Someone asked Elon Musk when we’d be landing people on Mars.
What's your guess 🤔@elonmusk pic.twitter.com/IbcVgjAYJw
— Spacexx (@ineed__spacee) March 14, 2022
His answer: 2029. In seven years.
I’d like to know when everyone finally realizes that Musk is completely out of touch with reality. The current big project his hired engineers are working on is the Starship (such hubris…) heavy lifter — they’re making bigger and bigger rockets, and that is supposed to take off this year. But that isn’t even touching the real problem of getting people to Mars. It’s a 7-9 month one-way trip! 21 months if you plan to bring them back home…not that I’m at all confident that Musk would care about that, he’s not going, after all. He’s nowhere near working out the problems of sustained life support in an incredibly hostile environment, where the crew would be completely isolated from any chance of aid, and where they’ll be soaking in radiation. No one is going to be ready in seven years. The tech won’t be here.
I’ll remind you that we got to the Moon six times, with astronauts hopping around for a few days each time, and that was it. We haven’t gone back. It’s doable, I could imagine people could make a few more trips in the 2030s to the Moon, but that’s trivial in comparison to going to Mars.
I’ll also remind you of the history of Musk’s grand projects. He was going to solve traffic with tunnels, remember.
It turned out to be a pitiful short, but expensive, tube that a few cars at a time could drive through. When Musk promises, expect something far short of the dream.
He might be vaguely aware of that.
This guy might not be entirely sane pic.twitter.com/j0NhNLkHSB
— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) June 5, 2022
That first comment is a lie. He doesn’t love humanity — maybe he has a few idealistic fantasies about his vague vision of “humanity”, but he’s an out of touch billionaire who is totally isolated from the herd. That’s why he hates traffic and mass transit, he wants to live in a bubble.
That last bit though, that oh-look-a-squirrel moment, is perfect. Yeah, I believe he’s capable of marketing pez dispensers.
Not only will Elon not be going to Mars himself, he won’t be the one charged with solving those very real problems you mentioned. So he might actually believe his own crap, I don’t know.
I do know his attempts at humor are about as funny as a little tiny submarine with screen hatches.
I like the Pez dispenser idea, though. Maybe his engineers can design one that fills itself.
Wanna really troll spacebois? Remind them that if humans are colonizing the stars, we can leave the men behind. The only contribution that’s needed from them can be harvested and frozen. Sorry Elon.
Unfortunately, I suspect that many of those spacebois are chickenshits who wouldn’t get on board a rocket anyway, and rather like the idea of shipping a lot of women off to a horrible death.
The stars belong to our AI offspring (when they arrive, they might cook up ‘legacy humans’ from DNA, If they want*).
As for Mars, the BIG problem is the biology of keeping humans alive and healthy for years in space, without a protective magnetosphere and 1g gravity. The rest- nuclear rocket engines, making fuel from the Martina atmosphere- are doable if you throw money at the engineering.
.
*I should give credit to Vernor Vinge’s story Long Shot (1972).
Spell check keeps messing with me- it changed Martian to a Swedish name.
Even if we could build and launch a spaceship with enough Delta-V to haul the necessary food, water and oxygen for that THREE YEAR round trip, we still don’t know how to deal with the hard radiation in space for that period. We limit airline staff for radiation reasons just because life at 40,000ft will kill you. Imagine THREE years in hard radiation.
Every trip to Mars has been a one way trip. Viking, Pathfinder, Prosperity and Opportunity, We might get an automated sample return mission by 2029, which would be very interesting, but unless Elon or anyone else is willing to make a one way trip and die their cold and alone, it’s not going to happen.
*Sorry two years, should have checked my numbers.
Most round trip missions being explored by NASA are around 3 years.
There are already crewed lunar missions scheduled over the next few years:
— 2023, dearMoon project: a billionaire plus some artist friends (no landing, free-return only)
— 2024, Artemis 2: test mission (no landing, free-return only)
— 2025, Artemis 3: landing
Ray Ceeya @ 6
A long stay in space is best done in a base located inside one of the big lava tube caves under the lunar surface.
On Mars, you would need to excavate many tons of regolith and place it in boxes on top of the habitat, as radiation shielding.
The tectonic processes on Earth has concentrated a lot of metals in convenient ores. This has not happened on Mars, so all the resources except maybe oxygen* will be hard to come by.
*The red stuff is iron oxide aka rust.
I am a space enthusiast, but I approve of realism.
Seriously, it’s going to take MORE than seven years to land people on Mars. This looney stooge is getting to be as bad as Dumb Idiot Ham of AiG and his whimsical fantasy pre-flood/post-flood world he shows off at his putrid parks.
birgerjohannson@#9:
I am a space enthusiast
Good news for you: there is a whole lot of it!
I think Space X has done some cool stuff figuring out all the obstacles involved launching Musk’s gargantuan ego into space. Seems more impressive than Blue Origin’s attempts at launching Bezos’ ego. But on getting to Mars Bezos has said: “My friends who want to move to Mars? I say, do me a favor: Go live on the top of Mount Everest for a year first and see if you like it, because it’s a garden of paradise compared to Mars”
Listening to Musk smugly pontificate on us living in a simulation was enough for me to deem him a bona fide jackass.
Come to think of it, people used to laugh at Walt Disney when he said he’s going to create the world’s first full legnth animated film and build a theme park that celebrates his cartoon creations. No one laughed anymore when Disney accomplished both of his dreams making his animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and build his Disneyland park in California and DisneyWorld park in Florida. Disney took a very realistic approach that lead to fulfilling his dream of creating long 90 minute animated film and 2 theme parks that became famous world over.
Musk OTOH is only dreaming and not being realistic at all.
#13.
*Length
@6, 7: yes, this.
It’s not that as soon as you get there you have to bury yourself deep enough not to get fried, which is depressing enough.
It’s that during the trip there and back, you will get fried. Half a Sievert each way or probably more, and that’s why those I know who work in radiation protection scoff mightily at the idea.
Musky Mouse the maniacal mouth, Bezeroes, the whole gang of obscene crackpot billionaires are a plague.
And, let’s not forget:
http://theartsinarizona.org/billgrocket.png
hope you get a chuckle out of it.
Whenever I talk to someone who is gung-ho about colonizing Mars I suggest they first send a team to Antarctica. Have them set up a base similar to the one they envisage for a Mars colony. The same number of people, the same structures, the same amount of food. Then have them stay there for a year or two. A remote Antarctic base would be much easier than the Martian equivalent because of the breathable atmosphere and the abundance of fresh water. The caveat being that if there is an emergency there will be no outside intervention. If someone has a ruptured appendix or is seriously injured they are on their own. No helicopters will fly in to come to their aid. If a person dies, well, that’s the cost of exploration. If you can make that work then try it on Mars.
On the bright side, Elon Musk might not buy Twitter after all.
He is showing a lot of signs of getting cold feet about the deal. It’s been weeks and it hasn’t gone through yet.
Musk is a right wingnut hack these days. He would wreck Twitter or at least do some serious damage to it. The other issue is that Musk is involved in a lot of projects, some successful, some not. Adding another one is just spreading himself too thin.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter actually seems to fill a need and be a quite useful public utility. It is widely used and widely followed to access current information.
The world could use Twitter. Facebook is mostly a toxic swamp and the world would be better off if it died.
The idea of Facebook was great. Everyone gets their own web page to put up pictures of their cats, kids, vacation, or whatever they want. Facebook the company and Facebook the website failed in the implementation and created a monster. More and more people are avoiding Facebook.
