Seeing as none of the major players in space exploration are even remotely talking of sending anyone to Mars, I just wonder why Musk thinks he can. Just sending somebody to the moon would be a stretch for private enterprise space travel, going to Mars is an order of magnitude tougher.
I had always thought he was the kind of person who did not waste his time with mind-changing substances, but maybe I was wrong.
Not remotely? Untrue. Both NASA and China have said they are working towards a manned Mars mission. One can question how serious they really are, but they are talking about it.
Sending someone to the moon is not a big stretch at this point. We have one and soon to be two private manned space programs. In a few years it might be three or four programs. Getting from LEO to the Moon isn’t completely trivial, but it’s by no means out of billionaire range. We’ll see about Mars.
Hell if I know. Like you I’m highly skeptical, at least over the ~30 year term of my remaining life.
But if anyone other than Musk himself is investing in Mars expeditions, they think there’s money to be made somehow. Vanity projects only go so far. And, ref Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch, have a bad habit of imploding the day after their vanity backer’s body goes cold.
I could see some super-tycoon with delusions of his eventual dynasty backing an expedition thinking that claiming Mars, or a big piece of it, for his eventual posterity would be an investment with insanely high returns on the scale of, say, 500 years, albeit with zero returns during their own life & their kids’ lives. Think of it as a gamble for the ages.
Is Musk that super tycoon? Maybe.
I’m not hostile.
We don’t have a different suitable idiom for people who volunteer for medical experiments, and “volunteer lab rat” is not a novel idiom.
There’s a difference between “if X exists” and “X will, inevitably, exist soon”. Their post was the latter, not the former. Their hope is that it will be in their lifetime, which is what renders it vapourware. I’m not pointing out “X doesn’t exist”, I’m pointing out X won’t exist. Not in any timeframe a currently-living human will be able to access.
Talking about space-living human augments and transhumanist cyborgs is all very well on Orion’s Arm or somesuch, but it’s vapourware when it comes to discussing the first humans on Mars.
Musk thinks X Æ A-12 is a great name for a child. I don’t think considerations of his immediate kids is a thing for him, never mind future generations.
Yes, but he is megalomaniacal enough to imagine (and relish) a time in 5 centuries when his name looms as large in human (or at least Martian) history as Jesus, Alexander the Great, King Tut, or Leonardo da Vinci does in Earth history. Doubly so when his descendants rename the planet Musk-01.
That was the idea I was aiming for. And yes, those later Musks would have riches beyond imagination, owning most/all of an entire planet, every inhabitant of which is paying rent to live there. Plus the mineral rights to the whole thing, unhindered by pesky oceans covering most of the good stuff.
Elon Musk doesn’t like someone (who pointed out his idea to save trapped soccer players wasn’t going to work, in other words exposing Musk’s self-promotion) and refers to him as a “pedo guy” on Twitter.
Musk is a bully with some delusions of grandeur. He may also be overrated.
My apologies I hadn’t realised that @Riemann was Elon Musk’s username the SDMB. My bad. Carry on.
This would be a good point if you’d said “volunteer lab rat”. Given that you didn’t, not so much.
Just checking; you were replying to @Riemann? The person who said
Perhaps you weren’t being hostile, but you can hardly blame me for thinking to the contrary.
The “volunteer” part was implicit in their post.
Nobody, but nobody, thinks I was saying Musk was going to come around to their house, tempt them out with food pellets, and then Borgify them and ship them to Mars to run in mazes…
Do you not grok what an “idiom” is?
And yes, I was replying to them. I did say “hope”, not “certainty”.
I can certainly, because you’re reading hostility into what was just some very mild sarcasm at the idea that we’re going to have the tech to be turning anyone into Borg anytime soon.
Musk has stated that he intends to die on Mars. Suppose he only means it literally : he wants to land on Mars in one piece, and ideally live for some time before dying. He doesn’t care about getting many people there, this is about him.
I think once the infrastructure is in place for Spaceship to allow easy access to/from Earth orbit and point-to-point travel, SpaceX will build an unmanned ship as a test bed for travel and landing on Mars. It will have a life support system, and seats with dummies in spacesuits strapped in. And right after the Mars translation burn, we’ll find out that one of the dummies is Musk himself. From then on, whatever happens to him, he’ll be famous forever.
See it with my own eyeballs?
I mean, yeah, I’m all on board with the idea that manned space exploration is not only a dead end but a tragic waste of money that could more efficiently be spent on unmanned probe.
But to get a chance to see it, not for science or commerce, but just for my own experience and achievement, of course I would do it. I’m already decided that once my kids leave the nest, I’m leaving town and doing something big for me. A one-way Mars mission would be a good fit.
There are desolate wastelands right here on earth you can see. And you can breathe the air and won’t have to look at them through a helmet or move impeded by a bulky space suit.
SpaceX wins a $2.9B contract from NASA to land astronauts on the moon:
It’s a little surprising to me that NASA didn’t pick two suppliers (Blue Origin and Dynetics also had bids). That seems to indicate a high level of trust in SpaceX, which isn’t too surprising given how well the Crew Dragon program has gone, but still I’d have expected a backup supplier.
The moon ain’t Mars, but a lunar program will enable SpaceX to retire a fair amount of risk when it comes to manned surface landings. They’re shooting for 2024.
I suspect that you and Sam Stone would very quickly get bored of looking at a vast expanse of barren sand and rocks through the visor of a heavy space suit. It would be very exciting for maybe the first 15 minutes, then you’d start wondering what the hell you were thinking.
I can see the attraction for a small minority to travel to a truly habitable planet and literally become the pioneers that started human civilization on another world. But Mars sure as hell ain’t that.
Reading up a bit more on the announcement–it came down to budget. NASA didn’t get the budget they wanted, and didn’t have enough for even a single of the three proposals initially, let alone two. SpaceX cut their bid to fit the constraints and that got them the win.
Hey, I didn’t say anything about wanting to go to Mars. And I agree - trying to live on Mars or the Moon would be endless amounts of hard work punctuated with periods of boredom. Breaking in a new frontier sounds exciting, but you’d probably have a better time in prison than on Mars once the novelty of being there wears off.
I guess it’s budgetary, but this seems like a high-risk choice. We don’t even know if Starship will be a viable orbital platform yet, and landing something that large on the moon has never been done. It will need an elevator to get people and cargo to the ground, and new engines around its middle to avoid blasting regolith all over the moon on landing.
However, it’s also high reward. Being able to land 100 tons at a time would be a hue accelerator for a moon base, and starship itself could be outfitted as a complete habitat and laboratory.
I understand that they decided to go with one vendor mainly for budgetary reasons. It may also have to do with the Biden administration hinting that the timeline will be moved out to the end of the decade, which gives Starship more time to be fully developed.
My apologies, Sam. I had you confused with Riemann! An unfortunate blunder on my part because I think you and I see this matter much the same way!
NASA in their conference has mentioned that they also see Starship as a better technological stepping stone toward Mars. Which is pretty clearly true; the other proposals are pretty much beefed-up Apollo-style landers, whereas we know what Starship is ultimately designed for. The lunar version will be different, but they’ll have to solve a number of the same problems, like orbital refueling, life support, the elevator, etc. The tech from the other proposals doesn’t seem to carry over at all. So while it may be riskier than the others, it’s due to tech that they see as helping future efforts.
"It’s only getting through me… a whole alien world, millions of miles from home. Pity it’s such a dump though.”