Elon Musk is Highly Confident SpaceX Will Land Humans on Mars by 2026 (cnbc.com) 229
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk remains highly confident that his company will land humans on Mars by 2026, saying on Tuesday that it's an achievable goal "about six years from now." From a report: "If we get lucky, maybe four years," Musk said, speaking on an award show webcast from Berlin, Germany. "We want to send an uncrewed vehicle there in two years." The ambitious 2026 goal matches with what Musk outlined at the International Astronautical Congress in September 2016, when he said that "if things go super well," landing people on Mars "might be kind of in the 10-year timeframe." "I don't want to say that's when it will occur -- there's a huge amount of risk," Musk said in 2016.
But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hah, I get your joke, itâ(TM)s worth noting though that none of the three lunar lander candidates involve the SLS. Lunar Starship would be launched on the Super Heavy booster (but thatâ(TM)s also on Elon time). Blue Moon would launch on New Glenn. ALPACA would be launched on a Vulkan.
The SLS truest would be a boondoggle if they end up launching astronauts on it to fly to the moon and then transfer them to a lunar starship that has all the hardware to take them there anyway!
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Yep, that's crazy talk. I for one believe that the SLS will land people on the Moon in 2024.
Well... The Senate Launch System [competitivespace.org] does seem pretty on-track to keep landing money in constituents' pockets, so you never know...
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An engineer pads their time, usually in multiples of either x3 or x6 on what they think it would really take. This isn't because they are lazy or trying to be a hero, like TOS Scotty. But because they have experience the reality that there are unforeseen compilations on the way. A CEO like to show fast progress, so they will often round down engineering time scale a bit.
Elon Musk having been an engineer and now is a CEO I think is advertising the engineers pre-padded time then multiplying it by 1.5.
This
Musk- Rarely on time, but it happens (Score:5, Insightful)
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With space flight, we have had 80 years of publicly funded research and development. What musk has done so far is apply the knowledge to a commercial product. What he has to do on his own, is figure out
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Re:Musk- Rarely on time, but it happens (Score:5, Informative)
Living quarters on Mars? Fuel for return trip? food? Transportation on Mars - and that pesky radiation problem?
All landed by a preceding robotic mission. Well in the case of fuel not the fuel itself but the means of producing fuel. All verified to be waiting before the manned flight.
Re:Musk- Rarely on time, but it happens (Score:4, Insightful)
By 2026. They will need to have the gear up there for at least a year to make sure it survives through the whole Martian year and proves reliable. Transit time is around 9 months on average. So he needs to have all this gear and a vehicle capable of reaching Mars and landing on it by the start of 2024.
Optimistic doesn't even begin to describe it.
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Last I heard the plan was still to send the initial automated fuel refinery in 2022. I give him decent odds of having Starship ready to go by then, but I've heard nothing whatsoever about the fuel refinery - and considering that it's going to have to also involve a mostly-autonomous ice-mining system... I have my doubts on that front.
But hey, maybe they have a less public partner developing the refinery. Assuming they have the refinery ready, that means by early 2023 they could have it deployed on the sur
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What is the fuel refinery refining fuel from?
Have we discovered a way to make fuel from the surface regolith, or is it something kind of science fictiony, like the the atmospheric gas processors in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars"?
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Not from the regolith, but it's relatively straightforward to convert water and CO2 into oxygen and methane, and there's LOTS of water and CO2 on Mars (over 800,000 cubic kilometers of water ice in the northern icecap alone, and many other glaciers scattered around the planet) Basically you use electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then the Sabatier reaction to convert hydrogen and CO2 into methane and water (used to recycle air on the space station, where the methane is discarded)
Thoug
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What is the fuel refinery refining fuel from?
The atmosphere. Although I think that plan assumes a nuke power plant.
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What is the fuel refinery refining fuel from?
Unobtanium, which in the future will be called Elonite.
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>What is best fuel? Hydrogen.
That really depends on context. It's certainly cleaner, and has a moderately better ISP than methane, but it's a LOT harder to keep contained. Not such a big deal when you load-and-go for a launch to orbit - but could be a serious problem when it has to stay in the tank for 6 to 9 months to power your landing maneuvers at the other end of the flight. Not to mention keeping it stored for years while producing enough fuel for the return journey to Earth.
There's also the issu
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Has he said anything about landing a fuel refinery?
