Has anybody given a consensus definition of a space colony? Do space stations count or only planets? Minimum number of people? Ability to survive without constant replenishment? Lasting long enough to raise children?
Without some parameters, lots of hand-waving can slip into the conversation.
Relax, it’s just snark, and not intentionally meant for SpaceX. Mainly just the kind of proposed plans that are actually scams. Some of them will be perfectly legal scams, but still scams.
That’s fine, but the specific mention of “starship” means SpaceX, since they’re the only ones that have named their vehicle that.
There are absolutely scams out there. For example, Mars One was one:
They even claimed to use SpaceX hardware, but there was no actual relationship. Total nonsense from beginning to end. Thankfully, no one would die since they’d never get off Earth in the first place.
Ask me again when we’ve colonized Antarctica.
We sort of have, but there are specific treaties saying we won’t. Oddly enough, the countries of the world with the capability have actually agreed to preserve the relatively pristine wilderness that is there. There are some fairly substantial scientific bases.
I saw this show on Netflix, and the last episode of season 2 is Antarctica - including a visit to the sewage treatment plant at the base they visit.
Departures (also promoted as departures ) is an adventure travel television series. An original Canadian production created by Andre Dupuis and Scott Wilson and produced by Jessie Wallace and Steven Bray.
As for space stations or colonies on other bodies - the problem first is the supply of basic supplies like air, food, processing cabon dioxide, sewage treatment, etc. Full recycling will be an issue. Once the colony gets big enough, then the issue becomes supplying the random items that people need. It’s fine that America imports its clothing or shoes from halfway around the world, perhaps future space staions will be clothing optional; but consider what the epidemic taught us about supply chains. How many different items do you consume? Toothpaste, salt, pepper, ketchup, soap, deoderant; what about computers and basic parts for the space station -ventilation, cooking equipment, plumbing, power cables, furniture? Air conditioning freon (or whatever it is nowadays out there where we don’t need to worry about ozone?)
There’s a critical mass before you can say a space station might be self-supporting even basically, if supplies from Earth are interrupted. It will be a long time before even minimal regular supply is unnecessary.
That’s for sure. Still, it’s interesting to think about how to minimize that as much as possible. To pick one of your examples, consider refrigerant. CO2 actually makes a perfectly decent one, and Mars obviously has plenty. CO2 hasn’t replaced every other refrigerant on Earth, because it has some downsides in some cases, but when the alternative is Amazon Prime 9-month delivery, you can accept a few compromises.
The same will likely be true for many other things. Basic economics will push heavily to local sourcing, even if its otherwise inferior to what would be used on Earth.
One might argue that a single figure governs the viability of any form of colonisation. Available energy. Enough energy and pretty much anything is viable.
If we have energy too cheap to meter in yotta-Joule quantities a lot of science fiction becomes just a matter of engineering.
Similarly, limited energy and no amount of engineering will get you there.
No one denies that. The issue is that a single-planet species will eventually run into an issue they can’t overcome. A multi-planet species has a chance of surviving because they won’t all be affected by the same thing.
It’s likely that we have only a small window of opportunity for becoming multi-planet species, and that this is our only shot. We’ve extracted all the easy mineral and energy resources already. If civilization has a setback, that’s the end. Maybe there are, say, resources still available on the seafloor, but there’s no way to bootstrap a new techno-industrial civilization able to retrieve those. So we’ll be stuck in a pre-industrial mode until an asteroid wipes us out or whatever.
The point to doing it now (or soon, at least) is that we have an immense amount of human, economic, and technological resources available at the moment, and these good times may not last.
Obviously, solar power answers a lot of questions. So the question then becomes, how easy is it to make passable solar panels, or else we would need to import low-weight ones from Earth. Plus AFAIK solar panels deteriorate , so replacement becomes an issue over time. Then there’s batteries, if you’re going to live where the sun goes down. Right now, good batteries are a high tech endeavour needing a vaiety of inputs.
Scale is the enemy. Enough to supply a decent community will require a lot of input from earth, or a lot of weight dedicated to getting the beginnings of industry up there.
The obvious question is why? A moon base, as NASA (and no doubt China) are planning, is basically a prestige item, like the ISS - not payback. LEO stations could service as hotels for space tourism, but for the forseeable future the customer base is rather small if a trip in in the order of hundreds of thousands to millions. (And they would be less likely to aim for self-sufficiency.) I believe Biglow was the driving force behind the test inflatable module on the ISS, and he had plans for much larger structures (30 feet diameter or more) that would be the basis for a hotel. But nothing has been launched yet.
But the cost to build a quasi-functioning colony with a moderate amount of self-support would be, to coin a phrase, astronomically expensive. It would take decades. I don’t imagine any country or company having the dedication and reason to pour money into it that long, for no payback. It was always touted that some industrial processes would be cheap and simple in low-G, zero-G, or vaccum that would provide some payback (pharmaceuticals? Chip making and similar crystal-growing tech); but that was the basis of Heinlein’s electromagnetic launcher in Moon Is A Harch Mistress, that returning moon products to earth would be cheap once that was built; otherwise, simply moving products back to earth for payoff would also be expensive. However, a good launcher would require huge numbers of superconducting magnets, rare earths, etc. that represent either a massive load from earth or large manufacturing capability (more likely both).
Just for you, I’ll make sure the target of my space exploration snark is more clear in the future.
Isn’t most of the deterioration from atmospheric effects, though?
