Why Mars, specifically? Why not "settle" Antarctica or Marianna's trench? Aren't these orders of magnitude easier?
Marianna's is probably way tougher than Mars to be honest.
Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
171–180 of 351 posts
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Next week, Musks inbox is flooded with "Weld 28467 is looking slightly bubbly. It'll probably be okay, but wanted to pass the buck to you".
That was my first thought as well - how does the spiritus movens behind both Tesla and SpaceX have the bandwidth to pull off that level of (micro)management?
Passing the Buck for Musk seems to ask people also to include in the buck a (potential) solution for the (potential) problem.
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
If so, why is everyone else so far behind?
Depends on how you measure "behind". If you measure it by "times been to the moon" SpaceX sure is behind. Less money? Less motivation? Less talent? The number of factors that contribute to success are unmeasurable, what a silly question.
Let's be objective: SpaceX has radically lowered the cost to get to Earth orbit, and commands a majority of the worldwide launch market. They are simply more efficient than other launch providers, so much so that they are branching out into global communications (StarLink) to capture more revenue (global comms is 10x the market size of the launch market). They don't need to go to the Moon to succeed. There is no market to get to the Moon unless nation states make one. Musk is building his own market for Mars logistics demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
> SpaceX's market share increased rapidly. In 2016, SpaceX had 30% global market share for newly awarded commercial launch contracts, in 2017 the market share reached 45%, and 65% in 2018.
Tesla, according to the opinion of a single auto industry expert, has a 7 year head start against legacy automakers [1]. They sell every vehicle they build, and combined, legacy automakers have shed almost 40k jobs in the last year as they attempt to transition to building EVs to compete against Tesla.
A reasonable person might conclude these metrics indicate an achievement of some level of success.
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/27/auto-experts-tesla-has-...
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#174It's quite inspiring to see a real goal and drive towards it. Purpose is so hard to come by now because we all don't know what we want. When we do know, we're constantly unsure about it. Such a clear goal makes it easy to have greater purpose that you don't second guess. This isn't a scheme to get rich, a zero sum political movement, or a narcissistic artistic endeavor. It's pretty unique there. There's that whole da…
> Purpose is so hard to come by now because we all don't know what we want. When we do know, we're constantly unsure about it. This statement resonates deeply with me. Whenever I meet someone new or that I might be interested in dating I ask "What are you doing with your life?" or "What are you striving for?" and I find the extreme majority of people don't have an answer beyond "I just go to a job I don't really like…
It's definitely very difficult. I'm striving to learn a new language,improve at chess and olympic weightlifting but that's a much lower level of purpose than building spaceships to reach Mars. I hope that I can find something in my career that fuels a burning desire like some of the SpaceX employees
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#175I don’t get the point
1) we are plain in the middle of a mass extinction event, expected to get much worst in a decade or two. Wouldn’t it be good to solve that first?
2) we need a 4th industrial revolution to survive global warming as a civilization. Wouldn’t be better to fix that first? (No, electric cars won’t suffice)
3) is it really necessary to spoil astronomy/night sky to finance one’s dream? (No, vantablack won’t solve the issue)
4) our technology presently rely on mining 100+ elements. Does anyone here believe one can mine all of those on an a planet that misses an atmosphere? Using Earth ressources for a “colony” seems a dubious idea.
5) has anyone an idea of the CO2 equivalent cost of bringing one person to mars?
6) there is growing evidence that there is life in the Martian underground. Should we take the risk of destroying another biosphere?
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
And why would they do that? Please, I beg you to explain it to me.
The total mass launched to orbit is currently in the order of 500 tons per year. To start a colony on Mars, millions of tons of material would need to be shipped there from Earth. This massive launch capacity is why they want to build so many ships and creating an assembly line is how they want to do it.
Cool story bro but let's just think for a minute, why do you need an assembly line of spaceships now/near future when you don't even have one? when you ARE far away from sending an human to orbit Mars, let alone land one there? I'm talking about the actual realist act of doing that, not a pseudo Hollywood story of sending a "suicide mission", for what? Seriously, for what? When the day comes ( it never will, in those terms ) I want to see who actually steps up.