It's not like landing boosters or an empty first stage, this thing will have a lot more mass.
So far the biggest thing anyone has soft landed is a small car size rover.
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Yes, repeatedly. He plans to have fuel waiting on Mars before sending the first humans. And chose methane as the fuel for Raptor in large part because it's relatively easy to produce from the abundant water and CO2 on Mars. And yes, despite the frozen desert conditions, water is abundant - over 800,000 cubic kilometers in the northern ice cap alone, with many more glaciers scattered around the planet.
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By 2026.
I'm not crazy enough to support the timeline, just the general strategy regarding logistics. :-)
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Living quarters on Mars? Fuel for return trip? food? Transportation on Mars - and that pesky radiation problem?
All landed by a preceding robotic mission. Well in the case of fuel not the fuel itself but the means of producing fuel. All verified to be waiting before the manned flight.
Where is the equipment? I wouls simply love to see the martian fuel production equipment. If we're going to be landing people on Mars in 5 years, the equipment must be already functional. Where is the documentation regarding the successful food production units? Where are these devices?
This is my point. We have a semi-functioning "starship that is little more than a stainless steel tube some plumbing and an engine. and has hardly been off the ground except for some little tests. That is only one part of
Re:Musk- Rarely on time, but it happens (Score:5, Insightful)
Living quarters on Mars? Fuel for return trip? food? Transportation on Mars - and that pesky radiation problem?
Did the Apollo astronauts set up a moon base?
No, they went there to make history. That was enough.
I expect a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very long queue of people who want to be the first person on mars.
I'm equally sure that Elon Musk will want to be remembered as the person who made it possible.
Re:Musk- Rarely on time, but it happens (Score:5, Interesting)
please mod parent up (Score:2)
Significant...
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It was a lot easier to return from the Moon though. Mars is much further away and much harder to take off from. The current reusable rocket technology they have needs extensive prep to fly again, it can't just take off from the place it landed a couple of days later.
It's probably impossible to do.
They will need to land and then rebuild the rocket stack and refuel it before taking off again. They will have to do all this with a minimum 3 minute radio delay from Earth, so minimum 6 minute round trip, meaning
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>It was a lot easier to return from the Moon though. Mars is much further away and much harder to take off from. T
Not really. The Starship system is far simpler than the multi-stage lunar lander, and benefits immensely from not having to carry fuel for the return journey with it. Of course that means they'll need fuel waiting for them on Mars to make it home again, but the plan is to have that waiting for them before they leave Earth.
>The current reusable rocket technology they have needs extensive
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Even if we can abandon folks on Mars in five years, Elon Musk's head will remain up his ass, right here on Earth.
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It turns out he has a specially constructed mini-submarine that's lets him stick his head up his ass anywhere, any time; even on Mars, underwater, or during a COVID test!
That's probably why Branson is so proud his spaceship is still a virgin.
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Did the Apollo astronauts set up a moon base?
Taking the fuel for the return trip (lunar surface to lunar orbit, lunar orbit to earth orbit or entry) was practical. Taking the fuel for a mars return trip is more difficult. More difficult than local fuel production? Not sure, but local fuel production is something we need to learn to do eventually so maybe just go that route.
Re:Musk- Rarely on time, but it happens (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Musk- Rarely on time, but it happens (Score:5, Insightful)
They can't just send anyone who signs up to Mars though. They need to be highly trained and expert in several fields, and undergo a great deal of training with their fellow travellers to make sure they can spend the rest of their lives working together in a small, confined space.
The psychology of being stuck on a small Mars base with a small number of people, forever, is probably more than most people can handle. Just the 9 month trip there is probably more than most people could deal with.
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This is not true. All trips have been said to be round-trip if you want, and likely only round trip for the first decade or so.
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It may be that abandoning people to die requires more than merely their agreement. Even if they stood in a long line.
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Most of these questions you're asking have been thought through by engineering teams years ago. I remember reading the detailed plans at least two or three years back in interview format with some tech web site that I have trouble remembering at the moment. Essentially, there's a lot of pre-human trips involved taking equipment, building supplies for habitats, supplies for food and air, and equipment to be spun up once the humans arrive to begin producing fuel and oxygen for the return trip and the habita
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Plans are one thing but they need to develop a lot of new technology to make it happen.
