As I mentioned, they’re not going to start pouring money into that until they’re sure there’s a point to doing so. At worst, the first stages of a Mars base could consist of basically operating the ISS on Mars’ surface, 100% dependent on consumables shipped from Earth. That could continue either until the technologies needed are developed or until they give up.
I don’t doubt Starship is currently a huge money pit, probably huge enough that SpaceX doesn’t want to scare off investors. But we do know what SpaceX charges for Falcon flights and I doubt they’re doing it at a loss. We’ll know how cheap or not Starship is when SpaceX starts accepting payload bids for it.
I mean, it’s not as though NASA and space exploration have really bothered to avoid controversy. Even though Werner von Braun is by far the most famous Operation Paperclip person, Arthur Rudolph was arguably worse. Quick career summary:
From December 1934 till roughly the close of the war, he was employed by Nazi Germany - so for basically all of the time Nazi Germany existed.
He joined the Nazi party in 1931, years before they actually controlled Germany
His stated reason for joining? “Frightened that the latter [communists] would become the government I joined the NSDAP [Nazis] [cut of parenthetical] to help, I believed in the preservation of Western culture.” Just so we’re clear, this comes from his FBI file (https://vault.fbi.gov/Arthur%20Rudolph%20/Arthur%20Rudolph%20Part%201%20of%201/view; page 15 in the document viewer; in fact, unless otherwise noted, all information comes from that, generally his own testimony).
He was part of the storm troopers
Claimed “[i]n the years immediately following…[m]ost that happened seemed reasonable”. Joined in 1931. By 1934 there were concentration camps.
Claimed he could not have foreseen the “more and more serious” “political developments”. For reference (this quotation from Wikiquote):
Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows…Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews. [1922; possibly not publicly stated]
Rudolph served as operations director for Dora Mittelbau!
He once not only watched several men get hanged, he made those working under him watch it. This is not inferred; he literally said so.
He knew the conditions the prisoners worked in (which one book, This New Ocean, said made Auschwitz look benign) and did all of nothing.
The liar claimed he didn’t know that they were slaves (even though he’d known they were probably coming from Buchenwald) - and then it was discovered that not only did he know, he helped implement the whole program
He was the only Operation Paperclip-er to leave or face any sort of investigation (and prominent figures claimed it was ok as his work at NASA made it so he’d paid his debt to society - yeah, right)
I fail to see how in a group of god knows how many Nazis only one committed horrific crimes.
Upon inquiry, he decided to leave the US and renounce his citizenship rather than be investigated.
According to Wikipedia, his benefits and such remained intact, meaning Holocaust survivors were, via Social Security, paying this Nazi.
NASA refused to rescind the medal they had given him.
Arthur Rudolph was the “father of the Saturn V rocket” that got us to the moon and an important figure.
If you want to be mad at SpaceX, great. But there’s much more to be conflicted about as regards space exploration.
Do you really think “we can provide high-speed internet for the ocean and Antarctica” is a compelling argument for the profligate obsenity that is Starlink?
Sustaining a colony of tens or hundreds of thousands of people “100% dependent on consumables shipped from Earth” is a logistical impossibility even if they have dirt cheap orbital launch capability. They idea that SpaceX is planning on Mars colonization, or even a large outpost, but isn’t “going to start pouring money into that until they’re sure there’s a point to doing so” is utter nonsense because getting people and supplies to Mars is the comparatively easy part. The budget for maintaining the International Space Station (independent of transportation costs) is ~US1.3B/year for a crew of six people; even if you want to argue that (somehow) SpaceX will do it for a small fraction of the cost, that is still several million dollars a year per person.
I am morally certain that SpaceX is operating the Falcon 9 at a loss, or at best at cost. They are clearly hinging the success of the company on Starlink, of which it is also unclear whether that program is making a profit or will be able to attract and support the required number of subscribers once the satellite fleet is up to full capacity, notwithstanding what happens if a solar energetic particle event takes out much of their fleet, or they experience either an incidental or deliberate Kessler cascade.
