I believe he's wrong about that one. The ships are coming back anyway, so the incremental cost is the extra propellant needed. That's it.
Quote from: Lar on 11/04/2016 01:39 amI believe he's wrong about that one. The ships are coming back anyway, so the incremental cost is the extra propellant needed. That's it.That's only part of the problem.The price of whatever you're shipping back to Earth has to be high enough on Earth to make those costs and the delay worthwhile.Musk didn't think even Crack had a good enough price/lb to justify this. What commodity/product do you think is that valuable?
It is not justifiable with a flags & footprint architecture.
It certainly is justifiable with an architecture expected to be able of transporting a million people to Mars. Otherwise transporting people wouldn't be viable.Of course, when instead of Mars you consider large-scale mining of the Moon or Asteroids, transport back to Earth can be made trivially cheap.
Quote from: Dave KlingerFunctionally speaking, there's no difference between living in a pressure vessel on Mars versus living in a pressure vessel in LEO, except that the pressure vessel in LEO is closer to help in an emergency, in addition to being easier to build and supply.I was going to write what you wrote.
Functionally speaking, there's no difference between living in a pressure vessel on Mars versus living in a pressure vessel in LEO, except that the pressure vessel in LEO is closer to help in an emergency, in addition to being easier to build and supply.
Suggest you consider economics differently for Musk/Bezos.
I get very suspicious whenever someone tells me normal economics does not apply to someones plan. It usually does, it just means people are not seeing all of the parts of the system that the business is a part of.
Anyone who thinks in terms of "living in pressure vessels on Mars" is missing the whole point.Mars has resources and energy, which is enough to build a stand-along civilization. Sunlight, water, CO2, an endless supply of oars and minerals. And isolation. So it's inherently different from Cis-lunar space.
Sure. And in comparing Musks plans to Bezos, once you send humans to Mars with minimum viable logistics they have a whole world of local resources to rely upon to fill in the rest. In contrast, any in-space colony will never have local resources to rely upon.Now I'm not arguing against space colonies, just pointing out that planets have an advantage in the ability to access resources, whereas with space colonies you have to ship EVERYTHING to them. There is really no chance of a space colony becoming self-sufficient, whereas there is some long-term possibility that a Mars colony could.
Quote from: su27k on 11/04/2016 01:24 amQuote from: RonM on 10/31/2016 04:47 amMars as a backup for humanity is a feature of a fully sufficient Mars colony, but from a practical standpoint it is not a good reason to colony Mars. It will cost too much. Reaching a one million person colony that needs no input from Earth will be incredibly expensive. Good luck on getting funding if that's the primary reason.For a fraction of the cost of a fully sufficient Mars colony, most of the civilization collapsing scenarios on Earth can be mitigated. Asteroid defense, civil defense, disaster relief, securing food production, reducing poverty, renewable energy, etc.It is a mistake to think Mars colony would be more expensive than fixing Earth, in fact it's the opposite. For example, Imperial College London estimates the cost to half CO2 emissions by 2050 is $2 trillion per year, that's just one of the problems in your long list. The cost of a Mars colony would be rounding error comparing to the resources we spent and will be spending to maintain Earth.It is a common misconception to think Earth is better than Mars because we have "free" air, water and good temperature range, but none of these are truly free. They're the product of a super complex, global scale ecosystem and climate, which is being strained by 7 billion people. Maintaining and fixing this complex system is going to make the ECLSS for a Mars colony like child's play, and that's ignoring man-made problems like politics, religion and war.Right, lets scrap Earth... Do you understand WHAT are you talking about?
Quote from: RonM on 10/31/2016 04:47 amMars as a backup for humanity is a feature of a fully sufficient Mars colony, but from a practical standpoint it is not a good reason to colony Mars. It will cost too much. Reaching a one million person colony that needs no input from Earth will be incredibly expensive. Good luck on getting funding if that's the primary reason.For a fraction of the cost of a fully sufficient Mars colony, most of the civilization collapsing scenarios on Earth can be mitigated. Asteroid defense, civil defense, disaster relief, securing food production, reducing poverty, renewable energy, etc.It is a mistake to think Mars colony would be more expensive than fixing Earth, in fact it's the opposite. For example, Imperial College London estimates the cost to half CO2 emissions by 2050 is $2 trillion per year, that's just one of the problems in your long list. The cost of a Mars colony would be rounding error comparing to the resources we spent and will be spending to maintain Earth.It is a common misconception to think Earth is better than Mars because we have "free" air, water and good temperature range, but none of these are truly free. They're the product of a super complex, global scale ecosystem and climate, which is being strained by 7 billion people. Maintaining and fixing this complex system is going to make the ECLSS for a Mars colony like child's play, and that's ignoring man-made problems like politics, religion and war.
Mars as a backup for humanity is a feature of a fully sufficient Mars colony, but from a practical standpoint it is not a good reason to colony Mars. It will cost too much. Reaching a one million person colony that needs no input from Earth will be incredibly expensive. Good luck on getting funding if that's the primary reason.For a fraction of the cost of a fully sufficient Mars colony, most of the civilization collapsing scenarios on Earth can be mitigated. Asteroid defense, civil defense, disaster relief, securing food production, reducing poverty, renewable energy, etc.
Yeah. And while total self-sufficiency is long-term, <99% self-sufficiency is probably very quickly acheivable. (That is, propellant/breathing air/water/food/simple building materials produced on Mars, stuff like electronics & fancy alloys being brought from Earth.)
I think people tend to overestimate the difficulty of making stuff with extraterrestrial resources because our current manufacturing is very complex. But there are often many other ways to do things that aren't economically viable on Earth... but with the different resources and constraints of Mars would make perfect sense.