- Systems to survive for a 9 month trip on Starship in zero-G
- Cargo landing system
- Rocket assembly on Mars
- Mars habitat
- Mars factories for producing the fuel and other stuff they aren't sending from Earth
- Self contained "mission control" so they can launch from Mars without real-time support from the ground
They also need to select and train a crew for long duration missions where they have to deal with a significant
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Yes. Which is why I'd say we need another ten to fifteen years to get there. With his engineering resources there's nothing on that list that screams "impossible to achieve." It just screams, "not in six years."
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I remember reading the detailed plans at least two or three years back in interview format with some tech web site that I have trouble remembering at the moment.
OK, so you're attempting to repeat shit you half remember, that you think you knew something about... because you observed an interview.
Fuck an A. You're as dumb as Musk. My advice, go to business school, maybe they know how to redeem you.
but 2030-2036 is totally feasible
OK, so you're just as willing to reach your hand into your ass and fling it as Musk is.
Nobody is going to actually fund, or give regulatory approval to, a manned mission to Mars that has no purpose other than "tu bee furst!" 10 years of time doesn't change that. There isn'
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I think many of those problems could be solved, but not by the 2026 timeline. For example:
The tech to land on Mars and take off again has already been pioneered by the Falcon booster recovery. Problem is, that's never been tested in Mars atmosphere. If we are sending the Starship to Mars (I assume that's the vehicle), it would need to launch to Mars within the next 2-3 years in order to have even a single test of landing in Mars gravity prior to 2026. And that's not even getting into the issue with deliveri
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I think radiation is a bigger problem than you're imagining. I think you're right that the early crews will simply have to accept a high risk of developing cancer, but do you know why the ISS has minimal radiation shielding? Because anything moderately more substantial would make the problem much, much worse. What they have blocks the low intensity radiation, and cosmic rays pass right through it. Make it more substantial and you'd block the moderate-intensity radiation as well, but would also block cos
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Shouldn't be a problem on Mars - between the atmosphere and being able to pile a bunch of gravel on top of your habitat it's easy enough to block, but in a spacecraft you'll likely be doing good to shield a radiation shelter sufficient to pack everyone in like sardines to shelter from the huge radiation surge from a solar flare. And you probably wouldn't want to spend any time in there otherwise since the baseline radiation levels within it would be much higher than the rest of the ship.
Last I heard, long duration interplanetary spacecraft should be using their on board water tanks as solar flare radiation shielding. It eliminates nearly all of the cascades you're talking about, so it's an exceedingly good radiation shield. Human metabolism is water positive over time, so even with water recycling on board, you reach your destination with more shielding than you started with.
Historically, using water shielding has been acknowledged as being wonderfully effective but impractical because o
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Quite a few ways to get sufficient fuel for liftoff onto Mars from previous missions, even if you don't land a robotic mission that does in situ fuel generation first. With Starship, the living quarters can be provided by the craft itself, or you can bring along something you can assemble once you get there. As far as food goes, they would bring food with them. Are you expecting that they'll need Star Trek replicators? As for transportation on Mars, there are existing designs that would work just fine, like
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Shielding a Starship on Mars would be a challenge - you need a really thick coating or you just make the problem worse. The ISS has minimal shielding since if they made it any thicker it'd start blocking cosmic rays, creating particle cascades that would greatly increase the astronauts radiation exposure. And you need far more shielding to block the particle cascade than you can realistically apply to anything that needs to accelerate significantly - I want to say something on the order of a few feet of ro
Re:Musk- Rarely on time, but it happens (Score:4, Informative)
Once you've got a system that can take off, land, and refuel in space, the rest is mostly money. SpaceX plans to make fuel on Mars, but they don't really need to; they could just send some Starship tankers. Starship is big enough you could just live in it for the required time on Mars, but if you've got a fleet of them you could also land a lot of supplies.
Starship hasn't yet demonstrated any of the three requirements (taking off to orbit, landing from orbit, or refuelling in space) but Falcon does #1 and half of #2, and Dragon carried up a module that did #3. Reentry tripped up the space shuttle, but advances in materials engineering in the last half century should make that a lot easier.
Pretty much all of the components for the proposed mission have been developed and demonstrated, either by SpaceX or others. The technology is fairly mature, so putting it together and actually landing people on Mars is more a matter of resources and will. Musk seems to have the will, and SpaceX seems to have secured the necessary resources.
