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Comment by snrplfth | Hacker News Reader

Most of the cost of building a base on Mars is in the transportation. If it becomes possible to reuse the launch vehicles, then the cost falls. Ideally, it falls far enough that people (and sponsoring governments/organizations/companies) will be able to afford it on a pay-per-seat basis.

That's pretty much the whole of the economics. People and governments will jump at the chance to send humans to Mars, if there's a way to do it at a reasonable price.

The cost of the things that are necessary on Mars that will have to be shipped from Earth will be rolled into the ticket price. Hence the first few rounds of tickets will probably be quite expensive.

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> Most of the cost of building a base on Mars is in the transportation.

How exactly do you know that? The only experiment about creating closed human colonies was deemed complete failures and not to be replicated due to ethical concerns.

Source? AFAIK NASA is performing successful experiments of closed isolated colonies. http://hi-seas.org/

Hi-seas isn't self-sustaining in food, water, or atmosphere.

Hi-Seas is not closed loop. You're thinking of something more like Biosphere 2[1] Which had it's flaws.

We've never done this on any significant scale with success.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

A Mars colony doesn't have to be closed loop either. If you're bringing a large power source, you can make oxygen and fix carbon from the martian atmosphere. This is already part of the plan for the purposes of making fuel and oxidizer for the return trip.

Think of it more like a nuclear submarine with a greenhouse full of potatoes attached -- we can most likely do that.

Nobody's going to try to launch an entire mangrove forest on the first go. Biosphere2 is a failure of experimental design, not a failed experiment.

>Think of it more like a nuclear submarine with a greenhouse full of potatoes attached -

Maybe, but if we want to make Mars economically self sustaining the correct analogy is nuclear submarine that never surfaces and can totally self repair, including building new nuclear reactors and eventually replace all parts in itself.

They are not experimenting with sustainable biosphere. They eat prepackaged foods and are not completely sealed from their environment. They just simulate trip to Mars psychologically and test foods.

There was Biosphere 2 experiment few decades ago, but they could not keep the biosphere stable.

I'm skeptical of how effective a simulation of a trip to Mars would be.

There's just a huge psychological difference between knowing that you're in space, millions of miles from Earth or any kind of help and knowing you're in a simulation on Earth.

I suppose it's possible to fool people that they're in the former while actually being in the latter. But the ethical issues surrounding such an experiment would make it out of bounds for NASA. It might make for a fun scifi story, though.

Because building a base on Mars is going to require quite a high amount of mass shipped to the planet's surface, much of which will be simple supplies and materials, like food, solar panels, methane generators, and so forth. These things aren't expensive on Earth - they're just very heavy.

And a base on Mars will not be a closed system. It will continuously draw in raw materials from the surrounding environment. Mars is enticing for this because carbon dioxide and water are abundant, giving you the three most important elements for fuel and food production.

If you need to replace wheel on Mars rover or take a aspirin and you need to transfer it from earth, the cost will be enormous. Colony that can't support itself economically will collapse when outsiders stop supporting it. When the honeymoon is over, people don't' want to pay.

To make the colony self supporting, you need to transfer factories, chemical plants, machine industry, mining industry, etc.

> To make the colony self supporting, you need to transfer factories, chemical plants, machine industry, mining industry, etc.

Like they said, most of the cost is transportation. Which gets cheaper.

I mean, it has to! You simply cannot build the kind of permanent presence on Mars with disposable rockets and ships, unless you have some sort of super-advanced Von Neumann robots that can be sent once and set it up on their own.

You need to transport a seed factory.[1] The clever thing about the Mars Colonial Transport is that it includes solar panels to generate electricity as well as the machinery needed to produce methane and oxygen which serves as fuel for a return voyage.

The really cool thing about this is that methane can be used as a feedstock to produce many plastics and the oxygen can be used for humans to breathe.

The MCT is a prototype for a seed factory style Von Neumann probe.

[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories

I'm skeptical about how feasible it is to send enough solar panels to Mars in order to power a base.

Everyone's keeping quiet about the inevitable role of RTGs or fission reactors in early human Mars exploration.

Solar will come either via an abundance of payloads delivered to Mars as things ramp up, or via panels produced on Mars itself.

Musk briefly commented on nuclear during the MCT announcement. He said it was ultimately dependent on environmentalists on Earth allowing it.

Other viable methods for power generation that are amenable to in-situ production include geothermal heat loops and solar concentrators.

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