Don’t bother debunking the math. I cooked that off in a hurry as I was late for dinner, and it was only meant to illustrate the point, which is valid: If you try to build a colony before you have figured out a way for it to pay for itself, it will create an annually increasing deadweight cost, starting from a very big number already.
Maintaining a growing colony on Mars is just not feasible until we figure out something to exchange of equal value or otherwise profit from the colony. It will be wholly dependent on an incredibly expensive and growing supply chain.
Who exactly is going to pay for the amount of goods that will have to be shipped to say, 100,000 people on Mars every year? Assuming they are having children, which any self-respecting colony would, you’ve got to supply housing and energy for them too. And the materials for building much of the growing infrastructure needs of a larger population. How many thousands of tons per year would you have to ship? For decades? How would that be even remotely sustainable for the decades or hundreds of years it would take to become self-sustaining?
In part, by the Martians themselves. Not everyone is going to be spending every moment engaged in labor just to keep the colony going. Some will just be normal people working remotely, like I’m doing right now. I certainly don’t make enough money for every single thing I need to be shipped from Earth to Mars, even with a cut-down lifestyle and Starship prices. But if the bulkiest items can be produced locally, like food, and if the transportation costs can be reduced even further, then eventually there is a crossing point and a semi-normal salary is enough to support a person.
How do people in San Francisco survive? 90% of what they produce is just bits and bytes. They have to import almost everything needed for survival. Mars is like that, just a lot more so.
I don’t disagree with your overall premise, which is that there’s a lot of work needed on local production for the numbers to work out even remotely. But I think it’s also important to look at them as clearly as possible and not just assume that because a hand-waving estimate doesn’t work out, that the enterprise can never work.
You aren’t going to pay to have supplies shipped from Earth on a programmer’s salary. Sure, it will help. You could work for an Earth-bound company, and use your salary to have stuff shipped to you. But the extreme cost of shipping without further breakthroughs means you’ll always need to be subsidized.
Eventually your children will need housing. You aren’t getting a new hab or dome shipped from Earth, along with all the stuff needed to maintain it, power and heat it, maintain an atmosphere, have airlocks, have space suits for the kids… Stuff that would be hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on Earth, shipped to Mars.
Someone’s got to pay for it. Plus sewage removal and processing for a growing population and all the rest of the infrastructure of a growing, very high tech society in an extremely harsh place.
There’s a big difference between none and some. At mature Starship prices ($1/g), I can afford a couple hundred kilos a year. That’s much more than what I ordered from Amazon last year, and covers basically everything except food and basic consumables. If the latter can be made locally, then it becomes possible.
The requirements change over time. First 100 people, sure, everyone has a spacesuit. 10,000 people? Probably not; the hab will be big enough that people don’t have to leave to not go stir-crazy. The infrastructure gets easier to build as you get more of it, and more production can be done locally.
Sure, I don’t expect it to reach this point in my lifetime. Best I’m hoping for is a vacation to the Moon in that timeframe. Or at least LEO.
Responding to that I believe would violate board rules, but I will say this:
The only numbers I’m even remotely confident in are the ones in the next decade. That’s based on the observable trajectory that Starship development is on. Everything past that is barely even speculative.
There are two basic categories of risk at play. The first is general technological risk, which is mostly what we’re talking about here: can affordable and sustainable tech be developed by then? But the other big category is just the overall development path. I’m confident that an 18-meter Starship 2 can be developed by 2036. But whether it’ll be used for 100+ person flights to Mars is an entirely different story. Maybe the Moon or Ceres or Phobos/Deimos will prove much more interesting in the short term, pushing out Mars somewhat. Maybe it’ll turn out cheaper to enhance Starship 1 a bit, increasing performance without requiring a big upgrade, but not reaching 100-person capacity. Maybe Starship 2 will only be used for tanker flights, not passengers. Maybe automation tech will improve so much that it’ll be easier to spend the first decade just deploying tons of construction robots, delaying human landing. Etc. So the probably of that particular event happening might be quite low, say 10%, even if we still have interesting things going on.
More interesting from my perspective is when various price per delivered mass thresholds are met, to LEO, to the Moon and to Mars. Lowering those costs is crucial no matter what development path is taken. NASA plans on offering a fixed payment per ton delivered to the lunar surface; it’ll be very interesting to see what the price actually is. Musk likes the idea–I suspect because it acts as a fantastic motivator for providers to lower their own costs. Lowering the cost to LEO will be the first step; if Starship can reduce it to <$100/kg, it’ll form the basis for cheap deliveries to farther destinations.
