It really puts the frustration I have with Musk's constant "we're going to Mars" in context. Yes, a big rocket is necessary prerequisite for Mars. No, it is not the only problem you need to solve.
And also having worked with the reality of human spaceflight operations, we are just not ready yet to send a spacecraft into deep space for months on end. It's easy to throw out blithe statements that we "just need a big spaceship", or we'll use ion drives or some other such tech, but the reality is way more messy than that. We just aren't ready yet and we won't be for some time.
The large rocket adddresses basically all the problems.
Time between resupply? Well, you can just take a bunch of resupply missions with you. Most stuff is packed ahead of time, except fresh veggies and fruits, but deep freezers can keep the nutritional value of those nearly as well as being fresh.
Redundancy/reliability? Bring the spare pool with you instead of keeping it on the surface for resupply flights. Bring two different systems.
Long duration life support? Enough mass allows you to avoid it all together if you like. This still has not sunk in to most of the fairly educated people who opine on this topic. Simple life support systems are VERY reliable, and the advantage of advanced life support systems is they reduce mass. If you don’t need the mass reduction, you don’t need the advanced life support.
Far from medical care? Small crew sizes are a mass constraint. More mass means you can afford large crews with dedicated medical personnel. And the equipment to go allow with it.
Also applies to radiation shielding (mass) and even partial gravity (centrifugal gravity is well known as a replacement but for some inexplicable reason is avoided… and yea, even short arm centrifuge is useful and could be used on the surface… the disorienting effects are actually manageable, and while in space, a tether can be used to enable long arm centrifugal gravity with little Coriolis effect).
Transit times can also be reduced significantly with refueling. 80-120 day transits are feasible, not just the most efficient 150-210 day transits for long stay. The surface of Mars also has significant radiation shielding in spite of the thin atmosphere. The Mars rover Curiosity measures the same radiation equivalent on Mars’s surface as on ISS today. Mars rover Perseverance also demonstrated production of unlimited oxygen from the Martian CO2 atmosphere using electricity. Regolith could also be used to enhance radiation shielding. This is before discussing water mining (and even that can be done without touching regolith, just the air using the WAVAR technique… useful for crew consumption although this method doesn’t scale up to producing enough for propellant very well).
There is no a single hazard or obstacle to a Mars mission that isn’t at least partially mitigated by having a lot more mass capability, ie a big and cheap reusable rocket (capable of landing on Mars and aerobraking).
Well there is the "one-way trip" version which takes out some risk but trades the risk of losing 4 astronauts for the risk of losing 400 or more.
Since it's not plausible that you could bring anything back from Mars that would be worth enough to make colonization practical from the perspective of Earth, Mars colonists would always have to assume that the last rocket that was launched is the last that will arrive. From their point of view, they'd want to be able to manufacture absolutely everything locally as soon as possible.
It's one thing to say "we can make unlimited oxygen from the soil never mind the atmosphere", it's another to find a source of nitrogen or other inert gas that makes it possible to live in an atmosphere that doesn't make everything into a firetrap. It's one thing to spin the kind of science fiction that Gerard K. O'Neill did, but his disciple Eric Drexler realized just how bad the problem of 'advanced manufacturing' is and went off to follow his own El Dorado, writing a fascinating book [1] about a class of systems that 'just don't work' [2]
Not to say that the goal of "a population of 10,000 people being able to make everything that 8,000,000,000 can make" is unattainable, even if we can get it down to an advanced industrial base being supported by 10,000,000 people it would be a game-changer here on Earth. I can see paths there, but it's by no means a bird in the hand.
It would probably be smarter to launch multiple payloads than have everything in one big payload, a fire can take out the primary and redundant supplies for example.
That said, throwing more money and gear against the problem will likely be the way to go. Besides, it doesn't actually have to be done all in one go, if the vision of SpaceX is that of mass production, they can launch a whole chain of Spaceship sized payloads towards Mars years before a human crew is sent that way, giving them supplies and whatnot on the way, in orbit, and on the surface. That'll require a lot of planning and automation though.
This is irrelevant and completely ignores the OP. We've had rockets capable of going to Mars since the 60s. More rockets do not solve the problem. Cheaper rockets do not solve the problem. Please read the article.
