Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars • Hacker News Board

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#341

Post by anthonypasq » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

nixpulvis wrote: post #167

anthonypasq wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sigh... there are plenty of reasons humanity should be multi-planetary other than escaping climate change.

Feel free to elaborate. I suspect any reasons you'll come up with are all still less urgent than the needs of our Earth. I've heard the argument about learning to control the climate through taraforming (or whatever you want to call it), but I'm completely unconvinced that is an efficient method. I'd be willing to be convinced otherwise, but I'm very skeptical.

There are multiple catastrophic events that could end civilized human life on Earth that we have 0 control over.

Asteroids, supervolcanoes etc.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#342

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

cstross wrote: post #335

carapace wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's colony design is flawed (and needs updating): in particular they had huge glassed-in window areas to admit sunlight (focussed via reflectors) for agriculture: he didn't account for differential heating-induced expansion/shrinkage. On the other hand, he didn't have modern CAD back in the early 1970s. So in principle we can come up with something better. The biggest problem is exposure to cosmic radiation --…

[deleted]

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#343

Post by moonmac » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

Elon needs to build himself a loony bin with thick padded walls. The children of kids not born yet will have on heck of a tab to pay back with all his constant insanity!

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#344

Post by carapace » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 11:42 PM UTC

cstross wrote: post #335

carapace wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's colony design is flawed (and needs updating): in particular they had huge glassed-in window areas to admit sunlight (focussed via reflectors) for agriculture: he didn't account for differential heating-induced expansion/shrinkage. On the other hand, he didn't have modern CAD back in the early 1970s. So in principle we can come up with something better. The biggest problem is exposure to cosmic radiation --…

Oh hey Charlie Stross! I'm a bit of a fan.

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I have a vague idea that a kind of spittle bug foam design made from bubbles of various diameters nested to provide redundancy might work well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spittle_bug#Spittlebug_nymphs

It's could be simple, flexible, easy to construct or modify, and resilient to impacts. I'm not an engineer or scientist though.

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A tangent, if I may...

I think we need more near-term hard sci-fi set in the future that e.g. Musk's space trucks are about to enable, to get more people excited and involved.

I've been trawling through Netflix and cable recently looking for inspiring, even-slightly-realistic sci-fi and it's a barren desert out there. There are a handful of shows that aren't bad, and I've heard good things about "Black Mirror". One the other hand, I watched a clip of "Star Trek: Discovery" the other day and had a minor apoplexy. It's more like a cartoon than the actual cartoon.

In contrast, I have a "100 Sci-Fi Movies" DVD set that my sister got me for Christmas one year, and a lot of the older black & white sci-fi movies are practically documentaries for space exploration and colonization. Sure there are silly aliens and such, but the technology and settings are realistic (at least compared to e.g. Star Trek or Star Wars.)

I think some concrete visions of what it might actually be like to attempt to build and live on a moonbase or Mars colony would inspire people to want to really do it.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#345

Post by carapace » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 11:45 PM UTC

cstross wrote: post #334

carapace wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fro…

This is why I like to draw a distinction between space exploration and space colonization . The former is definitely within the realm of possibility, using existing technology (never mind the Superheavy/Starship system). But Musk, with his talk of a self-sufficient city, is clearly targeting the latter, and there are a whole lot of details we haven't worked out.

It's one of those things, robots are much less romantic than astronauts, but they make so much more sense it's not even a contest.

I wonder how starry-eyed Elon Musk really is in re: Mars colonization? I know for myself that it was hard to admit robots make more sense (at least at first).

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#346

Post by allannienhuis » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

bergoid wrote: post #199

allannienhuis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of people who live indoors almost 100% of the time in the winter in northern climates. A lot of the larger northern cities have underground walkways between buildings with subway access etc. No one wants to even walk across the street when it's 40 below. :) I expect that designs for 'permanently underground/inside' cities would need to include some high-ceiling park-like areas with some bright UV ligh…

> I expect that designs for 'permanently underground/inside' cities would need to include some high-ceiling park-like areas with some bright UV lights, and other considerations, but that sort of thing seems pretty doable. Definitely doable. But then there's no longer any special appeal to living on Mars, as opposed to: living in rotating space habitats among the asteroids. If we reformulate Musk's goal as being: "Cre…

I like the idea - why waste all that energy going up and down, and missing out on swimming in zero g? :)

But rotating space habitats might not be as good at replacing gravity as some think. Even with the really-huge 'O'Niell cylinder' scale (8 kilometers diameter), coriolis effects would be noticeable. I suspect a number of industrial processes would be affected by it.

I expect some of the major industrial processes will still need/want to be done on a big pile of rock or sand, rather than in a more fragile object that inherently wants to explode and fling apart all the time :).

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#347

Post by labawi » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

SEJeff wrote: post #93

jcims wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payload_fraction Launch vehicles tend to scale payload capacity at a greater rate than dry mass. So a small launch vehicle like RocketLab's Electron might have a wet mass of 12,000kg at launch and an LEO payload capacity of 225kg (225/12000 ~ 1.8% payload), the SpaceX Falcon9 has a wet mass of 550,000kg and an LEO payload capacity of 22,800kg (22800/550000 ~ 4.1% payload). This just tend…

A Falcon 9 has a LEO payload capacity of 22,800kg in expendable mode, something SpaceX does not like to do. The largest payload mass they've carried to LEO was Starlink-2 at approximately 15,600kg (60 satellites at 227 kg each).

Electron is not reusable, so expandable mode is a fairer comparison.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#348

Post by FeepingCreature » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 12:21 PM UTC

jblwps wrote: post #177

FeepingCreature wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Tank dry mass scales (approximately) with surface area.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#349

Post by SEJeff » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

labawi wrote: post #347

SEJeff wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Falcon 9 has a LEO payload capacity of 22,800kg in expendable mode, something SpaceX does not like to do. The largest payload mass they've carried to LEO was Starlink-2 at approximately 15,600kg (60 satellites at 227 kg each).

Electron is not reusable, so expandable mode is a fairer comparison.

Maybe, but SpaceX strongly dislikes doing expendable mode, if at all.

Re: Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

#350

Post by Melting_Harps » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

jcims wrote: post #75

Melting_Harps wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect we have a few groups. I think that's pretty much accurate, and what I saw when I was at the Job Faire in Browning last month, most were surprised by how extensive my experience was before I applied to get there: I worked for one of Kimbal's companies, I did a short stint at the Mars Desert Research Station, and got to know the Director and was asked to come back under her on a crewed mission etc... Most w…

There is some segment of the population that would pity your perspective as the disillusionment of an abused spouse. I don't. I get it.

> There is some segment of the population that would pity your perspective as the disillusionment of an abused spouse. I don't. I get it.

Thanks, I often wonder if this is healthy practice myself as it can be rather personally-abusive to be so mission-centric, but then I see the consequences of the alternative: consider how many people in the US alone consume psychotropic drugs just to cope with depression despite having access to so much of everything but being so inherently listless and distracted.

I won't bemoan about the pitfalls about the Human Condition, but I will say that despite the hardships and loss I still see this as a worthwhile endeavor and wish to be part of it all, especially when you understand the implications it may have for the Species if we get this right.

Which right now as we're seeing the blow-back of something significant (albeit minor in the grand scheme of outbreaks) like Coronavirus is really alarming.