I, for one, am shocked that these guys couldn’t crowdfund their way to Mars. After all, it only cost NASA (frantically punching numbers into a 4-function desk calculator) $315bn to get to the Moon in current dollars. I mean, that’s only 77x total funds raised on Kickstarter to date. Perhaps they should have added the Kupier Belt as a stretch goal?
While I agree with your point on this, just to play devil's advocate I have to point out that a lot has changed since the 1960's. We have designed more efficient rockets, we have much better computer guidance systems, we have much lighter-weight synthetic materials that could save on fuel, etc. Conceivably if we were to go to the Moon today, it would be substantially cheaper.
That said, I did feel like this project was overly ambitious. Even with my previous points, rockets are expensive, and space R&D is pricey.
A better comparison is how much it has cost SpaceX to get to where they are (and still at least 3 years left to go for their Mars mission) - $2.5B in equity funding + $10s of billions in revenue over the last 10 years.
A lot of their initial revenue came from Air Force and other military contracts to launch satellites to space. GPS satellites, spy satellites etc.
E.g here's an article from 2016 about them launching a GPS satellite for ~$90M: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-spacex-launch-ula-i...
More recently they also launch private satellites. Iirc, Facebook has plans to launch their next satellites on a SpaceX rocket (an earlier attempt failed).
Conceivably if we were to go to the Moon today, it would be substantially cheaper.
This seems contrary to experience. In constant dollars, a jetliner today is 5-10X the price of a jetliner of the 1960s. Mass transit rail miles are >10X. The solutions may be better, but they don't seem to be cheaper.
Launch costs do seem to have fallen quite a bit in very recent history though. So maybe?
Is that 5-10x the upfront cost? What's the cost comparison in operating costs over the lifespan of the plane?
It's not that I don't believe 5-10x, it's that I'm pretty sure the net savings are on the backend, which is where a huge amount of airplane engineering has gone--better fuel efficiency, faster servicing, etc. I'm not an expert in this area, so I'm genuinely curious.
Jet technology is much more complex to meet environmental, safety and efficiency goals. Fuel was much cheaper in the 1960's, I wonder what the cost of a jet is in terms of it's operating life?
Rail and other ground works have got much more expensive as labour costs (in the developed world) have risen. I expect that rail costs in China are not 10x? I would be interested to know !
In term of moonshots I think that safety and risk would mean that a modern mission would be much more expensive than Apollo.
The fundamental Tsiolkovsky rocket equation and delta v required to get to Mars hasn't changed since the 60s. Some technology has improved, but the major difficulty is just lifting enough fuel out of Earth's gravity well to get anywhere.
It was a cool idea and I'm glad they tried it. It's easy to mock people going out and trying out something new. It was an interesting concept, even though I'd never want to be part of it. It got a lot of people excited, and hopefully, something else came of it as well besides excitement and the ire of some people on the internet.
It was obviously stupid and possibly a scam, and there's limit to how much "at least they tried, risk taking implies some failure" back-slapping one should indulge in.
Making wild claims _on the back_ of a cool idea and raising a bunch of money is not trying out something new. It was a scam from the start to the finish. Or if not a scam, atleast a very misguided wishful thinking not at all grounded in reality (of Earthly or Martian variety)
Or maybe up to $200B in today's dollars: "In 2009, NASA looked back at the cost of the Apollo program in its entirety, and arrived at a figure of $170 billion in 2005 dollars (or around $200 billion in today’s money)"
But each Saturn V launch cost a few billion dollars in today's dollars, so you could deduct ~40B if you only care about making a few launches.
Though still well out of reach of a privately funding company that has no real return on investment (it's not like an asteroid mining mission that could bring back a trillion dollars of minerals).
True — I simply added up NASA’s budget in constant dollars through the moon landings for maximum effect, but the Apollo program in isolation would have been less. (Still took an estimated 400,000 personnel to pull it off, though!)
To my untutored eye, your $200bn+ doesn’t sound out of the range of likelihood, plus or minus — you’re basically looking at an ISS with a number of novel capabilities, plenty of redundancies, and assurance that the crew won’t end up dead from hard radiation along or after the trip, so assume at least $150bn in engineering+build and another $10-15bn to get 500 tons or so of spaceship into orbit. Add in Martian lander and rover costs, new personal equipment, any novel work on propulsion, power, radiation, and life support ... what were these guys thinking, anyway?
I agree that the bankruptcy of Mars One comes as a surprise to no one, but a trip to Mars can be had for a lot less money than they Apollo program cost.
Apparently a good number did! Which baffles me... why would you want that? Sounds like a very odd death trap with no resources, economy, services, entrertainnent, ability to travel, etc etc.
To me, it would be very odd if no one wants that since human vary. Someone out there must be crazy enough to just abandon their life on earth to have a chance to set the first stone of civilization in mars (or on the other extreme, no longer wants to live on earth).
Make it more inhabitable for others, and maybe do a little research when not too busy just trying to stay alive? People volunteer to spend months stranded in a small research base in Antarctica, and they aren't even colonizing.