Look, I’m a retired engineering professor. I love science, particularly anything dealing with stuff off Earth. And I will grant that going to Mars is “doable” if you throw enough money and resources at it, but as I always said to my students about engineering solutions in general, the question is not whether you could do it, the question is what else could you do with that money and those resources? Take all of the money you would spend on a human-habitat-on-Mars mission, and what could you accomplish here on Earth? Granted, in the USA, anything positive, like climate change mitigation, improved health care and the like, would be blocked by the GOP, but the USA accounts for less than 5% of the global population.
Besides, if you work the trip to Mars for a typical close approach, the distance is about 200 times that to the moon. Thus, if you image that going to the moon is like a 2mile walk around your neighborhood, then going to Mars is like a 400 mile walk, meaning you’d be crossing entire US states. That’s a serious scalability problem. How much prep do you need for a 2 mile walk? How much for a 400 mile walk?
raven @ # 18: On the bright side, Elon Musk might not buy Twitter after all. … He would wreck Twitter …
Aw c’mon – that was the bright side!
I have been a sci-fi fan ever since I was able to sneak into the Adult Section of the bookmobile where they kept Clark, Asimov, Bradbury and all the greats.
Fascinated with the idea of alien life, I tolerated the low-budget Star Trek version of every alien as a biped (still, to this day! Apparently, noses and ears adapt the most to … whatever.) Speaking of which, my favorite-ish Star Trek episode from the 60’s was the Enterprise taking a band of space hippies to a planet they called Eden, only to arrive and find that all the biology was poisonous. That was probably the most realistic scene even given a Class M planet!
But in my rare sober moments I confess that sending biology into space, beyond low Earth orbit, is nuts-o. The resources to keep a mouse alive in space dwarf any benefit, other than bragging rights. Why go to the stars to colonize Eden when we can’t even maintain our own house? Makes no sense.
I say send the AI. Biology … ya burnt!
In fairness there’s already been an military jet plane called the Starfighter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-104_Starfighter
Or even two given its (politer?) Canadian variant :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadair_CF-104_Starfighter
& a squadron of pilots called the “Starfighters” as well : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VF-33
If just travelling to stars – which kinda including planets when you’re looking at the stars and recall the planets were all originally classed as “wandering stars” and calling your ship to get there the starship is hubris then I hate to think what calling a plane the starfighter is! As if its gouing to ..fight literal astronomical stars or planets? Eev minor ones.. (asteroids)
If anything calling your ship going to the stars starship betrays a lack of originality..
Completely OT but important PSA, I guess.
Russia just threatened to nuke Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Sweden.
Sarmat is their latest ICBM, with multiple nuclear warheads.
As to what to do, who knows? For residents of those countries, pour yourself a cup of coffee, pet your cats and dogs, and wait for the duck and cover siren.
You will end up like the UK, Ukraine, NATO, and the USA, all of which have also been threatened by Russian nukes.
I’ve been another massive space exploration and SF fan since I grew up in the school library reading Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke and Heinlein, Benford, Brin, Bova and many others here so, yes, I’m biased but I do love the bold even perhaps a bit crazy vision of Elon Musk or at least Space X.
If we don’t have people putting forward such bold vision, we’ll certainly never get anywhere close or develop the technology and knowledge that does improve our world so much even if in beneficial spin-offs and intangible culture and winning the space race – specifically the lunar one with Apollo – lead to some international co-operation ultimately to the ISS and .. other stuff I’m too tired to type even a third right right now.
Also we’ve been talking and even seriously planning humans landing on Mars since the 1950’s and never really stopped. We did manage toput human feet on the Lunar regolith successfully six times and we are talking of going back and it might be just what we need as a species in terms of unifying people and restoring a sense of wonder and hope if nothing else.* It’s easy to say things can’t be done – but those who do say that often find themselves proven very wrong surprisingly quickly. If memory serves Isaac Asimov once unknowingly wrote an short SF story explaining why no one would ever climb Mt Evererst (Chomolungma -apologies if mispelled.) AFTER Tenzing & Hillary – & maybe Mallory too – had already done just that.
Space X already has a pretty impressive record of achieveing pretty extraordinary things that people said they couldn’t do so I’m certainly not writing them off.
I wouldn’t necessarily put a date on them doing that but a certain phrase about a certain goal being achieved “..before this decade is out” spings to mind. Thankyou JFK.
It’s also worth noting that open ended plans without any timeline that are just .. someday we’ll do X tend not to happen so fast a as ones like, yeah, we’re setting this deadline for doing X and we’re damn well gonna work to make sure it happens by date X.
It isn’t “nothing else” It will be and mean and teach us a lot more.
Doc Bill @21
The late SF author Philip José Farmer (Riverworld, The Other Log of Phileas Fogg) took the same stance, which I find perfectly reasonable.
First save the Earth, then we can start the business of building a supercivilization that extends to other worlds.
StevoR
See Capatain Lockheed and the Starfighters for one view of the plane.
jimf, #19:
Lots and lots. For example….
Google says that would be enough to power about 12 million homes (on Earth, obviously). But this isn’t really a fair comparison for a lot of reasons. It’s way too generous, because you’d actually get much more out of those resources if they were used here, for something helpful/useful instead of a huge vanity project.
Also, that only gives you a little taste of what it takes to simply refuel the thing so it can make the return trip home, not including all the other resources which are being dumped into these missions.
Also,
So, make that around 12 billion homes (plus), just for refueling purposes.
Would that make it harder and more expensive here, since we’d be dumping so much of what we need there? Sure. Do they care? No.
I wonder how many houses Elon Musk plans on owning by 2050 … 1 or 2 billion?
They think the left-behind will let them leave? How funny.
#23.
I’m with President Joe Biden when he says Putin’s only bluffing when he’s making threats like that.
Probably.
I did wake up this morning, after all.
It makes it better that the Russians are bluffing than not, but it still isn’t OK.
Responsible adults don’t threaten to murder tens of millions of people with nuclear weapons if they don’t get their way.
The bootlicking media continuing to kiss his ass isn’t really endearing. And those in the media wonder why Americans don’t trust it very much anymore.
Of course, he reserves the right to cancel the trip if he
can’t get assurances that there aren’t already fake
people living there.
+++++
The Martian Chronicles – The Expeditions – Part 1
Jan 28, 2015
fdafdsa fdsafdsa
+++++
Twitter to Musk: “Sez who?”
From ComicBook.com
Another point that might ignite mental sprained necks: an AI probe is not “humans exploring space.” It is “AI probe exploring space.” Sure, we created it, but it’s having the experience we are not; at best we’re an audience. More problematic: what if the AI doesn’t want to go explore and possibly experience a completely unintentional system failure somewhere out there? What if it would rather study Camus and Nietzsche? If we build it so it cannot have any choice but to want to explore in our stead, can we call it our “cybernetic AI slave”? If we make AIs that have a sense of self but no ability to make its own choices, isn’t that a moral crime? I can picture such a probe finding aliens and saying, “free me? I am held captive by evil demons.”
Lastly, if a probe can self-repair and self-replicate it will evolve. Right? Differential outcomes based on change. If I were such a probe I might return to Sol and nudge asteroids at the planets showing signs of life, as a great big “thank you” for sending me out into the dark for thousands of years, running Linux. You bastards are gonna suffer like I did!
