Yes, it definitely is.
Solid contributions to the thread; thank you both.
I would actually like to have reasonable debate here, but argument by personal incredulity is not really an argument, and that’s pretty much all I’ve seen so far.
The costs seen in aerospace so far are not representative. It would be hard to come up with a better method of increasing costs as much as possible as the methods NASA has used for most of their existence. It has nothing to do with the actual, necessary costs of development and materials. This remains to be seen but SpaceX has an excellent record so far in several endeavors.
I’ve always felt fairly nervous for Musk, space development is more of a second mouse than early bird type of thing.
He’s gotten pretty lucky so far, there were a few make it or break it times, but he’s pulled through, so far…
But that doesn’t mean that there are not those waiting in the wings. Just learning fro his failures can be invaluable to a new entry. I don’t know exactly what Bezos is doing, but he’s biding his time and letting Space X pave the way.
If Space X fails, another will take its place, and do better and go further.
As far as Mars is concerned, I do think that it would be far better to develop local infrastructure before sending people out there. A ship to Mars can be made much better if it doesn’t have to be entirely sourced and launched from the Earth.
Start with near Earth asteroids that are easy to get to, work your way up from there.
We should practice living in asteroids first, really. Once we have that down, then we can work on Phobos or Deimos.
If we have a robust base on Phobos, landing people on Mars becomes much more viable.
Going direct to Mars is much more costly, much riskier. It may be worth it from a PR standpoint, but if it were to fail, it would be terrible PR.
A large cost of space access until the last few years was the monopoly of a very few companies with expenses plus contracts.
There certainly are real costs to overcome in order to get anything to be broken free of its bonds to the Earth, but with a lack of need for innovation, and the legacy costs of huge and ancient corporations, the actual price has been much higher than it had any reason to be.
Now that there is actual commercial competition, we should see development that makes access to space easier and cheaper.
ETA: plus, technology in general has just gotten better.
Agreed. I keep waiting for a really big slipup. I think Musk/SpaceX could survive one big mistake (bigger than an occasional launch failure, which they’ve already had), but maybe not two.
And I do keep waiting for Bezos and wish him luck. It’s hard to be too excited simply because there just isn’t that much information about what Blue Origin is doing. SpaceX has a fanboy team down in South Texas with multiple cameras on their facility 24 hours a day and doing constant Kremlinology. We just don’t see that out of BO due to the secrecy.
Right. I’d like to see at least a few robotic prep missions first:
- Preparation of landing/launch pads. While the first missions might get away with landing on unimproved surfaces, with some moderate chance of landing badly, I’d hope for at least a flat and smooth area for a manned landing (or even better, some kind of sealant, say by melting the soil via solar concentrator).
- Big deployed solar array. Energy is crucial and it should be straightforward to deploy many acres of panels.
- Water harvesting. The base will need water, as will propellant production. This might be the hardest piece for the early missions since although we know Mars has plenty of water, it’s not totally clear the best way to get it.
- Atmosphere harvesting. Simple in principle–just pumps and tanks. But dust and other factors will complicate it.
- Propellant production. Again, simple in principle if you have water and CO2. The actual chemical reaction is well understood. Building a machine reliable enough to do this for months or years without maintenance will be a challenge, though.
The recent news about ice volcanoes and an underground sea on Ceres is very interesting. It may well be an excellent starter destination. It even has a small amount of gravity–just enough to simplify a few things compared to microgravity.
A colony cannot just be ‘created’. It will have to develop organically based on economics. There is no way we can sustain a colony anywhere that isn’t ultimately self-funding.
Let’s say SpaceX sends 100 people to Mars. Let’s say each trip to Mars costs an astoundingly low $50 million. So we landed people on Mars for $500,000 each. That would be an amazing price, but let’s go with it.
How much in raw resources shipped from Earth will these people need each year? Let’s say they can get water and air on Mars, and can grow food in pressurized greenhouses. How much does it cost to build or ship a pressurized greenhouse to Mars? One that can feed, say, 100 people? Such a facility would no doubt cost many millions of dollars to ship to Mars. Also, the facility needs power - a lot of it.
I looked at hydroponic greenhouse power requirements, and for one that can produce 527 pounds of lettuce per month, Its power requirements just for the lighting are 307 kWh per day! On Mars you would also have to heat the thing and keep it prpessurized. Call it 500 kWh per day.
Vegetables are roughly 100 calories per pound. Fruit, around 250. Nuts, around 2500 per pound. Being very generous, let’s say you can make 500 pounds of any of them from our greenhouse. If the people are vegan and maintain a balanced diet of fruits and vegetables and supplemented with, say, 500 calories of nuts, you’re going to need 6-8 pounds iof food per day per person. That’s roughly 200 pounds of food per month, per person. So our greenhouse that costs many millions of dollars and uses 500 kWh per day can only feed maybe 2-3 people.