Part of the key is in “self-sustaining” - maintaining human life on Mars takes a LOT more tech than doing so anywhere on Earth. The closest would probably be Antarctica, and our colonies outposts there are nowhere near self-sufficient. A Martian industrial base would have to include producing materials from building bricks to metals to plastics; food production from creating viable soil and/or hydroponic solutions, sealed structures with suitable atmosphere and heating, and some means of pollinating those plants requiring it; construction of human habitations which means not only sealed buildings but atmosphere to breathe and potable water; and some means of producing energy on a planets with no coal and almost certainly where combustion is neither practical or safe (so solar - which will not be as efficient due to further distance from the sun - or nuclear). It will basically require a late 20th Century/early 21st Century industrial base at a minimum.
There’s a limit to how much we can know the long-term impact of gravity at .38g. The effects will be different than the microgravity of free-fall, but I would expect some muscle and bone atrophy due to less stress on those body structures, but not to the degree of zero g. This may not matter if the people going to Mars go there and stay there for life - it’s critical to maintain the ability to tolerate 1g only if you’re going to go back to Earth and live there. Also, anyone on Mars in the early days of a colony is going to be exposed to a crapload of radiation on both the trip to the planet and while living there so there’s a very high likelihood the colonists are not going to live as long as they would on Earth, probably getting cancer(s) within 20 years of arrival if various sorts of accidents don’t get them first. Which is not to say exercise of various sorts would be useless, it would in fact probably be vital to maintaining maximum health as long as possible in the environment.
This is a good point about technology and space. A Mars colony has to become self-sufficient in food, air, and water because all of those items are bulky and would be prohibitive to transport in quantities large numbers of people would need. It would have to become self-sufficient in building materials for the same reason. However, the long supply chain required to produce semi-conductors would be a nightmare to either transport or set up on Mars even though they will undoubtedly need such technology. So the colony probably won’t be self-supporting all ways and shipping computer chips to Mars would probably be the least-insane alternative.
Which comes to the problem of “who is going to pay for this?” What could Mars produce that would give them the money to pay to purchase and transport anything from Earth to Mars? Otherwise, the people on Mars are going to be relying on charity to continue to exist. Sure, at some point, they might become “self-sustaining” on some level (food, water, air, shelter) but it may not be truly self-sustaining over generations without input from Earth. Are there enough trillionaires interested in Mars settlement to continue helping Mars inhabitants the stuff they need from Earth?
The low-gravity in many ways is a bug and not a feature. People aren’t going to Mars (or the Moon) for less gravity. If you want less gravity low Earth orbit is far, far more accessible and cheaper to get to.
And while initially you’re going to have to import pretty much everything for the initial group to land we already have people trying to figure out ways to make stuff from what they’ll find on Mars (and the Moon). Such as ways to make cement and bricks, how to extract breathable air, how to recycle as well as find water (the ISS, for example, recycles a LOT - the folks up there drink water made from recycled/purified urine, as well as any excess humidity extracted from the air which means also recycled sweat and spit), how to grow the maximum food with the minimum resources and space required, and so on.
One solution is to land automated devices prior to human arrival that can do things extract oxygen from the Martian environment - there is oxygen there, just not easily accessible. Other useful gasses, too. Ditto for water. Land a nuclear power source or two, some solar panels, and so on. Do that in advance of the human colonists, and if you lose one or two of those rockets you’ll be able to send another without loss of human life.
A Mars colony can’t import everything - but they’ll have to find a way to be self-supporting in some vital areas or it will remain a remote outpost and not a colony.
pshaw! Gold? Really? Not that many industrial uses for gold (although it is used in aerospace applications) and there’s ample on Earth for making pretty baubles. No, what you’d want from asteroid mining are things like “rare earth metals” and you wouldn’t just get the raw ore, you’d refine that stuff in space where the toxic byproducts wouldn’t poison a biosphere. Then let gravity pull it down to the surface (yes, you will need to control the descent but you don’t need costly propellants for that - the Space Shuttle returned to Earth in an unpowered glide, that was the cheap part of the ride). Doing this would significantly drop true cost of producing those elements if you count the environmental degradation refining them on Earth produces.
Meanwhile, you’d get a lot of useful stuff for building things in space without the high costs of pulling them up out of a gravity well. Which makes building stuff in space a hell of a lot cheaper.
We know that microgravity causes muscle atrophy and bone loss. We don’t know what long term .38 gravity does, but the effects are likely to be different that the “zero g” of orbiting a planet or satellite or transit between planets.
A lot depends on whether or not you plan to stay on Mars for life. If you don’t plan to go back to Earth then have your muscles and bones weaken until they are sufficient for life on Mars but no more probably won’t matter. Especially since other environmental risks will decrease your lifespan so “long term” will mean something different on Mars rather than Earth.
