Hey! Hugh Howey, is that you?
Doesn’t matter how long it’s amortized over. Investors expect a certain rate of return. Whatever it is, it had better beat Treasury bonds by a decent amount.
Just take it to a logical extreme. Say it costs a trillion dollars and can put 1 kg into orbit per year. Does so indefinitely without maintenance, totally for “free”. Still worth it?
Never mind that all of these approaches are all highly experimental. Physics is physics but the engineering practicalities are unknown.
Yeah. And unfortunately, that means a distance of hundreds/thousands of kilometers. So it is necessarily a megaproject of some sort. Except for things that fly and don’t require extended machinery.
Rockets aren’t nearly as bad as people think; the propellant seems extreme but it’s actually quite cheap. The problem is just that they’ve been treated as artillery for most of their existence.
I heard a report that reported on research suggesting hypomagnetic fields had dramatic impacts on cellular stress and biological aging. Below is what I could find about it:
https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/11/12/nwae395/7876494
Relative to Earth, Mars is extremely hypomagnetic. FWIW magnetic field strength is strong at Earth’s poles but oriented near vertical instead of horizontal.
Research in animal models also demonstrate hypomagnetic reproductive health impacts.
We really do need to appreciate that life that evolved on Earth is well adapted to Earth, and may not do well elsewhere for reasons both known and for ones not even yet suspected. In my sci-fi imagination humans are genetically engineered for space and other worlds with designed speciation.
Some icy chunks out there do fit that pattern. Might have to go all the way to Saturn. Some people say that is The Martian Way.
ISWYDT.
You don’t think private investors can be cultists?
The public position of SpaceX is that they will begin researching in-situ resource processing “in seven to nine years”, the obvious implication being that nothing has been done.
I hope you realize how it sounds if you’re seriously arguing that the very rich man is probably doing things in secret. Yes, he could be secretly working on an advanced Mars civilization. He could also be secretly lying while laughing at everyone who thinks he’s being serious. Anything can happen in secret!
Is he obsessed with it, or does he just fantasize about it and is having fun using it to drum up business for his orbital lift business? He’s got a history of saying things that others considered patently unrealistic and not following through. The things he has succeeded at are incremental improvements on the achievements of others. Electric cars and orbital rockets already existed, he improved on them.
So that’s great, but nothing truly “visionary” he’s ever proposed has panned out. He says things for attention, throws a ton of money at half-cooked demos, then gets bored and walks away when it gets too hard. That’s what the “Mars Colony” is going to be. I bet he’ll get like 60% of the way there, realize it’s not happening, then say “I just realized that the REAL focus is Europa”. The cult will say “of course, it was always obvious, thank you sir, Europa or bust!”. Then he’ll use that hype to build even bigger rockets to put even more commercial shit into low-earth orbit.
Except that Starship, let alone an even bigger follow-on, is way too much boost capacity for much other than a Mars colonization effort. Not only is Starship supposed to be reusable but the Starships are supposed to be assembly-line mass producable for minimum cost. We’re talking about the space equivalent of Liberty Ships: a fleet of a thousand 100-ton payload ships being reused as fast as they can be gassed up and relaunched (mainly to support in-orbit refueling). If Mars colonization falls through (and it might if unknown unknowns happen) Starship would utterly flood the limited current market for space launch.
You’re predicating your argument on the fact that unbuilt imaginary capacity could exceed any real-life needs, therefore it’s not intended for any real-life needs. The flaw in this reasoning is more than obvious.
SpaceX is certainly proceeding as if they really do plan to create that “imaginary” capacity: they’re doing a lot of presumably expensive work in ironing out the bugs in making the Starships fully reusable, and their construction processes are geared to mass-production. That’s a hell of a lot of time and money to spend on what you claim is essentially a con job.
To echo a quote from above, “not your money”. I am not swayed by the argument that “Musk couldn’t possibly be squandering that much cash on nothing.”
I could fully get on board with the idea that the actual expected ROI is for something else. Asteroid mining perhaps. It’s possible he’s building out capacity for enterprises that don’t build hype like a Mars colony, but are potentially a lot higher ROI (metallic asteroid mining might be such a thing).
And it’s also possible that rich people just blow money on things that are fun and feed their egoes, just for the thrill of seeing what happens.
You seem to be simultaneously arguing that Elon Musk
- Never really intended to send people to Mars.
- Intended it as a whim but he won’t seriously follow through.
- Really means it, which shows how stupid and nutty he is.
You’re welcome to bash Musk as much as you want but do get your narratives straight.
The narrative is that Musk will not found a Mars colony, and the biggest piece of evidence is that he’s not working on habitat or in-situ resource processing. Full stop.
The rest of the commentary is response to all of the deflection about “why else would he be tricking us like this?” I don’t really know or care what’s in his head, because I’m not the one getting fooled. I offered several theories that align to his actual behavior of lying and blustering. You can keep getting fooled or not, it’s not really my problem.
And, as a megaproject, it would necessarily be the product of some sort of global arrangement between governments. No investors.
And I offered a perfectly logical reason, which has apparently been ignored, why we haven’t seen it yet: because there’s no point in researching the problem until they’re certain they’ll have the need to solve it. SpaceX simply isn’t putting the cart before the horse.
Complex projects are executed in parallel so all the components are ready at launch time. Otherwise the timeline isn’t realistic, because doing them serially would take way too long.