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Starship is big enough you could just live in it for the required time on Mars
Because that's the problem with living on Mars; lack of available real estate.
If only you had a place big enough then you could just live>.
Or just die, as the case may be. Might want to check the fine print.
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We see a lot of video and breathless reportage, on engine tests of StarShip where even the failures are celebrated, but I would love to see the outline and other components and plans. When NASA (that four letter word) was working on going to the moon, the Apollo project was well into design in the early 1960's.
Surely there is a lot of documentation of how they are going to get there, how they are going to live there, how they are going to survive there, and how they are going to return to earth?
SpaceX being a private company doesn't owe us an explanation on anything. Any information we do get is because they want us to. They only owe it to their investors and anyone who is partnering with them. They didn't explain every subsystem of crew dragon to the public but you bet your ass they did to NASA.
NASA is a government organization paid for with taxpayer dollars. They owe us an explanation of how they are spending our money. But even then they don't just publish schematics of spacecraft on th
[Citation Needed] (Score:5, Informative)
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That's the problem with credulous morons; they don't see something to be credulous of, and they shout for "citations."
Citations are for when you're publishing peer reviewed scientific work, not for when you're trying to check on if something is true. For that you have to ignore the provided bullshit and learn to do your own research.
I looked into it and it turns out Musk didn't deliver ventilators. They delivered biPAP and CPAP machines, which are known to be useless for treating COVID patients. Calling t
Fairly trivial problem really (Score:2, Funny)
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Even harder to return them home alive.
Musk has always said Mars is a one way trip for the first crew.
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Does that mean he thinks round-trips are out of reach for the next 30+ years? (The lifetime of those on the first mission?)
Yes, the correct implication is that it isn't going to actually happen, ie, they're out of reach.
As with other absurd statements, the implication isn't that the absurdity will happen, but merely that it would be absurd. That's true even when it is phrased as something expected to happen. Good luck getting them to stop.
He phrases it in a way that leaves empty space; it would be a one-way trip. That doesn't imply it will be a one-way trip; it implies that trips won't be happening in the time frame during whic
Re:Fairly trivial problem really (Score:5, Funny)
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So it is fairly trivial to land humans on Mars. Simply take some cadavers and ask their relatives to pay to send them for space burial. Crash land them on Mars. Done! Humans landed on Mars.
OK, so this is a good start but cadavers don't help with the "first" bit, because details.
So how about, we use patients who the doctors say are brain dead, but whose families are keeping their bodies alive. We can get past the regulatory problems with the lack of ability to survive or return by emphasizing that legally this patient is brain dead and can't be harmed or made to suffer by the procedure. But they're not yet legally deceased, so they count for purposes of "first." You'll have to "land" a tomb bu
Hopefully 2024 (Score:4, Insightful)
If it happens in 2026, it might be during Trumpâ(TM)s second term and he will take credit.
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If it happens in 2026, it might be during Trumpâ(TM)s second term and he will take credit.
To be fair his support of manned spaceflight and exploration from 2016-20 would have supported the effort. Sort of like Kennedy's support for going to the moon from 1960-63. :-)
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Yep. He always put showmanship ahead of real action.
And political considerations. He would not have been elected in 1960 with support from pro-space constituencies. Hence his rapid transition from an anti-manned spaceflight pro-robotic spaceflight to a champion of the manned moon race.
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His support was a reaction to the USSR beating the USA by putting a man in space and in orbit first, after having already put up the first satellite and first animal.
The Bay of Pigs debacle was also embarrassing for him and he really needed something to restore American pride and make his administration look like they were making every effort to defeat the Soviets and Communism.
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it might be during Trumpâ(TM)s second term
Trump will NEVER run again. He will make a million excuses. But his ego won't let him take a chance of losing a second time. Instead he will keep running his mouth and using it extract billions from his followers.
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If it happens in 2026, it might be during Trump's second term and he will take credit.
No way, Trump will definitely still be on his first term. Wait, you didn't mean prison term, did you? ;)
Human spaceflight (Score:2)
I wonder if NASA would actually be involved with this (since Starlink would be providing the money, they may not need NASA?), and if NASA was not involved, if SpaceX would have less red tape and certification / testing to go through to launch humans into space? Or would the FAA or whatever regulatory bodies require NASA approval for any humans launching from the US, even if it was 100% private?