It was 30 degrees below zero in Chicago a couple weeks ago, and the experience was a lot like what life on Mars would be like. Spending nearly 100% of your time inside your habitat, and going outside is a big deal that requires a lot of preparation.
A week was enough of that for me. I'd still like to visit Mars, but I can't imagine I'd enjoy living in those conditions for the rest of my life.
Well, sure. I live in Chicago which has winters as cold as those places. It's a relatively balmy 25 deg F in Helsinki right now. Not a big deal.
But the polar vortex we just went through was other-worldly cold. It was warmer on Mars much of the time that week. Stores and schools were shut down. The man in that video would have experienced frostbite if not death from exposure.
Yeah-- show me that you actually have the ability to (literally) get off the ground, and a solid plan once we get there that doesn't involve me dying of starvation or asphyxiating, and I'd at the very least seriously consider applying.
Mars One didn't have that credibility, though. (I've seen very little to indicate that they were anything but a complete scam.)
I'd do it in a heartbeat, if I'd thought it had a chance in hell of succeeding. Everyone's going to die, why not do it while having the adventure of the millennium?
Sounds great. Give me your life savings and I'll put you on top of 10 tons of TNT [edit: less interesting, cheaper, less watch-list flagging choice] in a zorb ball with 500 pounds of hot dogs and 40 gallons of powerade. It's as likely to succeed as this was.
Why would you want a one-way trip out of a uterus onto this planet called Earth? It's ultimately a death trap. Oh, has resources, economy, services, entertainment and travel: for a privileged minority.
Earth is a death-trap since no one lives forever, some people just like the chance of doing something more substantial than working a 9-5 job every day and then dying on the same planet they were born on.
Why do people have children? To my mind it's a similar tradeoff: giving up a lot of your freedom, wealth, time, ability to travel... for the sake of a better future not for you but for the generation after you.
Yep, and as often happens when a scam involves science or tech, many journalists helped out by promoting their ridiculous claims without due challenge or skepticism.
Gosh, what a surprise. I'm sure this saga will convince the general public of the need to be more sceptical about pie-in-the-sky bullshit in the future, and nobody will ever fall for pseudo-scientific scams again.
Now, if you'll excuse me I'm just going to go for a quick jaunt on the Hyperloop.
Instead of offering dumb 1-way trips to Mars why not create round trips to the Moon and back? You can see Earth from the surface of the moon, see the lunar lander, drive a lunar rover, bounce around for a bit then hop in your module and head back home and live the rest of your life with a new perspective. More interesting than Mars, and doesn't take months to get there.
Not as simple as you would think. Mars has atmosphere for capture braking, for parachute landings. The moon requires lots of powered deltav to get onto the surface from low earth orbit, more so than mars iirc.
Going to? If you are sending a robot, yes mars can be in some ways easier (less deltaV). Getting back is a totally different equation. Musks tesla, with a heat shield and parachute, could have made it to the surface of mars. Putting it on the moon would require more energy, a bigger rocket.
Hmmm... Mars' atmosphere is <1% Earth's. So far, everything landing there has needed either retro rockets or (if light enough) elaborate airbags. I don't think a parachute is enough to keep the Tesla intact after "landing".
The atmosphere is not thick enough for a soft landing of heavy rovers, but it helps a lot with slowing spacecraft down into an orbit around the planet.
A spacecraft attempting that would have to scream past the surface at extremely high velocity and low altitude and get really lucky not to intersect with terrain (mars is not a perfect sphere). It would also require many orbital passes to lower apoapsis to merely circular orbit (i.e., a lot of time). It is probably not practical.
> It lasted about six months [to circularize to a ~450 km orbit].
There's still a lot of orbital energy left at 450km orbit around mars that you need to get rid of some how, and a parachute probably isn't going to do it.
That is how it is done. Mars landers dont do orbital insertions. They crash strait into the atmosphere. 1% is more than enough. The retro rockets for landing only cover a few hundred m/s, all vertical. The atmoshpere is what bleeds off the several thousand m/s of horizonal velocity neede for capture.
Some probes used no rockets. Parachutes and airbags can land a small probe on mars. That isnt an option on the moon.
In terms of delta-V, Deimos is about as far as the surface of the moon. In terms of travel time, it's a hundred times farther away. For humans that is a crippling difference, but for rovers not so much.
Mars is not Deimos of course. My point is merely that from a delta-V perspective, the solar system suddenly looks very different.
Downvoted by people who know nothing about space physics. Deimos is indeed just about the same distance as the moon in terms of energy required. With one exception. When approaching a multi-body system there are gravity-boost options for slowing a spacecraft. Not an option when aproaching the moon.
Yeah, I'm a bit surprised to get downvoted for posting an interesting and unexpected truth. I'd love to hear what kind of reasoning the downvoters have for this.
