"). And if it has any form of the word "nuclear" in the title, multiply the average time from conception to deployment by a large number.
Re:Funding (Score:5, Interesting)
Why should we use price signals to determine knowledge and technology advancement? That kind of thinking led the government to stop investing in alternative fuel research when the price of oil dropped to $10/barrel in the 1990s. That is precisely the time government should have been funding more research into alternative fuels, as a hedge against market groupthink.
The government is not a business and should create money for the General Welfare (as the private sector creates money on the order of tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars a year, for personal profit).
Scarcity thinking applied to money throttles progress.
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many of your points are true. but at the same time, there are many possible programs that the govt could fund across all human endeavors, and it has to choose a suite of projects that will move forward. it makes sense that considering the demands for funding are much greater than the available funding, to fund a suite of projects that in aggregate will have the greatest impact.
Re:Funding (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, and I'm not sure a Mars program that might give people the idea that we'll be able to pick up and move to some other planet once we trash this one is a good use of resources. It sends a bad message.
Re:Funding (Score:4, Insightful)
Your comparison is way off. Sending people to Mars will have little or no effect on the lives of people on Earth. Researching alternate fuels would have an impact. The two are nowhere similar.
The government is not a business and should create money for the General Welfare (as the private sector creates money on the order of tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars a year, for personal profit).
The private sector does not create money. It converts resources, be that natural resources or people resources, into money. Other that devaluing all money by printing it governments do not create money. I see no "General Welfare" in wasting billion on sending people to die in a hole on another planet when there are cheaper and better alternatives.
Scarcity thinking applied to money throttles progress.
Scarcity of money is a fact of life. If it wasn't we would all me living in mansions and never working. We need to spend our limited money where it will do the most good. Tell me how sending people to Mars will help progress on Earth better than sending robots to Mars. "Because it is cool" is not a valid reason to send people to Mars.
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A person on Mars would explore a few days travel from their bunker. That is not much exploration. We can send robots to do much better exploration and not waste billions of dollars killing people. Just because one can do something does not mean one should. If you want to waste your money on a Mars mission go ahead. Just don't expect the taxpayers to foot the bill for an expensive lark.
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The private sector does not create money. ... Other that devaluing all money by printing it governments do not create money.
Where does money come from then--God?
Scarcity of money is a fact of life.
Money is artificial and requires virtually no resources to create. It's scarcity is also, therefore, artificial.
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Where does money come from then--God?
You didn't read what wrote.
. It converts resources, be that natural resources or people resources, into money.
Ever heard of farming, mining, logging, service industries, inventions, etc? That is how money is created.
Money is artificial and requires virtually no resources to create. It's scarcity is also, therefore, artificial.
You know absolutely nothing about monetary systems.
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Ever heard of farming, mining, logging, service industries, inventions, etc? That is how money is created.
No, that is how wealth is created. Money is not wealth.
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Money is the representation of wealth.
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Money is the representation of wealth.
The map is not the territory. Money is a transferable promise to deliver up wealth. Anyone can make a promise, it costs nothing. And as long as people keep transferring it amongst themselves you never have to deliver.
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Anyone can also look at a promise and call bullshit. Promises have to be accepted before they have meaning.
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Promises have to be accepted before they have meaning.
Right. That is why most of the money we use has been created by credible organisations like governments and banks.
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If the US government "creates" several hundred billion dollars, possibly trillions, to send someone to Mars the US government would loose credibility. That would cause the exchange rate with other currencies would immediately drop and the value of all US currency would decline. That is called dilution.
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Well, now you're talking economics. Creating money has effects of course, as does its destruction. Those effects are the real constraints on government spending/taxing decisions, not hand-wringing like 'money is scarce' or 'how will we pay for it?'.
If a government creates a trillion dollars, and the private sector creates a trillion dollars worth of wealth in exchange for it, then the world is a trillion dollars wealthier. Prices will be unaffected and so will the credibility of the dollar. So the question
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So the question boils down to "will a man on mars program be worth what it costs?".
The answer to that is no. There is no way a Mars mission will create a trillion dollars worth of wealth on Earth. Science for the sake of science does not create wealth. If you disagree then state how a Mars mission will create wealth on Earth.
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I don't have a strong view on the whether a Mars mission will be worth it or not. It depends on how much we learn and how much reusable infrastructure is built in the process. Basic science overall has had a massive effect on our ability to create wealth. In fact the knowledge it brings is itself a form of wealth.
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I don't have a strong view on the whether a Mars mission will be worth it or not.
If it might not be worth it then why do it? Just because one can do something does not men one should.
It depends on how much we learn and how much reusable infrastructure is built in the process.
Most of the cost will be for rockets and items sent to Mars. There will be little left over when the mission is done. Oh wait, it will never be done as wee will have to continually resupply a Mars outpost.
Basic science overall has had a massive effect on our ability to create wealth.
We already have the basic science of how to live on Mars so there will be no gains in that area.
