SpaceX's Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA's Manned Exploration Programs (marketwatch.com) 142
An anonymous reader shares a report: Entrepreneur Elon Musk's announcement late last month accelerating plans for manned flights to Mars ratchets up political and public relations pressure on NASA's efforts to reach the same goal. With Musk publicly laying out a much faster schedule than NASA -- while contending his vision is less expensive and could be financed primarily with private funds -- a debate unlike any before is shaping up over the direction of U.S. space policy. Industry officials and space experts consider the proposal by Musk's Space Exploration to land people on the red planet around the middle of the next decade extremely optimistic. Some supporters concede the deadline appears ambitious even for reaching the moon, while Musk himself acknowledged some of his projected dates are merely "aspirational." But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration doesn't envision getting astronauts to Mars until at least a decade later, a timeline NASA is finding increasingly hard to defend in the face of criticism that it is too slow.
give NASA the same access to money... (Score:1)
... as well as the same level of oversight... and they can race Musk. fact is, Congress has been starving NASA since the first shuttle blew up. and it's getting worse by the year.
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In what world does NASA have less access to money than SpaceX?
The problem is that government agencies waste money. If you don't believe it, go work for any city, county, state or federal agency in the USA. Keep a critical eye out for waste and inefficiency. In less than 3 months, you will see why NASA cannot keep up with the private sector. If you cannot see it after 3 months, then you are a perfect fit. Enjoy your new job.
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It's a tough issue. Any reasonable colonization plan calls for decreasing reliance on imports per capita over time as, one by one, they develop local production lines for various feedstocks and finished products. But at the same time, the population keeps growing. So the question is, how does the balance of these factors play out? As you rightly note, total independence will not happen any time remotely soon. But how quickly can the bulk be reduced relative to how quickly consumer demand on Mars grows?
The
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According to the sci-fi I have read and watched, Martian [wikipedia.org] colonization [wikipedia.org] has [wikipedia.org] never [wikipedia.org] ended [wikipedia.org] well [wikipedia.org].
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None. If it can't make things locally, it's not going to survive. You can't just ship a spare part to Mars overnight when it breaks.
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Many spare parts would just be fabbed on-site. 3D printing (and the next gen of multi-material micro/nano-scale assembly) is robust enough to cover a lot and related cutting/milling/grinding/shaping/finishing equipment is ripe for a generational improvement and consolidation. It's probably one of the most important techs that will come out of a mars colony project and key to short term survival.
But for all that you need feed stock. Raw iron, steel, gold, carbon, and so on. Sourcing those locally is the
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Question: How many CENTURIES will it take for a Mars colony to stop needing massive subsidies from Earth? We need a discussion on who is going to pay the many Trillions of dollars needed to support this.
Nobody can answer that question. We don't have a functional transport method, we don't know the complications of living on Mars, we don't know the feasibility of using local resources which is why we need to do experiments. Perhaps we send a greenhouse and it'll over-perform massively like the Mars rovers and become a semi-permanent food supply. Perhaps it'll die and the astronauts will have to eat MREs until they can return home. There's a theory we can produce methane fuel using the CO2 in the atmosphere,
Re: give NASA the same access to money... (Score:2)
I'd also like to know the methodology you used to gauge that NASA "can't keep up". Because as things stand, Space
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NASA--the National Aeronautical and Space Administration doesn't manufacture that much. They manage projects, contract out to subcontractors and then assemble the stuff and then put the NASA sticker on it. Their strength is in having subject matter experts, long term view, strong project management, strong quality and risk management (some say too strong), and lots of funding (no fear of going bankrupt). What they do is define interfaces to make sure everything will fit together, manage timelines etc.
SpaceX
Re: give NASA the same access to money... (Score:2)
NASA has also been lacking leadership and vision for the past few decades. However, for planetary-scale projects, I think some level of centralized planning is not just a good idea, but crit
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In what world does NASA have less access to money than SpaceX?
Possibly this one.
NASA has access to more money than SpaceX. NASA--the National Aeronautical and Space Administration--spends some of it's money on aeronautical research. They also spend money sending robot probes to various places. They also spend money on the International Space Station.