I'm personally quite fascinated by Deimos. It's far away and yet relatively easy to reach. Some people believe there might be quite a bit of water on Deimos. Put together, that might make it an interesting option for a base, for refuelling, if nothing else. Especially once Mars gets a colony and we start mining asteroids, I wouldn't be surprised if Deimos turns out to be a nice central point between the three.
Or not. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I find this a fascinating subject.
It is a tuesday. HN is full of millenials who think they know everything. Id bet most of the haters in this thread had to google "deltaV". The smart people show up on the weekends. Im only here because im visiting family and work doesnt have my cell number.
The Martian atmosphere is extremely thin — per wikipedia, "the atmospheric pressure on the Martian surface averages … about 0.6% of Earth's mean sea level pressure."
It is not really sufficient for capture braking / parachute landings with any efficiency or safety.
That's almost exactly backwards. For any decent-sized payload there's too much atmosphere to ignore (so you need heat shielding) yet not enough to exploit (so you need heavy rockets), parachutes rip off of big payloads... the skycrane was the least ridiculous device JPL could come up with for their rover.
The Moon is much easier, it's just a rock and some delta-V.
Lol, ignore atmosphere. EVERY mars lander has used massive aerobraking with a combination of shields and chutes. 99+% of thier speed was shed passively, without rockets. That Final touchdown is a drop in the deltav bucket. Check any deltav map.
Earth-moon surface = 2.66km/s
Earth-mars surface, with aerobraking = 1.06km/s +0.1 to .5 for final hover/touchdown depending on payload.
That seems like a much harder sell -- telling people they are going to be the first people to colonize another planet is exciting. Sending them on a sightseeing cruise around the moon (without even stopping) seems less interesting since even if the trip is "free" (paid by others), it's going to be risky.
Yes, of course, if it was safe and affordable lots of people would do it -- but you're not going to get safe and affordable space travel from an early spacefaring startup.
Mars One wasn't seriously aiming to colonize Mars. It was a glorified suicide mission. That isn't appealing to most people, especially compared to a trip round the moon you'd actually have a good chance of surviving.
Mars One didn't need to appeal to "most people", just enough people to fill their open seats. And they needed enough people to support their broadcast/merchandising rights based funding model, but I'm sure there'd be a lot of public interest in following a group of future mars colonists through training and the journey to Mars -- and I'm many potential viewers would be drawn in by the risks of the mission.
They claim to have had over 200K applications though I'm sure many of those people would have backed out if they were actually selected and thought through the ramifications of a one-way trip to another planet.
I think I'd be more likely to apply for a Mars One mission than a trip around the moon. After the moon trip you're back home again without much to show for the trip but the pictures... it seems a little like taking a bus tour where you're not allowed out of the bus and it takes 3 days to get there... and you didn't even have a unique experience since hundreds or even thousands of people did the same trip. But since space travel is still in its infancy, there's still a significant chance that you won't survive the trip.
The Mars trip had a much higher chance of failure (and no chance of return), but at least then you're part of a small group of people who are actually colonizing another planet. I think it's unfair to call it a "glorified suicide mission", since the goal was to survive, even if there was no way to come back again.
I have no doubt that it did - they are part of a very elite group of people doing something that literally no one else has ever done before and few could hope to do.
But when space travel is more commercialized and commonplace and anyone that can come up with $100K can buy a ticket for a trip around the moon and your instagram feed is full of people's snapshots from their moon trip, will it still have that mystique?
My grandmother was very proud of her first (and only) trip to Hawaii back in the late 1940's, she literally saved pennies over years to afford it, and said it felt like going to another world and she was a celebrity when she returned home to her small town. And even decades later she tells the stories from that trip (her only significant travel). But I've been to Hawaii about a dozen times, and while I enjoy it, it's not a profound experience that I'd save up for years and few people even care to hear about my trip when I come home, they just want to know if I brought them Macadamia nuts (the same ones I can buy at Costco!)
If you read the autobiographies of astronauts they talk about being in space as the thing that changed them and how they see the world, not the prestige of being an astronaut or act of going on a rocket.
Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14) said "From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty." I imagine that change in perspective is what going in to space would give you.
...but at least then you're part of a small group of people who are actually colonizing another planet.
I believe the key is economics: by the time the price of fuel is low enough to put Mars at the reach of private tourists, imagine how far mining, industry and even tourism would be in the Moon.
And... a rocket factory in the Moon would offer a different perspective for Mars travel.
So if technology was not there, what exactly have they been doing all this time? What did their daily work day look like? Did they just sit around for a few years then decide suddenly, yeah we should file bankruptcy now?
But unlike alchemy, space colonization is actually technologically possible, it's just prohibitively expensive and would likely take global cooperation to make it possible -- which won't happen without some clear extinction threat to Earth and given the response to the threat of global climate change, I'm skeptical that enough people would believe scientists claiming that we're a decade from a life-ending asteroid strike.
I'm surprised at the negativity on this on a startup accelerator's site where "a small chance of success" - Gimli style - means game on.
At my org, we've had one of these round 3 candidates give a talk about it and the interview and training process they went through seemed like no joke. It seemed to me that if you were to start a company with the final selectees, it would be hard to fail.