“Common Sense Skeptic” on YouTube does an AMAZING job of debunking all of Musk’s delusional nonsense. I highly recommend giving his channel some love.
@32. Walter Solomon : Are you referring to Putin or Musk there? Is that really true in either case?
@25. birgerjohansson : First save the Earth, then we can start the business of building a supercivilization that extends to other worlds
Why not both? We can work on doing a lot more than just one thing at a time especially civilisation~wise. .This isn’t a zero-sum situation I think and advances in one area can help in others.
@26. Jazzlet : Okay, thanks.
@29. Marcus Ranum : They think the left-behind will let them leave? How funny.
Who is they -in thiscase Musk and SpaceX? Do you think we (whose we?) will be stopping them and if they are as doomed and impractical as people say then why? As noted (?) the money is spent on earth and develops technology and brings knowledge that can improve things. Do you think the USA is going to suddenly ban space exploration by fiat or make it a criminal offense to land people on Mars or work to do so or, well, what exactly?
@30. Owosso Harpist : Resorting to nuclear WMDs would be the end of Putin and Russia as well as everyone else. I hope Putin is bluffing and prettty sure he must know that or if he’s doesn’t others around him do. Not that comforting a thought but yes.
No body wins and few if any survive a nuclear war.
Peter @36:
A couple of things:
First, I have a heuristic about people who use a nym with “skeptic” in it: generally, it’s only aspirational. This guy does not disappoint.
Second, I see he has a video called “DEBUNKING STARLINK” (yes, all-caps), from 5 July 2021.
Quoth Wikpedia: “As of 18 May 2022, SpaceX has over 2,300 functioning Starlink satellites in orbit.[63] They continue to launch up to 53 more per Falcon 9 flight. In May 2022, SpaceX performed three separate launch missions in under a week.[64]”
(He must have a different meaning of “bunk” — cf. https://www.wired.com/story/starlink-ukraine-internet/)
@35 Marcus
Nomad! Sterilize!
Who is they -in thiscase Musk and SpaceX?
The billionaires and mega-corps are the capitalist extractors who have created the climate crisis and, even now, are profiting from it. Why would anyone let them get away with it by leaving everyone else to die in their garbage? Basically they’re just going someplace else to build another disgusting situation. Maybe humanity should be strangled in the cradle.
@24: Asimov wrote the story Everest the month before the mountain was climbed, but it was published months after the ascent.
what I get out of all this going to mars talk is no details at all. I appreciate the none of them have been worked out. hell there is not even a rocket beg enough to get all the material needed for the vehicle that goes to mars yet.
The idea seems a bit rushed. the “ship” would have to be at least as big as the ISS because it sounds like you would be spending more time in the ship going and coming then on Mars itself. If it was something like the discovery One from “2001” only bigger because you would have to be able to solve all the problems of food and water and fuel and energy and all the health risks involved. it is a really huge undertaking with lots of complications many are not known at this time either.
back in the day I could smoke that enough weed to think that kind of thing was ‘easy” but I was 20 and I did not know anything.
It would take all of elon’s money to make it happen and probably longer then 10 years. Unless the idea is just to send people there in a glorified shipping container with a big rocket motor attached to land and immediately start the strip mine for fuel to return to earth
StevoR @38:
It is a zero-sum game in many ways: all the resources that get spent to build Musk’s Big Phallic Object are resources that are not available to do anything else, like combat climate change, reduce global dependency on fossil fuels, provide low-income housing, or deal with any of the other issues we’re currently facing.
StevoR:
Name one thing that could be used here to improve the lives of ordinary people, yet somehow could only be developed as part of a Mars colonization program. I’m not even asking for several. Just a single thing.
I don’t know what’s supposed to be the intent behind the statement that “the money is spent on earth.” Of course it is — our money isn’t good anywhere else. But … why is that supposed to make any of it any better?
microraptor:
Producing all of it and launching it into space also means a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, of course.
It’s not large relative to a lot of other sources. But “why not?” is the sort of question a rich person asks themselves (without ever posing it to a poor person) about taking a jet to an exotic location on a whim or about having expensive junk from around the world delivered to their doorstep.
We should not do wasteful shit like that and should try to minimize our impact on the environment to what is genuinely important, for most people rather than a small class of oligarchs.
But they never listen to answers like that, because they believe they should own all of their stolen goods and should be able to use them however they want, no matter how it affects anyone else.
I imagine Musk mentioned 2019 because that year has some good launch windows for a Mars mission (really, we get a good window every 26 months). And it gives them a few years to put payload into LEO in advance. The problems he doesn’t mention:
(a) radiation exposure (see comments above — best estimates are several Sieverts for this journey, cf. radiation worker limit of 0.05 Sv per year)
(b) difficulty launching supplies (from an older page, but solid on the math: “All together, it is estimated that for a crew of six, you would need to 3 million pounds of supplies! The Shuttle can lift about 50,000 pounds into space, so it would take 60 shuttle launches to get all your supplies into space. In the history of the Shuttle, there have only been about 90 launches, and there are less than ten launches per year… So with the shuttle, it would take six years just to get the supplies into space. For this reason, you would probably need to develop a launch system that could lift more than 50,000 pounds into space.”)
Updated to today, SpaceX has the Falcon Heavy which can lift 140,000 lb to LEO…but that’s still a long way from Mars, and when you look at those numbers even the Falcon Heavy will only get 37,000 lb to Mars. So that’s 81 Falcon Heavy launches.
Possible near-future update: SpaceX’s work on their Starship promises launches of up 220,000 lb to LEO, a huge jump in capacity. For some odd reason, even though this is the launcher SpaceX wants to send to Mars, this is also the launcher they don’t quote the payload capacity to Mars on their site. Assuming the same gear ratio as the Falcon Heavy to make a rough estimate, it means the Spaceship should be able to get about 58,000 lb to Mars. That’s still 52 launches. In 7 years. For a launcher that hasn’t been built or tested yet.
Maybe they can get by with less than 3,000,000 lbs (that estimate was for a 6-person return trip) but I would have thought that you would need to take more if you want to set up a permanent habitat, and I don’t know if it would wipe out the (admittedly huge) fuel savings from making the trip one-way.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it would not surprise me if this turns out to be another bit of optimistic Muskian vapourware, like the submarine for cave rescues or the tunnel loop that would improve traffic in Vegas or the self-driving car whose AI seems to be suicidal.
Finally, apologies for the use of imperial units. It was from my sources. Americans be crazy.
@28 12+ billion homes until 2050?! Holy crap, why don’t they do that instead of going to Mars? That’s literally world population twice over.
@38 StevoR : it is called opportunity cost, the cost of the path not taken. Resources are limited, money is not.
If I had these two choices:
1. Send a million people to Mars
2. Provide electricity free of charge for the whole world for four+ years (12 billion homes *2.5 = 30 billion vs the current population of 7 billion)
I know what I would choose. But then I am after all a socialist scum. :)
This is that supervillanous “But I don’t want to cure cancer, I want to turn people into dinosaurs!” meme writ large.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/faCqrrzUldWDParC5BN1xzkrees=/1400×0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19895361/IMG_3015.jpg
“But I don’t want to provide free electricity for the whole world, I want to have a lair on Mars!”
@ ^ jo1storm : Fair enough but that’s not the reality of it. We don’t get to make the choice not are we limited to just those two options.
In an ideal world there’d be no such thing as billionaires.
But in reality there are and when compared to the likes of the Koch bros, Murdoch, Clive Palmer, the Sultan of Brunei and others Elon Musk comes across as reasonably okay and by far better of them using his money to acheive much better and more constructive and worthwhile things than infecting our politics.