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Or would the FAA or whatever regulatory bodies require NASA approval for any humans launching from the US, even if it was 100% private?
Crew Dragon's launch to the ISS last month was solely FAA-approved. NASA's certification of Crew Dragon and its launch system were one time things for the vehicle and do not have to be repeated for every launch. Crew Dragon and the Falcon 9 it flew on were owned by SpaceX, not NASA. NASA was a paying passenger, not owner/operator. It's pretty significantly different. Starship will operate the same way, when it finally flies to orbit.
one-way trip (Score:5, Interesting)
IIRC, Musk's plan is for a one-way trip, which reminds me of one of my favorite episodes of From the Earth to the Moon, "Spider:"
ENGINEER 1: "We put a man on the moon as soon as possible."
ENGINEER 2: "Just get him there."
ENGINEER 1: "We can keep sending supply ships."
ENGINEER 2: "Until we figure a way to get him back!"
LEAD ENGINEER: "Well. That's... That's... No. I'm sorry, gentlemen. There is no way on God's green Earth we would ever do anything like that."
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At least they probably won't die of dysentery.
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Did the queue to go just get any shorter?
Q for Elon (Score:2)
Robots: maybe. People, no. (Score:3)
The Problem with this timeline is that travel time is significant and we haven't even solved all the transit problems like radiation. The only thing that would show up on Mars is a vehicle full of corpses. I can absolutely see SpaceX sending a probe/rover to Mars in a test run of sorts but sending people? No way.
Musk (Score:4, Informative)
Musk said in 2013 that, within a few years, all of Tesla's Supercharger stations would be equipped with solar panels and battery packs. He said the process was still underway in 2017.
In 2015, Musk said "I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years." He has pushed that timeline back to 2019.
Musk in 2016 said Tesla would produce 500,000 vehicles in 2018. Tesla made 254,530 vehicles during 2018.
Musk said in 2016 that a fully autonomous Tesla vehicle would be ready to drive cross-country by the end of 2017.
In June 2018, Musk said that Tesla was cutting 9% of its workforce so that "we never have to do this again." In January 2019, Tesla cut another 7%.
In August 2018, Musk famously tweeted he has "Funding secured" to take Tesla private. The SEC later charged Musk with fraud.
In January 2019, Musk said the company would be "profitable in Q1 and all quarters going forward." The company reported a loss in the first quarter.
In February 2019, Musk said Tesla would be "winding down many of our stores." Tesla later said it would only close about half the 378 stores it intended to.
So, to be honest, I'd be very dubious of ANYTHING that Musk claims will ever happen, let alone when he says it will.
Source: https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
So, I had to look this up (Score:5, Interesting)
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Thank you, that's exactly what I was going to look up myself.
The key date isn't when we "land" by, it's when can we LAUNCH by and hit the right Hohmann window.
Pretty fecking great JPL page on this https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/t... [nasa.gov]
Land a human on Mars? What?? We can do that now. (Score:2)
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The big problem is how long do they live when they get there.
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Easy to do (Score:2)
It's completely easy to do. But wait, do they have to be LIVE humans?
Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. Musk needs to be called out on it for once.
Landing a human on Mars is not a colony (Score:2)
That's very different from what his Mars plans have been in the past. Musk has said that he wants to have a permanent colony on Mars with 10M people in 10 years too. I think that putting a single person on Mars for a very short stay is possible in 6 years. Colony, no way.
Landing, sure... but returning? (Score:2)
When explorers first made their way across the ocean, the journey alone killed many.
And that's here on earth, where there's oxygen to breathe.
I expect that the mortality rate for the first mars astronauts to be very nearly a hundred percent for decades to come.
Here's how I read that claim based on his record: (Score:2)
Musk has a chance of putting humans on Mars sooner than many critics would imagine possible, but it'll be some time after 2026.
Musk's virtue as a corporate leader is a willingness to "fail faster", to build organizations willing to endure and learn from setbacks that competitors focused on quarterly profits wouldn't tolerate. But there's a lots more potential setbacks on the road to mars than anything Musk has attempted before.
Mars, to coin a phrase, is one giant leap for a man.
Define "humans" (Score:3)
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want to leave a living planet to die on a dead planet?