I think there are a lot of people on here who think that "conquering space" is a giant distraction from the many very real problems that exist here on Earth that can actually be solved by self-sustaining businesses.
I disagree. I think that conquering space makes sense from the perspective of creating a redundant copy of the human race (I say “redundant” rather than “backup” because Mars is too close to Earth to protect it against any sizeable interstellar events).
My issue with Mars One was that it didn’t seem very credible in achieving its goals and that worries me that now people have been burnt by Mars One, they will not take a more credible organisation seriously if/when one comes along.
I think such thinking is very short-sighted. Space exploration is necessary. It satisfies human curiosity, a very innate need among humans, one of the reasons why our species has been very successful so far.
That there are real problems that exist here on the Earth somehow does not preclude space exploration. Space exploration and solving problems on the Earth are not mutually exclusive activities. They can both be done in parallel and sometimes one helps the other and vice versa.
On the other hand, any argument which proposes that we should explore space because we are unable to solve problems on Earth is entirely foolhardy and fantastical.
>I'm surprised at the negativity on this on a startup accelerator's site where "a small chance of success" - Gimli style - means game on.
I think there are two different ways of interpreting 'a small chance of success'. The risk of a startup failing is generally because uncertainty is very high and competition tends to be fairly strong, not because the idea startups come up with are super outlandish or seem outright impossible.
But trying to crowdfund you to Mars is a little bit like saying "I'm going to build an AGI in my garage in the next 10 years".
And I think when it comes to actually bringing people into space, we need to talk about scientific expertise, health, safety and how much of this is a publicity stunt that, if it ever happened, threatens the health of people. We're far beyond a webapp here
Yet someone got paid and declared mission accomplished. Hilarious unless you were an investor. Maybe the engineers that worked at the company wrote really productive code in a really productive language. And the company offered amenities and benefits that were unlike anything else.
As long as everybody is investing their time, money and health as free choice I think it's a good thing and we should support them.
Of course it's a pipe dream. Of course people will dump sh*tloads of money for no results. Of course people will die if they really start doing stuff like this. But is there really a way to achieve such kind of goal without such sacrifices?
By that logic, we should celebrate Madoff for sacrificing other people's money. I don't think it's unreasonable for society to set limits on the scams and cons businesses are allowed to be based on.
Let's say you are right. Then we should discuss why Mars One is a scam and SpaceX isn't. And just saying "SpaceX has succeeded until now" is not really cutting it. Being a billionaire and probably having quite some parental and silicon valley network to make use of, Musk simply also had much better odds. But this is not something you or I couldn't have guessed when Mars One started. It's quite obvious.
So from what I can see you can't say one is a scam and the other isn't. Both are a gamble and the one succeeded until now while the other hasn't. A scam is, when they didn't even try to do anything. Or when they used the money to buy yachts instead of financing space base science. Is there something like this? If they sold a pipe dream and worked hard to try to make it become reality, imho, it's not enough to call it a scam.
Even Gerard 't Hooft, famous physics nobel prize winner and one of the ambassadors of Mars One said the schedule and budget were off by a factor of 10. [1]
Much too ambitious, especially with massive organizations (such as NASA) being unable to with much larger budgets and experience. Called it as a non-starter from the get-go. Good thing too, probably would have blown up on the pad and never left earth.
I think they could have got quite a bit of funding from crowd sourcing with lower ambitions, such as having a crowd-sourced satellite to go to Mars to conduct research. They could pay some external company to do a lot of the engineering and just act as a middle-man.
Like the cube sats, offer to take other people's research/commercial projects all the way to Mars and you have yourself a semi-viable investment project. For the backers, allow them time on the satellite, name stuff, something on the satellite that stores something personal to them (perhaps digitally and transmitting it back to earth with a massive time delay) - I think people would be interested.
I find it amazing that, even though Mars One looked so sketchy since the beginning, still 200,000 people applied for their program. That means that still many people dream about exploring space. If a solid project was launched, probably hundreds of millions of people would apply to travel and settle down on another planet. It makes me very hopeful.
Until a few years ago, medias were always very negative and described space exploration as a waste of money. But, it is getting a bit better. This may be thanks to Space X, the new race to the Moon (China), the landings on a comet (Europe) and an asteroid (Japan), the Indian mission on Mars, and so on.
Now, the project of replacing the ISS (end scheduled in 2020) with a permanent base on the Moon sounds more plausible (Moon Village).
One only needs to look at the death records for New England in the early period to realize that's not the case. An 90% mortality within a year is no stop for colonization if there is enough political will for it.
Definitely not comparable at all. We're talking about another world, one which is completely hostile to life. You need the best people to start the foundations.
> the water was undrinkable and they couldn't get food
It was just for a single group of people and only during a specific moment:
“the settlers, who first arrived on the island in May 1607, feasted on deer, turtles and sturgeon during their first year in the New World” “confined to their fort, the colonists could no longer hunt, fish or seek fresh water”
Siege conditions happened everywhere, not only in the New World.