The article doesn't really lay out any particularly difficult, let alone insurmountable, problems. In fact we even had plans to make it Mars before 1980 in the 60s drawn up by the exact same man who got us to the Moon. The reason we're not a massively multiplanetary species already is simply because of politics. Nixon defacto cancelled the human space program in 1972. After that we had to wait for the economy to develop to the point that private entrepreneurs could viably send us back to the stars, and that's where we are today.
Had we maintained the political will though there's no real reason we wouldn't have had a colony on Mars decades ago.
We've had a spacecraft in orbit around Earth for a quarter century with many astronauts having years of experience up there, including long duration stays of up to about a year. The idea that we can't do space with duration is silly.
The ISS's orbit is not particularly stable and it needs regular reboosts which leaves everything else scheduled with this in mind.
Providing food and other necessary resources for a long stay would not be especially difficult, but there's no need for it, and that leaves more volume to store other stuff.
The ISS, despite being a 'station', is very small with a pressurized volume of about 900m^3, about 100m^3 less than Starship. The linked capsule design also means the real usable volume is substantially less.
They know darn well that we're simply not ready to sail into deep space. Radiation shielding, orbital manufacturing, computer autonomy, peaceful nuclear use, etc. Lots of needed hypothetical technologies, or requisite trust and social stability that allows for the use of those technologies are missing. They couldn't even get to work on it in some of domains.
We in the public all knew about that wall by the 1980s: the anime Mobile Suit Gundam(1979) literally begins with a space habitat declaring independence and creating a Bay of Sydney in Australia by gassing and throwing down a resisting habitat with a reverse swing-by at the back of the Moon. It's all overblown plot for a work of fiction, but also something everyone knows will happen eventually that no one has response strategies for.
So as the immediate "path forward", NASA put up a boathouse next to a small lake near the ocean under the pretense that long-term researches of effects of lakewater on human body are to be conducted, using surplus Russian cargo ships. We know what happens if we did row into the ocean with the boats we have or can launch from Earth, we die from radiation. They're not conducting researches, they're just trying to keep the boat makers alive until we sort out the trust problem needed to work on the work to follow.
Not a lot had changed on that front in the past few decades, other than that the aforementioned weak trust had started collapsing very recently. No way the world is going to trust the US with NERVAs and Lunar shipyards under the current circumstance.
Perhaps we have unrealistic expectations. There may be just no definitive solution for space radiation - only limited mitigation.
And yet Mars is the next logical step - not the Moon. The Moon's total lack of atmosphere, lower gravity and extremely long day, coupled with its pesky regolith make it an environment far harsher than Mars IMHO. Worried about the cold on Mars? Think again - lunar night is equally cold, and it lasts two weeks. During that period, human survival depends on two weeks of continuous heating power.
A night out watching some meteor shower in August? Think again - by staying outside on the Moon, you're taking a gamble with meteorites, and it's not just "at night" - it's all the time.
I don't think you get it at all. You're talking about throwing a biggest camping tent in history, but you're not staying longer than a month on Moon or Mars that way. I'm talking industrialized space settlement with own shipbuilding capacity.
To live on the Moon or beyond, you need a proper ship, and steel shipping containers with bathroom tiles, aren't. Those are at best boats to carry people to the ship, at worst cargo sacks. Not the ship. The ship has to be "radiotight", so to speak, and for that, they have to be built in low- or microgravity.
And that raises the question of politics: the world is not only ready to handle megaton sized ships on orbit responsibly, but moving away from such maturity fast.
We send spacecraft to deep space for decades on end, not just months. Oh, you meant CREWED spacecraft…
We are in fact far more ready for sending crewed missions to Mars than we were to sending crewed missions to the Moon when JFK made his Moon speech. We had only barely launched an astronaut on a suborbital flight at that time! And yet 7 years later…
On the one side, you have a point, but on the other... as the article mentioned, a moon round trip can be done in the span of a week, they can set the craft on a trajectory so that it has a free return even if the thing becomes uncontrollable. Not so for Mars trips, after a few hours they're committed to the trip. The article then mentions everything that can go wrong.
I'm confident that if they tried to launch a Mars mission with current-day technology now, the crew wouldn't make it. Nobody's ever been in space for that long, to start - yet Musk wants to deorbit the ISS, the only viable platform at the moment to even try and simulate a two year space trip.
