Astronauts who have served extended stays on the ISS are actually showing a variety of chronic health problems at rates exceeding the general population (not including cancers because the population is too small for medical statistics on particular carcinomas) including macular degeneration, cardiopulmonary disorders, and a variety of metabolic issues. How much of this is due to radiation exposure versus the effects of long duration freefall or other non-space related lifestyle impacts is unknown, but there are clearly health risks and medical impacts from exposure to the space environment that likely also translate to the low gravity and lack of a radiation filtering atmosphere on the surface of Mars.
We have yet to develop and demonstrate the capability to move large aggregate bodies around interplanetary space, and the chemical rocket propulsion systems we currently use for most interplanetary missions are at best marginal in terms of being able to reach—much less redirect—water-containing asteroids and comets, but there is nothing fundamentally impossible about doing so, especially once we have developed an extensive capability for automation in space operations and a high specific impulse propulsion system with adequate thrust (i.e. something other than tiny electric ion thrusters suitable only for orbital stationkeeping and tiny spacecraft).
But then, that begs the question of why go to Mars at all? Mars is the most difficult solid body in the Solar System to controllably land upon, and it is unsuitable for habitation in a multitude of ways. It would make far more sense to use this technology to move and process asteroid materials in situ to build solar orbiting habitats where near-terrestrial conditions and protection from radiation can be provided to occupants without having to cope with the limitations and issues of a planet which has never been able to support plant and animal life and will is not capable of being made to do so outside of the dreams of science fiction authors.
I think it’s pretty clear that the health issues are related to microgravity, not radiation. Not only is that more likely for basic physical reasons, but the issues are measurable even on relatively short duration stays. Plus there is the evidence, on Earth, that low-intensity radiation exposure does not cause these issues.
No way to find out for sure without actually going there. But astronauts don’t drop dead after two years in orbit. They’ll last the duration of a Mars mission as well. Exactly how well remains to be seen.
It was that selecting the ratio of colonists to support infrastructure is a very key metric. And a rather brittle sensitive one.
You can’t willynilly send too many people. Nor can you waste lots of up-mass overprovisioning excess capacity and spare parts “just in case”. And despite your best engineering estimates of maximum credible failures, Nature (Mother Ares?) working closely with Murphy can still hand you a beyond-credible compound scenario just for the lulz.
In a large open system averages have great predictive power. In small closed systems the extremes are far more predictive. And limiting.
Whose money, then? It’s not about “wow I can’t afford this”. The ROI on this project appears to be zero, other than clout. We know that Musk is often not the most skillful investor, but is he willing to put down $3.6 billion for zero return on investment? (Please do not say “it’ won’t be zero” unless you’re willing to show your work, based on resources that are currently known to exist on Mars).
If the answer is “it will help develop better transport”, I’d point out that no Mars colony is needed for that. My best guess is Musk will send a rocket around Mars, potentially into the surface of Mars, because those are good tests of navigation and propulsion, which do have an ROI. At that point he’ll collect whatever payday is in the pipeline, declare victory, and then say he totally had the Mars colony solved, but it’s being stymied by woke or labor laws or whatever.
If the bulk of the cost is building a ramp the height of Mt Everest, the bulk of that could be constructed to have the longevity of the Pyramids of Giza. Your costs are amortized over the next few millenia.
If your launch system is to roll a bunch of massive rollers down the other side of the ramp, then the cable connecting the rollers to your vehicle is the thing you’re going to be replacing endlessly. That’s pretty cheap, comparatively.
At the end of the day, launching stuff into space is a simple exercise of adding enough energy into an object over a long-enough period of time that you’re not murdering the occupants of the vehicle. Any structure large enough to give you that amount of time is either going to be there for good or it’s going to cause the tectonic plate it sits on to submerge.
Musk will probably be worth a half trillion dollars in a year’s time. He can afford to throw around a few tens of billions on this.
The whole argument that he isn’t serious about Mars is really almost conspiratorial. He was donating to the Mars Society back in 2001 and giving talks (he had pretty low ambitions then, just wanting to land a greenhouse on Mars). There is no topic of any kind that he’s obsessed about more. Every single time he talks about space, no matter the context, he brings up Mars. Reusable rockets? Mars. Starlink? Mars. Moon landing? Cool, but also Mars.
In all that time he’s mentioned Antarctica zero times. Just completely off his radar. A distraction.
That said, the Mars Society did actually spend some Muskbucks on a simulator facility in Utah. It’s kinda silly IMO, basically people LARPing in fake spacesuits, but maybe some science is coming out of it. Dunno.
Setting up a base in Antarctica just doesn’t tell you anything about the technical problems that a Mars colony will face. Extracting CO2, growing food, all that stuff is different. And the parts that aren’t different (like water recycling) are already being tested elsewhere, like on the ISS.
No. There are great chunks of frozen clay mixed with water, dry ice, and ammonia. The clay contains some amount of every stable element, including the ones toxic to humans.
He wasn’t even a billionaire in 2001, and was about to blow his modest fortune on a silly one-off Mars lander. Thankfully, the Russians gave him the runaround and he decided to start SpaceX instead.
The whole thing rings of “The moon landing is faked, but for realism they had to do the filming on the moon itself”.
If you’re the richest private citizen in the world, if you can have virtually anything you want to have and do virtually anything you want to do, what do you do with the rest of your days? Is it really that implausible that Musk is living the fanbois’ dream of being able to single-handedly promote space development out of his own pocket?