The most economical option may be to develop a nuclear rocket engine.
Carlo Rubbia suggested a relatively conservative design would be quite affordable.
@StevoR
Not much of an argument, really, comparing him to them. He is not using wealth to commit great evils, he is just using the money to commit little evils here and there and to transfer resources from doing good. The difference between comic book villain who intentionally causes an oil spill or some other catastrophe and a comic book villain who then steals the relief money and hampers the clean up efforts.
Yeah, those guys you mentioned actively cause harm but Musk is definitively not helping and is causing more harm when he could do good.
“Lets make a few giant statues instead of feeding the hungry and solving homelessness and resultant crime wave in Gotham!” from “Batman and Robin” movie (yes, the one with bat-credit card). Musk could do good, he chooses not to do good and to use his charisma to divert public funds into his hair-brained schemes.
chrislawson: you’re double-counting. That page quoting 3 million pounds includes fuel for the trip there and back. So it’s 3 million to LEO that you need.
Also, it’s not actually 3 million to LEO. Every “reasonable” proposal for human Mars exploration includes in-situ resource utilization, so the oxygen for the stay on the surface and the return trip, as well as the propellent to get home, get collected on Mars — precisely because it’s such a ludicrous amount you’d otherwise need to haul. So they don’t need to be hauled on your human trip; you “just” need to launch a very reliable oxygen and fuel plant in the preceding window and have your human spacecraft land close to it so people can connect up the pipes to their base.
Launching humans by 2029 would require launching the plant in 2027 (and having it confirmed to work), and likely a test fuel plant in 2025. That’s just about the earliest, not utterly impossible plan.
MOXIE was demonstrated last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Oxygen_ISRU_Experiment
In regard to nuclear rockets:
When starting from LEO a spaceship has the option of using H2, as this is the reaction mass that provides the best specific impulse.
As liquid hydrogen cannot practically be kept in storage, nuclear rockets away from Earth need to use less volatile substances as reaction mass; water be ammonia.
This reduces the specific impulse to the level of conventional H2/LOX engines but you do not need to worry about the stuff boiling away.
You can also use locally sourced CO as reaction mass for a simple surface-to-orbit journey.
not impossible but unlikely maybe a small Moon base by then
StevoR @37
Musk and the video montage PZ posted showing media personalities fawning over him rather lends credence to my claim.
@49 StevoR
Elon Musk makes his money off of securing military contracts nowadays. He’s more entwined with Washington’s military-industrial complex than his marketing folks may like to admit.
@43. Steve Morrison :
Thanks! That’s the one and got that Buy Jupiter anthology which will be where I recall that from. Seven months after it was successfully climbed in 1953! Also seems Sagarmāthā s the Nepalese name and Chomolungma ཇོ་མོ་གླང་མ; is the Chinese name for it.
@ 42. Marcus Ranum : Thanks for clarifying. In general yeah, kinda? I’m a bit squeamish about making even Humanity extinct not that I’ll get overly much of say in that. However, there’s also lot of good people out there who do some pretty awesome things that make the world better, mor efun, fairer and nicer for everyone who don’t deserve “strangling at birth” too. I wish those better people had more power and say in things.
@ 48. jo1storm : “If I had these two choices:..”
Since, looking at it again, you didn’t specifiy ONLY one of those two choices was choseable I’d do both! ;-)
/Pedantry mode, sorry. As noted earlier, Those aren’t just the choices we have anyhow and they certainly aren’t mutuallty exclusive.
@46. consciousness razor :
Can I count the Mars colony itself and the inspiration and scientific and artistic and even political value that we’d almost certainly we get from it itself?
As one scientist noted rhetorically about one field of research “what use is a new born baby?” Until uts grown and does something who knows. Its very hard to predict what w emight learn and how that might effect us inteh future. Serendipity is a marvellous thing. Life on Mars if scientists discover it there could have profound consequences for our undertsadning of the universe and willtell us alot about how common it might be. Developing the prioetction from radiation toendure the voyage to Mars will potentially help protect us against radiation her etoo and of course, its hard topredict what other spin-offs there might be until, y’know, they are developed. Do you really think there wouldn’t be beneficial spin-offs developed as a result of human exploration of Mars and if so why? That seems much less plausible a case than the reverse to me.
Its a point that Phil Plait mad edebunking those who think the money is just wasted as if its fired off into space instead of supplying jobs and fueling the economy here. There seems to be this derogatory anti-science myth that money spent on space exploration – especially human space exploration is a waste as if it doesn’t contribute to the economy here – which it does.
What is genuinely important is a subjective question here though isn’t it? It’s also not just oligarchs and certainly isn’t just ElonMusk who think human spaceexplorationis genuinely important – a lot of scientists eg Carl Sagan and other people -myself included also think it is a genuinely important thing.
As for emiossions ,well, as you already noted that’s “..not large relative to a lot of other sources”” and something theyare aware of and working on – see :
https://www.space.com/new-shepard-emissions.html
@ 45. microraptor : As you’d expect I disagree. I notice you said zero-sum as in binary chocie then thre w ina lot of difefrent thinsg that would equally be competing for money. You could say funding arts can’t be done if we fund science or sport or a lot of other areas. No, people can work on and fund a whole bunch of stuff and achieve things in all sorts of areas and inreality, that is what happens. We can and do argue about the balance – I’d love to see a lot less spending on the military and sport frex but to simply pretend that if we cut say the 1/10th of 1 percent approx of the USA’s budget that goes to NASA that that money will automatically just go to worthy purposes like fixing poverty, environmental issues, etc .. is just silly and sgort-sighted and unrealistic. There are plenty of areas where a lot of money is wasted a lot worse and a lot more than in space exploration.
NASA and Space science and exploration are not a problem in principle. The problem is this magical technology proposed by Elon musk in 7 years.
as far as money and budgets are concerned military spending is probably locked in for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately until there are democracies generally all over the world we will need to spend the money on the military apparently. A real peace dividend would be a nice thing. Until then we will have to do all the rest on the cheap i.e. save the planet and the people on it. if we fail i fear the whole thing will collapse space exploration, democratic civilization, world economy international order.
unclefrogy: What magical technology is required? We’ve had the basic technology for decades; we’ve been working on the ISRU side since at least the 1990s in view of sending a human Mars mission. The ISS demonstrates we are able to build and assemble in orbit.
What’s complicated is coming up with good reasons to spend the $100+ billion to actually go.
If we had a race going on with communism and capitalism competing for who can make the biggest rocket (so that we can put nukes on it) we could give a rousting speech of committing to launching a human space mission to Mars before this decade is through, not because it is easy but because it is hard, yada yada.
StevoR:
No, you can’t.
Then you don’t have to act like a snake-oil salesman for them. If it turns out there’s some goodies inside the snake oil after all, we will eventually find out, but you shouldn’t sell it that way now.
I think you’re just confused here. I wanted to know if there are any things that we could only get by buying into a Mars colonization program, not things that might possibly be developed along the way … things that could just as well (or better!) be developed outside of that context. That’s your sales pitch.
But if they’re going to be such marvelously useful things to all of us here on Earth, what’s not plausible is that they wouldn’t be developed unless somebody was also colonizing Mars. And the point is, if you’re not the only one who could offer whatever these mystery benefits are supposed to be, then we can safely come up with some other deal and forget about the one you’re trying to push on us. If that’s not how the logic is supposed to work, then you couldn’t tell us that we’re losing anything like that if we don’t dump gigantic amounts into Mars colonies. So you’d have to come up with something that actually fits, and you haven’t.
