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Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
251–260 of 351 posts
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pursuit of sustainable living and the pursuit of a multi-planetary existence are parallel endeavours, not serial ones. Perhaps the view from Mars will instil a renewed perspective on our dependence on Earth, and teach us lessons on ecological management via terraforming.
I would argue that achieving self-sustainability on Mars forces the issue, even. The problem we’ve had on Earth is that because the costs of being wasteful, polluting, etc are externalized, which makes such behavior “cheap” in the short term — on Earth, the environment is constantly handing out loans that we rarely if ever repay. That’s not an option on settlements beyond Earth’s surface. There, you’re forced to live…
“Forcing the issue” is an interesting perspective, thank you.
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
The person who is doing this is also very concerned with the state of affairs on Earth. He owns SolarCity, a solar panel company, Tesla, an electric car and battery company, and Boring Company, an attempt at creating a transportation system that mandates the use of EV. The fact that all of this technology will benefit human existence on Mars should go ahead and show you how developing technology in order to survive a…
That's a fair point, and I'm not trying to say everything Elon is doing is bad or wrong. I wish his other projects got even a fraction of the attention his space project gets.
Tesla?
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#254This is a spectacular gamble, however Musk has a track record and I think Superheavy/Starship will pay off with unpredictable dividends. But the elephant in the room that Musk appears to be ignoring is the life sciences side of things. Only 12 humans have sortied outside the Van Allen belts (which protect us from the deep space radiation environment). Nobody has spent more than 18 consecutive months in space or reduc…
What about the sci-fi ships that rotate very quickly and use the momentum as a form of false gravity - iirc, the basic physics seems legit (I recall an Einstein thought experiment along those lines). Or: use the acceleration/deceleration to create gravity. Are they impractical to build or power?
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ability to survive nuclear war. He doesn't just want to settle, he wants to settle with a self-sustaining colony. It's a contingency plan. We've almost plunged the world into nuclear holocaust a couple times before. India and Pakistan are at each other's throats, and rising ethnonationalist populism and climate change are threatening to strain these tensions further. This is a real risk.
I'd buy into Musk's Mars bullshit if he built a sealed self-contained colony in New Mexico. We have experience with two long term space habitats, Mir and the ISS. Despite all of the engineering know how that built both shit breaks on them all the time and needs to be repaired. They also need regular resupply because they're nowhere near self sufficient. They also need a Soyuz capsule docked at all times in case they…
Arthur C Clarke opined that we should be building self sufficient settlements under the ocean before moving on to space
Not really a reference, but related, http://socialsciences.cornell.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/02...
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not in that area, but I struggle to find an analogue of a large pressurized tank on Earth where mass is the dominant cost factor. You might have equally big tanks on Earth, under equal pressures, but it will be more cost-effective to just increase the material used on the shell of the tank to solve your problems. Whereas in space, every kg that can theoretically be removed from the launch vehicle is worth investi…
> So yes it seems reasonable to me that these are groundbreaking challenges. Isn't weld strength something engineers would know/understand in advance, though? How would it come as a surprise that the welds would fail under pressure? It seems strange to me that Musk could be spending so much time working on Starship, and somehow a "badly designed, badly built, and badly checked" rocket makes it to the platform and exp…
There are additional constraints not found in most welding projects. They can’t just make the material and weld thicker/heavier as that would impact the rocket performance.
So it has to be as thin and fragile as possible but no thinner. That makes it very hard to get right, and the welds have to be done to very fine tolerances on thin material, you could say it is rocket science.
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lightbulb, Automobiles, Printing press https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/87288/8-skeptical-early-...
> Automobiles Automobiles were developed over hundreds of years. What was the skepticism there? > Lightbulb Edison "invented" the first commercial bulb in 1879. The first electric lights were created in the early 1800s. > Printing press People were trying to find ways to print books for centuries. Copying them was laborious. Some random monk claiming hand-writing to be morally superior doesn't change that.
