The fact that Musk’s plan for Mars colonisation has never got any further than “build Starship“ should have been the first clue that SpaceX is nowhere near able to achieve his ambitions.
Does SpaceX have a space galley system that can gaurantee food preservation and preparation for the duration of a Mars mission, has it been built and tested. Same goes for water and other life support systems. They will have to be both foolproof and redundent in an environment that we understand but have never operated in.
An effective Mars travel system, not safe just effective, requires tremendous development in multiple areas and disciplines and there is no evidence that SpaceX is close to achieving any of it other than having a big reusable rocket.
The fact that, after a quarter century of talking about going to Mars, Elon has only just now realized that due to planetary alignments you can only send a rocket to Mars every two years but one to the Moon about every few weeks should have been the umpteenth clue that this is never happening.
I’m reasonably sure the ‘concepts’ of the eventual plan Musk envisioned involved sacrificing volunteer lives until they figured out the engineering challenges through sufficient trial and error
I’m pretty sure that Elon’s push for data centres in space is because of, “cooling is a big problem for data centres on Earth, but according to TV and movies from the 1990s and earlier space is super cold, so let’s put them in space where cooling is free!”.
So his understanding of the pragmatic realities of space travel and operations is quite limited.
But if the plan was to get to Mars (or wherever), “build Starship” should have come much earlier and faster to achieve any ambitious plans.
If you were to tell me you had a plan to run a marathon next month and 3 weeks later, you haven’t yet run more than a single mile at a time in your life, telling me “well, you’ve got to be able to run one mile to be able to run 26 miles” isn’t the flex you seem to think it is.
Not that he seemed to understand much of it, judging by his use of grok and, well, everything else about him.
As for the self-growing city, I assumed he was referring to some sort of self-replicating robotics technology, but who knows what the ketamine is telling him these days.
He’s referring to a place where they are making the essentials for increasing the size of the colony in situ, not relying on shipments of prefab habitat modules or food or … from Earth.
The Mars trilogy first book Red Mars did a pretty good job of pointing out how hard that would be. IIRC …
Even with their nascent self-replicating tech, it wasn’t that hard to make crude materials like metal girders and sheet plastic and … But making high tech stuff was a bunch harder and they were dependent on shipments of that kind of stuff from Earth quite aways into the book. Only after the total Mars population was pretty big, and had been there a long time with far higher tech than we have today, did Mars become self-supporting enough to tell Earth to go F*** itself.
One of the few things I remember from the books is a plot point of a supply of some sort of essential vitamin pills being rendered ineffective by radiation. One of the unanticipated dangers.
I’m pretty sure that’s true. Such achievements as have been made at SpaceX – and for that matter, at Tesla – have been due to competent engineers who Elmo has often abused, and who are at their best when Elmo is distracted by something else and leaves them the hell alone. When Elmo gets closely involved you get things like non-opening Model S door handles, doors that are impossible to open from the inside in emergencies, and, of course, the fabulous Cybertruck!
Anyone else seeing an ad for Elon Musk xAi 2.0. Also seems to show the merger of Musk’s companies. The guy in the ad looks remarkably humanoid, not at all like a creepy cultist. Something we shouldn’t miss.
Perhaps he’ll address the co-founders abandoning ship. (Oops, soon to be scrubbed from the co-founding history). I can see him now in a SUPER K outfit complete with cape.
Yeah, I’m fairly sure he meant to say “self-sustaining”.
To give him a wee bit of credit, establishing a colony on the Moon would be orders of magnitude easier than establishing one on Mars… but it’s still pretty much unfeasible with current technology. Conventional agriculture is impossible on the Moon. Hydroponic farming might be possible with enough space, but there’s no way you’re raising livestock on the Moon, and lab-grown meat isn’t practical yet. We haven’t addressed the problem of how to deal with the increased cosmic radiation people living on the Moon would be exposed to in the long-term. Living at one-sixth of Earth’s gravity for extended periods of time is going to have a major impact on people’s health. We don’t even know how sex, pregnancy, and childbirth would work in low gravity.
We don’t even have self-sustaining colonies in Antarctica, and Antarctica is a lot less hostile to human life than the Moon is. It’s going to take a major technological leap for interplanetary colonization to be feasible, and I unfortunately don’t see it happening in my lifetime.