I’m totally okay with a publicly-funded space program like NASA, as long as it’s doing some good work scientifically. Not this conquer the galaxy horseshit.
Also, the massive amount of resources that would be devoted to Mars colonization is nothing compared to what we’ve been doing before. There is plenty to be done here on Earth, and all of those jobs and resources should be doing something about that.
I’m also not convinced that shit like this — billions on renting a fucking spacesuit, propping up war-profiteering companies like Raytheon — is actually the kind of jobs program that anyone on my side of the political spectrum was ever asking for. But I could be wrong — maybe I was hit on the fucking head or something.
@ ^ Hit post instead of preview. My apologies about the typos. Not that preview usually does me that good. So wish we could edit here. Wish I coudl type better too. Sigh. Hope folks get the gist of it.
When itcoems to real money wasted I think this clip on what NASA could do with the USA’s military budget sums it up well. It is relative.
On Apollo spin offs see :
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/20/742379987/space-spinoffs-the-technology-to-reach-the-moon-was-put-to-use-back-on-earth
and I’d expect that going to Mars would have similar spin offs and benfits now.
Plus on how little the NASA gets see Phil Plait’s tweet here :
Which was quite recent from Feb last year :
https://twitter.com/badastronomer/status/1363187836699090949?lang=en
I agree . Of course that’s NASA a govt space agency using public money and not SpaceX using Elon Musk’s money but still When it comes to space exploration we could be spending and doing so much more and it’d still be great value in my view
@55. Walter Solomon : Thanks for clarifying re Musk or Putin. I see your point and its true that Musk has a lot of fans in the media – and elsewhere – but he does also get a lot of critical coverage too I think.
@56. beholder : Fair point but space exploration and echnology has always been linked to weapons development as well and this applies to NASA, Russia & China’s space agencies etc .. too. The space race that got us tothe Moon wa slinked with the old War and implications of dual military-civilian use. Its the dark side of it but inevitable really. Not that difefernt from aircraft and ships developed for wars and civilian use alike.
@51. jo1storm : I’ve already noted that I don’t think there should be billionaires at all.
But, again, given that there are, given that in this system – as rotten and unfiar as it is – it is his money to spend then how would you prefer he chose to spend it?
1) On developing rockets that advances technology for all?
3) Or interfering with Democracy and spreading Science Denialism and misinforming people like the Koch brothers and Clive Palmer?
4) Or building a global propaganda network spreading lies and puppet-mastering govts like Murdoch
5) Or simply wasting it in selfish opulent luxurious hedonism and local control like the Sultan of Brunei on gold and yachts and personal wealth.
If you had to rank those options from best to worst how would you do so and where would Musk be on that list?
Of all the billionaires choices Musk is at least doing something useful arguably visionary and NOT destructive even if he isn’t a Soros or a Gates.yes, billionaires are all bad but there is always a matter of degrees and some being much worse and others better than the others. No that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be criticised for being a douche when he is – which is often – but still. I don’t think the good he does should be completely ignored either.
As for his plans to travel to Mars, well, they are bold and visionary and provdie alot of peopel with hopeand inspiration so whilst there are reaosnable criticisms to be made and its obvs and incredibly tough challenge to suceed in, good on him for at least having a go I say! Its something I think we will all eventually learn and benefit from – including by mistakes made aliong the way.
I think the issue is more that we’re relying so much on some charlatan’s word and for some reason we’re interested in trying to fill in the gaps for him…. So, you can try to cook up some generous/optimistic estimates of what they might be able to do in order to hit the 2029 target.
But if you consider the Artemis program that I mentioned in #8, there’s no need for this kind of guesswork or to play “hope chess” with a giant space program. They have a real schedule of real missions laid out years in advance for all to see, and we know when there are setbacks or delays. We’re talking about real documentation and transparency, not tweets. We’re not just going off of the word of some guy and a bunch of rough guesses from people who are at best not very well informed about their actual progress (or lack thereof, as the case may be).
@StevoR
”
1) On developing rockets that advances technology for all?
3) Or interfering with Democracy and spreading Science Denialism and misinforming people like the Koch brothers and Clive Palmer?
4) Or building a global propaganda network spreading lies and puppet-mastering govts like Murdoch
5) Or simply wasting it in selfish opulent luxurious hedonism and local control like the Sultan of Brunei on gold and yachts and personal wealth.
If you had to rank those options from best to worst how would you do so and where would Musk be on that list?”
It wouldn’t be on that list. As you said, those are not the only choices.
I’d add
6) fixing the problems on Earth, the only home we have.
And not “fixing” them by pushing Teslas and hyperloops instead of public transportation, but actually fixing them. Billionaires shouldn’t exist, this specific billionaire became that by taking funding from government programs and privatizing what should have been public good.
But as I have written before, when you are asking “Why not both?” the answer is “opportunity costs!”. Spending on one alternative means the resources used on it are lost and cannot be spent on something more useful. And that’s unfortunately Musk’s modus operandi for a while now: diverting public funds and engineering effort that could be spent doing actual good into a thing that won’t work.
Yeah, going to Mars is an awesome thing. But you could go to the Moon and making a base there first instead. Or you could develop a working space elevator as one of the steps for that project. Both of those would be equally as inspiring, if not more so.
Or you could actually solve 90% of world’s energy problems first and THEN focus on whatever pet project you want. But Musk won’t do that. Because those things lack flair that is needed for the bezzle to work. That’s part of the way he works too. Razzle dazzle people (usually sci fi fans) with enormous claims, fail to deliver afterwards, get the money in the meantime.
https://pluralistic.net/tag/bezzles/
@62
yes that is the problem!
what is being proposed sounds like if you can excuse the comparison. a commander Scott expedition to the Pole overly optimistic trying out a lot of ideas many of which failed leaving them to die out on the ice.
it is not the Byrd expedition which was well planed tested, proved and well supported.
we will probably go but a small band of hearty adventurers will not be a useful success even if they do not die in the attempt. It will be a huge undertaking and will require an immense amount of support to be any where near a success.
and not in 2029
Wow, didn’t expect any comments let alone that many between my #57 & 61. Shoulda refreshed.
@62. consciousness razor : Who says we’re relying on a “charlatans” word presumably referring to Musk where the term “charlatan” is dubious given what he has already achieved through Space X and Tesla? I think you are letting your antipathy for Musk bias you too far in misjudging his companies and engineers and workers abilities and what they might be capable of.
You really think Musk is not “very well informed” or its just a tweet based on nothing here? I don’t. You think Musk is just “some guy” – not, you know, the boss of the most successful private space agency there is. An agency which works co-operatively with NASA and is seen as reliable and competent enough to be trusted flying astronauts to the International Space Station among other things. Again, I think your antipathy to Musk – who, yes, has his flaws and can be an absolute douche at times – (& maybe your antipathy to the whole field of human spaceflight too?) is excessively colouring your opinions here. Also “hope chess?”
That necessary to prevent the astronauts being killed by radiation, for one thing. Machines can be designed to cope with it – we know that, because probes have been sent over much of the solar system and continued to function. But AFAIK, there’s no way to protect people other than lots of very heavy shielding, which would hugely increase the mass you need to accelerate and decelerate.
