If that is the intellectual level of the applicants, they have far worse problems than radiation and food.
All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
31–40 of 65 posts
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#32Well written article! As much as I would like to but I think it will probably never happen in the near future. Not because of technical reasons as some people state in the article. In my opinion the technical difficulties are not the most difficult things to solve in order to travel to Mars. Humanity went basically from 0 to space and on the Moon but this was only possible because of the political pressure where ever…
I agree. Barring some economic windfall that hasn't yet been discovered, it will require a national (world?) crisis and a Manhattan/Apollo project for a project on this scale. And the $6B pricetag is ludicrous. To put this in context, the state of California estimates the cost of high-speed rail from SF to LA at ~$50B.
> To put this in context, the state of California estimates the cost of high-speed rail from SF to LA at ~$50B.
Well, $67 billion, up from the $33 billion figure they were promoting when they asked voters to approve it.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. Barring some economic windfall that hasn't yet been discovered, it will require a national (world?) crisis and a Manhattan/Apollo project for a project on this scale. And the $6B pricetag is ludicrous. To put this in context, the state of California estimates the cost of high-speed rail from SF to LA at ~$50B.
> To put this in context, the state of California estimates the cost of high-speed rail from SF to LA at ~$50B. Mars One is pretty silly, but a significant portion of that $50B cost is because they need long, straight lines and as such will have to seize and reimburse a lot of very expensive real estate, isn't it?
I don't know, it was just the first thing I thought of.
Here are dozens of projects that make me chuckle about the naivete of the $6B figure:
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah fine, and everyone at SpaceX DEVELOPED the rockets that take people to SPACE for the same as what Facebook paid for Snapchat. Valuations are WEIRD. Further the $50B price tag has a lot to do with paying a LOT of union folks, legalized "corruption" in many forms and the like. Finding huge cost savings in the construction industry is possible if you're motivated but nobody is because big infrastructure projects li…
You mention paying union folks like it is a bad thing, in line with "legalized "corruption"" . Perhaps you should go work in a foundry, machine shop, or a mine for a while and then see how you feel about unions.
Way to make a not-relevant comparison that doesn't really address my point!
Ultimately this addresses my point best:
“The highway department didn’t use to see the drivers as customers,” said Frank DePaola, administrator of the highway division for the department. “For a while there, the highway department was so focused on construction and road projects, it’s almost as if the contractors became their customers.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/us/rapid-construction-tech...
It is possible to get this kind of thing done with or without unions, but when unions have a strong presence it's harder because the union bosses know that this could mean fewer jobs, and for them, less power. People generally don't take a pay cut (or reduction in status) willingly.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah fine, and everyone at SpaceX DEVELOPED the rockets that take people to SPACE for the same as what Facebook paid for Snapchat. Valuations are WEIRD. Further the $50B price tag has a lot to do with paying a LOT of union folks, legalized "corruption" in many forms and the like. Finding huge cost savings in the construction industry is possible if you're motivated but nobody is because big infrastructure projects li…
SpaceX benefited from a great many years of experience, technology, knowledge, and lessons learned in blood from NASA, which is priceless. Comparing SpaceX outlays to a corporate acquisition pricetag is a weak analogy, at best. NASA (federal taxes) provided roughly half of SpaceX's initial funding. Large fractions of their current contracts come from NASA. And of course plenty of SpaceX's engineers are ex-NASA employ…
Yes, that's all fine. But here's the thing: even if the billion dollars dropped magically out of the air, it still only took a billion dollars to develop a new rocket. Doesn't matter where the money came from if that's how much money it was.
I don't care if it's public or private money that made SpaceX possible, and it doesn't much matter to me if the tech to go to Mars is all designed from scratch or bought from people who already know how to do it. It's that it is possible to do big things for a lot less than $50B.
If you have to design everything from scratch because it's $10k/lb and every pound counts, well, then yes it's going to cost a huge pile of money.
But what if it's $1k/lb to get to space? Suddenly COTS stuff doesn't look as stupid.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#36To send actual humans to the surface of Mars requires several robotic missions first to prepare. If we expect to make fuel for the return journey there, that needs to be happening before the people leave Earth orbit. Ditto for digging the hole and putting in an underground habitat. Building a greenhouse from glass made on Mars. Growing actual food on the surface. Each of these steps are critical and need testing befo…
The fact that there is no return journey planned makes a lot of stuff much simpler.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
SpaceX benefited from a great many years of experience, technology, knowledge, and lessons learned in blood from NASA, which is priceless. Comparing SpaceX outlays to a corporate acquisition pricetag is a weak analogy, at best. NASA (federal taxes) provided roughly half of SpaceX's initial funding. Large fractions of their current contracts come from NASA. And of course plenty of SpaceX's engineers are ex-NASA employ…
Yes, that's all fine. But here's the thing: even if the billion dollars dropped magically out of the air, it still only took a billion dollars to develop a new rocket. Doesn't matter where the money came from if that's how much money it was. I don't care if it's public or private money that made SpaceX possible, and it doesn't much matter to me if the tech to go to Mars is all designed from scratch or bought from peo…
No, it took much more than a billion dollars to develop a rocket. You are just ignoring huge swathes of the cost to support your claim. If you estimate the aggregate cost of SpaceX launches, including 50 years of work by NASA, it will be orders of magnitude greater than $1B. I mean, tell yourself whatever you want, but R&D isn't free, and they didn't have to do most of it.
In the context of the present thread, since many of the problems associated with a manned Mars mission are unsolved, forgive me if I'm skeptical that Adam Smith's invisible hand will somehow bring the cost down to manageable levels. With or without COTS.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#38A well written article, interspersed with great art. Makes me wonder why he published it on Medium of all places.
This article deserved better. The author deserves recognition.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#39This piece is quite an interesting read, as well as being well structured and well phrased. This makes it all the more unfortunate that the writer is obviously unfamiliar with the technologies which would be used, and the realities of aerospace projects; leading to a slew of errors. Some of the errors include: 1) Separating oxygen from nitrogen is quite commonly done, and there are at least three distinct methods for…
I worked in industrial nitrogen/oxegen generator provider, and it is not really rocket science to do this. All we had to do was finding optimized pressure and substance for gas distillation.
Re: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about, before all that, we try and inhabit, say, deserts on Earth first? Make that psychologically and economically feasible first. To my knowledge, we are yet to successfully demonstrate that we can maintain a viable, materially-closed ecosystem, without having to worry about extra things we'd encounter on Mars like pressure and temperature differentials and excess radiation. I am all for Mars, 100%. The sooner…
We already comfortably inhabit a desert, we call it Los Angleles :-) Perhaps a better example is the underground city of Australia, Coober Pedy. Non self-sustaining examples exist in the Antarctic as well. The point being, Earth has hard to live in places, but not a lot of motivation for living in those places. Mars as a sort of sex appeal to it "Mars!" but its a valid question what happens once people figure out tha…
LA (or Sahara or whatever) at least has oxygen, decent atmospheric pressure, and non-freezing temperatures.
Mars is very, very different. You can't go out at any moment and take a breath if your CO2 scrubbers break down.