Particularly bad in the sense that it causes worse cancers than the type you get in LEO. ISS astronauts are not nearly at as much risk as someone heading to Mars for the same period.
Pretty sure radiation damages solar cells. Especially high energy cosmic rays. Those will damage anything.
I know you, yourself, aren’t proposing this, but the whole space colonization ‘community’ is rife with this type of hand-wavy thinking. It reminds me of the old Steve Martin bit, How To Get A Million Dollars - Tax Free!
“First, you get a million dollars…”
To colonize the universe all we need to do is send out self-replicating probes…
To colonize Mars all we need to do is terra-form the planet…
To go to Proxima Centauri b, all we need to do is build a generation ship…
Or Dyson Spheres, etc.
As TriPolar points out, there would need to be a humongous infrastructure set up before mining materials and building ships on the moon could occur.
All of these things are so difficult as to almost be impossible. I love space stuff. And I know we have to start somewhere but it seems like trying to build a base on Mars is more of a stunt than science or research.
Then what? Don’t pay your taxes? 
I’m thinking the first step in a Mars colony is to pre-position a number of supply ships with the essentials for a stay and return - meaning several rockets have to be landed within driving distance of each other, but not on top of each other. This has to be done by automation since the time delay means it’s not happening from Earth control. Plus, I’d hate to be already there and relying on incoming rockets for supplies. If one fails, we then need to send a replacement (or spread 150% of the necessary load evenly among all the pre-supply ships)
I’ve seen suggestions that the particularly worst parts are when a solar flare hits the ship. (The thing that occasionally causes spectacular northern lights at lower latitudes for a day or two) A suggestion was to build a small radiation shelter inside the ship that the crew could go to for an day or so when there is a particularly bad flare headed in their direction. Heavy shielding, but not as heavy as shielding the entire ship. Of course, we’ve gone from the solar cycle minimum to now where we’re building to a maximum and timing like that may also affect when to travel.
My problem with those giant space habitats is a simple one - the odds of a catastrophic failure (large rock collision etc.) are pretty low, but one such failure destroys the entire habitat and dooms most of the inhabitants. I see more potential for something like the space station in 2001 where presumably a major failure an be isolated to a segment. The full contents of the biosphere (Biotorus? Biocylinder?) are not lost in one go. I suppose a giant open volume would be an interesting addition, but should not be the majority of the habitat. When life is at stake, triple redundancy should be the norm.
The ground floor of the launch pad is like, the worst place to be in a space program!
Yep. Cosmic rays (as you mentioned) along wih the solar wind and solar flares. I think the current generation of solar panels used on the ISS has roughly a 15 to 20 year expected lifespan.
I think the first step will be to set up an automated cargo ship of some sort in what is called a “Mars cycler” orbit. This is an eliptical orbit with the outermost point of the elipse (apogee) out beyond the orbit of Mars and the innermost point (perigee) inside Earth’s orbit. Set it up correctly and the orbit effectively osillates back and forth between Earth and Mars and is stable, so you don’t need to expend any energy to go back and forth between the two planets. Put all of your heavy radiation shielding on this cargo ship, and you don’t need to expend any fuel at all to get your cargo ship constantly shuttling things back and forth between Earth and Mars. You’ll need to expend fuel to get your cargo up to the cycling cargo ship, and you’ll also need to expend fuel when you detach your cargo and de-orbit it to land on Mars. But that’s it.
It’s not the fastest way to get to Mars. To reduce the travel times, Buzz Aldrin (yes, that Buzz Aldrin) proposed using two separate Mars Cyclers in complimentary orbits, and use little cargo shuttles to transfer the cargo (or people) between the two cyclers. While Aldrin Cyclers have an advantage of drastically reducing the transit time between both planets (from a couple of years or so down to about 6 months), they have a disadvantage in that they pass by both planets at a very high rate of speed, requiring significantly more fuel to rendezvous with the cyclers in the first place, and more fuel to de-orbit at the destination.
You could probably use a single cycler to get most of the initial cargo to Mars, since cargo doesn’t really give two hoots if it takes longer to get there. When you have enough stuff there to safely land humans, then you set up your second cycler so that your humans don’t have to spend so much time in space.
Aldrin first proposed his version of the Mars Cyclers in the 1980s. We still have a long way to go before they become practical though.
I hate to be a cynic, but let’s consider the three main drivers for space “colonization”:
To conduct scientific research;
To mine, extract, or obtain valuable materials (e.g., rare metals); and/or
To preserve some portion of the human race so it survives an ecological or planetary disaster.
The first two are undoubtedly going to play a role in establishing “colonies.” But I suspect that #3 has absolutely no chance of happening. It’s going to be a case of crabs pulling other crabs back into the bucket.
OTOH, I can envision a small group, perhaps religious in nature, raising funds to send a small number of its members somewhere to establish a colony for ideological or religious purposes. But I suspect the effort will be short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful.
A cycler really only makes sense if there’s a lot of mass that you need on your vehicle, that’s going to stay on your vehicle (i.e., that’s not going to be used as fuel, or landed on Mars, or in any other way leave the cycler). Because otherwise, once you’ve matched velocities with the cycler, what do you even need the cycler for?
Why on Terra would people need to land on Mars? I understand someone will some day, maybe for as good a reason as why we landed on Luna, but more likely just because it’s there.
Can we grow food on Mars? If we can then why would we? If we’re going to colonize space then we need to mine the asteroid belt for the materials to build enormous space stations large enough to grow food to feed people living on Terra and in space. Colonizing Mars or Luna is a waste of resources.