If you want to go back to Earth at any point in time that will be much more problematic
[quote=“Dewey_Finn, post:18, topic:917426”]
Imagine these Martian colonists manage to corral an iron-nickel asteroid (and doing so is far from simple). They need to somehow bring it down to the planet surface and then what?[/quote]
I’m not sure why Martians would bother to capture an iron asteroid - all that red on Mars? It’s rust - iron oxide. Martians will be surrounded by more iron than anyone could possibly want, and if they have sufficient solar or nuclear power they’ll be able to split the rust molecules into both iron and oxygen - and they might find the latter more valuable.
For Mars capturing a comet/ice asteroid makes much more sense. They need more water. Just find one of manageable size and let the planet’s gravity pull it to the surface somewhere people aren’t (which is most of the planet). Or just send a load of ice down with anyone returning from Mars orbit. Or something creative and innovative.
You need a source of energy to produce a lot of heat to process iron ore. Again, you could use solar or nuclear power to do this. Depending on what you’re using the iron for a good part of “further processing” could actually be done by human muscle, as it was prior to the industrial revolution - AND it provides exercise! More likely it would be some sort of automated processing, or at least human effort aided by machinery. Ship in the right machinery once to get started and you can produce everything you need for iron working on site, enabling colonists to distribute that tech to multiple settlements on the planet.
No, due to the cost of getting out of Earth’s gravity well. Unless it’s things like computer chips and pharmaceuticals that have a long supply/production change and are small, low-bulk, and low-weight.
It makes a lot more sense to produce something like iron on site on Mars, where you are literally surrounded by a form of iron. An energy source and a one-time input of small-scale production machinery that will allow you to boot-strap to larger industry on site.
Absolutely. But on Earth that’s easy.
The question is how many people do you need on Mars to be self-sufficient?
Depends on your definition of “valuable”. The Cape York meteorite was an incredibly valuable resource to the local Inuit as it gave them a source of iron tools without the need for a mine, smelting, blast furnace, etc.
Also, meteorites on the ground have had their volatile and low-melting point components burned/boiled off on their way down to the ground. They don’t contain water, and gold would melt/boil off, too. That’s very different from something in space which could (and often does) contain all sorts of things that wouldn’t survive uncontrolled atmospheric entry.
And, as noted, it all comes down to cost-effectiveness. Would retrieving ores/resources from space cost more than those resources are worth, or could you produce a profit? At this point no one really knows.
A lot of the stuff out there is iron or the like. There are rarer elements and such out there, but then the question comes down to whether or not there is a cost-effective means to refine that stuff out of the raw ore/asteroid/Martian sand/Moon dust/whatever.
MOST people don’t like that. Some actually can do well with it - the trick is finding out who those people are. Which is why NASA, among others, has done a lot of work with screening people for various traits and having their space crews spend extended periods of time working together to make sure everyone is compatible and won’t go all stabby when confined for long periods in small spaces.
Which becomes a problem for a self-sufficient colony: you can screen your space explorers, but when the colonist start producing offspring you’re stuck with what the genetic dice roll and you will not get results that are 100% compatible with the sort of environment you’d find in a Mars colony.
Part of the key is in “self-sustaining” - maintaining human life on Mars takes a LOT more tech than doing so anywhere on Earth. The closest would probably be Antarctica, and our colonies outposts there are nowhere near self-sufficient. A Martian industrial base would have to include producing materials from building bricks to metals to plastics; food production from creating viable soil and/or hydroponic solutions, sealed structures with suitable atmosphere and heating, and some means of pollinating those plants requiring it; construction of human habitations which means not only sealed buildings but atmosphere to breathe and potable water; and some means of producing energy on a planets with no coal and almost certainly where combustion is neither practical or safe (so solar - which will not be as efficient due to further distance from the sun - or nuclear). It will basically require a late 20th Century/early 21st Century industrial base at a minimum.
There’s a limit to how much we can know the long-term impact of gravity at .38g. The effects will be different than the microgravity of free-fall, but I would expect some muscle and bone atrophy due to less stress on those body structures, but not to the degree of zero g. This may not matter if the people going to Mars go there and stay there for life - it’s critical to maintain the ability to tolerate 1g only if you’re going to go back to Earth and live there. Also, anyone on Mars in the early days of a colony is going to be exposed to a crapload of radiation on both the trip to the planet and while living there so there’s a very high likelihood the colonists are not going to live as long as they would on Earth, probably getting cancer(s) within 20 years of arrival if various sorts of accidents don’t get them first. Which is not to say exercise of various sorts would be useless, it would in fact probably be vital to maintaining maximum health as long as possible in the environment.