Yes, I'm pretty sure if you gave NASA the money they have now and told them to can all that other stuff and just worry about putting a man on Mars, things could get done much faster. Is that a good idea? Nope.
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Large companies waste money too. If you don't believe me, you should try working for one for a few months, look for waste and inefficiencies and report the results. The reality is that humans are not very good at running complex shows.
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Manned spaceflight produces very little science, and most of it is science about how humans live in space.
But it's not really true. Congress need to stop telling NASA to waste billions of dollars a year building rockets that will cost billions of dollars per launch and have no funded payloads. Then NASA could afford to do something useful.
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What criterion do you base your hypothesis on? What are you defining as "science"? What about the technologies produced/influenced/spun off from research done for Manned Space Flight? Pacemakers, for example, utilize several technologies developed by NASA engineers for the manned spaceflight operations.
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"What are you defining as "science"? "
You know. Science.
'Spinoff' arguments are almost entirely bogus, because if you wanted those technologies, you could have just spent the money on developing them and forgotten the whole man-in-spam-can thing.
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Re: give NASA the same access to money... (Score:2)
You're an idiot if you think NASA doesn't have way more money than SpaceX does.
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Their entire budget is certainly big - problem is most of it is earmarked for many ongoing projects and there is little left for discretionary use.
Moreover, now they have to fly to the moon first before they can send people to Mars: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a... [wsj.com]
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Honestly I don't really think the moon is a good place for NASA; they've been there and done that. They shouldn't even be bothering with earth either because the tech has advanced so well that now the private sector is doing well enough there...And leave the climate science to the NOAA; for space based observations, they can obtain everything they need cheaper and faster from the private sector than NASA can do right now. NASA should be setting its sights on deep space, including how humans might safely rea
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NASA has 'access' to far more money. NASA also doesn't have to EARN that money - it's given to them. Now, they DO have to document everything in triplicate and form a committee on a regular basis to discuss if they need more committees or more paperwork or both and then put all the suggestions into practice to test which is the most efficient and then have a round of committees discuss further...and hopefully at that point they will be able to order lunch.
SpaceX is a for-profit company. They don't get fr
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NASA has 'access' to far more money.
NASA also has a much wider remit.
Re: give NASA the same access to money... (Score:2)
I wouldn't blame it on war though...we never would have gone to the moon to begin with had it not been for enormous cold war spending. Competition tends to do things like that. War tends to do things like that.
increasingly hard to defend (Score:2)
"increasingly hard to defend"
Seems to me the defence is quite easy.
"We're going to do it properly and safely and with some kind of guarantee."
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"increasingly hard to defend"
Seems to me the defence is quite easy.
"We're going to do it properly and safely and with some kind of guarantee."
What kind of guarantee?
I really don't want to be on that first SpaceX trip to Mars though... This thing is SO expensive that taking the crawl, walk, run and then fly approach is going to soak every bit or profit SpaceX can create and then some, for little or no commercial benefit that I can come up with.
The real purpose of this story is that Musk is trying to soak up more taxpayer funding for Manned spaceflight, not that he actually knows how long it will take him to develop the technologies.
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Or Musk wants to be in the news and seen as a shaker and mover (which he is).
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Or both... Be seen and by virtue of that capture more taxpayer funding..
It's called vaporware (Score:2)
So SpaceX rockets don't exist? (Score:3)
Re:So SpaceX rockets don't exist? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tesla cars don't exist? Solar roofs? If that's all vapor then it is truly spectacular vapor.
OP was confused by the vapor trails from all those rockets.
Taking off: "All I see is vapor!"
Landing first stage: "It's just a big cloud of vapor!"
It's a problem for those with a stiff neck and hardening of the attitude. It's difficult for them to look up.
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Yes, we've only recently discovered how to launch rockets.
We've only recently discovered how to launch rockets and get them back in one piece and launch them again.
Jackass.
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Yes, SpaceX can bring them back, but they have not succeeded in re-flying them at a net cost savings, and to do so will take them several more years if it's even possible.
Don't buy Elon Musk's bullshit.
