I don’t know that I agree 100%, but you’re probably at least partially in the ballpark.
Here’s some nightmare fuel:
Imagine Musk goes down the same rabbit hole as MyPillow guy. Musk’s assets and drive directed towards pure QAnon insanity and the glorification of a know-nothing dictator whether Trump or somebody else.
There have been eras in the past when & where tycoons controlled governments. I sure don’t want to live through that with modern tech.
We’re getting into GD territory here, but I wonder which is the one time for which you attribute genius status to Musk. When he founded SpaceX? When he founded Tesla (well, technically he didn’t found it, though he certainly ensured the company’s survival)? When he founded The Boring Company? When he co-founded PayPal?
Sure, Musk is a bigmouth. But experience shows that more than once s he’s come up with ideas that peopel around him thought were crazy, but Musk made them work nonetheless. Perhaps not within the originally intended timeline, but he did demonstrate that his large-scale visions were not altogether the figments of a deranged mind.
If Musk wants people on Mars, and there are astronauts who are willing to go, who are you or I to say no?
When Mars One announced it was accepting applications for astronauts to go on a one-way trip to Mars and never return, there were over 200,000 people worldwide who submitted applications.
Of course, yes. Any motivation to participate in a Mars mission is not a function of the association with Musk, I’m talking about some credible mission.
I want to go obviously because of what I could do within the few months of life. The fact that death would ultimately be certain is irrelevant. I have no desire to die, but death is certain for all of us. It’s no more apt to describe this choice as “committing suicide” than to call someone who chooses to have children a murderer.
People should be allowed to choose how to live their lives or how they end. Dying as one of the first people on Mars is pretty cool and if I didn’t have a family I’d be up for the ride.
What could you do that can’t currently be done with unmanned rovers?
But can’t you vomit and lose your hair and teeth on Earth?
Having read the Mars Trilogy series as a 30-something the idea of living on a successfully colonized Mars sounds really cool. To see some of the gargantuan geological (areological) structures would be just awesome. When the atmosphere is not obscured by seasonal dust storms I have to imagine the view of the night sky is better even than prehistoric Earth’s. No light pollution, darn little atmospheric scattering, etc.
The sad fact is the early colonists will have a real tough life and for landing safety & surface survival reasons will probably be deposited on a boring flatscape not unlike what you can see in the Atacama desert or a US salt flat. And will be destined to remain within a couple of miles of their basecamp for the next couple of years pending the build-up of additional supporting equipment.
I believe this is just marketing on Musk’s part. He’s keeping excitement alive and motivating his workers. But he has to know the odds of this actually happening are close to zero.
According to Musk’s original idea, after Starship is operational he wants to sent one with an ISRU (In-Situ Resource Utilization - a device to make fuel from Mars’ atmosphere) to refill Starship. Then in the next Mars window send people knowing they have a ship waiting fhere that can get them home. This is a variation of Bob Zubrin’s ideas.
For that to happen, the following things still need to occur:
Starship has to be able to reliably do its belly-flop landing schtick without blowing up.
Starship then has to make it to orbital velocities and back.
The Super Heavy booster has to be successfully tested.
Starship needs to be stacked on Super Heavy and successfully flown to orbit and back.
In-space refueling of Starship has to be figured out and made super reliable, because each mission to Mars requires at least six on-orbit refuelings.
Starship has to prove out its ability to fly to Mars and land.
An ISRU system has to be installed in Starship, along with the plumbing to refuel, deployable solar penels for energy, etc.
An entire Mars base has to be designed that can keep humans alive for a year and a half at minimum, and which can be delivered by Starship.
Each one of those steps is harder and more time consuming fhan the last. We are getting a bit of a false perception of how fast Starship tests can be iterated, because right now Starship is little more than some flying fuel tanks and they can knock one out every couple of weeks. But as the development progresses the vehicles will become more complex and expensive and take longer to build and ground test.
For example, if a Starship crashes today, three million-dollar Raptor engines are lost. But Super Heavy will have twenty eight Raptor engines. Not only does this bring up problems with vibration, acoustic energy, resonances between engines and all that stuff, but a crash in testing will cost a hell of a lot more money and need 28 more engines to be built. Current Starship prototypes are probably on the order of 5 million bucks or so. Super Heavy will be more like $25-30 million, minimum (assuming Raptors get cheaper at scale). And a full Stack of an orbital Starship with heat shield and cargo bay and clamshell doors and all the rest will be at least $100 million, and take commensurably long to build. They can’t afford a lot of iteration on those, so testing will probably increase and delay each launch.