This is a good point about technology and space. A Mars colony has to become self-sufficient in food, air, and water because all of those items are bulky and would be prohibitive to transport in quantities large numbers of people would need. It would have to become self-sufficient in building materials for the same reason. However, the long supply chain required to produce semi-conductors would be a nightmare to either transport or set up on Mars even though they will undoubtedly need such technology. So the colony probably won’t be self-supporting all ways and shipping computer chips to Mars would probably be the least-insane alternative.
Which comes to the problem of “who is going to pay for this?” What could Mars produce that would give them the money to pay to purchase and transport anything from Earth to Mars? Otherwise, the people on Mars are going to be relying on charity to continue to exist. Sure, at some point, they might become “self-sustaining” on some level (food, water, air, shelter) but it may not be truly self-sustaining over generations without input from Earth. Are there enough trillionaires interested in Mars settlement to continue helping Mars inhabitants the stuff they need from Earth?
The low-gravity in many ways is a bug and not a feature. People aren’t going to Mars (or the Moon) for less gravity. If you want less gravity low Earth orbit is far, far more accessible and cheaper to get to.
And while initially you’re going to have to import pretty much everything for the initial group to land we already have people trying to figure out ways to make stuff from what they’ll find on Mars (and the Moon). Such as ways to make cement and bricks, how to extract breathable air, how to recycle as well as find water (the ISS, for example, recycles a LOT - the folks up there drink water made from recycled/purified urine, as well as any excess humidity extracted from the air which means also recycled sweat and spit), how to grow the maximum food with the minimum resources and space required, and so on.
One solution is to land automated devices prior to human arrival that can do things extract oxygen from the Martian environment - there is oxygen there, just not easily accessible. Other useful gasses, too. Ditto for water. Land a nuclear power source or two, some solar panels, and so on. Do that in advance of the human colonists, and if you lose one or two of those rockets you’ll be able to send another without loss of human life.
A Mars colony can’t import everything - but they’ll have to find a way to be self-supporting in some vital areas or it will remain a remote outpost and not a colony.
pshaw! Gold? Really? Not that many industrial uses for gold (although it is used in aerospace applications) and there’s ample on Earth for making pretty baubles. No, what you’d want from asteroid mining are things like “rare earth metals” and you wouldn’t just get the raw ore, you’d refine that stuff in space where the toxic byproducts wouldn’t poison a biosphere. Then let gravity pull it down to the surface (yes, you will need to control the descent but you don’t need costly propellants for that - the Space Shuttle returned to Earth in an unpowered glide, that was the cheap part of the ride). Doing this would significantly drop true cost of producing those elements if you count the environmental degradation refining them on Earth produces.
Meanwhile, you’d get a lot of useful stuff for building things in space without the high costs of pulling them up out of a gravity well. Which makes building stuff in space a hell of a lot cheaper.
We know that microgravity causes muscle atrophy and bone loss. We don’t know what long term .38 gravity does, but the effects are likely to be different that the “zero g” of orbiting a planet or satellite or transit between planets.
A lot depends on whether or not you plan to stay on Mars for life. If you don’t plan to go back to Earth then have your muscles and bones weaken until they are sufficient for life on Mars but no more probably won’t matter. Especially since other environmental risks will decrease your lifespan so “long term” will mean something different on Mars rather than Earth.
If you want to go back to Earth at any point in time that will be much more problematic
[quote=“Dewey_Finn, post:18, topic:917426”]
Imagine these Martian colonists manage to corral an iron-nickel asteroid (and doing so is far from simple). They need to somehow bring it down to the planet surface and then what?[/quote]
I’m not sure why Martians would bother to capture an iron asteroid - all that red on Mars? It’s rust - iron oxide. Martians will be surrounded by more iron than anyone could possibly want, and if they have sufficient solar or nuclear power they’ll be able to split the rust molecules into both iron and oxygen - and they might find the latter more valuable.
For Mars capturing a comet/ice asteroid makes much more sense. They need more water. Just find one of manageable size and let the planet’s gravity pull it to the surface somewhere people aren’t (which is most of the planet). Or just send a load of ice down with anyone returning from Mars orbit. Or something creative and innovative.
You need a source of energy to produce a lot of heat to process iron ore. Again, you could use solar or nuclear power to do this. Depending on what you’re using the iron for a good part of “further processing” could actually be done by human muscle, as it was prior to the industrial revolution - AND it provides exercise! More likely it would be some sort of automated processing, or at least human effort aided by machinery. Ship in the right machinery once to get started and you can produce everything you need for iron working on site, enabling colonists to distribute that tech to multiple settlements on the planet.
No, due to the cost of getting out of Earth’s gravity well. Unless it’s things like computer chips and pharmaceuticals that have a long supply/production change and are small, low-bulk, and low-weight.