All of this assembly line talk is "idea guy" talk trying to keep all the plates spinning. Mars is just a pretext for other more mundane/ego/profit driven things.
And what I criticize is this mass stupidity driven romanticism where nobody calls him out on his Starship sized bullshit.
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm having a mental blockage on this, as you can always launch 10 rockets at the same time and get 10 times the payload. Having those 10 rockets strapped together should not change the payload of them flying independently. What am I missing here -- I'm sure I'm overlooking something.
Correct. You can (super¹)linearly increase launch mass by adding fuel. The rocket equation hits when you're trying to go farther, rather than more massive. ¹ Superlinear because tank mass scales with a lower exponent than tank volume.
> tank mass scales with a lower exponent than tank volume
I'm confused here. How are they not both cubic?
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#178It's quite inspiring to see a real goal and drive towards it. Purpose is so hard to come by now because we all don't know what we want. When we do know, we're constantly unsure about it. Such a clear goal makes it easy to have greater purpose that you don't second guess. This isn't a scheme to get rich, a zero sum political movement, or a narcissistic artistic endeavor. It's pretty unique there. There's that whole da…
> It's quite inspiring to see a real goal and drive towards it. I'm throughly uninspired... As a friend of mine once said: "progress when you're going the wrong direction, is turning around". The idea that we'll settle Mars while the Earth burns in borderline sinister. It reminds me of the elite outpost from Kingsman (the movie). We have a planet that is in dire need of this kind of motivated action, and yet Elon wou…
Instead of being fatalistic and bemoaning the problem, you'll find yourself in a better mental space if you just apply yourself to solving it. Yes, you will only start with small steps, and yes, that will be a great risk, but in the end it the only chance we have of making things work.
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm having a mental blockage on this, as you can always launch 10 rockets at the same time and get 10 times the payload. Having those 10 rockets strapped together should not change the payload of them flying independently. What am I missing here -- I'm sure I'm overlooking something.
If you strap 10 rockets together, you don't need to keep all 10 copies of some components. You don't need 10 computers, or ten emergency abort systems, or ten communications systems, etc. One large tank will have less mass/volume than 10 small ones, etc.
Interestingly there are couple rockets that are close to "strapping couple rockets together" for various reasons:
The R7 rocket
- mostly to avoid engine ignition in flight & due to having a lot of nozzles you need to fit on a rocket
- this was then kept for Soyuz even after an additional stage has been added that is started in flight
- Soyuz 2V uses a more efficient engine & uses only the central stage
The proton Rocket
- the central tank has the maximum diameter you can ship via rail from the factory to Baykonur
- by mounting smaller tanks around it that are shipped separately you can avoid building an overly long rocket, that could be fragile and unstable
Saturn 1/1B
- basically a stop gap using existing Jupiter and Redstone rocket tankage tooling
- strap 8 Redstone tanks around 1 Jupiter tank and you get the S-I first stage
Delta IV Heavy/Falcon Heavy
- you have a rocket that can launch by itself with smaller payload or by strapping 3 first stages together can launch a bigger payload
- better economies of scale as you can doe more with a single rocket design instead of maintaining 2 separate one (big and small)
- in Falcon Heavy case you can also save all the first stages from more demanding trajectories where you would otherwise have to expend the regular F9 first stage
OTRAG
- make dirt cheap and as simple as possible standardized "rocket tubes"
- strap a lot of them together
- fire and jettison in the right order to achieve orbit (check your staging! ;-) )
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Siberia you can have: breathable air, drinkable water, edible food, safe radiation levels.
Siberia is not survivable without technology. Mars requires more technology, but that's a matter of magnitude, not impossibility.
This 100%.
But you don't need to go to Siberia for Earth to be extremely difficult to survive in. Wherever you are, if you lack technology your chance of surviving is very low. Without clothing, housing, fire, tools it's very, very hard to survive anywhere on Earth.
The only reason life is so safe and pleasant right now on this planet is because we changed our environment to make it so.
If we were to survive on Mars, we would have to do the same. The advantage with Mars is that we wouldn't have to start from scratch.