Well, I am in favor of assisted suicide so I can't hold that position and also argue for people to be prevented from going to Mars , each person should decide freely the manner in which they want to go.
> When the Space Shuttle retired in 2011, stranding the USA without access to orbit, it took a retirement tour around the country. As it was carted from city to city the images played out nation-wide in funereal Americana. Despite the uplifting rhetoric and crowds, it was clear on TV we were watching a casket be carried out, and it seemed then inevitable my generation would be Earth-bound our whole lives.
The Space Shuttle was a metaphorical casket, because in 135 missions, it failed twice, killing all on board.
Are people nostalgic about the original de Havilland Comet? Were they disappointed the Boeing 737 MAX was grounded until it was redesigned?
> and it seemed then inevitable my generation would be Earth-bound our whole lives.
Yeah, by that time Falcon-9 already flew (first flight on June 4, 2010), and those tiny little green men on the other side of the pond(s) were routinely sending people - including Americans - to ISS.
Author’s reasoning seems far fetched. I would believe that SpaceX will go to mars in the next 5 years. But to think that building a city on mars is a simple next step seems silly
Maybe establish a self-sufficient moonbase first? But before that, establish a self-sufficient (modulo raw materials) orbital base. But before that, establish a self-sufficient undersea base. But before that, establish a self-sufficient base at the South Pole. But before that, establish a self-sufficient base in the Atacama Desert. But before that, establish a self-sufficient base in Arizona.
A self-sufficient base in Arizona is beyond our current capability. Good luck with Mars.
While not perfect, BioSphere 2 in Arizona did pretty well considering it was a first of its kind (or second if you count Earth). Wonder how well another attempt would be with modern tech and the lessons learned from the past missions.
All they did was try to live in it, sealed off, for two years. That failed because, it turns out, concrete absorbs oxygen for months after it hardens. Nobody knew that, before. They didn't manufacture anything, not even cloth.
Mars will be thousands of times harder, with correspondingly-many likely-fatal lessons. Anybody who doubts that even a little is not somebody you want on the project.
I don’t think thousands of times harder rings true, conditioned on having accessible shipments of new goods. On a slow but regular scale. A colony wouldn’t even need to be self sufficient. Just protected from the elements.
I have no doubt it’s very difficult, but thousands of times harder? Seems extreme to me.
I can name a great number of problems obviously, but at the end of the day, most of these challenges are bypassed with frequent supply drops that include massive steel edifices.
Oxygen? Send a fuck ton of the candles they burn on nuclear subs
Food? Send a fuck ton of food
Water? Probably better ways to do this but, fuck it, send a fuck ton of water.
Power? Send them a bunch of solar panels and batteries. 100x daily needs.
Shelter from radiation temperature and weather? Go sit in the starships. Stack them together. They’re not going anywhere. Send 50x the space suits. 50x the rovers. 50x the fruit loops.
The hard part of colonizing a planet is the self sufficiency. If you can just keep the supplies coming then it’s not all that different from the ISS. You can try and build your moxie units if you want, or your Martian farms, or whatever, but there’s not much in the way of mission critical goals. Mars’ dust storms aren’t nudging the starship heavy.
> You have only thought of the most obvious problems,
Enlighten me on what the critical issues beyond food, water, power, shelter, and oxygen are then. And make sure it’s not solveable with a single shipment of 100 Tons of the most obvious physical pre made solution on earth.
> and your solution to each is the least manageable that could be imagined
That’s ok if the cost to implement them is magnitudes lower than previous space efforts, e.g. the space shuttle and the ISS. I’m aware I’m lowballing the effort here. I’m sure smarter engineers can come up with smarter systems. But if we can afford to just send the stuff we need in bulk, that does work and requires little innovation. A cost effective, low risk method is fine.
I don’t know why you mentioned the sabatier process. I said the solution was ship them a fuck ton of water. Here. 100 Tons of water. Stupidly high amount. Dumbass hyperbolic example. But that’s one starship heavy in caravan of hundreds of shipments back of the enevelope says that’s drinking water for 900 humans’ entire lifetimes.
*not doing the math to check the volume capacity of starship heavy, just the mass. I don’t care if I’m off by multiple orders of magnitude. This is the lowest dumbest solution and the expectation should be that a much better job is done.