It makes a lot more sense to produce something like iron on site on Mars, where you are literally surrounded by a form of iron. An energy source and a one-time input of small-scale production machinery that will allow you to boot-strap to larger industry on site.
Absolutely. But on Earth that’s easy.
The question is how many people do you need on Mars to be self-sufficient?
Depends on your definition of “valuable”. The Cape York meteorite was an incredibly valuable resource to the local Inuit as it gave them a source of iron tools without the need for a mine, smelting, blast furnace, etc.
Also, meteorites on the ground have had their volatile and low-melting point components burned/boiled off on their way down to the ground. They don’t contain water, and gold would melt/boil off, too. That’s very different from something in space which could (and often does) contain all sorts of things that wouldn’t survive uncontrolled atmospheric entry.
And, as noted, it all comes down to cost-effectiveness. Would retrieving ores/resources from space cost more than those resources are worth, or could you produce a profit? At this point no one really knows.
A lot of the stuff out there is iron or the like. There are rarer elements and such out there, but then the question comes down to whether or not there is a cost-effective means to refine that stuff out of the raw ore/asteroid/Martian sand/Moon dust/whatever.
MOST people don’t like that. Some actually can do well with it - the trick is finding out who those people are. Which is why NASA, among others, has done a lot of work with screening people for various traits and having their space crews spend extended periods of time working together to make sure everyone is compatible and won’t go all stabby when confined for long periods in small spaces.
Which becomes a problem for a self-sufficient colony: you can screen your space explorers, but when the colonist start producing offspring you’re stuck with what the genetic dice roll and you will not get results that are 100% compatible with the sort of environment you’d find in a Mars colony.
There are international treaties discouraging/forbidding resource extraction in Antarctica - but there are definitely resources there and I have no doubt there are people trying to figure out cost-effective ways to extract them if that ever becomes legally possible. We definitely know how to live and work in Antarctica long-term even if we don’t have self-sufficient colonies there - a deep-sea oil-drilling platform isn’t self-sufficient, either, but it does extract resources in a cost-effective manner.
There is a big industry that involves pulling money out of polar and deep-sea environments. The outposts are not self-sufficient, though, because they don’t have to be. Re-supply from outside is cheap and quick enough to make that unnecessary although Antarctic bases do utilize some small-scale recycling and hydroponics due to long stretches of time when resupply is impractical.
If you go to space or the Moon or Mars to extract resources those outposts will have to have some level of self-sufficiency due to the length of the supply lines.
Actually, McMurdo base has a capacity of slightly over 1200. For half the year it is essentially cut off from the outside world so it is “self-sustaining” for those months although, of course, atmosphere is provided by the planet’s biome and water is available, if frozen, right outside the door. Which vastly simplifies things. Also, McMurdo mostly exists on stored supplies shipped in during the summer. They do have hydroponics on site but they’re a minor component at most.
The main obstacle to further expansion of human presence in Antarctica is not technological, it is legal - there are treaties that severely limit what is permitted there.
Or you send a smaller number of people and they produce more people the old-fashioned way. Then the question becomes how many people do you need for a colony to prevent fatal genetic bottlenecks? You’ll still be able to bring more people from Earth in small numbers, but to get to a million the most cost-effective way is to import a smaller number and breed more humans. You can import sperm and eggs for greater genetic diversity at far less cost than importing grown human beings, too.
I’m not sure we’d want to put all the colonists on Mars in one place, even if we could.
No, you can’t build a self-sustaining city of one million in Death Valley. There are, in fact, no self-sustaining cities of one million anywhere. But there have been people living in Death Valley for centuries, probably millennia living there with what they can build, produce, and drink.
Sure, the initial landing of a Mars colony will have everyone in one place, but over time it would make sense to spread out and incorporate redundancies so if something bad does happen you won’t lose everyone.
Definitely. But those were either pre-industrial level technology people (no really what Mars need or how anyone living in Mars would want), extremely low standards of living compared to today (no TV or phone) or people with some, limited contact.
I’m willing to bet than we won’t see anything more than the scientific bases in Antarctica even in 50 years.
A city (i.e. not everyone is a scientist but with baristas and taxi drivers) of 10 000 people?
Never,
We’re not even mentioning cosmic rays or the stress of living there with 21st century people fromaffluent countries. You’ll get the anxiety of covid-lockdown times a thousand. No rescue possible.
Maybe you can get some kamikaze people ready to go there until they die, but I’m not even sure of the ethics or the bad publicity of their demises.
Most of the personnel at McMurdo are actually NOT scientists, about 1000 out of the 1200 or so during the summer (winter crews are much smaller) doing such mundane stuff as logistics, repairs, maintenance, construction, cleaning, cooking food, and so forth including, in fact, at least one store clerk. So you’re already 1/10 of the way to your city of 10k people.
