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SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

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Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#251

Post by dotancohen »

Tepix wrote: post #175
jetzzz wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all those things, even after nuclear war, Earth is still much better place for life than Mars.

Depends on the size of the asteroid

> Depends on the size of the asteroid.

Which is inversely correlated with the chances of it coming in any particular timeframe.

I'm the biggest fan of colonizing Mars, but my children know that if Daddy ever has the chance he is going to Mars to suffer, not to play. Mars will be hard and unforgiving. Life will be horrible for the first two generations at least. At no point will it ever be better than life on Earth.

And yet, I'll be the first in line.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#252

Post by anoncake »

anticensor wrote: post #143
simonh wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No light for part of the year vs no air ever. Hmm, let me think about that one for a minute. I think settling Mars will and should happen, but anyone who doesn’t realise it will be thousands of times more expensive, risky and dependent on external support than eg Antarctica I think isn’t really grasping the difference in scale of the problem.

Mars does have an atmosphere, although unbreathable.

I don't think it's called air if you can't breath it.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#253

Post by anoncake »

vilius wrote: post #108

My “cool things to do once in a lifetime” list just got a new item - Watch SpaceX send humans to ISS. There is this strange urge to actually witness my species achieving great things.

But your species sends humans to ISS all the time. Or do you think Russians are cats? :)

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#254

Post by mcv »

nine_k wrote: post #154
shkkmo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A successful mars colony would need to have a plan to reach self-sufficiency through Martian plus asteroid resources. Not at all. While there will be an economic and logistical incentive to reduce the dependence on imports from earth, it is not reasonable to expect the colony to fully duplicate the manufacturing capabilities of earth. There will be drugs, electronic components and human experts that will imported f…

I don't think any imports from Mars could be profitable. Except scientific data, of course. The colony will depend on Earth tech for a long time. The only case for a self-sustained colony I see is some local political extremism. To prefer to live on Mars by one's own means would take some very strong Earth-incompatible views.

The one import from Mars that might be profitable does not come from Mars: resources mined from asteroids. Mars is closer to it (and in a shallower gravity well than Earth), so if for whatever reason we want people closer to asteroid mining operations, that might be a viable niche for Mars.

That's very speculative, though. Asteroid mining is probably going to be entirely robots, and both supply of those robots and the demand for the resources are almost entire based on Earth, so it's very questionable a Mars colony will add any value there. But it's the one area where I can see the possibility.

A refueling station on Deimos, however, sounds like a much more interesting prospect.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#255

Post by rocqua »

shkkmo wrote: post #142
javagram wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trade is required when the materials of subsistence cannot all be produced locally. A successful mars colony would need to have a plan to reach self-sufficiency through Martian plus asteroid resources.

> A successful mars colony would need to have a plan to reach self-sufficiency through Martian plus asteroid resources. Not at all. While there will be an economic and logistical incentive to reduce the dependence on imports from earth, it is not reasonable to expect the colony to fully duplicate the manufacturing capabilities of earth. There will be drugs, electronic components and human experts that will imported f…

What products would a martian colony produce that are worth transport costs? Even taking into account you only need to pay for the return trip, because the earth-mars leg is payed for by imports anyway.

Data has much more favorable transport costs, but there is only so much valuable data on Mars. Especially since astronomy isn't really a free market. There might be resources on Mars that are rare enough on Earth to be worth it. I'd be interested in hearing more on those.

It seems to me like the main value of a Mars colony (human exploration, achievement, and insurance against planetary wipe-out) are abstract, and can't be exported in any real sense.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#256

Post by nickik »

xPhobophobia wrote: post #125
warp_factor wrote: post #122

Congratulation to SpaceX. That being said, we should take a step back and stop drinking the Elon Musk Koolaid. This has been done flawlessly by Russian Soyouz hundreds of times over the last decades (with almost no failures). This has also been done with the Shuttle.

Agreed! Notable achievement, but not game-changing. One thing I remind myself is that Elon really didn't start Tesla. He's been snow balling off initial success and continues to accelerate thanks to collaboration with brilliant people.

Tesla was a utter disaster when Elon took over and would have failed. Making a tiny as car maker into a very large on is 100x harder then starting a little car company and running it into the ground.

Elon didn't start Tesla but he wanted to start a car company when he heard that another company had just started with the same idea so he joined them instead.

Since then he saved Tesla by taking over and investing his own money.

> He's been snow balling off initial success and

I'm sorry but that is just insane. The company was not very successful when he took over, so 'snow balling of early success' is just nonsense.

> continues to accelerate thanks to collaboration with brilliant people.

So like all successful business people/inventors in the history of the world?

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#257

Post by iguy »

isostatic wrote: post #226
rplnt wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not something you can compare. Space Shuttle was not a can for humans to reach LEO. It was a much more capable spacecraft with a significantly bigger (both in volume and weight) payload.

With an appropriate payload there were proposals for upto 80 people in the shuttle. At $450m to launch that would be $6m a seat.

Indeed, clearly not a head-to-head comparison, I just wanted to find some figure for the shuttle's cost. It's not clear to me what the 450 includes.

I had not heard of this 80-person shuttle-bus, that sounds pretty crazy!

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#258

Post by childintime »

dotancohen wrote: post #251
Tepix wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the size of the asteroid

> Depends on the size of the asteroid. Which is inversely correlated with the chances of it coming in any particular timeframe. I'm the biggest fan of colonizing Mars, but my children know that if Daddy ever has the chance he is going to Mars to suffer, not to play. Mars will be hard and unforgiving. Life will be horrible for the first two generations at least. At no point will it ever be better than life on Earth. A…

> if Daddy ever has the chance he is going to Mars to suffer, not to play. Mars will be hard and unforgiving. Life will be horrible for the first two generations at least. At no point will it ever be better than life on Earth.

This reminded me of computer tech in its first approximation: hard and unforgiving. It took about 2 generations to make it into a ubiquitous mobile device. In about four generations AI will make space colonies possible. "And AI shall produce acomodations for adventurous humans and preserve them". Space seems first and foremost the realm of AI, embodying our outreach. We won't actually go to space unless a planet is discovered and farmed to be hospitable.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#259

Post by imtringued »

blhack wrote: post #199
jononor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now we can keep X% of the knowledge of humanity on a portable device. That should help.

A lot of human knowledge cannot be written down and has to be passed on person to person. There isn't enough bandwidth in a book to actually convey a lot of it. Machining is one instance of this. You basically have to have somebody show you how to do some of it. Same thing with forging. (At least in my experience)

You don't need a complex example. Your first language is something that can only be taught by people who are alive. Even if there is a comprehensive textbook that teaches all languages you still have to learn your first language to read the book.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#260

Post by imtringued »

7952 wrote: post #115
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don’t see any benefits to living on Mars until every inch of space on Earth is used up. Everything about living on Mars is hostile to life. Doing anything there like mining and manufacturing will be orders of magnitude more difficult and for what? To say we are somewhere else that looks like the Atacama but infinitely more difficult to get to? It seems silly to be trying to rush to a place that wants to ki…

The irony is that this kind of technology could be important on earth now. From an environmental perspective a closed ecological system could be very beneficial. A system where resources are not wasted or allowed to pollute. And where all outputs are used as an input for something else.

We already had this but then we decided to dig out fossil fuels and we could no longer go back to the previous life style.
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