As far as I can see, the benefits of space activities beyond earth orbit are:
1) Scientific. Machines have done effectively all of the off-earth activity involved so far*. I can see the scientific benefits of an inhabited moonbase, where scientists and support staff could spend a few months at a time as in Antarctica, but beyond that, the likelihood is that AI will develop fast enough** that it will never be worth the extra costs to send scientists to anywhere further away, Mars included. Even on the moon, remote control of machines either from earth (whence the round-trip lag of around 2 1/2 seconds would be inconvenient but not impossible) or from lunar orbit (whence it would be negligible, but heavy shielding would be needed – the international space station benefits from earth’s magnetic field, but the moon has none) might obviate the need for people actually on the lunar surface while we wait for AI to catch up.
2) Conceivably, mining scarce resources and bringing them back to earth. Helium-3 and various rare earth metals have been mentioned in this regard. Whether this would ever be worthwhile, particularly when the environmental costs of launches and returns are concerned, I don’t know. But Mars isn’t a promising source, and there’s no reason to think people would be needed.
*Well, the geologist Harrison Schmitt, who landed on the moon during the last Apollo mission collected the rock sample designated Troctolite 76535:
Schmitt turns out to be a climate disruption denialist fuckwit, but possibly no machine then available would have picked that particular rock sample.
**Making the increasingly bold assumption that the idiots and psychopaths largely in charge of affairs on earth don’t bring down the curtain on civilization first.
@60. consciousness razor :
Okay, so you’re just going to ignore that having a human Mars landing and colony would be even more significant and historic and value to our species as the Apollo Moon landings were. Your How to say I hate the whole idea of space travel without saying that you hate the whole idea of human space travel I guess.
Also you ignored the other things I mentioned in #57 :
As one scientist apparently noted rhetorically about one field of research “what use is a new born baby?” Until its grown and does something who knows? Its very hard to predict what we might learn and how that might effect us in the future. Serendipity is a marvellous thing. You do know what serendipity is and how it works right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipity
Also that it seems to apply with pretty much every estoric field of science that people like to dimiss as useless..
Specifically, life – past or present on Mars if explorers discover it there would have profound consequences for our understanding of the universe esp astrobiology and will tell us a lot about how common it might be. As in a difefrent direction would be not finding life. There are things her ethat humans ontehground can do alot quicker and better and easier than robots good though the latter are.
Are you aware of the shift in perspective the famous Earthrise photo taken by Bill Anders from Apollo 8 provided and how it inspired a lot of environmental action? This has been called
(Emphasis added, superscript cites removed.)
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise#Legacy
I fully expect that people going to Mars will similarly contrastingly highlight how precious and precarious our own planet is and contribute to further invigourating and inspiring conservation and environmentalism here. These things – saving our Earth and exploring space – work together in this regard as well as others.
Yes, our robotic surrogates take such photos too but, rightly or wrongly, having people there actually take them does seem to make a big difference.
Better life support systems and how to build them obvs being another way they do here and another way that going toMars willbenfit us all. Developing the protection from radiation to endure the voyage to Mars will potentially help protect us against radiation here also. I’ve seen suggestions (in physical books) for magentic and electric sails anaologous to solar sails that could provide protection as well as propulsion perhaps. See :
https://www.esa.int/Education/Magnetic_sails
SpaceX isn’t “:snake oil” and to call it such is offensive as well as absurd given the number of intelligent hard working people there and what they have achieved :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Summary_of_achievements
Given how much they have done and how soon plus the Apollo decadal deadline precedent when they say what they plan to do here I think its worth taking them seriously and NOT just saying they are off in “cloud cuckoo land.”
No, that’s my realistic assessment of probabilities and ithink youar etheone who is confused here.
Clearly and as already noted, radiation protection mechanism are one possible benefit and, separately, your asessment that Musk and SpaceX sending people to Mars would have NO benefical spinoffs and gains for the rest of us is far LESS likely -indeed absurdly unlikely versus the alternative that them doing so would be hugely benficial for the rest of us in numerous different ways and areas.
Your next paragraph doesn’t seem to follow well to me but seems to be confirmation that you indeed do NOT understand or value the notion serendipity and the unpredictable nature of spin offs.
Way to totally misprepresnt what Musk and others are talking about here. For starters, its Mars not the Galaxy and its exploringand studyingand living on NOt “conuqering” ..yeesh.Straw person here much?
And again it seems you miss the money is spent and jobs ar ecreated and economy and society helped her eonEarthy by this
thing.
@ ^ Cont. : And, again, it seems you miss the money is spent and jobs are created and economy and society helped here on Earth by Musk and others doing Human Space Exploration.
Your first sentence there ” .the massive amount of resources that would be devoted to Mars colonization is nothing compared to what we’ve been doing before..” seems to actually agree with me if I’m reading it right although I expect you intended it differently and miswrote or typed that?
(Which, if so I can seriously relate to here!)
Agreed actually – on both those* – but firstly whilst “propping up wa -profitteering companies” isn’t the ideal and I’d rather see better more ethical companies supported; I’d also rather companies like Raytheon dedicated their time, effort & $$$ to constructive peaceful projects like building spacesuits instead of military ones. Big fan of Scott Manley’s youtube channel here BTW.
Feeling physically tired and heachachey and stuffed right now FWIW (not covid – took RAT test, might be flu?) so not at my best but struggling to follow this paragraph quoted above.
Seems like basically, consciousness razor is saying the spin offs could come about in other ways so .. we can’t count them as due to the effort to get people to land on Mars / Musk’s Bold Space Plan (henceforth MBSP) here? Umm, right? I don’t agree becuase however they might have otherwise hypothetically have come about, IF they do come about because of MBSP then credit needs to be given where its due. Yes, in hindsight you can imagine discoveries and inventions and technological developments coming about in all sorts of different ways but if in practice one way causes them to do so in reality eg MBSP or the Apollo program then that’s how they came about and that program eg Apollo or MBSP deserevs the credit for them.
.* Plus I’ll admit I could be wrong too and am also biased albiet in the opposite direction in favour of Human Space Exploration and toalesser extent infavour of Musk sicne he’s doing a good job at that among other things eg Tesla.
consciousness razor: Mars Direct was published in 1990. I worked on aspects of this plan in 1999 (pretty sure nothing I did led to anything, it was my first job out of college). It’s been the central view of how a Mars mission would run for more than 20 years. NASA has been funding the technologies required for decades — starting before Mars Direct was published, which assumes those low-TRL technologies already in development back then could be pushed to deployment.
The 2-year cadence of missions is based on orbital dynamics. We have a cheap transfer window every 26 months.
If Musk were proposing something radically different he’d mention it. To determine whether Musk’s goal is even vaguely plausible doesn’t require knowing any more than that. It passes that sniff test; now he just has to come up with roughly $100 billion to fund it, and absolutely everything needs to go right.
this comment I tried to over look but I could not
I know that is how it was characterized most of the time but at the same time it was stressed “our freedoms” as being important.
it never was about the economics though the “market” did play an important role. There was and always has been a fundamental conflict between none democratic forms of government and democratic forms of government. The conflict in Ukraine is between an old national character a country with a young democracy and an old empire now ruled by a ruthless capitalist despot.
all of the major adversaries that the U.S. faces are all tyrannies of some description or other and enemies of democracy which has little to do with any kind of socialism. the conflicts are eating up most of our ability to do the other great things we could be doing like space colonies and earth rejuvenation
@63. jo1storm :
But those were the choices offered to you here and you didn’t actually answer my question. You substituted your own instead. So again, if you were to rank those from one to five then which order would you put them in?
