Let me make something clear. I think SpaceX will take about a decade to land something on Mars (and they'll do it with NASA funding) and I think that's pretty good. We live in a time where no private company has soft landed any spacecraft on any planetary body. (I guess the closest we've come is the Mars Phoenix lander, with the lead team at UA.) To go from nothing to something is a hell of a thing. If all goes well, I think Raptor will be a mature engine around 2022 and MCT will do an uncrewed roundtrip flight in the years following that. Early 2030s for first crew landing, and early 2040s for first colonists, sounds reasonable. All assuming very little setbacks. Think about it, 25 years before there's people living on Mars.
Quote from: Bargemanos on 08/17/2015 09:11 amSpaceX post is up.http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.htmlNone of those "extinction events" will make Earth less habitable than Mars.If you want to prevent "mass extinction" from happening, the money is better spent on asteroid detection/deflection, prediction/control of volcanic eruptions and disease prevention/control.Just stating the obvious, hopefully not spoiling the party.
SpaceX post is up.http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html
None of those "extinction events" will make Earth less habitable than Mars.
If you want to prevent "mass extinction" from happening, the money is better spent on asteroid detection/deflection, prediction/control of volcanic eruptions and disease prevention/control.
Have you considered that the article quotes Elon as saying about ten cargo flights for each crew flight? If those are done sequentially, that's a loooong time. I expect he's planning to do them parallel, but not all parallel.
- Mankind has never truly regressed technologically.- We have electric propulsion for asteroid deflection and the capability to detect big asteroids on a collision course early enough.- There's enough food, we just waste it. Time to eat potatoes instead of meat every day.- Do you know what percentage of the total workforce in the US in employed in agriculture? See the picture attached. When we're at 90% again I'm starting to get worried. By the way, the US is a net food exporter, so is Europe.- So maybe we should spend 0.5% of GDP on reducing emissions instead of colonizing Mars...
Quote from: meekGee on 08/17/2015 09:02 pmThe only solution that I've ever heard of is "multiple isolated islands".Apart from the fact that a Mars colony would hardly be isolated and develop independently from Earth, if we really need "multiple isolated islands" to survive as a species we deserve to go extinct.
The only solution that I've ever heard of is "multiple isolated islands".
Also, predicting a supervolcano even a year in advance will do little to mitigate its effects. And to prevent it? Terraforming Mars would be cheaper.
Quote from: llanitedave on 08/18/2015 04:00 amAlso, predicting a supervolcano even a year in advance will do little to mitigate its effects. And to prevent it? Terraforming Mars would be cheaper.Ridiculous, Mars is a BILLION times the size of a super volcano and located million of miles away from all out infrastructure while the Earth's super volcanoes are easily accessible. Something like Yosemite contains a magma chambers of thousands of cubic miles of material that is only a fraction molten and is growing incredibly slowly, we could drill into it and relive gas pressure as well as remove heat in a process similar to how Geothermal power plants work. To keep it from erupting all we would need to do is stabilize it, not make it disappear. According to my math the growth rate of the magma chamber is 16,000 m^3 per year, aka a block 25 m on a side.
Most NSFers are "higher than average" in space technology awareness.
A while back, saw a documentary that touched upon working conditions at Space X. Everyone (the ones on camera) agreed conditions are demanding but would not want to be anywhere else.From reading elsewhere, it seems typical of many successful places. Then there are successful places that workers don't seem to feel that working there is demanding.I was always told, vote with my feet.
One thing the article made clear, Musk doesn't have some fancy master plan for a Mars colony. What he thinks is that if the price of the trip can fall enough, then a colony will be possible. He's focused on reducing the price of the trip. He's got a vague idea of how an MCT might be used. But beyond that, he's got no more than any Mars colony fan does. Mind you. lowering the price of a trip to Mars is mega-fantastic, and plenty to achieve.
I doubt that there are blueprints for a Mars colony in a secret room at SpaceX, but I'm pretty sure there's a "master plan", in that it extends beyond "We land MCTs and then magic happens".
Yeah, these are seemingly absurd percentage improvements, however not impossible. The critical elements of the solution are rocket reusability and low cost propellant (CH4 and O2 at an O/F ratio of ~3.8 ). And, of course, making the return propellant on Mars, which has a handy CO2 atmosphere and lots of H2O frozen in the soil.The design goal is technically 100+ metric tons of useful cargo per flight, so maybe more than 100 people can be taken. Depends on how much support mass is needed per person and the luggage allowable.Avionics, sensors, communications, aspects of vehicle structure, landing pads and a few other things get better with scale, plus it is more fun to be on a cruise ship than a bus, so I suspect that the 100 people per flight number grows a lot over time, maybe to several hundred. Also, we could subsidize the equivalent of economy by charging a lot more for first class.Factor in all of the above and getting below $100k/ton or person eventually is conceivable, as the trip cost is then dominated by propellant, which is mostly liquid oxygen at a mere $40/ton (although a lot of it is needed per useful ton of cargo). That would be really awesome!
<...>I got the impression the author had no special access to information and basically put together a wide and shallow overview from general knowledge.<...>
Looks like the Raptor will run oxidizer rich. That puts its niche even closer to the BE-4.