In fact the knowledge it brings is itself a form of wealth.
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge does not create wealth. Only when you practically apply knowledge does i
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Just strapping a few Saturn 5s together and dumping a half-dead astronaut on the surface of Mars, never to return, would be completely pointless I agree. But if by trying we learnt how to travel more quickly through space, how to survive the radiation, how to maintain a habitat with nothing but sunlight and regolith, everything required to colonise the Solar System then we will have secured both enormous wealth and long term survival of the species. We have to get out there eventually whether the immediate
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But if by trying we learnt how to travel more quickly through space,
We can do this be sending robots.
how to survive the radiation how to maintain a habitat with nothing but sunlight and regolith,
That can be done on the moon for a much lower cost. It might also be economical to return to Earth the things we find on the Moon.
everything required to colonise the Solar System
Not quite as it would only be relevant to Mars and a few moons.
long term survival of the species.
Sorry but unless we can create a completely self sufficient colony any outpost will be reliant on re-supply from Earth. Creating a completely self-sufficient colony on Mars would bankrupt any countries that tried it. There will always be some critical material or item that is available
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We can do this be sending robots.
True, but there would be less impetus (hah!).
That can be done on the moon for a much lower cost. It might also be economical to return to Earth the things we find on the Moon.
Yup.
Not quite as it would only be relevant to Mars and a few moons.
I meant 'and everything else' not 'that would be everything'.
Sorry but unless we can create a completely self sufficient colony any outpost will be reliant on re-supply from Earth. Creating a completely self-sufficient colony on Mars would bankrupt any countries that tried it. There will always be some critical material or item that is available only on Earth.
Self-sufficiency is something we'll have to learn how to do. As for bankruptcy, no. Provided things are arranged to give value for money on Earth there is no end to money. Tricky, I grant. Running out of resources could happen.
Mars is not a lifeboat. Until we can get to another star system where we can live on an Earth-like planet long term survival of humans is not ensured.
Yup, but we'll not get there in one bounding leap. It may take generation ships, and if you can do that why do you need a planet?
We need waypoints. Mars may not be optimal or
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Why should we use price signals to determine knowledge and technology advancement?
Because it is better than the alternatives.
That kind of thinking led the government to stop investing in alternative fuel research when the price of oil dropped to $10/barrel in the 1990s. That is precisely the time government should have been funding more research into alternative fuels, as a hedge against market groupthink.
What has happened since to demonstrate that something bad happened in the 1990s? Sorry, I don't see any evidence that increasing investment in alternative fuels at that time was a good idea, and that's looking at it from twenty years in the future. Plus, we can always invest in alternate fuels when the pricing signal is higher, which is what we did.
The government is not a business and should create money for the General Welfare (as the private sector creates money on the order of tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars a year, for personal profit).
"Create money"? That's not even wrong.
How about the government do something useful instead? I think a huge part of
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At a most fundamental level, money is a substitute for trade because direct trade is inconvenient. The private sector doesn't create money. It produces goods and services that are traded using money. That said, please explain why the government should "create money for the General Welfare".
Re:Funding (Score:4, Insightful)
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So it is a step forward but forward to where? So to you optics are more important than facts? I bet any program to actually send people to Mars on the tax payer's dime would generate just as much negative press along the lines of government wasting yet more money while people on Earth starve.
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And with much less public excitement and inspirational value. Another robot on Mars will not be widely seen as a major step forward in our exploration of the solar system, a man on Mars will be.
Playing devil's advocate here, for how long? Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Apollo 13 got way more exciting than expected. Apollo 17 was end of the line. In 2.5 years it went from "OMG we put a man on the moon" to "been there, done that... moving on". And that was when space travel was new and the astronauts were actually exploring. I'm sure you can find many ways the moon and Mars are different but it's still a rock in space, bigger and further away.
All the current mission plans basically say the area will
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My estimate is that this will happen in 2050. NASA is saying more like 2035, but I don’t have faith in Congress to fund them.
I, in fact, hope that NASA does not fund a manned mission to Mars. Spending billions of dollars to send people to Mars so they can hide in a hole in the ground praying that the next re-supply mission will get through is a complete waste. Anything useful a human can do on Mars can be done by a robot for much less money and loss of life.
The 1960's called. They want their arguments for not sending a man to the moon back.
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Anything useful a human can do on Mars can be done by a robot for much less money and loss of life.
Citation, please.
I have a somewhat different opinion. I agree with you regarding the much less money. If your goal is to see the view from the top of Mons Olympus, a probe is the obviously far less expensive than sending a man to climb it. If your goal is to study the rocks along the way, though, a robot probe is a bit more limited than a human being and quite a bit less efficient. As others have pointed out, Opportunity has spent 11 years to go 26 miles. Apollo 17 astronauts covered nearly the same di
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Apollo 17 astronauts covered nearly the same distance (22 miles) in less than 22 hours.