Or if we have the power to terraform Mars, and not just be stuck in a space colony out there, but be able to explore the planet freely, why not just terraform Earth back to Earth [1]?
There is no chance it happens by 2030. However, that will probably be around when we establish the first lunar city, which is still pretty damn cool. Then a Martian city in 2040 or so.
Seems mostly reasonable. Except maybe labeling progressive (what's the definition of the progress, again?) democrats the ones who wouldn't go to space - ?..
More specific - we know how to fly to Mars every 22 months or so. What could prevent SpaceX launching the first unmanned Starship to Mars soon? Stubbornness of FAA refusing to allow enough Starship launches to fuel up one of them for the flight? Last time checked, technical problems were still bigger than navigating bureaucracy - did things change over the last few years? Asking because technical problems with getting Spaceship to LEO are getting solved like on schedule.
Current significant open technical issues that I know of for Starship are 1.) Raptor engine production being significantly behind on schedule (granted, the schedule is aggressive, but still behind), and 2.) TPS tiles disconnecting from Starship at moments they shouldn't.
Issue 1 will likely only delay development and deployment of Starship (production isn't halted), but issue 2 can make-or-break the business model if no solution is found.
As opposed to regulatory issues which are generally (!) a case of putting in the effort and time, with a relatively well-known time path to get permission to e.g. launch to LEO or Mars; this has been done before and will be done many times after. The only unkown issues that I believe are still open are mostly related to range and environmental issues, but I don't think those will be the limiting factor to getting the Starship launch vehicle ready for production payloads.
While still unknown, issue 2 is hard to imagine breaking the whole plan. TPS were used before - Starship is bigger than Shuttle, but the principal possibility is solidly here at least. Again, it's hard to imagine Elon explaining in half a year the absence of launches by the inability to invent a good attachment of TPS. Let's wait and see.
Regulatory issues may have a hiccup on the frequency of heavy flights - liquid propellants in Starship don't have infinite shelf life on LEO, so refueling Starships will need to be launched promptly, and that's something which was never done by humanity - the combination of flight frequency and the size of payload (fuel). So FAA may object. Worse, something bad could happen - like a failure of a Starship, requiring attention of designers again, which would temporarily put on hold all other Starship flights. However, even these issues have low product of probability and severity, so Mars flights are still possible soon.
Again, we'll see soon. Now that the wait time to results is compressed from decades to months, we need to adjust to this unusual luxury.
> Except maybe labeling progressive (what's the definition of the progress, again?) democrats the ones who wouldn't go to space - ?..
Progressive democrats may not be against space travel itself, but they are certainly against billionaires and corporations with large market caps. I have also heard a lot of progressives decry Musk for his goals to colonize mars when he could be spending his money to fight climate change or racial inequality on earth.
> they are certainly against billionaires and corporations with large market caps
True, but maybe we're talking about different definitions of "large market caps".
Lately I'm seriously impressed by the apparent shortsightedness of VCs who aren't able to find and fund a reasonable SpaceX competitor. A few companies make promising moves - Orbital, Sierra Nevada, Rocket Lab, Masten Space - but all achievements are just too modest. One would think that 17 years after X Prize was won, VCs would be more fearful of missing out. And of course it's hard to believe that the deficit on the founders' side - while externally impressive, SpaceX mostly does something well known to the modern space engineers, with perhaps Starlink being the largest "side application".
Casey Handmers, https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/ , tries to bring attention to the achievements, but maybe stopping a bit short when not discussing possible alternatives of the next years or decades. Of course, one may wonder what SpaceX would do next - by the time Starship lands first time successfully on Mars, it could be seen roughly as the first flight of Falcon Heavy or first landing of Falcon-9 booster.
> a lot of progressives decry Musk for his goals to colonize mars when he could be spending his money to fight climate change or racial inequality on earth
This is a long-established complaint to space developments as a whole. It was given a rather good answer - among other things, space development makes everybody on Earth richer right now. Don't think it's particularly enlightened people who would still make objections on these grounds.
I know several Bernie's supporters who're serious Elon's fans and quite knowledgeable in rocketry. At this point I suspect the anti-billionaires angle is at least somewhat misplaced.