You do know that unlike the ISS which had to balance radiation protection against weight, habitat modules on Mars’ surface can use local material for any amount of shielding desired? Their radiation exposure when not on EVA should be just above zero.
IMHO the biggest radiation challenge is the 260-day journey to Mars when the crews will be beyond the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere. That would not be a good time to get caught by a solar flare for example. But even this doesn’t require going in blind; a dress rehearsal of a Mars trip could be conducted in high orbit (maybe even that near-rectilinear halo orbit planned for Artemis’s Gateway), with the option of cutting the rehearsal short and getting back to Earth pronto if the flight surgeons started to get alarmed.
I’ve had friends and acquaintances who’ve done stints at the SA base (multiple stints and overwintering, in one guy’s case). I am alwaysvey jealous of their experiences and would do it in a heartbeat. So would my wife.
That’s not at all what I hear. Yes there are psychological issues, but everyone has meaningful work and a similar mindset, and with modern amenities it’s quite liveable by science posting standards. Better than some other posts like the SubAntarctic islands, I’m told.
Having interacted with Musk, and interviewed many former SpaceX employees (and hired a few of them because it is actually a good place to get solid engineering experience even if I take issue with the company’s business practices and leadership) I don’t find that to be a ridiculous notion at all. Musk’s claim on being a genius ‘rocket scientist’ (as well as having designed every system on the Tesla Model 3, and any of a vast array of other unlikely claims) are entirely predicated on repeating the things other people have told him, often with embarrassing errors and mangling of fundamental concepts. Elon Musk’s talent lies in his ability to create hype and attract wealthy investors, not any special knowledge about engineering or planetary science, and most of his notions about colonizing Mars draw their inspiration from ‘Fifties era science fiction stories and ‘artists renditions’ that are far more logistically complicated than he imagines and completely unworkable in practice.
High energy cosmic radiation can punch through meters of solid material and creates spallations of even more dangerous daughter particles that rapidly decay. If you have to use ‘local material’ piled 10 meters or more of regolith upon your habitat, you might as well save the bother of lifting it (with what soil-moving equipment? how would it be powered?) and just tunnel down into the regolith which also provides thermal insulation. But I don’t think most enthusiasts’ dreams of “A New Life on Mars” consists of living in windowless warrens, only able to make brief sorties to the surface and in constant vigilance of tracking in toxic dust or having a seal blow out and subject a section full of colonists to near vacuum conditions. Better to stick with Rekall even if they do have the occasional lobotomy. “Well, don’t worry. Things hardly ever fuck up around here.”
I can’t speak for anyone else here, but I wouldn’t characterize it as a “long con” where he’s faking being interested in Mars. I do believe 100% that he’d love to take credit for putting a person on Mars. So would I. Dreams are free.
What I don’t believe is that he’s actually interested in doing the work, or making any serious financial sacrifice to get there. I think he’s building rockets because it’s a fun way to make money, and it feeds his fantasy of founding a Mars colony. He’s telling himself and others that all this is instrumental to a Mars colony, because it’s fun to say that you’re the Mars King, and it attracts investors and credulous cultists.
When push comes to shove and it comes time to actually follow through on the habitat, that’s when the low-ROI phase comes in, the one that also deals with the messy realities of human spaceflight and habitation. He’s demonstrated that he doesn’t really care about people at all, sees them mainly as robots to be exploited. I think when the complexities of that emerge, all the work and effort that requires, plus the fact that settling Mars will be the beginning of negative ROI, he’ll lose interest or find some excuse to back out of it, just like he tried to back out of the Twitter purchase.
In the end, it’ll be just another one of those things that he hypes up and then backtracks on, trying to blame it on the economy or government regulation or the wokes. Look up whatever excuses he’s made for not completing things like Hyperloop, it’ll be the same thing with the “Mars colony”. And the evidence starts right here in the present day with the fact that he’s not prototyping habitat or in-situ resource processing, the things you need to actually live, the things that we currently don’t know how to do. He’s just doing more of what he already knows makes money. That’s the tell that deep down this is just another one of his amusements.
I had a physics professor in college who spent time in Antarctica. His name was Fries, pronounced “freeze”. There was a “Doctor Freeze” in Antarctica. (And, thanks to the miracles of the internet, I can see that he was there in 1963. And I don’t think that he ever mentioned having a mountain named after him, but they do name Antarctic mountains after Antarctic scientists, and yes, there is a “Mount Freeze” (even if you spell it weird) in Antarctica.)
“Cultists” can’t invest in SpaceX since they’re private. Institutional investors see Starlink as being highly lucrative (and it is). If they see Mars plans in any kind of positive light, it’s just as a means to the end of attracting top talent to the company. Which it does work well at.
It’s kinda hilarious how often this gets brought up. An idea he came up with while being stuck in LA traffic is in no way comparable to something he’s been obsessed with for decades. Not all ideas are bangers. So what?
How do you know this? They aren’t publicly displaying anything, but they aren’t publicly displaying a lot of stuff. They worked on EVA suits in private for a long time before anyone knew about them. We’ve gotten only a tiny amount of leaked info about the interior config of HLS (the moon lander). We don’t hear anything about Raptor development until the engines are basically done. Their production line for Starlink satellites virtually appeared out of nowhere, immediately ramping up to thousands of sats per year. Etc. They’re a private company and do almost everything in private. Giant rockets notwithstanding.
Sure, we’d know about an Antarctic base, but all of the actual equipment, like large-scale CO2 electrolyzers or lightweight deployable solar panels or oxygen generators or whatever we wouldn’t know about. Though anything shared with Artemis will be apparent fairly soon.