“Current day technology” is sort of poorly defined because you can make new technology in one day. “Current tech” is a fake constraint, because even preparing for a launch in two years, you’d be developing new technology all along the way.
The annoying thing is that we could’ve been simulating long duration partial gravity using artificial gravity for decades, but NASA has refused to do so. For inexplicable reasons. If I had to guess, it’s due to the microgravity research community fiefdoms who have made a career of microgravity health effects and so don’t like the idea of directly addressing them using artificial gravity as it makes a whole career’s worth of work largely obsolete.
Not if you want it dependable enough to entrust a multi billion dollar project and several people’s lives to it.
People talk about the moon mission like some massive conquest of space, but we needed to get the fuck off the moon much past sunrise or astronauts would have cooked. It was based on extremely limited oxygen supplies and involved significant radiation exposure that was only ok because again we ran away from an extremely inhospitable environment before things went wrong.
Even today the ISS benefits from earths magnetic field, its space light not a true replica of a mars mission.
The "To the Moon" speech was made in 1962 when we had basically no knowledge of space. We'd only sent a man into Low Earth Orbit for the first time a few months prior. 7 years later we'd land a man on the Moon. And we'd repeat this several times over until Nixon effectively cancelled the human space program in 1972. Obviously 7 years is not one day, but I think 1 day was clearly figurative rather than literal.
The biggest problem is that people have really lost the ability to think big. There's always infinite reasons to not do something, and there will never be a perfect time. So at some point you simply have to choose to push forward. Like Kennedy put it:
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
> The "To the Moon" speech was made in 1962 when we had basically no knowledge of space.
Talk about hyperbole.
The moon mission has been prepared for before that speech took place. It wasn’t just starting from scratch and hitting the moon in 7 years, instead the speech was more public disclosure of a deadline that looked achievable but would hit after his presidency (1960 + 8 being less than before the decade is out: 1970).
The biggest problem is we already did the easy stuff. Playing tag with the moon is unbelievably easier than a permanent moon base or landing on Mars and getting back to earth.
Obviously we'd been wanting to go to the Moon before that speech, but there was no secret technology that we were just being coy about. We still knew nothing, had nothing and were in the process of figuring out what John Glenn's fireflies were during a flight where, if he wasn't such an uncannily good pilot, he probably would have died.
Saying we'd be on the Moon in 7 years was not something that looked achievable except to the most fanatical of enthusiasts. To the average layman it would have sounded no less impossible than me saying we'll have a man on Mars in 7 years from today. And landing on Mars in many ways will be much easier than the Moon. Not only is the terrain broadly more hospitable, but you have an atmosphere to enable aerobraking which simplifies both landing and braking and enables various options (like some sort of parachute staging or backup). The biggest and really only complexity with Mars is its distance. Outside of that it's easy mode.
No, NASA also didn't think it was possible at the time. There's an informative little paper here. [1] It only gets more informative from the first sentence, "Mathematical risk analysis was used in Apollo, but it gave unacceptably pessimistic results
and was discontinued." By the time of the launch to the Moon NASA's internal estimates were looking at around a 50% chance of success based on Gene Krantz's (mission controller) "Failure is Not an Option" book.
It was a mission they dedicated themselves to, and humans have this way of making things happen when we actually set our minds to tasks. A reality that's often been lost in modern times as we have mostly moved away from pursuing, let alone achieving, great things in the real world. One of the many reasons to get humans on Mars.
You’re confusing specific low odds of success for “didn't think it was possible.”
The Apollo missions got unbelievably lucky in that none catastrophically failed despite multiple close calls. However, if you’re willing to try multiple times the odds any mission being successful is much better than every mission being successful.
IE: Six missions landed on the moon. If they each had independent 50% odds then six heads is a long way from impossible ~1.6%, but at least 1 head is quite likely ~98.4%. I doubt we would have tried for a 6th mission after 5 failures in a row, but the point is definitions of success matter a great deal here.
Similarly failures improve odds of success in the future because you learn from mistakes and success means the system is functional eliminating some risks.
What I'm demonstrating is that we indeed knew basically nothing. There was no secret tech or expectation of success. Mathematical models doomed the entire idea to failure, and all the way up to the day of the launch people who spent years in a bubble of optimism still didn't really expect more than a 50% chance of success.