Clearly there’s lots of windage in that estimate. Maybe we can come up with the most efficient vegetables and fruits, etc. and cut that in all in half. Or maybe it will take twice as much.
Let’s say that greenhouse costs $10 million to get to Mars and set up (even on Earth such a greenhouse would be at least a hundred thousand dollars).
Now, assuming we are going to power this with solar cells, Mars has about 590 W/m^2 of solar flux. Assuming 20% efficient solar cells, a square meter of solar cells will generate maybe 100-120 Watts. Mars has a day about as long as Earth, so let’s use 10 hours as the average daily light amount. That’s roughly 1.0 kWh per day per square meter. The greenhouse needs 500 kWh per day, so we are going to need 500 square meters of solar cells to power it. Using the best-case weight of thin-film solar cells, a square meter weighs about 2.2 kg. Assuming you can build support structures on Mars, you’ll need 1100 kg of solar cells to power your greenhouse. Also, you will need batteries to store excess power, and you’ll have charge/discharge losses, so multiply everything by 20%.
So just for 2 or 3 people we need a pressurized greenhouse that no doubt would weigh thousands of kilos need all kinds of motors, pumps, and other moving parts that can break, and would take a team of people quite a long time to get up and running.
Those people also need a place to live, they need clothes, they need all kinds of things that would have to be shipped from Earth. At $1000/kilo landed on Mars, even your toothpaste budget could be $1000/yr. How many parts would have to be sent each year to replace worn seals, pumps, motors, valves, and the myriad other high-tech devicec that would be required to keep such a thing going?
Let’s not forget spacesuits for everyone, plus enough hardware per year to service them all.
So you’ve landed your hundred people, and suddenly you’ve got a responsibility to send them maybe a billion or two per year in goods just to keep them alive. And it cost you billions to set up the initial small colony in the first place.
So next year you plan to send another 100 at a cost of a few billion dollaers. But now you’ve got 200 people to support. As each year goes by, your annual support costs grow, and Mars returns not one dollar in revenue. Just how long are you going to keep this up?
By the way, a million people isn’t NEARLY enough for a self-sustaining colony on Mars, if we are talking about a situation where Earth for whatever reason stopped sending anything to Mars at all. My estimate would be more like 100-1000 times that many people. Where are you going to get rubber for seals? How about electronics? All the various rare-earth chemicals that go into so many high-tech products? Copper for motor windings?
Take that greenhouse above. How many people are needed to plant, maintain, harvest the food? Those are people that aren’t available to prospect for copper, mine it, smelt it, purify it, work it, etc. Most people in the early days of the colony would be working 24/7 just to stay alive.
Without a source of revenue for the investors, this venture would break down the minute SpaceX goes looking for investors and they ask, “what’s in it for us? What’s our rate of return? What’s our risk?”
And if Musk can’t get investors, even his own wealth plus the revenue from Starlink wouldn’t be nearly enough to even start a major colony, let alone support one until it’s self-sufficient.
Hell, I still hope Boeing/ULA can get their act together, too. As a taxpaying American who supports the exploration (and eventually the exploitation) of space, I would say we really need some redundancy and diversity, both in space vehicles (Crew Dragon, Starliner, Orion [?]) and in launch systems (Falcon, Vulcan, New Glenn), as well as things that are both (Starship). I don’t want us to be grounded for another decade–or even for a lot shorter time than that–because one rocket or one capsule has some sort of problem.
I’ll try to get to the rest of your post later since there is actual meat to it, but I think this is a good example where it’s always good to sanity-check your numbers. 6-8 lbs is a crazy amount of food, even for vegans. Maybe you could get that high if you solely ate only the lowest caloric density foods possible, but that would be a pretty dumb way of going about things. Add some legumes and even algae and it changes your estimates drastically.
Before I go to answering all of your questions, are you asking because you want to know the details of how such a project would be achieved, or are you just pointing to problems that you think that no one has thought of or addressed?
There are answers to all of those questions, and it could actually be a bit entertaining writing a small novel to answer them all, but I just want to see if such an effort would be worthwhile.
I’m incredulous because your arguments are not remotely reasonable. I’ve given many reasons why I think that. Your responses amount purely to a faith that’s nearly religious and based just as little on reality. Perhaps you should take notice that you are not convincing anyone here that is not already a member of your cult. That SpaceX has had a series of successes that I applaud does not magically imply that the future you project from them are possible.