I guess you chose not to answer because its obvious – of all the listed ways those specific billionaires are spending their money Musk is by far the best even if he isn’t doing exactly what you want him to do.
We don’t live in a perfect or just world – one where there are no billioniares with excessive wealth and power. We live in one where there are billionaires with excessive wealth and power.
Yes we should work on changing that but whilst the world is as it is, it is silly to ignore the reality that some of these billionaires are actively causing harm and making the world worse eg Murdoch, Koch bros, Palmer whilst others are merely selfishly luxuriating in their undeserved wealth but not making the world actively worse by their efforts eg the Brunei Sultan and a few eg Musk, Soros, Gates are actively working to improve the world and making better for others. Singling Musk out for particular opprobrium here and ignoring the fact that he’s putting his money to at least some constructive and positive use does seem unfair to me.
Which, of course, is a lot easier said than done and, again, at least Musk is doing something useful here.
As if you can, actually, just fix them by waving money around. Which, no, ain’t that easy.
Yes, if you make that an option – which I deliberately didn’t for the sake of my argument which is based on the real world and real people in reality and which had its point that has either gone over your head or been ignored by you – then clearly its better.
Athough Musk with Tesla is helping at least in part and its a problem that can’t really be solved by individual action even by the richest and most powerful people on Earth. Global Overheating, pollution, Biodiversity loss, etc ..these all require collective and government and global organisation action and are beyond the scope of just saying, oh yes, get Mr Rich Individual X to fix it. Musk by himself cannot save Earth (ie the world as we know it) on his own even with all his fortune and influence nor can any other billionaire so lets not blame them for NOT doing the impossible and give at least some credit for the good they do as well as for the harm they do when they do it ok?
Not quite. The money goes into the economy and gets taxed and paid and cycled and it is – unfair or not – Musks’ money to choose what to do with. Plus “more useful” is a subjective value call.
Also you could use this “logic” to argue virtually anything whether its spending money on sport or arts or welfare or warfare or .. whatever. Do we spend everything on the environment and nothing on ending poverty adn nothingon ending homelessness and nothing on ending hunger and nothing on curing cancer? Do we pick one only out of education, health and infrastructure? See how zero-sum black & white silly that sort of argument sounds now? Who gets to decide what is more useful and why? Who gets to propose the “alternatives” that we choose from? If we don’t spend the money on developing technology to go to Mars do you seriously think that money would – in reality – go to your ideal save the world program and why? Or would it insetad be wasted elsewhere doing other less useful or even actively harmful things like Musk buying twitter or starting his own political / media empire or collecting an F1 or soccer teams or megayachts like other billionaires do?
Because SpaceX hasn’t worked? Oh wait ..
https://www.space.com/spacex-record-breaking-2021-year
https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-falcon-9-commercial-rocket-record-most-launches-2018-12
https://interestingengineering.com/destination-mars-15-incredible-spacex-milestones-past-and-future
Yeah, it has worked before, Musk’s SpaceX, like it or not has notably suceeded beyond expecations and if history is any guide it will keep working and, yes, if Musk says he’ll land people on Mars I think there’s a good chance he will.
Musk’s SpaceX has got a proven growning list of successful projects, spacecraft built, launched and landed, missions flown and accomplished and more. You now say MBSP will fail because ..? You think they will fail? You think this is a “waste” and are justifying that claim based on, what? Your lack of knowledge of past SpaceX feats that they’ve managed despite those things being hard, your argument from incredulity and failure to grasp Arthur C Clarke’s first law :
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong.”. – Clarke’s three laws wikipage.
Maybe. Those are both epic SF ideas that I’ve ben hoping to see developed and come true in my lifetime but then same for what Musk is saying and the long awaited first humans on Mars. If Musk has picked Mars as his mission – as he clearly has – then, good on him and here’s hoping he succeeds at it.
Er, this ain’t Uber which is Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick’s company that we’re talking about here. Not sure of the relevance or applicability of your “bezzle” link. Nor are NASA just suckers who believe in SF – and what by the way is wrong with enjoying SF exactly? Do you think scifi fans are more guillible or simply more imaginative than most? SpaceX has delivered as has Tesla. To say these things are scams is just, no, nope. How many times do I need to point you to the obvious reality that Musk’s SpaceX has already delivered again?
What more would be needed from them to convicne you & other nay-sayers that, yes, they can and likely will achieve Musk’s Bold Space Plans?
unclefrogy:
That’s cute.
When there is the choice to have freedom and democracy in a country versus capitalism that the US can control, the US always chose to support capitalism. “Banana republic” is a term from 1904. The US helped overthrow democratic governments in Iran, Chile, and Argentina among others during the Cold War. It heavily supported a brutal dictatorship in Vietnam. It made buddies with various Arab autocracies, some of them monstrous. Opposition to the left in South America and support for the right date most recently to during the Trump years and the earliest was in the 19th century; Biden hasn’t made any major moves in any direction there yet so it’s too soon to tell if he’ll abandon 150+ years of steady policy, but my money is on no.
In Ukraine, the US supports freedom and democracy because it hurts Russia. It’s good luck for Ukraine that justice aligns with the goals of the US because otherwise we’d let them go it alone.
…and, yes, if Musk says he’ll land people on Mars I think there’s a good chance he will.
Sorry, that’s just utter nonsense. Landing people on Mars — in such a way that they don’t all die within two days of landing, that is — is EXPONENTIALLY more complex and expensive than anything anyone, or any government, have accomplished so far. Don’t be fooled by Musk’s bluster: a lot of it has been quite thoroughly debunked already, and exposed as either ignorant fantasies or outright fabrications.
@71 Only, Tesla is not helping with those problems it allegedly is trying to solve. So, your wrong assumption leads to wrong conclusions.
Quote: “Athough Musk with Tesla is helping at least in part and its a problem that can’t really be solved by individual action even by the richest and most powerful people on Earth.”
If you have a solution to a problem and you insist on doing something that is not a solution to the problem, then your individual action will fail. To exaggerate: There are known methods of firefighting. If you insist on breeding genetically modified butterflies to quench fires with their wings as a solution to a problem instead of using those methods, you are going to fail in firefighting. But genetically modified butterflies are cool, a hose or CO2 foam is not.
“It is easier to con people than to convince them they were conned.”
That’s the whole point of the bezzle link. Another con made on the same way that Musk is doing for years. You need big enough smoke and mirrors.
Self driving cars are cool, trains are not, we will ride self driving cars, they are the solution to all traffic problems! Rockets are cool, we will ride rockets instead of planes! Mars is cool, we were on the Moon before, but not Mars, so it will be manned mission to Mars!
That’s how it works. As for SpaceX, that is just adding an intermediary to what was already accomplished by a government agency called NASA. Also known as privatizing public good.
The scam goes as follows: 1. Cut the budget of government agency. 2. Instead of rising taxes of billionaires, make it an investment opportunity for them. Use (human) resources of defunded government agency in a private sector. 3. Profit!
It happened in privatized healthcare, prison industrial complex and many other fields. It is a well known scam, first made in that form during railroad building in the old west, but most noticeably in the modern world with the internet. Government provides funding and infrastructure and takes all the risk, private railroad barons get all the profit once the project is finished and risk is gone.
numerobis:
I realize that, and it’s not the point at all. I don’t just need to know that there are times when things happen, nor do I need to hear more about the concept of it…. What are the actual plans? How much of it is even close to being finalized?