To counter,
"first lightbulb", "first automobile", "first airplane flight", "first color photograph" etc. are always arbitrary thresholds; much ink has been spilled over who, when, and where; over what exactly makes a lightbulb or whatever else. "First rocket" was probably constructed & launched around the time of gunpowder invention, i.e., in the 9th century China. That's not quite the same as reliably getting cargo & crew to the ISS.
In contrast, "first commercially successful" is about as clear-cut case of inventiveness and crossing a threshold as there can be: the product was made worth more than its costs, and thus became viable for large scale deployment. Whether by one big change or accretion of several smaller ones. Some key inventions regarded manufacturing process rather than the end product itself, and thus are easily lost on a casual observer.
Commercially viable means a fleeting dream got turned into an ever growing reality for us all. To wit, we already have had some /nuclear fusion reactors/ up and running. But we will only perceive it as a real thing when it becomes commercially viable.
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#258This is a spectacular gamble, however Musk has a track record and I think Superheavy/Starship will pay off with unpredictable dividends. But the elephant in the room that Musk appears to be ignoring is the life sciences side of things. Only 12 humans have sortied outside the Van Allen belts (which protect us from the deep space radiation environment). Nobody has spent more than 18 consecutive months in space or reduc…
Then we'll merely go to the Moon. :-) (And LEO and the Lagrange points.)
You raise a good point IMO in re: viability of space. In the limit it may turn out that humans can't live anywhere but on or near the surface of Earth. What is certain is that living in space will suck for many years, or likely decades. It will be like living in a mine, but there are more things that can kill you and you're much much further from fresh air and safe ground. And I suspect living on Mars would suck anyway just due to the ~0.4G surface gravity. At least on the Moon you can go home (in a few days rather than lots of months) or fly like a bird under your own power if your cave is big enough. ("The Menace from Earth", Heinlein; "Welcome to Moonbase", Bova)
But even if we can't live there it's still really useful and important to go: micro-gravity manufacturing; robotic asteroid mining; science...
I hope we can live in space, I want to colonize the galaxy. (The green galaxy on the cover of "The Millennial Project" book is one of the more compelling images I've personally ever seen. A photosynthesizing galaxy... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Coloni... )
But even if we can't go at all these rockets are really important!
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#259This is a spectacular gamble, however Musk has a track record and I think Superheavy/Starship will pay off with unpredictable dividends. But the elephant in the room that Musk appears to be ignoring is the life sciences side of things. Only 12 humans have sortied outside the Van Allen belts (which protect us from the deep space radiation environment). Nobody has spent more than 18 consecutive months in space or reduc…
What about the sci-fi ships that rotate very quickly and use the momentum as a form of false gravity - iirc, the basic physics seems legit (I recall an Einstein thought experiment along those lines). Or: use the acceleration/deceleration to create gravity. Are they impractical to build or power?
Are you thinking of an O'Neill colony?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
> The O'Neill cylinder (also called an O'Neill colony) is a space settlement concept proposed by American physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in his 1976 book "The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space". O'Neill proposed the colonization of space for the 21st century, using materials extracted from the Moon and later from asteroids.
> An O'Neill cylinder would consist of two counter-rotating cylinders. The cylinders would rotate in opposite directions in order to cancel out any gyroscopic effects that would otherwise make it difficult to keep them aimed toward the Sun. Each would be 5 miles (8.0 km) in diameter and 20 miles (32 km) long, connected at each end by a rod via a bearing system. They would rotate so as to provide artificial gravity via centrifugal force on their inner surfaces.
Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really helping them that they have some of the most motivated employees on Earth. Their people absolutely believe in this vision of colonizing Mars just as much as Elon Musk does. (Hell, I do too, I just don't work there.) Meanwhile I'm working at an advertising company.
> Meanwhile I'm working at an advertising company. That's a funny way to spell Google.
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