I think that gets lost sometimes in discussions of colonies - not everyone is going to be a scientist or engineer, an endeavor like that involves a LOT of grunt work. Somebody has to scrub the toilets. Or at least be able to fix the toilet-scrubbing robot.
I think we actually DO have the technology at this point to make a self-supporting settlement in Antarctica, including food production. It wouldn’t be easy, life wouldn’t necessarily be pleasant (especially in winter), but I think we could do it. We just don’t (currently) have the motivation to do it.
There actually is already a sub-culture in Antarctica, this website mentions some of it in a short manner, you can look more detail if you’re inclined.
Which gets back motivation - WHY have a colony? We could have one in Antarctica, but we don’t. Why not? Because we aren’t motivated to do so.
We certainly can grow food in Antarctica - we already do. A greenhouse smaller than my current 1-bedroom apartment supplies fresh food to the winter crew at McMurdo that is a significant addition to the stored supplies, producing up to 250 pounds of food during peak production periods. As McMurdo station has buildings much, much larger than the current greenhouse it is certainly possible to expand such a facility. Sure, there’s a four month continuous winter but it’s been demonstrated that you can still keep such a greenhouse operational during that period. It would impose greater power demands both for lighting and for producing the needed water (McMurdo relies on a desalinization plant, recycling although not to the level of a space station, and rationing) but it is definitely possible with current technology.
So sure, we could have an Antarctic outpost/colony self-sufficient in food IF we wanted one badly enough. Heck, given there is no need for hermetically sealed buildings and unlimited atmosphere you could probably have chickens and other small livestock for a limited amount of animal protein.
If we wanted it badly enough.
But re-supply isn’t that hard, and storing stuff for the six months of winter isn’t that hard (deep freeze is free, after all, in that part of the world during winter) so no need. We just don’t want it enough.
If we set up an outpost on the Moon, though, much less Mars, being self-sufficient in food, or nearly so, starts to be a lot more important. And I think we’re at a point where we could do it. Then you’d need personnel whose sole job it is, is to keep the farm running.
And at that point we’d be looking at a larger outpost and more support personnel and yes, I think you’d wind up with a barista or three
But we can NOT shield from cosmic rays… unless we go underground, or build really thick habitats. Which is possible on the Moon or Mars if we can utilize local materials, but provides additional problems regarding construction. Cosmic rays can do a lot of damage to living things.
There is the stress of being confined. McMurdo Station has a LOT more room per person than any extra-terrestrial outpost will but during the winter-over it’s well know that people can get strange, have outbursts, and so forth. It even has a discreet name: winter-over syndrome, which of course is not limited to just McMurdo station but any isolated outpost with similar traits.
A Mars outpost/initial colony will be even more cramped, more isolated, and, as noted, no rescue possible. You won’t even have real-time communications. While at their closest the gap would only be three light-minutes most of the time they won’t be that close and the communications lag will be an average of around 10 minutes, and at their furthest distance from each other their 20 light minutes apart. You will not be able to “phone home”, you will not be able to have a real-time conversation.
People destined for the space station are carefully screened for the ability to tolerate such cramped conditions, and those chosen for long-duration missions invariably have prior experience in orbit so there is some idea of how they will tolerate it. The psychological aspects of building a colony in space, or even and outpost where people spend significant lengths of time might wind up being more of a problem than the physical aspects of keeping people alive in a harsh environment. It does no good to have a functional space habitat full of crazed, insane people.
A space colony will emerge wherever there is enough profit to be had to justify lots of people living there. Period. We can build research stations wherever we want, if we are willing to fund them, but an actual colony needs to exist for its own reasons.
For example, let’s look at how a theoretical moon colony might develop.
A mining company sends a probe to 16 Pysche, and discovers vast riches in gold, silver, palladium, and other very expensive metals. But how to exploit them? You have problems of mining and transporting the stuff in a cost-effective way. The machines needed to mine the stuff are big and heavy, and would cost a fortune. Shipping costs would be outrageous.
Time passes, and someone comes up with a plan to mine titanium and iron on the moon, and ship the powder to the asteroid, where 3D printers use it to build the machines needed. A ‘pinwheel’ accelerator is used to throw the mined material back to Earth orbit, almost for free.
Over time, all this activity results in hundreds of miners living on the Moon. Years of refinement in living procedures, new ways of utilizing resources, and refinements in rocket travel bring down the cost and raise the quality of life, and now secondary people move in - shopkeepers, teachers, etc.