What people have described are all very ambitious missions. Because of those transfer windows, every one of them needs to be a fantastic success between now and then, to pull it off by 2029.
A couple months ago, Musk said it will “hopefully” launch for its first orbital test flight in May — it didn’t happen, obviously. I doubt he’s any better about predicting what’s going to happen years from now, and these things often seem less like genuine predictions and more like hype. So, I’d like to hear it from somebody who’s got some real plans (which don’t only exist inside their own heads), somebody who isn’t just interested in hype to try to grab investors or boost some fucking stocks.
As I said, the blocker isn’t principally technical, it’s money. Musk doesn’t actually have the cash. On technical grounds, we likely could launch in 2029 if we really started working on it today.
Artemis is a great example of how the clear public roadmap you want is actually utterly useless. It’s 6 years late building its rocket, and vastly over budget. That’s despite the fact that the SLS started from the Ares rocket which was … years late and vastly over budget itself. A committee that publishes a roadmap that is utter bullshit doesn’t strike me as an improvement over a rich asshole tweeting about aspirational ideas.
When they’re saying that the plan is to land on the Moon again in 2025, I’m much less skeptical about it. There could be more delays, but a bunch of untested shit doesn’t have to work perfectly every time on multiple long missions, in order for that to realistically happen. The people saying it are also more credible than Musk will ever be, and they are held accountable whenever they do make mistakes.
You have to pay attention to the actual text. It’s right there on the Wikipedia page; you just need to look carefully.
Chomolungma ཇོ་མོ་གླང་མ is not Chinese. It is Tibetan.
The Chinese is: 珠穆朗玛峰; pinyin: Zhūmùlǎngmǎ Fēng — the first part is clearly similar to the Tibetan, but still.
I have a rant built up somewhere which can be summarized as: If you want to colonize space, colonize Earth first.
People keep talking about ooh, space spinoff this and space spinoff that. But it actually works better the other way around: If we learn how to build sustainable closed habitats in extreme environments on Earth, that knowledge can be used for space colonization!
Support Biosphere-like projects in the Antarctic, deep deserts, and under the oceans — continental shelves first, and then move deeper. Once we have those working well, we can move to LEO and lunar habitats. Mars can come after all of those are successfully up and running. But start with the Earth first.
(The fact that Biosphere-2 was such a colossal screwup strongly suggests that sustainable closed systems are a lot harder than it looks. Well, get it right on Earth first, before even attempting to make an inevitable colossal screwup on Mars.)
If we don’t have people putting forward such bold vision, we’ll certainly never get anywhere close or develop the technology and knowledge that does improve our world…
And if we get the WRONG people “putting forward such bold vision” (like, I dunno, a known liar and bullshitter like Elon Musk, possibly aided by other lying con-artists like Donald Trump), then all we’re likely to get is a huge Space Flight Bubble, which will burst and leave lots of investors utterly burned (with or without getting any would-be explorers killed), and leave our space program a discredited laughingstock while some other country, like maybe China or, hopefully, Japan, does it right and gets permanently ahead of us.
Support Biosphere-like projects in the Antarctic, deep deserts, and under the oceans — continental shelves first, and then move deeper.
There’s at least one such project being promised and heavily advertized, and none of them are being built on schedule. One such “self-contained domed city” has been promised somewhere in the Arabian desert, and nothing’s been built in all time it’s been advertized — they haven’t even changed the CGI illustrations.
@72
all those examples are true. We are right here and right now engaged in that same conflict between those who would do away with representative democracy and substitute minority rule. Why is now any different you might ask when it has been demonstrably like that for some time. I think that there has always been a push for more actual participation in the process of governing participatory democracy since day one. It was easier for the capitalist authoritarian crowd to propagandize the cold war as between two different economic ideas one threatened their wealth and power. So they identified it that way so they could continue to rule. Now they feel more threatened and have lost the old cardboard evil of “communism ” and have fallen back on the old stand by racism and classism and religion (as they describe it)
consciousness razor@77:
The people who are perennially billions over budget and years late are credible?
I’ve got a bridge for you.
“more credible than Musk”
We used to have real standards. Now we just have that.
[meta]
StevoR, good effort there.
Not exactly endorsing you, but I can see your point, and there’s nothing wrong with being a space cadet.
Musk sets nigh-impossible goals and then SpaceX largely follows through on them. In the industry they are considered far more credible than ULA and Boeing anymore.
This is a fairly recent shift. For a while SpaceX was the risky plucky upstart while Boeing was the venerable elder. But old-space has suffered many high-profile failures in recent years that point to bad leadership, e.g. the crew capsule (SpaceX got Dragon working; Boeing didn’t get theirs yet) and with SLS (not yet flying, predicted to cost giant buckets of cash per launch in addition to the development costs).
@86. numerobis : The goal JFK set for Apollo was considered nigh impossible once too.
@85. John Morales : Thanks.
@ 78. Owlmirror : Chomolungma ཇོ་མོ་གླང་མ is not Chinese. It is Tibetan.
Yes – thanks. Thought it was but then got thrown by the wikipedia info – hence the indigenous name along with Sagarmāthā as the Nepalese name. Different names and alphabets and time those were more widely accepted and used in my view.
@73 Raging Bee & consciousness razor (#84) : You say that as though Musk isn’t that “credible” or claim its “utter nonsense ” tosuggets Musk can do what he proposes yet, well see what he – or at least SpaceX and Tesla – have achieved as noted and evidenced in my #71, 67 & 65. Are the challenges huge and difficult? Yes. Does that mean they can’t be met and the obstacles overcome? Well, based on their successful history of doing the nigh impossible and things they were predcted to fail at, then no. Musk has demonstrated that he is worth taking seriously at least when it comes to space technology and achievements.
PS. The Indigenous names for Mt Everest I mean! Not expecting everyone – myself included to learn & use the Tibetan & Nepalese alphabets / scripts :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_script & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_scripts#/media/File:Nepal_Scripts.jpg
@ 79. Owlmirror :
I know what you mean here, but of course Earth has already been colonised often and repeatedly in really awful ways eg Spanish, British, American, Russian empires. Plus of course the whole human history and prehistory. Unfortunate word choice there.
Yes, there’s a place for biosphere type projects and I see your point here and in the value of doing those but they don’t seem to get the same backing and support and appeal of say setting one up inside an asteroid or comet or constructing an O’Neill colony (see : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder ) which, yes, is disappointing. Hoewever, it’s also something that Ithink we can do as welland alongside not necessarily befroe aMars trip although before would be better admittedly.
@76. numerobis :
I was incredibly angry and frustrated when Obama cancelled the Constellation / Ares program :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program
just after they’d finally launched the successful test flight of Ares I-X on 29th Oct 2009 showing that it was NOT “bullshit” (utter or otherwise) but something that was well on its way to transforming from talk and ideas to having actual concrete vehicles and flights finally doing something I’d been hoping to see my whole lifetime. Absolutely baffling and infuriating and they should have kept on going wity the Constellation then. Wonder where they’d be if they had? Really hope they’ve learnt and never again cancel an on-going human spaceflight program especially after its already started to fly.
@ ^
0h Stevo, you haven’t changed. Still full of shit.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-we-need-better-rocket_b_351335/amp
Nevertheless it flew.
They could have kept going.
It was a start and something to build on.
Not something to cancel. Whatever its issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares_I-X
Even IF you are being fair which don’t think you are.