The tipping point that made me unsubscribe from Bernie's mailing list was when he used billionaires spending their money on launch vehicle R&D to make a personal attack:
"Jeff Bezos has so much money that he says the only way he could possibly spend it all is on space travel. Space travel. Have you ever heard of such a thing? It is absolutely absurd."
As someone who has heard of such a thing, it seems absurd and shortsighted to criticize someone for doing work that helps bring us closer to being a multiplanetary species. Even though I'm sure there's an ego aspect, I think it's still laudable that Bezos is blowing his fortune on space travel instead of buying yachts full of cocaine.
I don't think the anti-space rhetoric is unique to Bernie either. Representative John Culberson was a huge proponent of exploring the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. He's played a pivotal role in funding the Europa Clipper mission. His opponent ran attack ads criticizing him for funding space exploration. Her ad said that she'd focus on spending more money on local pork projects instead of hunting for extraterrestrial life.
I would love for human settlements to happen faster, but the #1 issue is food. Mars does not have living soil and packaged food is not sustainable. Yes, we can probably engineer a way to get there and back, but what level of health will the returning astronauts be in? It's the robots until we figure that out.
We have hydroponics. We can create soil over time, modeling the same cycle we have on Earth. This makes the problem more quantitative, rather than qualitative.
The bigger problems are still radiation and lack of (Earth) weight. For both we have ideas, some data and results, and both need to be addressed more. Other issues, like meteoroids on the way there and back again, or lack of resources, seem to be of a lesser caliber.
People generally underestimate how hard is to settle mars comparing to moon. Getting there is the easiest part. Entirely sustainable colony on its own have never been achiewed before. Projects like biosphere2 failed miserably. On current nasa budget even 2030's are even out of reach for a self sustaining colony. Hundreds of bilions are needed. It eon't happen without big push.
> Entirely sustainable colony on its own have never been achiewed before.
First, we don't need to have entirely sustainable colony initially. We can send serious amounts of supplies and rotate crews for a long time - ISS, while being vastly simpler, works for two decades.
Second, colonization of islands and whole continents was exactly that - entirely sustainable colonies, at least eventually.
Settlement of islands and continents on Earth had the benefit of an adequate life support system that had far fewer catastrophic failure modes than anything we've come up with right now.
> If the oxygenator breaks down, I'll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I'll die of thirst. If the Hab beaches, I'll just kind of implode. If none of those things happen. I'll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So yeah. I'm fucked.
It has to be sustainable enough to survive without relatively immediate access to Earth's resources. The moon is only a few days away in an emergency. Mars is months away. The ISS works because it gets fairly constant supplies from Earth. It is vastly from self-sustaining.
> The ISS works because it gets fairly constant supplies from Earth. It is vastly from self-sustaining.
Right. Analogies only go so far.
> Settlement of islands and continents on Earth had the benefit of an adequate life support system that had far fewer catastrophic failure modes than anything we've come up with right now.
Looks like we agree that "it was never done before" is exaggeration.
> If the oxygenator breaks down, I'll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I'll die of thirst. If the Hab beaches, I'll just kind of implode. If none of those things happen. I'll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So yeah. I'm fucked.
True, but. If asteroid meets the Earth, if supervolcanoes will misbehave, if particularly nasty virus will get to humans etc. we're toast. The thing is, all those things don't happen often - even ISS works for decades, with relatively minor glitches.
So - if oxygenator breaks down, as Neil Armstrong would say, we'll fix it. If water reclaimer breaks down, we'll invent a dehumidifier. If the external wall will develop a break, the inner one will serve until the outer one is fixed. We may die - but we also may prosper.
51 comments
[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadErr, hmm…
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/HighStakesSpaceX/
> When the Space Shuttle retired in 2011, stranding the USA without access to orbit, it took a retirement tour around the country. As it was carted from city to city the images played out nation-wide in funereal Americana. Despite the uplifting rhetoric and crowds, it was clear on TV we were watching a casket be carried out, and it seemed then inevitable my generation would be Earth-bound our whole lives.
The Space Shuttle was a metaphorical casket, because in 135 missions, it failed twice, killing all on board.
Are people nostalgic about the original de Havilland Comet? Were they disappointed the Boeing 737 MAX was grounded until it was redesigned?