On that specific launch, which is another way of saying they believed the project had a very good chance of having someone walking on the moon. Failure there wouldn’t even mean people died, just that they didn’t walk on the moon and then safely get back on that mission.
The exact opposite position after 6 failures would be that the odds were good that at least 1 mission would have succeeded.
Obviously, things aren’t actually completely independent, but 6 lunar landings could have successfully been completed with a huge range of different odds. 50% odds of success on the first launch isn’t inconsistent with 6 successful launches or 6 failures, it’s just not enough data to really narrow things down.
On the contrary, we can easily get people there alive. What exactly do you think is beyond our capacity to send crew to Mars while still being alive? Crew regularly do year long expeditions on ISS (edited for clarity), with total radiation dose similar to Mars transit (and show no measurable effects of that radiation).
Again, I’m addressing the point “getting them there alive”. Unquestionably, we know how to get crew to Mars alive, and even for the full mission duration, radiation isn’t even in the top 10 of the hazards that could actually kill them during the mission. (It’s a long term hazard, comparable to lung cancer if you’re a cigarette smoker.)
The world record duration still sits at 438-days after 35 years. We limit people below that due to medical issues, suggesting no we don’t know how to safely do multi year space flight.
It’s possible people spending significant time on the surface of mars would recover, but that’s more speculation than proven.
The person who went 438 days was Valeri Polyakov, and he experienced exactly 0 ill effects from such, going so far as to intentionally briefly walk immediately after landing precisely in order to demonstrate that working on Mars after any transit would be possible.
Going beyond that is not really meaningful since that's far longer than any normal transit to or from Mars, which is the immediate target.
A young formally fit person being capable of making a few steps doesn’t demonstrate “0 ill effects.” He was vastly weaker upon his return as shown by making a few steps being considered a significant achievement rather than an actual sign of fitness like lifting a heavy weight and moving it around.
Living on mars at 38% earths gravity is believed to make things worse over time, so no you can’t just consider transit times independently. On arrival they would likely be fine inside a habitat. But trying to walk around in an Apollo 11 era 180 lb pressure suit in 38% gravity would be nearly as strenuous as walking around on earth and we’d like them to be able to work not just take a few steps and sit down. It’s possible to reduce that weight, but needing to carry oxygen tanks means there’s quickly a tradeoff between lighter weight and less time outside.
Now, for an extremely brief touch Mars and come back while burning a huge amount of fuel to make a shorter trip sure they’ll survive. But start talking a 3 year mission and things don’t look good.
Polyakov was 52 years old when he did his 438 day stay, and astronauts always take a couple of days to readjust to gravity. The overall effects of well over a year in space seem pretty comparable to a few months in space. It's just not a big deal. Those Boeing astronauts (both around their 60s) have been stuck on the ISS for going on 9 months now, and NASA's basically like ¯\(ツ)/¯.
Back on Mars they'll be able to quickly regain their motor skills coordination, as well as strength/bone density. So it will be effectively equivalent to Earth in this regard - actually it will be even better than Earth because the reduced gravity will probably send the overall adjustment time down from a couple of days to a couple of hours, especially with a normal duration transit.
Yep 52, as I said still young. John Glenn flew a useful mission at 77 that’s old. Strength will often peak around 35 barring significant injury. Show me a 52 year old who’s happy to make a few steps and I’ll show you someone with significant impairment.
> stuck on the ISS for going on 9 months now
Stick right next to earth and all the medical care they would want on landing. That’s the difference they don’t need to be functional on earth.
> regain motor skills and coordinate
Meaning they’re nearly helpless for a significant period on landing. That’s a massive safety concern and limitation on mission profile.
> as well as strength/bone density
There’s serious concern around retaining let along regaining bone density on Mars. 38% g isn’t a well studied environment here but it’s a long way from earth and likely to result in significant bone loss up to a point. Meaning their trip back is now significantly more risky.
No one has ever done a "years long" expedition to ISS, and the radiation flux in transit to Mars, in particular GCR dose, is much higher than experienced on the space station.
I’m well aware, just mistyped. The total equivalent radiation dose on a fast transit to Mars is less than some ISS expeditions.
Note that the magnetic field only deflects lower energy galactic cosmic rays which have a lower gyro radius than the real whoppers. The magnetic field is less important to overall radiation shielding than the earth’s atmosphere.