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Where are the solar roofs? I mean a complete working installation on a regular customer roof. Right now, solar roofs are still vapor, though I am relatively confident it will turn into a real product. After all, solar shingles are not breakthrough technology. I am not sure about the economies of it though.
Tesla cars and Falcon launchers are very real. Hyperloop and Mars missions... not so much. Musk is not all hot air, but there is still a lot of it between the real products. He is a smart guy, he knows how
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Being able to build an electric car is pretty darned far from building a mission to take people to Mars and bring them back successfully.
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"Let him. He won't do it because he's all hot air. "
Yeah, I mean just look at his rocket company. Whatever happened to that?
I'm no Musk fanboy, and I think Tesla is a massively-overvalued dead end (except to the extent that self-driving electric vehicles will be very useful on Mars), but there's no denying that he's revolutionized the rocket business. His Mars plans are optimistic, but there's nothing impossible about them.
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Mars is hot air, yes. They were a great orbital rocket company. It would have done a tremendous lot for the world if they'd stayed an orbital rocket company. They might have even been able to finish the economic part of bringing 17 rockets back, which is flying them again at a net cost savings. They haven't done that yet, and it will take several years, probably at least three, to achieve that.
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They are a great orbital rocket company, and will continue to be the best they can, because everything in space depends on stuff getting to Earth orbit. This includes any Mars-bound spaceship. Therefore, Musk has every incentive to make Space-X work inexpensively (well, inexpensively for space shots) and reliably.
I don't really care about sending people to Mars in the near future, but I do appreciate reduced cost to near Earth orbit.
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You can't be a multiplanetary species if you can't have children on multiple planets. It is astonishing how little research there is on that little detail at present. We don't know that humans can birth healthy children on Mars.
And any kids you do have on Mars are probably not coming back to Earth and its 3X gravity.
It's not a race. (Score:2)
He's from South Africa, not Russia.
Musk's problem (Score:2)
Musk's problem isn't getting people to Mars... it's that he's not sinking any R&D funding into keeping them alive once they get there, while mouthing off about establishing a significant permanent colony.
We still don't know if a mammal can remain healthy in 0.38g, nor where we'd get all the resources required, how to do much with the ones we're pretty sure are there under local conditions, or how to maintain a closed biosphere indefinitely.
I'd love to see a Mars colony, but first I think we need to do s
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An even bigger problem is that there is no reason to establish a "colony" on Mars.
One reason to work to establish self-sustaining colonies is the simple fact that at present, humans are one decent-sized asteroid impact (or any massively-cataclysmic event) away from total extinction. Perhaps that means nothing to Nihilists, but most average people would opine that humans not going extinct would be a net-positive.
There's another, even more-important reason. It's because humans *need* to explore, expand, and colonize new places. They need a vast frontier to explore and expand into where tho
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I fould find all of this to be a lot more credible if Musk was seriously interested in the moon rather than just posing it as a stepping-stone to Mars or a means of addressing current objections. If we can't have a viable colony on the moon, Mars is really unlikely. Even if we can, Mars is inconveniently far away.
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I fould find all of this to be a lot more credible if Musk was seriously interested in the moon rather than just posing it as a stepping-stone to Mars or a means of addressing current objections.
Personally, I believe Musk is trying to find, promote, and harness a vision for the greater public which excites enough broad interest to get something...anything....going manned-space-exploration/colonization-wise. For the scale of Musk's space ambitions, he needs a grand vision to capture the imaginations and hopes of a very large number of people. You don't get that sort of mass-appeal with plans involving tiny micro-steps and cautious, moderate goals determined by an extremely risk-averse organization.
S
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In the event of any massively cataclysmic event, Earth is almost certainly still going to be the most hospitable planet in the Solar System. It will have air and be at a halfway reasonable temperature somewhere. Besides, we haven't had an event that would wipe out humanity in hundreds of millions, perhaps
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You don't really have a colony if you can't birth healthy children there. It is really astonishing how little research there has been about that.
And it would probably be Mars-only for any such kids, no going to Earth and 3X gravity.
It's not for new tech, it's for the rocket club. (Score:2)
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WTF is "Non-relativistic propulsion"?