NASA has, in fact, been running months-long ‘expeditions’ of simulated Mars missions in ‘self-contained habitats’ (albeit, not environmentally self-contained) for many years, the latest of which is CHAPEA. HI-SEAS was the previous series of simulations. Several of these have not gone well, requiring evacuation of one or more ‘crew members’ due to injuries, anxiety, or crew conflicts. None of them, of course, simulate the low gravity field (37% of Earth’s), the toxic perchlorates in the Martian regolith, the beyond-frigid environment, damage from UV radiation, the effect of weeks-long dust storms on communications and solar power, and of course the possibility that a single error on their transportation system might mean no provisions or possibility of rescue or return to Earth.
No, the goal is to provide anywhere on Earth internet that does not rely on a local server. If you have a Starlink interface and a smartphone/laptop, you’re connected to the internet. This is important for areas that are still underdeveloped.
This is why we can’t have nice things. We can’t even agree on what our problems are right here on our home planet or even in a simulated space environment, or form a cohesive response, so there is no pathway to inhabiting other worlds as long as we cannot constructively address this core issue first. Unless we can somehow correct our inbred savagery toward one another, we wont last long enough to reach and explore other planets.
And I agree with the other posts, getting back to SpaceX, that their leader has positioned himself for the ultimate grift.
Good thing that isn’t what I said. I said an outpost, perhaps no more than 6-10 people at first would be supplied that way. The scale of operation would depend directly on how well ISRU, recycling and growing food goes. Some of the posters here seem to believe that SpaceX is going to start mass-dumping colonists on Mars without proving the technology first. Now Musk would like the program to move swiftly, but he seems to be presuming that the necessary technology will be developed and proven swiftly. If the necessary self-sustainability technology doesn’t materialize, it’s just not gonna’ happen.
And if so, so what? Space exploration is a fun hobby, but nobody needs clearer pictures of Ganymede. Musk supports things that do real harm to real people. The failure of Musk is much more important for humanity than the success of SpaceX.
You may see satellite mega-constellations as like factory automation, I see them as like rows of smokestacks belching black ashes into the sky to line the pockets of robber-barons.
Sure, if you want to do it the difficult, expensive way. Old infrastructure is only cheap in the places where the old infrastructure already exists. If it doesn’t, then it’s cheaper to build the new infrastructure right from the start.
They believe that because this is literally what Elon Musk is said that SpaceX will do. Anyone actually familiar with the state of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) and self-contained habitation understands that this is pure nonsense and there are many decades of development to get to a point that we can even recover a useful amount of water and oxygen, much less all of the resources to grow crops or otherwise create a sustainable off-planet colony, even assuming some of the fundamental constraints such as low gravity and toxic perchlorates in the Martian regolith make that practicable at all.
Of course, the Luddites were among the most skilled workers of the Industrial Revolution and had no fear of technology. What they fought was the use of technology to displace them and reduce them to a state of poverty. What they opposed, as it were, was capitalism. If the technology was used to reduce the working day and maintain employment and pay rates, rather than enrich the boss, there would have been no problem. We could use more Luddites today.
And thank God they failed, or we’d still be as backwards as they were today.
You mean, if the Luddites formed a cartel to maintain an artificially high price for the goods they produce by enforcing scarcity? It would have been good for the Luddites, and terrible for everyone else in the world.
Again I ask, why? Why put human lives at risk even if it was all free – but it certainly is not free; it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to put humans on a fundamentally uninhabitable, lifeless, poisonous planet, and those are resources that we desperately need here at home, where we’re recklessly destroying our own environment while huge swaths of the world’s population is deprived of decent health care or even sufficient food and clean water.
The legitimate interests of science are well met with exploratory robotics. People who claim they “want” to go to Mars are basically either sci-fi dreamers or like the extreme adventure-seeking lunatics who parachute to earth from what’s basically outer space to set new records. It’s a form of insanity.