I think a better timeline, if it happens at all, is something like this:
Late 2021-early 2022 - Starship makes orbit.
2022-2023 - Starship evolves, Earth-orbit refueling worked on. Perhaps unmanned Starship gets sent to Mars orbit, or if they get refuelling right, even a landing. If they can get permission due to risk of contaminating Mars with Earth life.
2024 - first Starship that can carry humans flies. Starship flies ‘Dear Moon’ mission, maybe in 2025.
2026 - Starship with prototype ISRU flies to Mars.
2028 - unmnned test of manned Starship landing on Mars filled with ‘colony’ supplies. Perhaps a second, improved ISRU Starship also goes.
2030 - first humans fly to Mars.
This is all assuming that everything goes reasonably well at every stage of development. Flying a rocket with 28 engjnes is not trivial. Surviving re-entry with those movable flaps is not trivial. In-space refueling may be incredibly difficult to pull off. Everything from static charges to massive heat differentials while moving cryogenic fuels will be issues. If an ISRU design fails on Mars it’s a year and a half before you can test another one. And as Starship gets closer to being a full spaceship, the cost of iteration will go up and the speed of iteration will go down.
I hate to say it, but two highly possible estimates for when SpaceX gets to Mars are ‘sometime in the 2030’s’ and ‘never’. Starship has yet to prove that it can actually work as a reasonable deep space platform. The ability to land from orbit and to refuel in orbit are potential show-stoppers, as is the ability to fly Super Heavy reliably.
I’m pretty confident that they’ll soon be able to stick the landing with Starship, but that’s just the next milestone in a very long list, with lots of unknowns along the way. It’s a high risk, high reward program that could still fail completely.
Human civilization ultimately has the potential to expand in some form to colonize vast amounts of space for billions of years. Short-term existential risks to human civilization may be far more significant than we realize, risking the total loss of an unimaginably vast potential future.
I’m not under any illusion that a human-derived civilization that may colonize the galaxy and survive the death of the Sun will look remotely like we do. But taking the first tentative steps to expand our civilization beyond one planet is an important step in mitigating existential risk. My early death is an utterly trivial consideration if I felt I could participate and contribute in even the smallest way to the first tentative steps. You may be right that for decades yet the most useful and cost-effective work will be done by robots. But I think the symbolic significance of a successful human mission (begging the question of how “success” is defined, of course) could matter a great deal in prioritizing this for humanity.
Every time someone makes this analogy I have to wonder about the state of critical thinking in education. The “New World” of the Americas was rich with resources, fertile open land that was ‘abandoned’ by the plagues that devastated the native population, and of course, fundamentally habitable with air, plentiful fresh water, game animals, and edible plants. Mars literally has none of these things; not only is it lacking in the basic essentials for life (free oxygen, liquid water, arable land, et cetera) the Martian regolith is also filled with toxic perchlorates, weeks long dust storms block out sunlight making normal agriculture impossible, what water there is on the surface outside of the polar regions is found only in the thick brines of recurring slope lineae, solar insolation that is less than half of what is received at Earth orbit, and the atmosphere is not only toxic but just thick enough to make landing a multi-ton vehicle highly risky by any conventional means.
Nobody will be ‘colonizing’ Mars in the sense of being able to maintain a self-sustaining colony for the foreseeable future, and without a supporting space-based infrastructure capable of extracting and processing consumable resources the cost of maintaining more than an outpost with a small, temporary crew is utterly prohibitive. This is notwithstanding the unknown effects of living in a fraction of Earth-level gravity for durations of years and the cosmic and solar particle radiation that constantly impinges the surface because of the lack of a magnetosphere and thick atmosphere, as well as the intense ultraviolet radiation that will break down any organic materials due to the lack of an ozone layer.
In most cases, I would consider Musk’s projections wildly optimistic, but this one is frankly complete bullshit, not only because of the difficulties of maintaining a self-sustaining colony on the surface of Mars but also because his “Starship”-based interplanetary transportation concept is cartoonish nonsense without a shred of substantial technical detail or evidence of feasibility. There is not one aspect of what has been presented about it that isn’t trivial to poke planet-sized holes through, and it is frequently apparent that not only is there no engineering rigor behind it but that even the images that are presented of the configuration of “Starship” are not only nonsensical but aren’t even to correct scale, notwithstanding the complete lack of details of how prospective colonists are supposed to survive once (if?) they even get to Mars. This Harold Hill routine may appeal to the space enthusiast crowd but for anyone who actually works in aerospace or has a knowledge of engineering, ecology, space medicine, or just active critical reasoning faculties it is very evident bullshit.