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As for "next-gen reactors", we're STILL
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I propose a test for any new unconventional propulsion. Bring it to ISS, and raise the orbit. Even a little bit, we can measure that orbit very precisely. Call me back after that works, please. Not interested until it does.
Good reasons to doubt (Score:2)
From TFA: But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration doesnâ(TM)t envision getting astronauts to Mars until at least a decade later, a timeline NASA is finding increasingly hard to defend in the face of criticism that it is too slow.
That criticism largely comes from the legions of ill-educated members of the Cult of Elon. Not that being ill-educated is all that notable in the space fandom community, it's practically a defining characteristic. Another defining characteristic is their credul
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True, but not all that relevant - Dragon is the only lander platform they have.
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I count myself as a Musk cultist, but you won't need a retardant suit. The thing is, Musk has at least delivered on some of his promises and they actually seem like a fairly well reasoned approach to getting us somewhere. Musk's work is showing results in cheap, high cadence (and high cadence over time spawns reliability) access to space, what the Space Shuttle promised but didn't come close to delivering, and what no one else was showing any progress toward, until Musk came along and forced everyone else
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Ah, the old 'Falcon Heavy hasn't flown so Musk sucks' argument.
The biggest reason Falcon Heavy hasn't flown is that there's no been no need for it. It was meant to launch the big payloads while Falcon 9 launched the smaller ones, but Falcon 9 has been upgraded so much that it can now launch all but the very largest payloads.
The second biggest reason is that starting 27 engines and separating two booster stages in mid-flight turned out to be harder than they expected. BFR, or whatever it ends up being called
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Same to you, AC.
0123456 was addressing the latent criticism of BFR: "lets see FH fly before moving on to BFR" and it's implied FH is a useful stepping stone to BFR. It's not. As 0123456 very correctly noted, most of FH's raison d'etre has been rendered moot by upgrades to F9 and solving the risks inherent in flying 3 cores in intimate proximity will not help in the next progression on the road to full reusability: Second stage re-use.
In case Musk's slides were to complicated for you to follow, let me lay it
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It really doesn't matter if BFR depends on Falcon Heavy or not. Falcon Heavy has taken something like six years to get to launch status. As AC said, that's a reasonably impressive achievement, but it suggests that "working on the BFR" is a pretty long-term project for a 2024 launch, considering everything else that needs to happen and leaving time for integration testing.
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FH has always been on a back burner for Space-X because it's need had been mostly rendered moot by their continual improvements in F9 whereas Elon indicates that BFR, being fully reusable and thus much less costly to operate will be _replacing_ both F9 & FH. That's a huge difference in priorities that you appear to have overlooked.
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So, when can we expect a first test of BFR? Add a few years onto that for making sure it works great, and 2024 looks pretty aggressive.
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Space-X was mocked for attempting to recover F9 first stages without spending decades studying it to death the Nasa way. Now that F9 1st stage recovery is routine that aggressive schedule has been proven. Musk has already stated that F5 block 5 (arrival before 2018) will be the end of the upgrades to F9. The engineers that more than doubled F9 performance and achieved routine 1st stage recovery will now be turning all their efforts to BFR. Given that Raptor and BFR sized COPV development is much further alo
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NASA's core problem is still pork... (Score:5, Interesting)
NASA for decades has been primarily a program to send pork back to all 50 states, by using cost-plus contracts and making sure that as many congress-critters as possible can point to jobs they brought to their district. One report put ARES/SLS spending at $19B to date, and Orion at $13B to date. So we've spent nearly half the adjusted cost of the Apollo program with no hardware in flight yet. And the same report puts NASA overhead at 72% of Orion cost. NASA isn't really trying to return us to space as much as they're trying to run a jobs and pork program. Now I love NASA, have since I was a kid. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize an out of control government program thats been taken over by MBAs and politicians.
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In other words... Pretty much the same as in the Apollo program itself.
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The Apollo program included the Little Joe II and Saturn 1, 1B, and V rockets in addition to one CSM stack and a Lunar Lander, by Apollo budgets we should be at least into the Saturn flights, while SLS is still busy redesigning 40 year old Shuttle hardware.
SLS is likely going to end up north of $1b a launch to put about the same payload as Falcon Heavy for $90M a launch? And Falcon is expected to fly in a few months, while SLS first flight is officially now Dec 2019, insiders say more likely 2021.