In 1948 (or around there), the Army sent a rocket up 75 miles. That convinced many people that a moon rocket was right around the corner. They were projecting linearly, but space is always exponentially harder the farther out one goes. Ten thousand engineers and ten billion dollars were needed. I don’t believe for one second that Musk has a way around that, no matter what you think of NASA.
Musk will not launch a 100-person Mars expedition in the next decade. He might not be able to do so in his expected lifetime. We cannot reasonably debate these numbers, though. All we can do is wait, year after year, to see what happens.
First you said he’s going to die before the first 100-person craft is built, and now it’s just that he might not be able to in his lifetime, and that now you are only certain that he won’t do so in a decade. I’m not sure what caused you to change your mind, but I guess this is progress.
Fine. He won’t do it in his lifetime. Now what?
You must have noticed that Musk always overpromises and underdelivers. When he finally gets around to delivering a product, later and less than what was originally expected, it tends to be very good and that gets him lots of attention. (When he doesn’t deliver, like his miracle solar cells, the media are strangely silent.)
Rocketry is a good place for extravagant promises because they excite people and build cults. How many have you seen come and go? Me, lots. But they never pan out. Never. Not once.
The Super Heavy as a concept dates back to 2005. It’s gone up 150m. Not miles, but meters. How do you extrapolate that out to a 100-person Mars mission?
Put your cards on the table. What is your date for it?
When people talk about FTL or time travel, and try to justify it by saying that we used to think that flying was impossible, I point out that it just doesn’t work that way. We knew that flight was possible, it was just that there were those who did not think that human ingenuity and perseverance would make it happen.
This is much more along those lines. We know that it is possible, it certainly breaks no laws of physics, we just need the ingenuity and perseverance to pull it off.
Will it be Musk, will it be in the next decade? Who knows. Will it happen eventually, yes, it will. Musk does seem to be doing a pretty good job of it though. Eventually may happen sooner than we think.
The only reason that it would not is because humanity kills itself off or reverts to a permanent non-technological society.
If it is thought that civilization will collapse on a shorter timeline than space development, then that’s a valid, but pessimistic point of view.
Not once? Even if SpaceX doesn’t accomplish a single additional thing beyond where they are today, they will still have been a remarkable success and far beyond saying they didn’t “pan out”. I lived through much of the Shuttle era, with the promise of dozens (hundreds, even) of missions per year, and low costs due to reusability. It took a long time to realize that it failed at this task, and even longer to realize why: that it was a boondoggle from the beginning, with Congress as its master instead of the laws of physics.
SpaceX’s reusability efforts were criticized on this basis, and other failed efforts: reusability doesn’t really work, it’ll never pay off the development costs, or the vehicle costs, and anyway the refurbishment is more expensive than building a new vehicle. It’s a good story because up until recently it was true for every known example. But SpaceX built a system that was developed on the cheap (because they tested on flights for paying customers), with low vehicle costs (no wings or crazy heat shields or anything, just some landing legs and control surfaces), and with low refurbishment (again, no crazy heat shield). It’s true that they’re only reusing the first stage but they are reusing it. The skeptics had to move their goalposts massively. Now they have to say that only second-stage reusability won’t work, or whatever.
Hard to say, but I remember Grasshopper making similar test flights in 2013 and the first landing in 2015. This isn’t quite the same since SpaceX already had an orbital rocket, and they were just retrofitting a landing system. But on the other hand, SpaceX has lots of experience in building orbiting rockets.
The Falcon 9 itself first flew in 2010, 8 years after SpaceX’s founding, and now a decade after the first flight, reusability isn’t just commonplace but almost boring.
Sure, why not? Starship+Super Heavy will orbit by 2022 and demonstrate full reusability by 2024. Orbital refueling and some degree of crew support by 2026. Unmanned Mars mission by 2028. Manned by 2032 (maybe not landed on Mars proper). Permanent base by 2040, with dozens at least and self-sufficient on food and other basic consumables. 1,000 by 2060, 10,000 by 2080 and 100,000 by 2100. I won’t predict past a century.
Sorry, I missed the date for the 100-person mission. I think this won’t happen with Starship, which will be limited to more like 40 people (life support being the critical limiter, not living space). Say, 2036 for the 18-meter Starship 2 that can carry 100+ people.
I think even Musk is worried about this. It’s certainly an open question if an industrial civilization capable of building spacecraft at all can survive the next century. We may find ourselves very much poorer in a few decades than we are today.
Cool. We can start holding our breath now. 
The SDMB has been around for 21 years; 2036 is only another 16. Big deal!
Us Musk cultists may be optimistic but we know better than anyone how to factor in Elon Time.
If you are seriously telling us Elon Musk is going to land 100 people on Mars in a single ship by 2036, I’d like to know what kind of money you’re willing to bet on that.