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Comment by Schweigi | Hacker News Reader

Well written article!

As much as I would like to but I think it will probably never happen in the near future. Not because of technical reasons as some people state in the article. In my opinion the technical difficulties are not the most difficult things to solve in order to travel to Mars. Humanity went basically from 0 to space and on the Moon but this was only possible because of the political pressure where everything was dedicated to reach this goal. This included a lot of money and ten thousands of people. But most important it was the society who supported this goal no matter what. Today nobody really cares if people go to space and this makes it impossible for a hand full of people who do.

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I agree. Barring some economic windfall that hasn't yet been discovered, it will require a national (world?) crisis and a Manhattan/Apollo project for a project on this scale.

And the $6B pricetag is ludicrous. To put this in context, the state of California estimates the cost of high-speed rail from SF to LA at ~$50B.

Yeah fine, and everyone at SpaceX DEVELOPED the rockets that take people to SPACE for the same as what Facebook paid for Snapchat. Valuations are WEIRD.

Further the $50B price tag has a lot to do with paying a LOT of union folks, legalized "corruption" in many forms and the like. Finding huge cost savings in the construction industry is possible if you're motivated but nobody is because big infrastructure projects like that get handed out more based on politics than merit.

You mention paying union folks like it is a bad thing, in line with "legalized "corruption"".

Perhaps you should go work in a foundry, machine shop, or a mine for a while and then see how you feel about unions.

Way to make a not-relevant comparison that doesn't really address my point!

Ultimately this addresses my point best:

“The highway department didn’t use to see the drivers as customers,” said Frank DePaola, administrator of the highway division for the department. “For a while there, the highway department was so focused on construction and road projects, it’s almost as if the contractors became their customers.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/us/rapid-construction-tech...

It is possible to get this kind of thing done with or without unions, but when unions have a strong presence it's harder because the union bosses know that this could mean fewer jobs, and for them, less power. People generally don't take a pay cut (or reduction in status) willingly.

SpaceX benefited from a great many years of experience, technology, knowledge, and lessons learned in blood from NASA, which is priceless. Comparing SpaceX outlays to a corporate acquisition pricetag is a weak analogy, at best. NASA (federal taxes) provided roughly half of SpaceX's initial funding. Large fractions of their current contracts come from NASA. And of course plenty of SpaceX's engineers are ex-NASA employees.

As far as unions go, I will grant that wages are higher as a result of their existence. That's a feature, not a bug. I'm curious: just how much of that $50B pricetag do you imagine is due to unions and "corruption"? A ballpark figure from the website of your choice will be fine.

Yes, that's all fine. But here's the thing: even if the billion dollars dropped magically out of the air, it still only took a billion dollars to develop a new rocket. Doesn't matter where the money came from if that's how much money it was.

I don't care if it's public or private money that made SpaceX possible, and it doesn't much matter to me if the tech to go to Mars is all designed from scratch or bought from people who already know how to do it. It's that it is possible to do big things for a lot less than $50B.

If you have to design everything from scratch because it's $10k/lb and every pound counts, well, then yes it's going to cost a huge pile of money.

But what if it's $1k/lb to get to space? Suddenly COTS stuff doesn't look as stupid.

No, it took much more than a billion dollars to develop a rocket. You are just ignoring huge swathes of the cost to support your claim. If you estimate the aggregate cost of SpaceX launches, including 50 years of work by NASA, it will be orders of magnitude greater than $1B. I mean, tell yourself whatever you want, but R&D isn't free, and they didn't have to do most of it.

In the context of the present thread, since many of the problems associated with a manned Mars mission are unsolved, forgive me if I'm skeptical that Adam Smith's invisible hand will somehow bring the cost down to manageable levels. With or without COTS.

There's a big difference from developing the FIRST rocket and developing A rocket. The first one is now built. We now have the people with the experience. It can (and is!) being done.

I'm not arguing the price of the first rockets that NASA built at all. I'm arguing that SpaceX didn't have an extra hundred billion of secret NSA black money that they used in addition to the publicly known about billion that we can be sure was spent.

You can't argue that because NASA spent $20B or whatever in 1960's dollars to get us to the moon that somehow SpaceX's $1B rocket is ACTUALLY a $21B rocket. You could argue that if SpaceX had to develop everything from scratch it would cost a lot more than $1B, but they didn't.

Similarly not everything that it would take to go to Mars is going to have to be engineered from scratch. Especially as launch prices keep coming down. If you could get to orbit for $100/lb it's only 10x as expensive as overnight air freight and at that point weight wouldn't even be a real issue anymore.

Is it kind-of crazy to talk about $100/lb launches right now? Yeah sure. But Musk has said that it's $200k worth of fuel to launch a Falcon 9, which has a 30klb payload to LEO. That's $6/lb in marginal cost plus whatever overhead on the rocket. Suddenly $100/lb doesn't look quite so batshit insane.

> To put this in context, the state of California estimates the cost of high-speed rail from SF to LA at ~$50B.

Mars One is pretty silly, but a significant portion of that $50B cost is because they need long, straight lines and as such will have to seize and reimburse a lot of very expensive real estate, isn't it?

I don't know, it was just the first thing I thought of.

Here are dozens of projects that make me chuckle about the naivete of the $6B figure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_megaprojects

> To put this in context, the state of California estimates the cost of high-speed rail from SF to LA at ~$50B.

Well, $67 billion, up from the $33 billion figure they were promoting when they asked voters to approve it.

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