We should create a society where people who aren’t rich and/or famous feel so shitty about life that they would rather be a kept canary in a rich persons coalmine. Then maybe we can consolidate the vast majority of human output into a few people hands so we can dance for them as they toss pennies.
But perfect Earth-adapted specimens are useless. We need mutants to survive on Mars. We need to send people with massively mutated gametes to breed thousands of offspring, most of which will abort or be horribly disfigured and be sent to work in the mines, but among which we may hope to find the first well-adapted SuperMartian. It seems to me that the SDMB membership could be fertile source of mutated gametes.
The government is so worried about your safety it won’t let you drive without a seatbelt and you are mystified as to why it might limit your ability to strap yourself in a rocket headed for a planet with no oxygen?
Perhaps if I put a warhead on the rocket it’s covered by the 2nd Amendment?
Or Hugo Drax.
Actually, you’re almost onto something there. As you say, Musk is building a rods from god planetary bombardment system. But not for the US. For himself. All Hail Emperor Elon! Or else.
Like @Marvin_the_Martian upthread perhaps? Didn’t have to look to hard. 
Not true. Musk is worth about $172B. That is certainly “approaching” the $500B estimates that Stranger mentioned for non-suicide missions. But getting back is the hard part, due as usual to the tyranny of the rocket equation. So landing a small suicide mission could easily be done with $172B. And he already runs a manned space program so he has a bit of a head start.
Not that one should trust the $500B number, either. NASA predicted an initial development cost for the Falcon 9 of $3.9B. It actually cost $390M, and they built the Falcon 1 along the way. And anyway, the numbers tend to be based on highly specific mission profiles (often based around the notoriously expensive Shuttle).
Every time someone brings up space tourism as a primary industry to support crewed space exploration, I wonder how said tourism is going to provide a fiscally sustainable industry. All tourism on Earth—even “adventure tourism”—is essentially built upon existing transportation and support services, often using cheap local labor and sustained beyond the initial novelty by the volume of tourists. Orbital space hotels, Lunar and Martian excursions, flying through the rings of Saturn, et cetera, are all activities that will be extraordinarily expensive for the foreseeable future even with hypothetical orders of magnitude reductions in cost to orbit, and will require an already existing sustained human presence. There may be a small cohort of billionaires willing to shell out millions for that kind of experience but the volume necessary to sustain actual tourism is just beyond the means of even very wealthy upper-middle class people. Tourism follows exploration, not proceeds or drives it.
It is true that we don’t have any long duration experience with humans in fractional gravity, and everything known about it is an inference from freefall conditions and bed rest studies, but the general consensus by space physiologists doing research is that anything less than half Earth-normal gravity is very likely to induce a number of problems. Although the assumption is often that these are limited to musculoskeletal effects that can be partially addressed by weighted or tension band exercise (although degradation continues to occur regardless), the more problematic difficulties are in cardiopulmonary issues, tissue and cellular energetics and regeneration, issues with the vestibular system, and potentially even changes to the epigenome resulting from long duration in reduced gravity. It is difficult to clearly separate radiation and freefall effects in studies on the ISS but there is at least some aspects of long duration freefall effects that are almost certainly associated with the lack of gravity, and physiologists strongly suspect that this would apply to some degree in a Lunar-level gravity field. I’m not sure how you would put a centrifuge large enough for habitation within even a large lava tube or operate it in the Moon’s gravity field in such a way to allow people within to live and work but that is basically creating a Rube Goldberg-esque situation to support habitation rather than just constructing large orbiting habitats that can produce terrestrial-like conditions without excessive Coriolis forces and other noticeable disorienting effects.
While putting habitats under the lunar surface (in lava tubes or otherwise) separates the regolith and occupants, they still need to interface through the surface, and of course nearly all mining or scientific activities will be conducted on or through the surface, still presenting that challenge. This became a problem for the later J-class Apollo missions and has been noted as one of the major unresolved problems with both crewed Lunar and Martian exploration.
@QuickSilver, you continue to defy my attempts to provide an amusing death for you.
Stranger
I should add a footnote to my above-stated skepticism about the wisdom or utility of sending humans to Mars in any foreseeable future. I’ve been fascinated by astronomy and Mars in particular since I was a little kid. When NASA sent Mariner IV to Mars, I wrote them a letter requesting pictures, a typical little-kid letter, and I even enclosed a money order (Pay to the order of: National Aeronautics and Space Administration) to defray their expenses.
I was delighted when they sent me a packet of 8x10 glossies of the Mariner photos (plus they returned my money order!). My enthusiasm remains unabated. I anxiously followed the latest landing, that of Perseverance. Yet I think this enthusiasm is perfectly consistent with a sober assessment of the value of a human landing there – or rather, a lack thereof, compared to putting much less money into more robotic missions doing really sound science. What Musk thinks he’s trying to achieve is anyone’s guess, but it doesn’t make any sense to me either from the standpoint of feasibility or of practical value.
As for “humans eventually have to get off this planet”, that’s undoubtedly true, but I think it’s only true in a much longer timeframe than many of us imagine. In fact by the time it happens, we may have become human-computational hybrids.
Why is everybody so eager to become Borg?
If Musk wants to run “a small suicide mission” he could do that today by just packing some of those willing volunteers into his next Starship test.
Since I’ve worked on multiple adjunct studies for a Mars exploration architecture, I can speak with some knowledge beyond just repeating highlights from a NASA report. A US$500B estimate is, if anything, a lowball figure for a 4-6 person crew on a conjunction-class mission. There exists this assumption that sending people to Mars is all about getting them up to orbit and on an a Mars transfer trajectory, but the propulsion aspect is actually the easiest part of a mission architecture to estimate and develop. No architecture that NASA has published has ever been “based around the notoriously expensive Shuttle”, although the early “90 Day Study” did reference Shuttle-derived heavy lift vehicles and an assumption of using the Shuttle for personnel transfer from and to the then-assumed Space Station Freedom. This was before the growth in costs to support the aging Orbiter Vehicle fleet and reduction in flight rate that pushed the cost of Shuttle launches up near the US$1B/flight cost, so it was never a major driver in cost estimation.
