NASA and SpaceX are establishing the first Martian city by 2030
erikhoel.substack.com
erikhoel.substack.com
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.
[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...
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.
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.
> 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?
Err, hmm…