The Moon is also close enough and will be cheap enough to get to that you could eventually see a huge tourist industry. Maybe even retirement homes. 1/6 gravity looks pretty appealing to someone using a walker and in pain all the time on Earth. With earth-level pressure, you could strap on wings in a large lava dome and simply fly like a bird. Billionaires might turn a lava tube on the Moon into the next Dubai - a playground for the very rich. Maybe a villa on the Moon in a luxury lava tube will be the next superyacht-style dick measuring method for Arab shieks and other billionaires. They will bring capital investment and spur new technologies for living large lunar style.
That’s the way cities are built - people move into an area because there is something to exploit there, and over time services and infrastructure are built, and the little mining or fishing camp or whatever slowly becomes a city. You could try to force the construction of a huge city in an area where there’s nothing to exploit, but no matter how much you plan it, its survival would totally depend on whether the people there can actually find something useful to do that can pay for what the city needs. Otherwise, it will be a welfare state that eventually fails.
We have no idea today what will be profitable enough in space to warrant the creation of a society living there. But the only place where we can currently conceive of profits being available is the Moon. From He3 to easily accessible iron, titanium, oxygen, water, and other minerals, the moon has a lot to exploit. Being only a few light-seconds from Earth, you can control robots remotely and the people living there could stay connected to the internet. The far side would be a great place to set up a large radio astronomy center. The poles have constant sunlight on some crater rims, and hundreds of millions of tons of water.
The Moon’s vacuum is actually a feature compared to Mars’ very thin atmosphere. Both would require space suits to survive and pressurized habitats, but working in a vacuum allows you to do things like sputtering on a large scale. The moon’s surface is extremely uniform across wide swaths of area, simplifying mining operations. The terrain never changes with the winds. The temperature fluctuations are known and consistent.
On Earth, mining machines have to handle all kinds of weather, wet materials, dry materials, etc. On Mars there’s not enough atmosphere to be of much use, but there’s enough to make it harder to do work on the surface or even land on the planet.
The Moon’s gravity well is less than half as deep as Mars, and its vacuum allows you to build mass drivers to launch material into orbit. Hell, you can make a transfer vehicle on the moon powered by water and a nuclear power source. You could fill it with lunar water and have a very cheap, simple and reliable mode for getting to lunar orbit and back.
But the big thing the Moon has is protected living space. Why terraform Mars, when you can pressurize a 5 km in diameter underground lava dome? The Moon is riddled with underground voids - about 12% of the crust consists of voids. The Marius Hills has an open skylight into a lava tube 80 meters deep, hundreds of meters wide, and many kilometers in length. There are hundreds of such tubes on the Moon.
These are the most stable, most protected environments in the solar system. A lava tube with many meters of solid rock overhead would be impervious to cosmic rays and the solar wind. The temperature in these tubes is likely a constant -15 to -21 degrees, depending on depth. They’ve been sitting intact for billions of years.
Sealing a portion of such a tube has to be much, much easier than building a surface habitat on mars. Martian habitats still have to protect you from cosmic rays and solar storms, so you’re likely to be underground in some way, or at least have the houses buried in Martian regolith.
A single lava tube on the Moon, suitably sealed and pressurized, could easily support a million people. You would almost certainly need nuclear power, but then I suspect you’ll need it on Mars, too.
Sure, the Moon may be lacking in carbon, nitrogen, and some other crucial materials. Or maybe it isn’t - the moon is littered with the remnants of meteors, and it’s entirely possible that there are large pockets and veins of materials we simply haven’t discovered yet. We’re still learning about the Moon constantly.
If I had to put my money on the first off-Earth location where a community of say, 10,000 people live, my money would be on the Moon. My second choice would probably be an asteroid or ships in the asteroid belt. Third would be Mars.
A much bigger risk is that the market for Starship will simply not develop. Musk plans on cranking out hundreds of Starships. The only current market for them is his own Mars colonization plan. If that fails, or even if it takes a lot longer than he thought to prepare and scale up, he’s going to have fields full of Starships and no reason to fly them.
Look at Falcon Heavy. It’s a fairly revolutionary heavy-lift rocket that crushes the competition on cost to orbit. And it’s flown twice, and only has four more missions on its manifest between now and 2024. There just isn’t much need for heavy lift right now.
Of course we can hope that if you build a really cheap launcher a market will follow, but that’s a huge risk. No doubt the market for space launch at $1000/kilo is a lot smaller than one at $100/kilo, but it may take a long time for that market to develop - and in the meantime Starships are accumulating.
The saving grace here is that SpaceX is private, and Musk isn’t going to release control of it to investors until his Mars plans are well underway. He can also use some Starships to finish out the Starlink constellation, and maybe that will pay enough to keep the company afloat and able to start a Mars colony.