You might want to check your figures [nasa.gov].
That was done in three traversals where the rover returned to the LEM after each traversal.
On Apollo 17 the rover went 35.9 km in 4 hours 26 minutes total drive time. The longest traverse was 20.1 km and the greatest range from the LM was 7.6 km.
The LRV never got further than 7.6km from the LEM. There is the same issue with Mars. One has a limited range from base camp and Mars is much larger than the Moon.
Maybe we should be sending better rovers to Mars.
One major difference is also that the Apollo astronauts came back to Earth. Mars astronauts probably won't.
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Was that designed before the discover of the issue with radiation?The structure is only 636 kg. There can not be much shielding. I would not want to be in it for days on Mars.
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Can you identify as being from another planet, declare yourself that planet's ambassador, and get diplomatic immunity? And what if you do something that would normally result in the ambassador being kicked out of the country? What are they going to do, send you back to the planet you claim to be from?
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You should look up "Other-Kin". Be prepared to laugh and cry at humanity at the same time.
Yeah. We have people identifying themselves as non-human and we have people trying to identify various non-humans (ie. chimps) as human. It is a crazy world we live in.
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He made the trip, it killed him but he made the trip. He hopped a junker ship at a county fair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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You are absolutely correct and thank you!
I vaguely recalled reading that story, but couldn't find a reference to it, so thought I'd imagined it.
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I could not find a colonist to ask. There appears to have been a 100% fatality rate among colonists of the New World.
Re:dirt cheap rocket launches (Score:4, Interesting)
We need dirt cheap rocket launches, and the willingness to allow a few sacrifices of lives along the way
I don't think that's really the fastest way - the blocking problem seems to be radiation killing you on the journey. There are risks of the form "20% of the ships won't make it" that people might be willing to take, but barriers of the form "no one can make it alive, or at least not healthy enough to do anything once there" aren't about risk taking.
We need cheap fuel in orbit more than anything else. The ability to send very heavy payloads to Mars would go a long way towards the current blocking issues. I'm not sure "dirt cheap" rocket launches to orbit will ever be cheap enough for this scale. However, dragging a CHON asteroid into orbit and building a robotic fuel processor on it would make fuel quite cheap (and if we can solve the latter problem, the problem of how to move a CHON asteroid is solved too).
This is a low-tech "bigger hammer" solution for everything but the robotics aspect. Viewed as simply a robotics engineering problem, it doesn't seem that far-fetched: automatic mining of a soft surface, and repairs on a refinery that can make usable fuel from messy inputs (doesn't have to be great, high-purity fuel, as we'll have a remarkable quantity of it already in orbit).
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It would of course not make fuel cheap until we can learn to mine cheaply in space. And we're not even 1% to that stage. You have to pretty much relearn how to do everything you take for granted on Earth in space. Look at Philae just attempting to softly touch down at very low speeds - it had four different ways to try to stop it from bouncing (shock absorbers, ice screws, harpoon, counter-force rocket), and it still bounced way off and ended up in some rocks somewhere. And you're picturing setting up a who
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Sorry, it's just never going to be "cheap" to lift thousands of tons of fuel into orbit. Lifting bulk raw materials into high orbit is just silly - the bulk raw materials are already up there, and landing a payload on an asteroid isn't science fiction any more. The robotics would break new ground, but that's a 1-time research costs with immediate commercial benefits.
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That's a bizarre way of looking at the problem.
Sure, the fuel cost is a pretty trivial part of rocketry today, though it's more for high orbit. I believe LOX/Hydorgen fuel is about $10K/ton. That may be a NASA markup cost, I suspect it's rather cheaper for the Russians and Chinese, but still this stuff isn't like jet fuel - it's takes a considerable multiple of the energy of the fuel to make the fuel. It'll never be the sub-$1000/ton price of jet fuel.
You need about 60 tons of fuel to get 1 ton of payload
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Nobody of course is requiring rockets to be our long-term future. I have a soft spot for the Loftstrom loop [wikipedia.org] concept, for example (aka, a track that holds itself up via the centrifugal force of a rapidly spinning rotor magnetically suspended in a vacuum inside it). Way more efficient and high throughput than a space elevator and requiring no unobtanium.
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I'm pretty skeptical of that concept (for geopolitical reasons if nothing else), but yeah, it at least seems possible. Space elevators don't just require the unobtanium cable, but a counterweight made of pure handwavium to avoid energy stored as oscillations in the cable from building up to catastrophic levels over time.
But I do take the idea of robotic asteroid mining in high orbit seriously (at least for fuel, a nickel-iron asteroid is something else), as there's so much ongoing, related, high-budget res
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I didn't realize Martian citizenship was quite so open as Canada's.
(for those who didn't know, Canada is one of the easiest western nations to get citizenship- it's pretty common for folks who want to live somewhere dangerous to secure Canadian citizenship so they will get a free evacuation if things go to hell where they actually want to live)