Actually not dieing is one of the goals of the mission, although there will certainly be a high risk of death nonetheless. With that correction in mind ask one of the twelve men who walked on the moon. They might have some insight into that question. :-)
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Some folks have the desire to explore and push the boundaries of human understanding and existence. And some do not.
In my younger years I'd have leapt at the opportunity. Now, with my age and family and friend connections, I can't see myself doing it unless there were some way of bringing my inner circle with me, and I'm well aware there's a high probability someone in that inner circle wouldn't want to be an adventurer.
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Here's the thing you're missing. It's not about wealth for the future; It's about the future.
There are dozens of ways humanity could be knocked back into the stone age, and we don't have the natural resources to claw our way back from that again. We need to build self sustaining off-world colonies because that helps ensure the survival of our civilization.
Building those footholds of humanity has to start from somewhere, and those initial attempts are going to be suicide missions where people die for dumb
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Nope, the Roanoke colony failed, twice! Better just write off the whole English colonization of the Americas idea.
Far too many people these days think significant danger is sufficient reason to not do something, without stopping to recognize that the world we live in today wouldn't exist without the deaths of thousands of ambitious people in generations past gambling their lives on a better future.
Heck, just think of all the millions that died in WWII. Far too dangerous, we should have just laid down arms
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Yes, I do.
The problem with space stations is that we won't spread them out widely. We'll nuzzle them right back into LEO because that's what we know how to do. We are lazy monkeys.
I'm gambling that Mars is the closer putt vs. asteroid mining and fab-in-place O'Neill cylinders far enough a way to matter. I'd love to lose that bet.
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Here's the thing you're missing. It's not about wealth for the future; It's about the future.
There are dozens of ways humanity could be knocked back into the stone age, and we don't have the natural resources to claw our way back from that again.
It is brain dead if you think Mars is a better place for that than Earth's orbit.
Plus, your idea of what natural resources are is rather odd. Where did you think they went? Don't worry, the same people who understand how things work now will be the ones who will be figuring out how to utilize resources. Nobody will ask you to make the phone call to the Mars base for resupply.
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In Red Mars by KSR the first human to walk on Mars was in 2020 and then they launched the colony ship in 2026.
But they should really also read KSR's The Memory of Whiteness before they decide they want to travel so far from primate comforts.
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I don't know why its flamebait because its all well considered and honest questions about how this is going to work. I guess people here on Slashdot are a bunch of Elon cultists who just disdain their fantasy being confronted with real world facts. Very sad.
We have trouble here on earth figuring out how to do sustainable energy. Survival on mars depends on large amounts of artificially generated energy just to run all the life support systems you will need to survive there. Consider that mere survival has a
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What if "trips to mars" really means disposal of excess population?
Physically impossible. No, really. We could not physically lift enough people off this planet to make a difference given how many rockets we could reasonably produce and fuel. Maybe if we had several space elevators all working 24/7... But then we'd still have nowhere to send them except for kicking them out the airlock and watching them burn up on re-entry.
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Re:Regardless of timeline... (Score:5, Informative)
Being born into fantastic wealth and thus having the ability to buy up exciting companies does tend to do that. Very few, if any, people on slashdot are born into those kinds of resources and opportunities.
This has been debunked so many times. Elon was given $28K from his father to start his first business. Stop spreading fud. Elon's parents were not billionaires or anything.
Re:Regardless of timeline... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if his parents were billionaires...
How many children of billionaires end up doing great things?
The best most end up doing is continuing the business of their parents.
It's the same with Bill Gates. Yes, his family was well-off. His dad was a lawyer. His mother was a business woman. No doubt advantages that most of us don't have. Yet, I know plenty of lawyers and kids of rich people who don't do anything extraordinary. The good ones, have just become another generation of upper class lawyers. Some just languish in the wealth of their parents, not accomplishing very much. So many people grew up with advantages like Bill Gates, yet how many took advantage of it to build one of the most successful Computer companies in history?
At the same time, dirt poor people have overcome their disadvantage and risen to such heights as well. Howard Schultz, the founder of StarBucks, grew up dirt poor in subsidized housing. Even Elison of Oracle grew up pretty poor.
The point here is that no matter where you come from, it's really really really really hard to be great. Elon Musk is great. Bill Gates is Great. Larry Ellison is great. Howard Schultz is great. They're great no matter what background they came from. They're great because no matter what resources you have, it's really hard being great.