Yeah, by that time Falcon-9 already flew (first flight on June 4, 2010), and those tiny little green men on the other side of the pond(s) were routinely sending people - including Americans - to ISS.
Label that as a failed metaphor?
A self-sufficient base in Arizona is beyond our current capability. Good luck with Mars.
Mars will be thousands of times harder, with correspondingly-many likely-fatal lessons. Anybody who doubts that even a little is not somebody you want on the project.
I don’t think thousands of times harder rings true, conditioned on having accessible shipments of new goods. On a slow but regular scale. A colony wouldn’t even need to be self sufficient. Just protected from the elements.
I have no doubt it’s very difficult, but thousands of times harder? Seems extreme to me.
Anybody useful would be able to list dozens of debilitating problems to prevent before even starting research.
Oxygen? Send a fuck ton of the candles they burn on nuclear subs
Food? Send a fuck ton of food
Water? Probably better ways to do this but, fuck it, send a fuck ton of water.
Power? Send them a bunch of solar panels and batteries. 100x daily needs.
Shelter from radiation temperature and weather? Go sit in the starships. Stack them together. They’re not going anywhere. Send 50x the space suits. 50x the rovers. 50x the fruit loops.
The hard part of colonizing a planet is the self sufficiency. If you can just keep the supplies coming then it’s not all that different from the ISS. You can try and build your moxie units if you want, or your Martian farms, or whatever, but there’s not much in the way of mission critical goals. Mars’ dust storms aren’t nudging the starship heavy.
They tried to use the Sabatier process on the ISS, and it failed for unpredicted reasons.
So, again, you and everybody who thinks like you would be bad choices to have involved.
Enlighten me on what the critical issues beyond food, water, power, shelter, and oxygen are then. And make sure it’s not solveable with a single shipment of 100 Tons of the most obvious physical pre made solution on earth.
> and your solution to each is the least manageable that could be imagined
That’s ok if the cost to implement them is magnitudes lower than previous space efforts, e.g. the space shuttle and the ISS. I’m aware I’m lowballing the effort here. I’m sure smarter engineers can come up with smarter systems. But if we can afford to just send the stuff we need in bulk, that does work and requires little innovation. A cost effective, low risk method is fine.
I don’t know why you mentioned the sabatier process. I said the solution was ship them a fuck ton of water. Here. 100 Tons of water. Stupidly high amount. Dumbass hyperbolic example. But that’s one starship heavy in caravan of hundreds of shipments back of the enevelope says that’s drinking water for 900 humans’ entire lifetimes.
*not doing the math to check the volume capacity of starship heavy, just the mass. I don’t care if I’m off by multiple orders of magnitude. This is the lowest dumbest solution and the expectation should be that a much better job is done.
Which we can do in Arizona na.
Which we can do in the desert.
Which we can do at the south pole.
Which we can do underwater.
Which we can do in orbit.
The only thing we haven't done yet is a moonbase. Which is being planned. Astronauts are taking a look at the likely Artemis moon base site in 2024.
Not suggesting their time frame is realistic, just trying to point out your premise is wrong.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XdkKMhAdnA&t=458s (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
More specific - we know how to fly to Mars every 22 months or so. What could prevent SpaceX launching the first unmanned Starship to Mars soon? Stubbornness of FAA refusing to allow enough Starship launches to fuel up one of them for the flight? Last time checked, technical problems were still bigger than navigating bureaucracy - did things change over the last few years? Asking because technical problems with getting Spaceship to LEO are getting solved like on schedule.
Issue 1 will likely only delay development and deployment of Starship (production isn't halted), but issue 2 can make-or-break the business model if no solution is found.
As opposed to regulatory issues which are generally (!) a case of putting in the effort and time, with a relatively well-known time path to get permission to e.g. launch to LEO or Mars; this has been done before and will be done many times after. The only unkown issues that I believe are still open are mostly related to range and environmental issues, but I don't think those will be the limiting factor to getting the Starship launch vehicle ready for production payloads.
Regulatory issues may have a hiccup on the frequency of heavy flights - liquid propellants in Starship don't have infinite shelf life on LEO, so refueling Starships will need to be launched promptly, and that's something which was never done by humanity - the combination of flight frequency and the size of payload (fuel). So FAA may object. Worse, something bad could happen - like a failure of a Starship, requiring attention of designers again, which would temporarily put on hold all other Starship flights. However, even these issues have low product of probability and severity, so Mars flights are still possible soon.