That's mostly inaccurate and only true after they had been taught by the Indians how to hunt in the new world. The first year the pilgrims were in America was spent ransacking Indian villages destroyed by the plague for food. It wasn't until a friendly Indian called who renamed himself "the wrath of god" showed them hunting that they stopped starving. Again the death records for the early colony are fascinating reading.
That just showed how bad the alternative of staying in Europe at the time was, and how a class system, abject poverty, and the constant risk of death from war, injury, disease, and miscarriage (of justice, and the genuine kind) reduced the value of human life.
All cynicism aside, today’s developed democracies offer vastly improved lives. You may feel bored and adventurous, but I am unsure if those feelings can naively account for the motivation of the settlers.
There is also something to be said for the difference the actual experience would bring. It’s one thing to be alone on a vast green continent, ready to be molded in the shape of your dreams by your bare hands (ignoring here, as always, the existing, native, population).
Something tells me these settlers would have fared less well in a tiny aluminum sphere that requires you to solve differential equations to grow some salad.
Ya I'd definitely go. I have military experience, flight experience, and I am educated, but definitely not in the top percentages that astronauts are in. Even if there was a 90% chance of death the first few years, I'd 100% go. I'd get on a rocket to Mars now, knowing there's not support structure at the destination, and I'm sure I'd cry and be freaked out, but I would definitely get on that rocket. I hope one day I can.
There are missions well above 90% death rate which are very valid. Kamikaze attacks on wars. Chernobyl water release. And so on.
You wouldn't apply the same psychological tests on those volunteers as you would on a ISS mission. You'd just thank them as they go.
It seems bizarre that after spending thousands of years dreaming of the stars; the best place we can go is the bottom of another gravity well! And one that is massively less hospitable and pleasing than planet earth.
Maybe we should focus on building in orbit, and extracting resources from asteroids and moons. It could be profitable. And probably more fun to be messing about in low gravity than living in a tent on a wasteland.
200.000 started the registration, but only 2800 remainend at the end of the process. Problably because they where not willing to pay the fee of $73 Dollar.
My friend "applied," knowing full well it was a scam. He said that he regretted nothing, as it allowed him to fantasize about the journey more concretely. So perhaps it served the same function as pornography.
I think calling it a televised execution is quite an oversimplification. Mars One was deeply flawed, but the basic concept of a one way colonization mission to Mars isn't insane. A one-way mission is legitimately simpler from a technical perspective, and there are obviously plenty of people who would be happy to go. If it were done well, with a high probability of survival and prosperity (and really, only in that case), I would be fascinated to watch.
Not to mention, even if the initial mission were one-way, it's entirely possible that return trips could be possible within the lifetimes of the initial colonists. And besides, everyone dies; I can see why someone might choose a life of adventure (and pain, toil, monotony, etc.) on Mars over a life of relative comfort on Earth, even if I wouldn't make the same choice.
I don't really see the logic of "it'll be so much less costly and complicated if we make it a one way mission"
Why?
If we are able to successfully lower the $ per kg cost for cargo to LEO, and from LEO to mars transfer orbit, it will be a moot point. We're going to need something like the most wildly optimistic scenarios for full re-use of the SpaceX BFR, and huge numbers of BFRs or BFR-equivalents flying many missions to make a Mars colony a reality. Doesn't matter whether one-way or not.
Presuming that we have done so, and the spacecraft are fully reusable and the $ to orbit cost is low, what technical problem or economic problem would prevent a few launches from Mars on a return trajectory to Earth? For whoever was part of the initial colony that decided they wanted to return.
i'm not a rocket engineer, but at least some reasons are pretty obvious.
1. you need less than half of the fuel. Yes, you will need less fuel to take off of mars, but its still a massive amount of fuel you need to safely transport to mars, as its an exponential curve of fuel consumed per kg of fuel transported
2. you don't have takeoff infrastructure on mars. your space vehicle would have to be able to safely lift off without any external help.
interestingly, while it takes something like 9800m/s delta V to get from earth sea level, at the equator, to LEO, it's more like 3800m/s delta-V required from surface to achieve low orbit of mars.
I think most mars return missions presume the ability to produce fuel locally through something like the sabatier process, and not haul it from earth -> LEO -> mars transfer orbit -> mars surface.
Not my own, it actually came from a forum for Kerbal space program players who've installed a mod that changes things to a 1:1 scale model of the real solar system.
You may not have to take your return fuel from Earth to Mars. Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan is to first send a return vehicle to Mars together with some hydrogen and a plant that generates methane and oxygen out of CO2 and hydrogen. Let it work for two years, then send another one, while also sending the manned mission. If all goes right, the first return vehicle is ready for take off when the manned mission arrives, so they can evacuate right away if necessary. If something is wrong with the first return vehicle, they can spend their planned two years on Mars and by then the second return vehicle will be ready to take them home. Otherwise the second return vehicle waits for the next manned mission.