For your consideration: Common Sense Sceptic: “Starship and Mars”
It is interesting that you cite the Mars One ‘project’ because that has every indication of being a complete scam as is the Gateway Foundation and Orbital Assembly Corporation.
As for “who are you or I to say no?” to people willing to throw their lives away into a reckless, ill-conceived scheme to colonize Mars, there is certainly the libertarian argument that people should be free to do what they want even if it is harmful or extremely risky. However, the government does have a vested interest in public safety and assuring that people are making those decisions based upon an informed consideration of the actual risks instead of being sold scammy investments. This is why we have agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration, and why we do not have airliners routinely falling out of the sky at the rate that planes did in early aviation.
If a group of billionaires want to burn up their fortunes thinking that they can play at being John Carter of Mars despite being presented the reality of the state of the art, I’m perfectly fine with that. The comparison to polar explorers fails, however, insofar that those people are making informed choices that do not put others at risk. SpaceX needs to first demonstrate that they can at least reliably deliver people to orbital space and land their “Starship” without it routinely exploding putting both passengers and people on the ground at risk. Once their passengers are beyond any area of national responsibility or risk to nonpassengers, I could pretty much not give a fart in vacuum what risks they elect to take.
That’s what is as known as a “scam”.
Stranger
Heck, being born is “a one way ticket to certain death”, for that matter. Besides, dying in such a noble enterprise seems much more meaningful to mean than rotting away from some disease or being shot during a carjacking.
Exploration has always been a very risky business. It’s in the nature of the beast. Up to now, the casualties due to space exploration have been very low. However, now that we are going to be involved in highly complex endeavors over a span of tens of millions of miles, we can expect casualties to markedly increase.
Good riddance or not, I would absolutely be inclined to veto such an adventure if I were not convinced proper procedures were in place to prevent biological or chemical contamination of the Martian environment, or if it were a risky suicide mission with the possibility of generating debris, or for any number of other reasons.
I don’t think visiting Mars is madness. I think putting Elon Musk in charge of such an expedition is madness, though.
Getting people to and from Mars safely is a solvable problem. It doesn’t look like it will be solved by that artificial deadline. Furthermore I think this is worthwhile. Not only will it benefit any search for life on Mars, but it’s also practice for the next step.
I totally agree with this. The Mars surfade is about as inaccessible and inhospitable as the surface of the Moon. The atmosphere isn’t thick enough to be of much use other than fuel production, and there is no reasonable prospect for terraforming. Radiation on the surface has to be avoided, so colonists will either have to bury their habitats under the martian regolith or live in Lava tubes.
Because survival on Mars requires a complete high technology supply chain, it is not possible to build a self-sustaining colony there without millions of peoole and re-designing an entire infrastructure. We will need to re-learn how to mine, smelt, refine, build and maintain in Martian conditions.
Importantly, there is no chance of an economy growing organically that can pay for the quadrillions of dollars of imports that would be needed to over decades or centuries to build up equipment and people. You can send a handful of people to a scientific base without a market, but if you are planning to put thousands to millions of people there, there has to be some kind of payback or the minute Musk passes on or SpaceX falls on hard times the entire project would end.
If you want to terraform a world, the Moon is right next door. Sealing lunar lava tubes and pressurizing them is orders of magnitude easier than terraforming a planet (but still way beyond what we can do today), and the Moon has enough space in lava tubes for an entire civilization.
Most importantly, there are multiple pathways to a profitable lunar colony that could grow organically based on profit motive.
Technology for modifying and augmenting humans will advance rapidly over the next few decades, and not just for space exploration of course. But these advances may be far more significant for space exploration than advances in the more conventional aspects of space exploration technology. The humans that do ultimately establish the first successful colony somewhere other than earth will be heavily modified, the sharp distinction between human and robot/AI may be less clear cut. Developing that technology will require volunteers. I’ll probably be decrepit or dead by then, but for sure I’d volunteer if I could.
Start with the telephone sanitizers!
But then again, why do we want so much to build underground 5th-world hellhole slums? The Expanse gets one thing right in that the vast majority of people off-world would be basically empoverished laborers living in makeshift shantytowns. Why look at the future and say 'You know what humanity needs? Billions of Morlocks."
And then the thread readers.