But the minute SpaceX goes public, or Elon Musk dies or retires, the Mars colony dream will die. No board of directors with a fiduciary duty to shareholders will sustain a decades-long, annual drain of billions of dollars into what’s essentially a vanity project. A well meaning one, but the only market right now for a Mars colony is one billionaire with a whole lot of passion. Musk’s continual involvement and willingness to keep SpaceX private is probably the biggest risk of all.
I think the next cost reduction won’t come from incremental improvements or scaling of Starship. I would look at revolutions in things like spacesuit design, satellite design/construction, reusable Earth-Moon shuttles, cheap reusable lunar landers, etc. Lots and lots of low-hanging fruit in many other areas other than space launch.
Yes, but it will take time for industry to adapt to that. Take the way we make satellites or space probes now. When a program costs a billion dollars, you have to take extraordinary steps in development, so you get very careful, painstaking construction of everything by people in bunny suits and clean rooms. So a simple communications satellite takes years to build and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
If you can launch a satellite for a hundred thousand dollars, you can switch to much cheaper manufacturing, much like the lower cost of Starship means it’s acceptable to build it jn a field with commercial welders. You can tolerate the occasional failure as ling as the cost of failure is low.
We are going to need a revolution in thinking about how to build stuff for space.
Falcon Heavy isn’t a great example right now due to a specific limit: the payload fairing. Even SpaceX isn’t bothering to use FH for their Starlink flights because even filling the current fairing with satellites barely reaches the limit of the current F9.
F9 improved too much; a F9 1.0 Heavy would have made sense but the current upgraded one (based on Block 5 boosters) barely does except for specific high-energy trajectories (Earth escape), and there just aren’t too many flights of those.
Starship has a huge payload bay though and it’ll be lofting 400 Starlink satellites at a time once operational. SpaceX may need Starship just to keep the complete network going, since the satellites aren’t supposed to last more than 5 years.
SpaceX is trying to support larger fairings for FH but they don’t want to build them in-house, and there are some complications with buying them externally. Will probably increase the cost a lot and only make sense for military launches.
All true. SpaceX may find that they have to break the chicken-and-egg problem themselves. They’re already doing it with Starlink–for example, using krypton instead of xenon for their thrusters, because it’s a significant cost when the satellite costs $250k (not so much for a $1B geosat bird, though). They may have to expand into tourism, too.
People still haven’t really thought through the consequences of cheap lift. I’ll say it again: the tradeoffs you make when 1 kg costs $10k are different than when it costs $1000 or $100. Everything going to space will look different once this is really internalized. Something like the James Webb scope would never, ever be built if Starship was available and the builders weren’t serving some other master (Congress, etc.).
This discussion reminds me of the Michael Flynn sci-fi book series The Firestar Saga.
Amazon book description:
It is the dawn of the twenty-first century, and America is in trouble. Our public schools breed apathy and ignorance. Politics has become the art of the quick fix. But one woman has the vision and money to leverage change. Mariesa Gorley van Huyten, heiress to one of the great American fortunes, founds an educational subsidiary - Mentor Academies - and begins to subcontract public school systems in order to raise a new, less cynical generation. But her clandestine program is much larger, including the founding of a private space program, the eventual construction of an orbital power station, and supporting technological innovation on Earth.
Firestar is a chronicle of private enterprise and individual initiative - the story of one woman’s quest that becomes the focus for a whole new world of the future. Her program lets teachers strive to teach, hires astronauts who have no government space program to fly for, and provides productive outlets for the idealistic desires of the rich and powerful - at least those who remain sane enough to have such desires in the face of a crumbling America. And it just might work.
Exactly. The entire scope is this crazy origami folding thing. The main mirror is 6.5 meters, which is too big for an Ariane 5 fairing, so it folds into three pieces. You can eliminate that complexity if your cargo bay is 9 meters. It weighs 6.5 t and they had to pull every trick to get the mass that low. But… what if you have 100 tons to work with?
It’s worse than that, though. It’s designed as this perfect, precious jewel that has to work right the first time, because otherwise they’ve just blown $10B. But what they could have done instead is have numerous test flights to experiment with the tech they needed. Even just one test flight would have been far more valuable than the billions they spent on ground testing. In fact, I can’t see how any level of ground testing would be sufficient given that it will deploy in microgravity.
Maybe the original style made sense when launches were expensive. And there’s definitely a sunk cost element as well. With Starship flying, someone can send up an 8 m scope with no tricky bits, that doesn’t bother with mass-reducing anything, and would likely work just as well. And if it doesn’t–well, it’s just a $100M experiment and you can try again. Then when you finally get it right, you can build 100 of them for a lower price than the entire James Webb program.