I'm sorr
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Not really no. CSM flights didn't start until late '66.
Not really, no. SLS payload to LEO, 70,000 to 130,000 kg. Falcon Heavy payload to LEO, 63,000 kg. Not to mention that SLS can handle larger
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The plan to pay for the Mars mission using Iridium XXL is somewhat silly on the surface, but you have to acknowledge they are operating commercial LEO launch services at the highest launch rate in the world AND have already brought the price per to pound to LEO under $1k while their competitors are pushing $5-6k... So this does put their "aspirational" comments in a context somewhat different from most others. If SpaceX wanted to launch 8k Cubesats (as a silly counterpoint) they could do that without any
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They've done a very good job so far, reducing price to LEO dramatically. They're working on reducing it further. Cheap and reliable travel to LEO is an essential part of doing anything in space.
Actually, I don't really care about it. I don't think sending people to Mars os high priority. Developing infrastructure in space around Earth is much more important in the short run (say, the next fifty years). I really l
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I agree that they've been doing a good job in near-orbital space and I would have been a lot happier had they stuck to that. I would also like to see them turn profitable, as no matter how well they are doing now it doesn't matter in the long term if they can only do it with yearly Billion+ capital injections rather than be self-sustaining. They've now brought 17 boosters back, but haven't yet shown that they can turn one around at a net savings.
Mars is a diversion from what the company should be working on
Different goals (Score:2)
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Naah, Nasa _pretends_ to want to send men to Mars but their primary function (as defined by Senate funding) has become keeping the pork pipeline of continual studies on "how to get to mars" open.
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Naah, Nasa _pretends_ to want to send men to Mars but their primary function (as defined by Senate funding) has become keeping the pork pipeline of continual studies on "how to get to mars" open.
I'm sure that NASA would love to send people to Mars, but they know that's not going to happen and only mention it because every administration since Bush the Younger wants to say they're working on it. There's not enough NASA money going towards Mars to even claim it as pork.
show you can put a man on the moon (Score:2)
Maybe going to Mars is possible (Score:2)
But I'm pretty sure staying there will not be economical perhaps for centuries. Even "The case for Mars" [google.fr] says so. Humans are not very good at planning for centuries.
Re:One (Score:5, Funny)
Is a lonely number.
Two can be as bad as one It's the loneliest number since the number one.
On the One Hand... (Score:2)
...competition is good.
On the other, the current form of racing to do this or that before anyone else is going to end up costing someone their life.
I would suggest we don't really have anything to prove these days and that their needs to be far more cooperation between all the various entities building and launching space vehicles.
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On the other, the current form of racing to do this or that before anyone else is going to end up costing someone their life.
You may not have noticed, and I don't condone it, but progress is fueled by the blood of the innocent.
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He says astronauts are going to be heroes and will die with honor.
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I recommend you read what you wrote there. First off to your 0G claim: https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
That's for a year in space. BFR trips to Mars will be around 3 months.
As for radiation, they only experience we have of sending people to an area that's not protected from the earths magnetic field is to the moon. We have no experience of keeping people outside of its bubble for months. And then it doesn't get much better once you get to Mars as Mars has no magnetic field to protect people. The planet may provide some protection at night from the sun, but nothing from all the background radiation. And in what world is building underground not "too much effort"? Here on earth it's a right pain in the ass where we can, you know, breath, and have established infrastructure.
Yes, we don't have that much experience with people in those sort of high radiation environments, and that could be a cause for concern. Some proposals have suggested having one's fuel tanks act as an additional barrier (and frankly, I suspect that the next version of BFR will have something like this or end up having a water-ice shield). It is true that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, but this ignores the fact that as I pointed out,
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Then of course there's the whole, what do you eat when you get there? You can't exactly grab a hoe, till some ground and plant seeds.
The food that arrived long before you did? Every proposal about sending humans to Mars involves sending a supply cache well ahead of the humans, and making sure it lands safely, before humans ever launch. The US military and NASA both know a great many things about preserving food for long periods of time. NASA research into the topic continues to this day. It's something that can be done on the ground easily enough, which is mostly what NASA does these days.
