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Comment by HillRat | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

question..how does spacex make revenue? or I might just google...

People pay them to put things into space

Should be their moto.

out: "SPACEX DESIGNS, MANUFACTURES AND LAUNCHES ADVANCED ROCKETS AND SPACECRAFT"

in: "SpaceX: We put things in space so you won't have to"

Don’t they sell space launch services?

They are in the commercial space launch business. They deliver satellites and other payloads to orbit and the ISS.

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.

The fuel is minimal part of the cost - putting 100ton of it into LEO even at $10K/kg is just $1B. And with BFR it will be even much cheaper than that.

$1B is a lot of money and LEO is a long way from mars.

LEO is about half way to Mars

Looks like more than halfway. Assuming you can arrange aerobraking on Mars, soft-landing on Mars is slightly nearer than soft-landing on the moon!

Getting back is a different kettle of fish though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget#/media/File:Del...

That difficulty changes substabtially if you have rapidly reusable rockets.

The fuel itself is cheap, it's throwing away a rocket per launch that makes it infeasible.

If you're counting just the Apollo program, your numbers seem high -- the entire program cost "only" $25B in 1973 dollars, or $106B in 2016 dollars.

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).

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?

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.

The new gilded age needs its bucket shops.

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)

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.

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.

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