I'd expect it to get boring quick, just like watching rocket launches. New exciting images can only happen every so often. You probably want some drama or tension for better ratings. That's a pretty big mismatch of incentives combined with tricky power dynamic. I'd stay away from that unless that reality show is just a small side venture. And no way it could ever significantly finance a mars base in the first place.
Yeah, I agree. Like almost everyone else I assume, I'd watch the launch and initial landing. And I'd be interested in major milestones (but I probably watch more rocket launches than the average person too). But yeah, day to day I expect you're dead on that it'd be about as exciting as watching the live ISS footage: ie, not very.
Edit: Was my sibling that made the comparison to ISS, not the parent. Either way, apt.
Bone loss, changes in bone structure, muscle atrophy, and changes in the inner ear are just some of the suspected negative effect of spending extended periods of time in weaker gravity.
They'd have to spend hours each day working out to counter those effects. Their day would primarily consist of sleep and working out, with a few hours of time for everything else. That doesn't make for a good televised program.
On top of that, a minimum-energy launch window appears every two years and two months (or 780 days), making it way more realistic to send people on two year long missions.
> a one way colonization mission to Mars isn't insane
Actually, it pretty much is. There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet we don't do it because even that is borderline insane (at the very least, economically irrational). No rational person should take Mars colonization seriously until, at the very minimum, someone puts a colony in the middle of the Nevada desert that manages to sustain itself for a few years with no outside help. No one is doing that because it's both unsexy and stupid. But being sexy doesn't make colonizing Mars any less stupid.
Personally, I'm waiting for the "put rocket boosters on Mars and fling it into Venus, re-enacting the impact that created the Moon and altering Venus's orbit to be approximately opposite of Earth's (but still safely far away), thus creating Earth-2" mission.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadThat said, I did feel like this project was overly ambitious. Even with my previous points, rockets are expensive, and space R&D is pricey.
out: "SPACEX DESIGNS, MANUFACTURES AND LAUNCHES ADVANCED ROCKETS AND SPACECRAFT"
in: "SpaceX: We put things in space so you won't have to"
This seems contrary to experience. In constant dollars, a jetliner today is 5-10X the price of a jetliner of the 1960s. Mass transit rail miles are >10X. The solutions may be better, but they don't seem to be cheaper.
Launch costs do seem to have fallen quite a bit in very recent history though. So maybe?
It's not that I don't believe 5-10x, it's that I'm pretty sure the net savings are on the backend, which is where a huge amount of airplane engineering has gone--better fuel efficiency, faster servicing, etc. I'm not an expert in this area, so I'm genuinely curious.
Rail and other ground works have got much more expensive as labour costs (in the developed world) have risen. I expect that rail costs in China are not 10x? I would be interested to know !
In term of moonshots I think that safety and risk would mean that a modern mission would be much more expensive than Apollo.
Getting back is a different kettle of fish though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget#/media/File:Del...
The fuel itself is cheap, it's throwing away a rocket per launch that makes it infeasible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program
Or maybe up to $200B in today's dollars: "In 2009, NASA looked back at the cost of the Apollo program in its entirety, and arrived at a figure of $170 billion in 2005 dollars (or around $200 billion in today’s money)"
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186600-apollo-11-moon-la...
But each Saturn V launch cost a few billion dollars in today's dollars, so you could deduct ~40B if you only care about making a few launches.
Though still well out of reach of a privately funding company that has no real return on investment (it's not like an asteroid mining mission that could bring back a trillion dollars of minerals).
To my untutored eye, your $200bn+ doesn’t sound out of the range of likelihood, plus or minus — you’re basically looking at an ISS with a number of novel capabilities, plenty of redundancies, and assurance that the crew won’t end up dead from hard radiation along or after the trip, so assume at least $150bn in engineering+build and another $10-15bn to get 500 tons or so of spaceship into orbit. Add in Martian lander and rover costs, new personal equipment, any novel work on propulsion, power, radiation, and life support ... what were these guys thinking, anyway?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct
For example is a proposal that would send men to Mars for about 55 billion dollars over ten years. That even includes a return trip.
Edit: It also needs humor.
Large parts of adventures are basically boredom in poor conditions.
A week was enough of that for me. I'd still like to visit Mars, but I can't imagine I'd enjoy living in those conditions for the rest of my life.
But the polar vortex we just went through was other-worldly cold. It was warmer on Mars much of the time that week. Stores and schools were shut down. The man in that video would have experienced frostbite if not death from exposure.
Mars One didn't have that credibility, though. (I've seen very little to indicate that they were anything but a complete scam.)
I fucking would. It's the ultimate adventure and I have nothing here on earth.
Now, if you'll excuse me I'm just going to go for a quick jaunt on the Hyperloop.
There's still a lot of orbital energy left at 450km orbit around mars that you need to get rid of some how, and a parachute probably isn't going to do it.
Some probes used no rockets. Parachutes and airbags can land a small probe on mars. That isnt an option on the moon.
Mars is not Deimos of course. My point is merely that from a delta-V perspective, the solar system suddenly looks very different.