Ah, you’re being tricky. You’re ignoring the substantial trapped radiation dose on ISS (it is, after all, the total dose that causes the defects). That, combined with GCR, gives an equivalent dose the same at Curiosity altitude as on ISS.
In fact, look at Table 2. It shows that at ISS, the dose from the SAA is about the same as the GCR dose, so by ignoring trapped radiation, you’re manipulating the result by a factor of 2.
It does not; see the paper cited in my other reply to you. GCR dose is 1.5-2x on Mars compared to ISS.
The mention of "quality factor" here just begs the question. The reason we need research on biological effects of high-Z ion exposure is that it has a different mechanism of damage, not captured by that paradigm.
GCR /alone/, maybe, but it’s, um, strange to pretend the substantial trapped radiation dose on ISS doesn’t exist, as you’re doing here (Table 2 in your linked paper shows the trapped dose at ISS is about equal to the GCR dose at ISS, so ignoring trapped dose makes your estimate off by approximately a factor of 2). It is the total effective dose (including quality factor) which matters, not cherry picking one particular source.
The 2-3x uncertainty in tumor risk comes entirely from the heavy ion component of GCR. Please go back and re-read that section of my post if you need to.
You are again picking one part of the risk to cherry pick to exaggerate the difference. There’s a risk in non-solid-tumor cancers as well. You have to take the whole value.
It's because of this I like the concept for a one-way mission crewed by volunteer elderly astronauts. Why worry about developing a cancer 20 years down the line due to cumulative space radiation exposure, if your remaining life expectancy is lower than that, and you fully expect dying of old age in Mars anyway: https://web.archive.org/web/20101023054414/http://journalofc...
With the current worldwide ageing demographics, it would have the added benefit of providing an awesome feat to inspire seniors across the world to not go gentle into that good night, showing old age should burn and rave at close of day.
A significant part of that is because it’s much further from the sun.
A hypothetical 500 day mars mission is ~1 Sv optimistically which is something like 5% fatal cancer risk. A 3 year mission you’re well above that even before considering solar storms etc.
I think many would sign up for a mars mission especially as treatment improves, but there’s only so much wiggle room here.
I think this shows a fundamental, widespread misunderstanding of space flight in general:
> you’d be developing new technology all along the way
Aerospace does not work like this. Hardware does not evolve until launch, it is frozen in time to allow for testing and flight qualification for subsystems, and systems as a whole.
> We send spacecraft to deep space for decades on end, not just months. Oh, you meant CREWED spacecraft…
The track record for successfully landing on Mars isn't that awesome:
> Historically, counting all missions by all countries, there has been about a 50% success rate at Mars — and the odds of successfully landing on Mars are only about 1 in 3.
That isn't a very useful statistic - all you should really glean from it is that landing on Mars is hard. The US has done it 9 out of the 10 times it tried, so it seems reasonable that it would succeed.
It was done by NASA, who have a culture of triple/ quadriple checking and being very careful about mitigating risk in ways that may seem inefficient to some. I don't see NASA leading the effort to Mars in any meaningful way besides being a conduit for money from the treasury.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 is the most reliable rocket ever launched, by a rather wide margin. It's had 439 successful launches and 2 failures. NASA's Space Shuttle had 133 launches and 2 failures.
People who don't normally follow space may be confused by recent things re: Starship because the media is being intentionally deceptive, as usual. These are not normal flights. They are purely experimental flights, mostly expected to fail, to gradually work the kinks out of the system. It's the difference between hitting compile and launching something to production.
There's no reason to think the Starship won't be at least as reliable. The point is that this culture of double and triple checking everything certainly adds a bunch of bureaucracy, but doesn't necessarily translate to positive outcomes.
> We are in fact far more ready for sending crewed missions to Mars than we were to sending crewed missions to the Moon when JFK made his Moon speech
When JFK made the speech, it was in the middle if the cold war and there was a realistic fear that the "capitalist way if life" could be beaten by command economics of the Soviet Union in cutting edge science and rocketry, justifying the huge amounts invested in the space race. What is the impetus now? We're all about government efficiency in cutting the social-safety nets, scientific research, but we'll carve out a Mars mission "because it's hard"?