Quote from: Vultur on 11/12/2016 06:58 amYeah. And while total self-sufficiency is long-term, <99% self-sufficiency is probably very quickly acheivable. (That is, propellant/breathing air/water/food/simple building materials produced on Mars, stuff like electronics & fancy alloys being brought from Earth.)Then you seriously underestimate the problems you're facing.
QuoteI think people tend to overestimate the difficulty of making stuff with extraterrestrial resources because our current manufacturing is very complex. But there are often many other ways to do things that aren't economically viable on Earth... but with the different resources and constraints of Mars would make perfect sense.That's partly true and necessity is the mother of invention but now you're into an R&D cycle to replace a product. Given it's got to fit into a slot in the original equipment it doesn't just have to work it has to work in that slot. That original part may well have been through dozens of iterations spanning years to deliver that level of performance in that form factor.
Mfg Tungsten Carbide cutting heads for drilling or excavating is a very specialized technology and if you're using diamond heads then even the raw materials may not exist on planet.
Another case in point. Semiconductors and LEDs (both for lighting and lasers) are the product of multi $Bn factories. While a small scale system (making ones and twos at a time) could be much cheaper no one knows how to build such a system.
How many people do you know who can make their own gloves? Can they do that in a 3 or 4 layer composite?
Mmm... how? In Musk's plan, propellant/air/water will be locally produced basically from Day One. (The smaller human needs for water and oxygen will just be side products of the propellant ISRU, which already involves melting ice and making oxygen.)
Spare parts in existing equipment, yeah, you have a point. But early on you WILL need that sort of thing shipped from Earth, I'm not arguing that. That 99% by mass I was talking about is "consumables".
Past that start-up period, though, you're talking about making equipment from scratch on Mars, not spare parts for Earth-made stuff. And there you've got much more flexibility to do things in different ways.
Huh? Diamond is just carbon - we know there's tons of that on Mars. It's in the CO2 atmosphere. And synthetic production of industrial diamond is well understood.
Yes. Granted, semiconductors/LEDs are very low mass/high difficulty so they will be one of the last things made on Mars. On a 40-50 year timescale though, much less a century... there are a ton of potential pathways. By that point they may not even be making electronics out of silicon chips anymore, it might be quantum computing (though I am personally skeptical of the practicality of that) and As-S nanotube semiconductors. Or something totally unexpected.
QuoteHow many people do you know who can make their own gloves? Can they do that in a 3 or 4 layer composite?That's not really a fair comparison, as nobody on Earth really has the reason to get that capability on a small scale. I'd be surprised if the descendants of current 3D printing/additive manufacturing technologies 30 years down the line couldn't do that quite easily.
And I'm not sure Mars suits have to be as complex as existing EVA suits. No need for MMOD protection,
and the thermal issues will probably go only one way (there is likely enough atmosphere on Mars to deal with cooling).
And a real colony will be using simpler mechanical counterpressure suits.
Quote from: Vultur on 11/12/2016 09:59 pmMmm... how? In Musk's plan, propellant/air/water will be locally produced basically from Day One. (The smaller human needs for water and oxygen will just be side products of the propellant ISRU, which already involves melting ice and making oxygen.)Full self sufficiency means the settlement is self replicating. If you can't make in the settlement it has to be bought in from Earth so it will be somewhere between 80 and 120days+ to get there.
You'll no doubt be waving your hands and saying "But 3d printing can make anything" except something that calls for raw strength is very time consuming to make as it's going to be a solid lump of metal, and 3d printing is actually better at making things with holes in.
For 4 to 5 decades IE from when a child is born on Mars to the time they are in early middle age, (at least) Mars will have to import parts of all kinds from Earth.
IOW it will have to be doing something to pay for those parts or live in a continually deteriorating base.
That "existing equipment" you casually hand wave is very complex and to design and mfg replacements from local materials will take decades,
Wrong. IIRC image analysis of Martian surface over about a 5 year period identified about 120-200 new craters using existing cameras more than 0.3m is size. Mars air pressure is good enough to suck the heat out of any uninsulated surface structure but not to protect it from meteorites.
Musk won't have the ability to source deep industrial items on Mars for quite some time. So one compensates by having high lifetime items that are locally repairable/serviceable instead. Which means that obsessive maintenance would be necessary to stave off replacement.
Bezos OTOH has to reinvent manufacturing/resources/processing in a on-orbit environment, involving trial and error. So lots of facilities to "bootstrap" such need to happen first before you can scale-up and deploy.
While we are not a species that have ever lived on Mars or needed to be supported so remotely, even more of an issue is being off planet in space itself.
Back to your issue - neither economics close, they are "bargaining" for existence under the same rules.Same rules but different ways/priorities/means to apply them.Again, read the past histories of colonization and industrial revolution for applicable examples for each.
Right but we are talking about different stages of development, I think. I see 3 - 4 different stages if it works out at all.The question is how quickly they can move up stages. I think 3) can be reached in 40-50 years if the "Musk plan" lasts that long and thus there is still a commitment to getting to self sufficiency. 4) possibly not too long after that.
It's not just 3d printing. I'm well aware 3d printing isn't an universal panacea for all manufacturing.
True.Now that I'm not sure holds true. Depends on how the economics are set up. It's quite possible (likely, IMO) much if not all will be paid for by a "Mars Colony Foundation" nonprofit's investments on Earth. There needn't be actual Mars-side exports.
But there will be, by a few decades in. Maybe not physical exports, at least not primarily, but IP.
I'm not convinced it would take nearly that long, given motivation to actually pursue it, especially given technology likely to be available 30 years from now (even assuming only incremental improvements in existing tech, no major breakthroughs).
0.3m craters is way larger than micrometeorites. I don't think Mars suits will need micrometeorite protection, and an impactor large enough to make a foot-wide crater or more would probably damage a human regardless of the suit they wore.