I'm personally quite fascinated by Deimos. It's far away and yet relatively easy to reach. Some people believe there might be quite a bit of water on Deimos. Put together, that might make it an interesting option for a base, for refuelling, if nothing else. Especially once Mars gets a colony and we start mining asteroids, I wouldn't be surprised if Deimos turns out to be a nice central point between the three.
Or not. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I find this a fascinating subject.
It is not really sufficient for capture braking / parachute landings with any efficiency or safety.
Also, mars takes more delta v than the moon.
The Moon is much easier, it's just a rock and some delta-V.
Earth-moon surface = 2.66km/s
Earth-mars surface, with aerobraking = 1.06km/s +0.1 to .5 for final hover/touchdown depending on payload.
I got my son a telescope last year and we have been watching the moon whenever we get a chance. It is another world.
They claim to have had over 200K applications though I'm sure many of those people would have backed out if they were actually selected and thought through the ramifications of a one-way trip to another planet.
I think I'd be more likely to apply for a Mars One mission than a trip around the moon. After the moon trip you're back home again without much to show for the trip but the pictures... it seems a little like taking a bus tour where you're not allowed out of the bus and it takes 3 days to get there... and you didn't even have a unique experience since hundreds or even thousands of people did the same trip. But since space travel is still in its infancy, there's still a significant chance that you won't survive the trip.
The Mars trip had a much higher chance of failure (and no chance of return), but at least then you're part of a small group of people who are actually colonizing another planet. I think it's unfair to call it a "glorified suicide mission", since the goal was to survive, even if there was no way to come back again.
Literally every astronaut who's been in to space says it profoundly changed them as a person.
But when space travel is more commercialized and commonplace and anyone that can come up with $100K can buy a ticket for a trip around the moon and your instagram feed is full of people's snapshots from their moon trip, will it still have that mystique?
My grandmother was very proud of her first (and only) trip to Hawaii back in the late 1940's, she literally saved pennies over years to afford it, and said it felt like going to another world and she was a celebrity when she returned home to her small town. And even decades later she tells the stories from that trip (her only significant travel). But I've been to Hawaii about a dozen times, and while I enjoy it, it's not a profound experience that I'd save up for years and few people even care to hear about my trip when I come home, they just want to know if I brought them Macadamia nuts (the same ones I can buy at Costco!)
Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14) said "From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty." I imagine that change in perspective is what going in to space would give you.
To me your argument sounds like "Nobody space-tourists to the moon any more, it's too crowded" ?
I mean, if they send so many space tourists to the moon that going there isn't noteworthy any more, their sales would have to be really, really high.
I believe the key is economics: by the time the price of fuel is low enough to put Mars at the reach of private tourists, imagine how far mining, industry and even tourism would be in the Moon.
And... a rocket factory in the Moon would offer a different perspective for Mars travel.
You just described 99% of all vacations taken by humans on the planet. People still go on vacations, and even go on the same trip multiple times.
http://loveandradio.org/2014/05/hostile-planet/
Colonization is inevitable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals
It's not cost effective, but it is cheaper than space colonization.
At my org, we've had one of these round 3 candidates give a talk about it and the interview and training process they went through seemed like no joke. It seemed to me that if you were to start a company with the final selectees, it would be hard to fail.
My issue with Mars One was that it didn’t seem very credible in achieving its goals and that worries me that now people have been burnt by Mars One, they will not take a more credible organisation seriously if/when one comes along.
That there are real problems that exist here on the Earth somehow does not preclude space exploration. Space exploration and solving problems on the Earth are not mutually exclusive activities. They can both be done in parallel and sometimes one helps the other and vice versa.
I think there are two different ways of interpreting 'a small chance of success'. The risk of a startup failing is generally because uncertainty is very high and competition tends to be fairly strong, not because the idea startups come up with are super outlandish or seem outright impossible.
But trying to crowdfund you to Mars is a little bit like saying "I'm going to build an AGI in my garage in the next 10 years".
And I think when it comes to actually bringing people into space, we need to talk about scientific expertise, health, safety and how much of this is a publicity stunt that, if it ever happened, threatens the health of people. We're far beyond a webapp here
Of course it's a pipe dream. Of course people will dump sh*tloads of money for no results. Of course people will die if they really start doing stuff like this. But is there really a way to achieve such kind of goal without such sacrifices?
So from what I can see you can't say one is a scam and the other isn't. Both are a gamble and the one succeeded until now while the other hasn't. A scam is, when they didn't even try to do anything. Or when they used the money to buy yachts instead of financing space base science. Is there something like this? If they sold a pipe dream and worked hard to try to make it become reality, imho, it's not enough to call it a scam.
Even Gerard 't Hooft, famous physics nobel prize winner and one of the ambassadors of Mars One said the schedule and budget were off by a factor of 10. [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/23/mars-one-pla...
I think they could have got quite a bit of funding from crowd sourcing with lower ambitions, such as having a crowd-sourced satellite to go to Mars to conduct research. They could pay some external company to do a lot of the engineering and just act as a middle-man.
