There are probably many but the National Park Service doesn’t allow and actively prosecutes BASE jumping in the parks, for example.
But hey, if you want to be mystified knock yourself out.
That gives me an idea. Why not start a new branch of engineering to support this…maybe…“Fun-geneering?!”
The people who design roller coasters & such certainly think of their work as fun-gineering. The product has to work in the safety sense, but it’s ultimate use is strictly recreational. If it isn’t fun it’s a failure.
I note Richard Branson has been mentioned a couple of times - just wanted to add that in 2008, he declared that Virgin Galactic planned its first ‘space tourism’ flights for 2009. As of 2021, these have still not happened. And putting humans into low earth orbit (as planned by Virgin Galactic) is orders of magnitude simpler than sending a live human to Mars, let alone establishing a colony there.
I wouldn’t trust either Branson or Musk to watch my pint while I went for a piss, never mind board a spacecraft they were behind.
How strange. You criticize Branson because he hasn’t put anyone in low Earth orbit, then throw in Elon Musk, who actually has. Strange criticism against the first non-governmental organization to actually fly humans onto LEO and the ISS.
In the meantime, Boeing has failed so far on the same contract, despite getting almost twice as much money from NASA as SpaceX to develop the same capability.
I mean, over 5 million people trusted Branson to put them into very, very low earth orbit in 2019 alone. Didn’t look for 2020 numbers, I assume Virgin Atlantic is fairly just as poorly as every other airline these days.
The strong anti-Musk sentiment amongst many people here is faintly amusing, almost as amusing as the strong pro-Musk Twitter followers.
He has clearly helped his companies to make enormous strides and part of the trick is to garner huge enthusiasm and set highly ambitious goals both in scale and in timescale. Perhaps (probably) this time he’s bit off more than he can chew but it definitely makes the place more interesting.
If SpaceX misses the 2026 date so what? Setting it so soon may help to bring forward the eventual date. Better to aim high and just miss it then to aim low. As long as people don’t die pointlessly along the way that is…
If I was an IT manager and had detailed specifications for a project that showed a three-year development plan with a competent 20-person development team, and someone like Musk came along and told me he could personally code and fully test it in a month, I wouldn’t be fired up by “huge enthusiasm” and inspired by his “ambitious goal”. I’d throw him out of my office.
If you’re interested in an actual history of rapid development at SpaceX, I’d recommend the book Liftoff by Eric Berger, which details the Falcon 1 program and the personalities (not just Musk) behind it. They really did build and launch a rocket faster and with fewer resources than just about anyone else, before or since. And while Musk had hoped to be faster yet, even with their failures and delays the program was remarkably fast. The extreme workload and harsh environment burned out about half the company, but they really had no choice in order to survive.
Agreed. I’m not sure he actually believes that date himself but he’s very passionate about humanity becoming a multi-planetary civilization. Just keeping people talking about it is a win for his cause.
Fair comment, but the main point of my post was to point out that if a billionaire says they can achieve space travel, the timeframe they envisage could be a lot longer than they first think. I do admit Musk has achieved more than Branson in this regard, but putting people on Mars is way, way harder than what he has done so far - as already ably pointed out by the experts in this thread and elsewhere.
Presumably 2026 is significant in terms of Earth’s proximity to Mars? How often does this sort of proximity occur? I mean, it’s far from the only problem, but it’s got to be easier getting a rocket from Earth to Mars if they are on the same side of the Sun compared with if they’re on opposite sides, right?
About every 26 months. If they miss 2026, there’s another opportunity in late 2028, maybe early 2029. Missing one launch window isn’t that disastrous.
Incidentally, it’s not exactly proximity at work, but rather that if you launch from Earth at one of those windows, you’ll end up intersecting Mars at the right time. You end up launching well before the point where Earth and Mars are closest.
Thanks. Yes, I realised there would be orbital mechanics involved and it’s not just a case of waiting for Earth and Mars to line up, then quickly fly in a straight line from one to the other. I’m mildly surprised the windows are that close together, but I have very little intuitive sense of how this works.
I recommend playing Kerbal Space Program for gaining intuition!
This one is not too tough, though. Mars is farther from the sun and so moves more slowly in its orbit. That means you have to launch when Mars is “ahead” of you, in terms of relative angle to the sun. As it happens, the right number is about 44 degrees–launch from Earth when Mars is that angle ahead, and you’ll catch up with it at the right time given how long it takes to get there.
So the question is then, how often are the two planets lined up so that Mars is 44 degrees ahead of Earth? Well, the Martian year is about 1.88 Earth years. If it starts 44 degrees ahead, then after 12 months the Earth will have gone 360 degrees (wrapping back to 0) and Mars will be at 235. Another 12 months and the Earth has gone around again, but Mars has wrapped around and ended up at 67 degrees. That’s getting close–so just a couple months after you’re back at the 44 degree number.
Sorry but that’s not even a close analogy to SpaceX.
It’s very common to shoot for unrealistic deadlines in development. The thinking is that if you want something done in a year, you tell the team they have 9 months. If you tell them they have a year, they’ll deliver in 15 months. People tend to not work as hard at the beginning of a project, then become very focused as deadlines loom.
I don’t think anyone really believed the Artemis mission would put a man on the moon by 2024, but if you pushed for that date you might get there by 2026 or 2028. But if you say we’re goong to get there by 2028, it’ll like be more like 2030 or 2032.
The problem with that strategy is that your employees eventually figure it out, and then they stop taking deadlines seriously. So I’m not a fan of the strategy, but there is some truth to it.
Musk has the problem that he needs to keep his work force motivated, and saying ‘work really hard on this rocket, which will go to Mars one day maybe in twenty or thirty years’ is mot particularly motivational. So he sets fantastic goals and misses them, but still gets things done much faster by keeping his workforce motivated and working hard. And he does deliver a lot of things close to schedule. He beat Boeing with Commercial Crew by what’s looking like a couple of years.
The other thing about iteraive development (which Imam a big fan of), is that the workers get to see continual progress and get to actually fly rockets without waiting for a giant 10 year development plan to come together. That alsomhelps keep them motivated.
Good thing that’s not the analogy I was making, then.
The analogy I was making was with Musk’s ridiculous claim that he’ll put people on Mars by 2026.
How is Mars going to be monetized?
So your “worthwhile” contribution is off-world disposable lab rat for vapourware transhumanist augments?
I don’t get the reason for the hostility.
Comparing a person who wants to do something to a lab rat is obviously inapt.
Your reference to “vapourware” doesn’t make sense. When someone says they would do something if X existed, it hardly advances the conversation to point out X doesn’t exist, does it?