I guess they could in theory; and a couple of decades.The real question is why, why not just build it on earth and fly it over.Steel can be useful for construction of habitats and a small mill might be feasible in the next 10 years. But, to my limited view, a martian based shipyard would have limited advantages when compared to the disadvantages.
This is ridiculous on multiple levels. It's like building a car in your apartment instead of in the factory.
Quote from: PaulVla on 09/17/2019 10:55 amI guess they could in theory; and a couple of decades.The real question is why, why not just build it on earth and fly it over.Steel can be useful for construction of habitats and a small mill might be feasible in the next 10 years. But, to my limited view, a martian based shipyard would have limited advantages when compared to the disadvantages.Sure, and that will happen. But it gives the inhabitants of a martian settlement some kind of independence. And due to their lower gravity, they are not bound to some to the restrictions, Starship has on earth, they can even produce a taller and wider variant.Oh, and regarding "ridiculous" So many ideas that were deemed to be ridiculous turned to brilliant, after Musk wrote about them in a tweet. Just considering...
There is one thought, that I have over and over again, when seeing the production-sites of Boca Chica and Cocoa: They assemble steel rings, weld them in place, add plumbing, computers, etc... and the engines.So, it will take a while until a Mars-settlement will be able to produce microcontrollers, computers, etc, and it will be quite hard for them to produce raptor-like engines, but steel should be possible (transport a steel mill over there, that's just a "few 100 tons".My take is, that a Mars-settlement will be able to produce its own Starship-derived crafts within a few years after they got the steel production running (which they will need for many other tasks aswell), maybe not with raptor-like engines, but something with lower manufacturing requirements (keep in mind, the RL10 was from 1950, something similar should be 3D-printable now or soon).Which challenges do you see? Because I don't see any big roadblocks. And manufacturing rad-hardened microchips should be possible in space, with a vacuum, that is far better than anything we can produce on earth.
Which challenges do you see? Because I don't see any big roadblocks.
Quote from: Hotblack Desiato on 09/17/2019 10:50 amWhich challenges do you see? Because I don't see any big roadblocks.To get to the point where we can fully produce Starships on Mars from raw mineral components, the list of challenges is huge.To name a few:-- There's no oil on Mars, so replacements / alternatives would be required for all oil-derived components, including plastics
-- Ore deposits, mining, refining, milling and machining would be required for a long laundry list of materials. Iron is among the easiest, but I could imagine 40 or more different elements being needed, plus alloys and a wide range of chemical compounds
-- Energy. Solar is nice, but the energy requirements for something like a steel mill are huge. Without oil, coal or hydro, nuclear seems like an inevitable pre-requisite, including all of the associated infrastructure from mining on up
It may not be obvious, but it wouldn't surprise me if the number of people involved in mining, refining, construction, transportation and distribution of all of the parts required to build Starship and all of the downstream tooling it needs was more than a million. Literally.The most likely progression, IMO, is that heavier items that are needed locally, that have readily identified sources of raw materials, will be the first to be produced on Mars. Other items will follow slowly over time as the foundations are built. I don't see any reason they would rush Starship production vs. the many other things a colony would need.
This looks like it's going to be a rehash of a lot of the stuff discussed in the Mars Export Economy thead:https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=44411.0A self sufficient mars colony doesn't really need spaceships, just like earth doesn't need spaceships to be self sufficient.When mars gets to the point that it can make a rudimentary rocket, like in 100 years or more, Earth's rocket construction industry will be 100 years further along. Hulas Motors, the nepalese car manufacturer, has better odds competing with GM.
Quote from: Eerie on 09/17/2019 11:07 amThis is ridiculous on multiple levels. It's like building a car in your apartment instead of in the factory.This is ridiculous on multiple levels. It's like receiving a knockdown kit of the hard to fabricate car parts, then building the easy to fabricate parts of a car and doing final assembly in a less sophisticated factory local to you instead of in the original factory 12000 miles away...Oh wait, car companies do that all the time.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock-down_kitThe experience gained, and the supply chains built up, often enable companies to locally source more and more of the parts over time. Decades of time in many cases...
Don't know about building SS, but the knock-down concept could be useful if a Mars settlement needed smaller spacecraft for orbital or suborbital operations. Something like that wouldn't fit in a SS pre-assembled, so send a parts kit and use local steel for the hull.
Quote from: Eerie on 09/17/2019 11:07 amThis is ridiculous on multiple levels. It's like building a car in your apartment instead of in the factory.This is not ridiculous. It is the reason why i think that the mars colony will inherit the solar system. Mars has an huge advantage. Mars can build a fleet of spaceships and deploy it in interplanetary space with considerably less effort than Earth.