If you think there is a realistic architecture for a crewed Mars mission–not handwaving estimates based upon the ‘artist rendition’ animations that comprises the entire technical content provided by SpaceX on the Mars exploration plans to date–that costs significantly less than this, I’d love to see it as would thousands of other engineers and space sciences because a cheaper path to Mars for people is also one for uncrewed exploration as well as developing the space-based infrastructure that is necessary to actually develop orbital space industries. But if the answer to that is a slightly warmed over version of Zubrin’s “Mars Direct” or animations of people doing zero-g ballet in front of a big isogrid window that is half of the nose of Elon Musk’s notion of a spacecraft, it is not really worth the time to glance over it. Actually getting even a small payload to Mars like the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers is an extraordinarily challenging effort with no small amount of risk of mission failure at numerous points despite not having anywhere near the complexity or logistical requirements of a crewed mission.
Stranger
They get cool leather bike suits and those awesome laser-pointer eyepieces. It is certainly better than listening to Vogon poetry or flying around in a junky ship with a bunch of thieves and crazy people. They probably have a better health plan, too.
Stranger
They never struck me as being ones for showering often.
[Moderating]
I guess I’m the first GQ mod on the scene? This thread started out as more of an IMHO than GQ, and has only evolved further in that direction. Moving.
[Not moderating]
Anyone Musk sends to Mars will die on Mars. But more importantly, anyone he doesn’t send to Mars will die on Earth. Shouldn’t we be charging him with seven billion counts of murder?
To be honest, it would not shock me if he could find a few volunteers for the next test.
Yes, the 90-day study was one that came to mind (as far as I’m concerned, Shuttle-derived vehicles all fall into the same category as far as costs go, and the SLS isn’t proving me wrong). But the $500B number has appeared elsewhere. A more recent one (which, granted, hardly qualifies as an actual study) projects a >$500B cost by simply scaling up the mass and cost of the ISS. But the ISS was expensive because the Shuttle was expensive. Even if launch costs are a relatively small fraction of the total, they dictate the design.
All that aside, I consider NASA cost projections to be basically nonsense when applied outside of NASA. The complex of Congress, NASA, and traditional aerospace contractors is explicitly designed to make things as expensive as possible. I am not being metaphorical or hyperbolic here. The entire point is to funnel money from the federal government to the districts of influential senators and congressmen as rapidly as possible. The side effect of occasionally launching a mission is virtually irrelevant and only has to happen often enough that NASA doesn’t look like a complete black hole.
NASA’s cost models aren’t based on any underlying economic facts, just a historical look at what things did cost in the end, and the way costs increased over time. So of course when they look at their own costs–which derive from a system intended to make things as expensive as possible–they will conclude that just about everything will be extremely expensive. And it’s probably not all that far off when applied to themselves. But we already know that it was wrong by a factor of 10 when applied to Falcon 9 development. That does not mean we can just divide their projections by 10 in the future. But it does mean that we should ignore the projections completely due to inapplicability.
SpaceX has not presented a detailed architecture as of yet for a mission. What we can reliably predict, if the Starship program succeeds as a launcher, is that it should be possible to land material on Mars for a few thousand dollars per kg. That assumes full second-state reuse on Earth. We’ll know in a few years if that actually comes to pass. But if it does, then various Mars architectures become relatively straightforward. ISRU is the long pole, but you can do quite a lot if 1000 tons only costs a few $B to land.
Hey, if Musk wants to send this hypothetical person to Mars…
In high school, I was fascinated by the space colonization ideas promoted by Gerard K O’Neill. He suggested mining the moon for material to build large manned space colonies. I’ve read that Jeff Bezos is also influenced by the same ideas (and I have a friend who works at Blue Origin).
He’s “worth” $172 billion only because Tesla’s stock price is wildly inflated. If he actually tried to sell a big chunk of that, I expect the stock price to crash to earth.
That’s one form of tourism. There is also a huge industry supporting extremely expensive tourism. There are private islands you can rent for $200,000 per day. There are thousands of ‘super yachts’, some costing more than half a billion dollars. There is a thriving industry in yacht charters, which can go for $500,000 or more. The large yacht industry was worth $5.7 billion dollars in 2017, and has been increasing at almost 8% per year. The Middle East is full of billionaires who like to flaunt wealth in incredibly expensive ways. The Bugatti Veyron sold for over a million bucks, and Bugatti sold 450 of them. The ‘supercar’ industry is worth about $15 billion dollars per year. There are a lot of very rich people in this world.
Companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are betting on there being enough wealthy people out there willing to spend $100,000 for a twenty minute flight to non-orbital space to sustain an industry. People have paid as much as $55 million for a space flight.
Tourism wouldn’t be the only, or even the main source of revenue for the Moon. If any colony develops on the Moon, it will happen gradually and organically as we find more things of value to do there. If there are enough people there, flights to and from the moon will become regular, and costs will come down. As they do, even more people will go there. Given enough demand, markets will spring up to provide better equipment, habitats, etc. People will look for in-situ replacements for stuff shipped expensively from Earth. Secondary industries start up to support the population.
Where that all goes, I have no idea. Certainly there is no guarantee that we’ll find enough profitable things to do on the Moon to justify any sort of colonization. But the odds of something like that happening on the Moon are far greater than something similar happening on Mars.
Musk promotes anti-vax conspiracy theories.
On his social media account.
He has zero credibility with me.