> We are, in fact, in the middle of a Cold War again
Which political order are we in an existential battle against; Russian-style oligarchy or or Chinese-style state-controlled capitalism? It appears we're losing on both those fronts, any "space race" to Mars would further emphasize the point, AFAIAC.
I'm sure this question has been addressed already, but why not try a 1-year moon base first? With a hot standby ready to either rescue them or drop a brand new habitat.
Not to mention launching to Mars from the moon is easier (in some respects, not all).
Missions to Mars are mostly planned with in-orbit refueling, so launching from the Moon would not be easier. The Moon in general is also a rather harsh mistress. You have 2 week long nights with absolutely brutal extremes of heat and cold ranging from -133C at night to 121C during the day, no atmosphere whatsoever, a fraction of the gravity of Mars, regular bombardment with meteorites and so on.
A Moon base will be a far harsher place than a Mars base. Mars is bizarrely similar to Earth - nearly the same length of day/night, similar axial tilt so similar seasonal patterns, nearly the exact same land area, and even calm weather. Notably the 'raging dust storm' in "The Martian" that was used to set up the crisis for the movie was one of the few things that was intentionally faked. The low atmospheric pressure on Mars means even the most brutal dust storm would feel like a slight breeze at most. It's also telling when you need to fake something to create a crisis, in an otherwise very hard sci-fi book!
Can they go more than 6mo without resupply? I am picturing a moon base that is only resupplied every year or so. I seem to recall that Mars only comes around every 18mo? I may be wrong on that. The ISS is not a ground based structure. So lots could be gleaned from having a base where astronauts enter and exit regularly. Also, ISS gets a different amount of sunlight. So I don't think there is a valid comparison.
To be fair, the vacuum on the moon is also not comparable to the windy atmosphere on Mars.
There's nothing especially exceptional about going long terms without resupply. One can easily prepare/cycle food, water, and other necessities for years ahead of time. The reason the ISS is constantly resupplied is twofold. The first is because its orbit needs regularly reboosting to stabilize it, so you'll always have craft going there to do that who also bring supplies.
The second is because the ISS is quite tiny. It has a total compressed volume of ~900m^3 contrasted against the 1000m^3 on Starship. Factor in its design of interconnected pods and the usable volume sharply decreases.
This is exactly what NASA has had on its timeline since the Obama era ("Constellation"). Trump #1 didn't like the slow timeframe (get to the moon faster - "Artemis"). Current plan from Trump/Elon ("let's scrap the space station and the moon and go to Mars ASAP") sounds like an even more accelerated abandonment.
I think a moon colony would be awesome. We could watch them in near real time. Learn what it actually takes to maintain a habitat while still having a safety net. Yes I know NASA and others have been researching that since the 60s anyway, but it needs a dress rehearsal with modern technology. Go to moon, prove we can sustain N humans, process the waste, recycle the water, make O2, etc. Do it on the lunar surface, then go big.
I do see Trumps side, that if they take decades to get anything done, maybe the project should be scrapped. But space-x has proven they can launch rockets reliably and cheaply, I believe we should use their innovation but to the moon before the red planet.
On the contrary, Constellation is from the Bush era. Obama tried to cancel it (with good reason, to be fair!), and then Trump started an accelerated Artemis, which basically combined both the Obama program of record with Constellation.
No, the biggest hurdle is having astronauts survive the journey (health and successful landing/departure of Mars). It would be over 3 years in space to round trip to Mars with current tech. We haven't had an astronaut in space continuously over ~1 year...the body suffers tremendously in a low gravity environment and you would have to handle SO many side effects and redundancies in life support etc.
Artificial gravity would address those issues. The big rocket (ie mass margin) also addresses life support redundancies (and allows you to use simpler, much more reliable methods like used on short duration spaceflights).
Yes, and we have never built artificial gravity and tested it in space, much less its effects on the body. I think this validates how rocket tech is not the limiting factor on reaching Mars.
No, the big rocket is the easy bit which has been done many times before.
Designing a mission involving 1000 days in space with no prospect of resupply is the hard bit. And it's the likes of ESA and NASA that have visibly been spending money on research and testing for that bit, not the very successful private launch vehicle supplier and LEO constellation operator.
It's easy if you use additional payload available with bigger rockets.
Just like invention of the rocket engine enabled all kinds of rockets, the ability of having a lot of payload available for the mission enables all kinds of solutions for existing problems. Robotbeat is correct.