Again, we'll see soon. Now that the wait time to results is compressed from decades to months, we need to adjust to this unusual luxury.
Progressive democrats may not be against space travel itself, but they are certainly against billionaires and corporations with large market caps. I have also heard a lot of progressives decry Musk for his goals to colonize mars when he could be spending his money to fight climate change or racial inequality on earth.
True, but maybe we're talking about different definitions of "large market caps".
Lately I'm seriously impressed by the apparent shortsightedness of VCs who aren't able to find and fund a reasonable SpaceX competitor. A few companies make promising moves - Orbital, Sierra Nevada, Rocket Lab, Masten Space - but all achievements are just too modest. One would think that 17 years after X Prize was won, VCs would be more fearful of missing out. And of course it's hard to believe that the deficit on the founders' side - while externally impressive, SpaceX mostly does something well known to the modern space engineers, with perhaps Starlink being the largest "side application".
Casey Handmers, https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/ , tries to bring attention to the achievements, but maybe stopping a bit short when not discussing possible alternatives of the next years or decades. Of course, one may wonder what SpaceX would do next - by the time Starship lands first time successfully on Mars, it could be seen roughly as the first flight of Falcon Heavy or first landing of Falcon-9 booster.
This is a long-established complaint to space developments as a whole. It was given a rather good answer - among other things, space development makes everybody on Earth richer right now. Don't think it's particularly enlightened people who would still make objections on these grounds.
"Jeff Bezos has so much money that he says the only way he could possibly spend it all is on space travel. Space travel. Have you ever heard of such a thing? It is absolutely absurd."
As someone who has heard of such a thing, it seems absurd and shortsighted to criticize someone for doing work that helps bring us closer to being a multiplanetary species. Even though I'm sure there's an ego aspect, I think it's still laudable that Bezos is blowing his fortune on space travel instead of buying yachts full of cocaine.
I don't think the anti-space rhetoric is unique to Bernie either. Representative John Culberson was a huge proponent of exploring the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. He's played a pivotal role in funding the Europa Clipper mission. His opponent ran attack ads criticizing him for funding space exploration. Her ad said that she'd focus on spending more money on local pork projects instead of hunting for extraterrestrial life.
He’s doing both.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/10/business/jeff-bezos-yacht/ind...
The bigger problems are still radiation and lack of (Earth) weight. For both we have ideas, some data and results, and both need to be addressed more. Other issues, like meteoroids on the way there and back again, or lack of resources, seem to be of a lesser caliber.
First, we don't need to have entirely sustainable colony initially. We can send serious amounts of supplies and rotate crews for a long time - ISS, while being vastly simpler, works for two decades.
Second, colonization of islands and whole continents was exactly that - entirely sustainable colonies, at least eventually.
> If the oxygenator breaks down, I'll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I'll die of thirst. If the Hab beaches, I'll just kind of implode. If none of those things happen. I'll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So yeah. I'm fucked.
It has to be sustainable enough to survive without relatively immediate access to Earth's resources. The moon is only a few days away in an emergency. Mars is months away. The ISS works because it gets fairly constant supplies from Earth. It is vastly from self-sustaining.
Right. Analogies only go so far.
> Settlement of islands and continents on Earth had the benefit of an adequate life support system that had far fewer catastrophic failure modes than anything we've come up with right now.
Looks like we agree that "it was never done before" is exaggeration.
> If the oxygenator breaks down, I'll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I'll die of thirst. If the Hab beaches, I'll just kind of implode. If none of those things happen. I'll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So yeah. I'm fucked.
True, but. If asteroid meets the Earth, if supervolcanoes will misbehave, if particularly nasty virus will get to humans etc. we're toast. The thing is, all those things don't happen often - even ISS works for decades, with relatively minor glitches.
So - if oxygenator breaks down, as Neil Armstrong would say, we'll fix it. If water reclaimer breaks down, we'll invent a dehumidifier. If the external wall will develop a break, the inner one will serve until the outer one is fixed. We may die - but we also may prosper.