Like the cube sats, offer to take other people's research/commercial projects all the way to Mars and you have yourself a semi-viable investment project. For the backers, allow them time on the satellite, name stuff, something on the satellite that stores something personal to them (perhaps digitally and transmitting it back to earth with a massive time delay) - I think people would be interested.
Until a few years ago, medias were always very negative and described space exploration as a waste of money. But, it is getting a bit better. This may be thanks to Space X, the new race to the Moon (China), the landings on a comet (Europe) and an asteroid (Japan), the Indian mission on Mars, and so on.
Now, the project of replacing the ISS (end scheduled in 2020) with a permanent base on the Moon sounds more plausible (Moon Village).
The first several waves will need to be the absolute best of us to have a chance of establishing a permanent settlement.
> By the time Lord De La Warr showed up with supplies in June 1610, the settlers, reduced in number from several hundred to 60, were trying to flee.
It was just for a single group of people and only during a specific moment:
“the settlers, who first arrived on the island in May 1607, feasted on deer, turtles and sturgeon during their first year in the New World” “confined to their fort, the colonists could no longer hunt, fish or seek fresh water”
Siege conditions happened everywhere, not only in the New World.
All cynicism aside, today’s developed democracies offer vastly improved lives. You may feel bored and adventurous, but I am unsure if those feelings can naively account for the motivation of the settlers.
There is also something to be said for the difference the actual experience would bring. It’s one thing to be alone on a vast green continent, ready to be molded in the shape of your dreams by your bare hands (ignoring here, as always, the existing, native, population).
Something tells me these settlers would have fared less well in a tiny aluminum sphere that requires you to solve differential equations to grow some salad.
Sort of like the old joke that "I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member".
A toxic environment, surrounded by a toxic environment.
Maybe we should focus on building in orbit, and extracting resources from asteroids and moons. It could be profitable. And probably more fun to be messing about in low gravity than living in a tent on a wasteland.
It actually looks to be closer to 2030: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#En...
2030 would give us more time to prepare an ambitious next step.
Knew it was a scam and did it anyway?
These are the people that need to have conversations with economists.
Here's a technical assessment of the viability of their plan: https://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2014/01/18/ask-etha...
Not to mention, even if the initial mission were one-way, it's entirely possible that return trips could be possible within the lifetimes of the initial colonists. And besides, everyone dies; I can see why someone might choose a life of adventure (and pain, toil, monotony, etc.) on Mars over a life of relative comfort on Earth, even if I wouldn't make the same choice.
Why?
If we are able to successfully lower the $ per kg cost for cargo to LEO, and from LEO to mars transfer orbit, it will be a moot point. We're going to need something like the most wildly optimistic scenarios for full re-use of the SpaceX BFR, and huge numbers of BFRs or BFR-equivalents flying many missions to make a Mars colony a reality. Doesn't matter whether one-way or not.
Presuming that we have done so, and the spacecraft are fully reusable and the $ to orbit cost is low, what technical problem or economic problem would prevent a few launches from Mars on a return trajectory to Earth? For whoever was part of the initial colony that decided they wanted to return.
i'm not a rocket engineer, but at least some reasons are pretty obvious.
1. you need less than half of the fuel. Yes, you will need less fuel to take off of mars, but its still a massive amount of fuel you need to safely transport to mars, as its an exponential curve of fuel consumed per kg of fuel transported
2. you don't have takeoff infrastructure on mars. your space vehicle would have to be able to safely lift off without any external help.
https://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png
interestingly, while it takes something like 9800m/s delta V to get from earth sea level, at the equator, to LEO, it's more like 3800m/s delta-V required from surface to achieve low orbit of mars.
I think most mars return missions presume the ability to produce fuel locally through something like the sabatier process, and not haul it from earth -> LEO -> mars transfer orbit -> mars surface.
Is that your own? If so, what software did you use to paint it?
I'd expect it to get boring quick, just like watching rocket launches. New exciting images can only happen every so often. You probably want some drama or tension for better ratings. That's a pretty big mismatch of incentives combined with tricky power dynamic. I'd stay away from that unless that reality show is just a small side venture. And no way it could ever significantly finance a mars base in the first place.
Edit: Was my sibling that made the comparison to ISS, not the parent. Either way, apt.
They'd have to spend hours each day working out to counter those effects. Their day would primarily consist of sleep and working out, with a few hours of time for everything else. That doesn't make for a good televised program.
On top of that, a minimum-energy launch window appears every two years and two months (or 780 days), making it way more realistic to send people on two year long missions.
Actually, it pretty much is. There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet we don't do it because even that is borderline insane (at the very least, economically irrational). No rational person should take Mars colonization seriously until, at the very minimum, someone puts a colony in the middle of the Nevada desert that manages to sustain itself for a few years with no outside help. No one is doing that because it's both unsexy and stupid. But being sexy doesn't make colonizing Mars any less stupid.
(OK, you can have a low-bandwidth, high-latency internet connection and one small shipping container every two years.)