You need to determine what those solutions are before you figure out whether additional payload space is even necessary. I mean, if you just want more payload than is possible with the current largest launch vehicle, you send more rockets (and get redundancy for the return journey as a bonus!). Of course, there are mission design complications with sending multiple rockets, but there are also mission design complications involved in astronauts spending three years away from earth or even LEO that don't get handwaved away with extra mass too...
> It really puts the frustration I have with Musk's constant "we're going to Mars" in context.
This is just the latest version of The Music Man and Marge vs. the Monorail.
Musk is serious about getting rich but not about going to Mars. It's always been a ploy to trick naive tech nerds into sacrificing themselves for the goal of "saving the world".
Tesla is a perfect example of this. A low-cost no-frills electric car would do a lot more for the environment than the vehicles produced by Tesla, which are luxury-priced and continue to (falsely) promise "Full Self Driving". The market is obvious: well-off tech nerds who are made to feel good about themselves that their luxury purchase, with cool technology, is "saving the Earth". (A similar strategy is used by Apple, by the way. Apple convinces people that buying a new iPhone every year or few years is "carbon neutral" and that it's somehow ok to eschew device repairability, upgradability, user battery replacement, etc.) We're told that the plan was to sell cheaper Teslas "later". It's always later. Yet other auto manufacturers have produced cheaper electric vehicles without the self-driving crap, and still for Tesla it's "later". So Musk has $44 billion to spend on Twitter but not on taking lower margins on Tesla vehicles?
We're told now, by Musk, that the biggest barrier to the Mars project is not, say, the gravity on Mars, or the radiation, but rather "the woke mind virus". Uh huh. Con man.
I'm not denying Musk's accomplishments, any more than I'm denying that Trump managed to get himself elected POTUS twice. But they're both con men, and their real goals—power, self-enrichment, self-aggrandizement—have never been the same as what they tell to their followers. They're surely among the best con men on the planet. It feels like all of the top con men are coming together now for the big heist, like Ocean's Eleven.
For sure; as the article points out, a viable trip to Mars requires a ton of investments yet, but Musk is currently helping dismantle NASA and the ISS, probably with the intent of sending more high value contracts to SpaceX.
Any stage in making a mars trip viable is a multi-billion dollar project. Actually arriving on or around mars has no value in itself other than the achievement and some science, but the runup will possibly make SpaceX the wealthiest company in the world. Or at least pull tens, hundreds of billions out of the US economy.
What you're saying doesn't even make any logical sense. Musk is the primary contractor for ISS contracts and given the shit show that Boeing has turned into it's safe to call him the exclusive contractor for ISS contracts.
And most of NASA's budget is not spent doing stuff, but on thinly veiled graft like the SLS which obviously will not be redirected to SpaceX because the goal isn't to achieve anything, but to spend money on interests tied to the people directing the spending.
> Musk is the primary contractor for ISS contracts and given the shit show that Boeing has turned into it's safe to call him the exclusive contractor for ISS contracts.
Just because they're doing fine now, doesn't mean we want to give SpaceX a monopoly in the future.
Reminder: SpaceX was not a thing a few years ago, and NASA throwing money at them could have been considered 'wasteful' when there was a solution that worked already. We are where we are now because the government spread the money around a bit: some of those 'bets' worked out, some did not.
The commercial crew program started in 2011, the same year that the Space Shuttle was retired. From 2011 to 2020 (when SpaceX first sent astronauts to the ISS) we were 100% dependent upon Russia. That's undesirable not because of Russia, but because it's plainly ridiculous for any superpower to not have the power to independently send humans to space! SpaceX also won the exclusive contract for commercial crew. Boeing managed to get this overridden with political connections forcing NASA to not only also accept their bid but to pay their dramatically larger asking price.
All that aside, I actually agree with you in principle! The SpaceX of tomorrow will not necessarily be the SpaceX of today. And having a space economy full of good healthy competition is a great thing for everybody, including SpaceX. But this was not a case of that. This was just an old dysfunctional company relying on some old corrupt politicians to butter some bellies.
Blue origin is doing pretty well. Got partly reusable rocket to orbit recently. NASA has no reusable rocket in development. This is fine, as the private market is doing it, but SLS needs to be retired soon. Maybe after the manned moon landings?