People visiting Mars is much like people visi
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one person eats about 2000 pounds or about a metric ton [reference.com] of food a year. Water can presumably be largely recycled and some can be found on Mars, so we can ignore this. So you are right, this is probably adequate for a while.
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How does Musk propose getting around the 0-g effects on the human body?
By harnessing the detrimental affects of radiation to just kill the travelers outright. 0.G effects are the least of your concerns here.
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SpaceX's solution is simple: go fast. They propose carrying smaller cargos at higher speeds rather than higher cargos at smaller speeds.
That said, Musk is a bit handwavy on issues related to gravity and radiation. He seems to genuinely believe it won't be a problem, but a lot of people in the field aren't so sure. At this point in time, we don't even know if a person can live on Mars for protracted periods of time without suffering problematic degeneration due to the reduced gravity. At least with Venus,
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At this point in time, we don't even know if a person can live on Mars for protracted periods of time without suffering problematic degeneration due to the reduced gravity. At least with Venus, gravity is close enough to Earth that we can say, "It's probably fine". With Mars it's more of a case of "We hope it's fine", while in the case of the moon it's "We're worried that it's not fine".
Well, when you consider the extreme differences in mass from the anorexic to the morbidly obese I think a healthy person will survive a few years on Mars, it's only 0.38g but compared to 0g it'll all hang like it's supposed to hang and flow the way it's supposed to flow. I'd probably also consider wearing a weight vest/bracelets/shoes to get a more earth-like strain, it wouldn't be quite like on earth but combined with an exercise program my guess is you'd do better as a Mars astronaut than an Earth couch p
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It's quite possible that Mars or Moon gravity are better for human health than Earth gravity. Less stresses, less wear and tear all around. The issues we have with microgravity are mostly because the human body evolved with the expectation of things naturally flowing downward, and that's certainly not an issue on Mars.
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If he can't make his goals of Telsa 3 production, why should we believe he can put people on Mars...
Hey, the first schedule is always based on "If nothing goes wrong" planning. It's how industry always works....
Ah, reminds me of a conversation I had with a sales exec once who was yelling about how engineering (me) never cooperated with him on the schedule... I kept saying that the best delivery date we could hope for was 6 months later than he wanted (or as it turns out, what he promised the customer already w/o asking me). Then he hit me with the following question... "So what keeps you from doing this
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Wow, a month delay on a greatly accelerated production target, on a vehicle where the original plan wasn't to start production until "some time" in 2017, after explicit statements that the deadline was moved up in order to be able to hold supplier's feet to the fire because some would inevitably miss it. My teapot can hardly handle this tempest!
Maybe when we start doing similar concern trolling about future SpaceX missions we can have a tempest in Russell's teapot.
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Ah, Rei, always to be counted on to apologize for Musk...
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As usual, those who are unable to refute the facts, stoop to attacking the messenger.
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Where's the pressure for pine cone eating research Where is the "we choose to eat this bag of pine cones not because it is east, but because it is hard" spirit?
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The pine cone industry is the backbone of this country, a pillar to its communities and a staunch defender of what makes this country great. We here at Loblolly Technicorp just donated a park bench last week and today made a meaningful contribution to a local youth sports team. We do this not because we must, but because we believe that children our our future, and all of us need to be proper stewards of our environment. Don't fear Big Pine Cone; we're just like you.
And besides, we own your senator, so....
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There is no "pressure" needed for anti-aging because there is a strong market pull (demand). Just ask your wife how much she's spending on anti-aging lotions etc.
Joking aside - there have been tremendous advances in extending life expectancy worldwide: https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo [youtu.be]
You may educate yourself here with more updated numbers: https://www.gapminder.org/ [gapminder.org]
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Sovereignty is not a hurdle. The outer space treaty already forbids the USA or any other country from laying claim official claim to any part of Mars. For the foreseeable future, Mars colonies will be effectively controlled by Earth powers because they can't sustain themselves without outside help. Once they can, unless they discover some sort of amazing new precious material not available on Earth, I think you'll find governments unanimously say "Alrighty then, have fun with your self-rule and try not to d