The reason he’s doing it serially is that it’s a profit-driven business. Each phase has to make money to help fund the next phase. That’s two reasons the Mars colony isn’t going to happen - the serialized timeline is unrealistically long, but more importantly, the Mars colony can’t be funded because the ROI is negative.
That’s why I think this will end up either in the orbital launch business, or maybe in asteroid mining. I think SpaceX might be able to figure out asteroid mining. But running a Mars colony is hard and no ROI, so he’ll scoot right past Mars and try asteroid mining (if things get that far, which I’m not at all sure about). Maybe a robotic Mars lander as a vanity project, but no humans living on Mars.
To be sure the Mars colony is going to be a money pit indefinitely; but funding it at the level we currently spend on space, a few billion dollars a year, will yield progressively more benefit (even if not monetarily) as the colony becomes better established. Musk could probably afford to spend $3 billion a year on Mars for the remainder of his life purely as his personal hobby. One reason SpaceX hasn’t gone public is because corporations are required by law to serve the stockholders’ interests of best return on investment; Musk doesn’t have to do that. That being the case, there’s no reason not to develop it serially because it isn’t like there’s a deadline at which the colony has to begin operating in the black. In fact one enduring criticism of the Mars proposal is that it’s too ambitious too fast; okay, so why not then take it slower like so many people are urging?
The cost of a single Mars mission with 4-6 person crew is in the many hundreds of billions of dollars. The cost of of an ongoing Mars ‘colony’ (large outpost requiring regular sustainment) is vastly more than “a few billion dollars a year” even assuming dirt cheap Earth-to-orbit launch costs. The idea that SpaceX enthusiasts and amateur colonization advocates have that just getting bodies and ‘stuff’ headed toward Mars is virtually solving the problem of exploring or inhabiting Mars is so risible as to be not even worthy of serious consideration; the ‘transportation problem’ is literally the easiest part of a Mars mission, and even that is underestimated by people not cognizant in interplanetary spacecraft and habitation system design, propulsion engineering, and space medicine and physiology. I say this having worked on multiple adjunct studies feeding into Mars exploration architecture proposal, and having myself gone from cautious advocate to somewhat jaded realist as I understood the real scope of what such an effort would entail.
Stranger
No, it’s not. Or at least the plan is for Starship to drastically reduce the cost of sending mass-scale flights to Mars. You’re thinking of the “Old Space” mission model, where developing a specialized transport vehicle and lander (and getting it into LEO to start with at $30,000 a pound prices) along super-Apollo lines would have taken hundreds of billions of dollars, which is why it never happened.
Make payloads cheap and large enough, and you no longer have to design and build everything you send into space along “costs its weight in gold” engineering specs. Again, you appear to be presuming that a preliminary Mars base would be like transporting and landing the ISS on Mars; providing habitable volume and life support at five billion dollars a crew member. Old Space thinking.
Again, the Earth-to-orbit and interplanetary transit element of interplanetary missions is literally the most straightforward and cheapest aspect; even making it significantly cheaper doesn’t actually reduce the cost of a mission (and particularly a crewed mission, where the the vast majority of the cost is keeping a crew alive and functional). Setting aside the lack of innovation that came out of the post-Cold War consolidation of aerospace contractors, the “OldSpace vs. NewSpace” dichotomy is largely bullshit; most of the cost-cutting measures of using commercial off the shelf (COTS) technologies doesn’t end up actually being cheaper because of all the work required to bring it up to an adequate standard of reliability in the most stressing conditions and environments of orbital space launch and the space radiation/thermal/vacuum environment. And the oft-repeated claim that being able to ship large amounts of mass to orbit makes things orders of magnitude cheaper does is not borne out in practice, nor is the notion that colonists can McGuyver their way to success a realistic approach versus the disciplined advancement and maturity of the required technologies. Again, I have participated in several studies on this particular topic and the degree of complexity for even a small crewed mission is unappreciated by space colonization enthusiasts, even discounting the entire cost of transportation to Mars orbit.
Stranger
They usually don’t have that much money. Unless you’re simply defining a cultist as someone that thinks SpaceX will pull it off, like Steve Jurvetson.
No idea where that quote comes from–the video it cites doesn’t contain anything like that. I checked the full transcript. The closest thing is a slide that contains a bunch of items, some ISRU-related, and Musk says “Sometimes people ask me, are we developing these things? I’m like, not yet because this is the cart and we need the horse first.”, but it’s not clear exactly what he’s referring to.
On the other hand, we have Tom Mueller–lead engine designer at SpaceX until his retirement–saying:
But unfortunately, no detail beyond that:
Mueller has always been a straightforward person, and currently has no reason to particularly stick up for SpaceX beyond saying what is true.
And a lot of stuff that others considered patently unrealistic and then did follow through (or got his teams to follow through with, if you wish). Many people were in absolute denial about the practicality of resuable rockets until very recently, and we can see that they really believed that, because several companies got caught completely with their pants down with “modern” rocket designs that were obsolete the day that they first flew.
Also, I still get a kick out of this exchange, where SpaceX shared some pics of their new engine, like:
But Tory Bruno, CEO of their competitor ULA, said:
To which Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, replied:
So it’s not just stuff on the drawing board that their competitors find patently unrealistic. It’s sometimes stuff that already exists!