> What you're saying doesn't even make any logical sense. Musk is the primary contractor for ISS contracts
It makes lots of sense to torch a crowded market & lean-in on heavy-lift first-mover advantage. He will be the only contractor for a hypothetical Mars missions and will have a blank check as soon as the government commits to it - if he doesn't write the bill himself.
SpaceX will lap Blue Origin on heavy lift, while having NASA pay for R&D that will be used by SpaceX to go the asteroid belt and mine precious metals or whatever post-Mars yarn will be spun to make SpaceX a trillion-dollar company, realistic or not.
> Musk is the primary contractor for ISS contracts and given the shit show that Boeing has turned into it's safe to call him the exclusive contractor for ISS contracts.
From Musk's perspective, NASA is an unnecessary, inconvenient middleman. Eliminate the public middleman, and everything goes to private companies, in other words, to SpaceX. And it's not just about NASA; the current administration wants to privatize the entire government, including the US Postal Service, for example.
> And most of NASA's budget is not spent doing stuff, but on thinly veiled graft like the SLS which obviously will not be redirected to SpaceX because the goal isn't to achieve anything, but to spend money on interests tied to the people directing the spending.
Musk/DOGE currently controls all federal spending.
> Tesla is a perfect example of this. A low-cost no-frills electric car would do a lot more for the environment than the vehicles produced by Tesla, which are luxury-priced and continue to (falsely) promise "Full Self Driving".
Even getting all cars to be hybrids would be a huge win (either parallel or series / range-extended).`
Have you tried the latest version of FSD. I recently got a Tesla with it and it is about at the level of someone who has been driving for a few months. Has made one or two non-accident mistakes over the last few months but nothing serious. Sort of a dangerous uncanny valley I have to be careful of and not just forget I need to pay attention still (it tracks your eyes to make sure you look at the road most of the time but you can still zone out if you are not careful).
The proof will be robotaxis in Austin this June. I hope to be able to send my Tesla out to be an Uber to earn money when I sleep sometime late this year or next. Time will tell but we do have re-usable first stages and Starlink already and it is pretty great.
Maybe Musk has no interest in getting humans to Mars, but if this con man builds a rocket that gets cost to orbit in the $10/kg, con me some more please.
I think a lot of people just approaching this topic from largely ignorance are unaware of how hardcore Falcon 9 has actually delivered on its promises, in spite of being mocked by its competitors.
Starship is already well on its way to succeeding, in the big picture
Falcon 9 proved the concept of reusability. Almost everyone does not understand what Starship will do for space travel. Like Musk says, imagine air travel where you throw away the plane after each flight. That is where space travel was at. Hope to go to a space station or the moon in my lifetime (dream about Mars).
I don't see any problem in companies making huge profit. We live in a free market there is always an opening for new competitor to offer something at low price point that can be repaired. Nobody is stopping anybody to start such a company.
The reason nobody is able to compete because it takes lot of capital to bring new technology in market. If you cannot hire the best people you will not get the best technology. And no engineer wants to work at a company at pays less.
More profit buffers company from random market events.
We live in a capitalist society. Tesla/Apple are just a by product of the system.
Also, whatever Elon says is should be taken with a grain of salt. He is a salesmen. Hyping stuff up so that people buy.
> I don't see any problem in companies making huge profit.
I didn't say there was. But there is a problem in lying to people, claiming that your goal is to "save the US" or "save the Earth" or "colonize Mars" when it's really profit maximization.
> Also, whatever Elon says is should be taken with a grain of salt. He is a salesmen. Hyping stuff up so that people buy.
Just to play devil's advocate, Isn't he getting the ball rolling? Put aside his unrealistic timelines, at least he's trying to solve the rocketry part of the equation. I feel like this extreme hatred is unwarranted.
It really puts the frustration I have with Musk's constant "we're going to Mars" in context. Yes, a big rocket is necessary prerequisite for Mars. No, it is not the only problem you need to solve.
And also having worked with the reality of human spaceflight operations, we are just not ready yet to send a spacecraft into deep space for months on end. It's easy to throw out blithe statements that we "just need a big spaceship", or we'll use ion drives or some other such tech, but the reality is way more messy than that. We just aren't ready yet and we won't be for some time.