SpaceX--Spacecraft, rockets, and Mars

[Altherion]

17 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

So Tesla, Solar City and any other profit making initiatives of his are only intended to generate money which he can pump into SpaceX.

It's a bit more clever than that. Tesla and Solar City will ideally generate revenue, yes, but they were also intended to nudge the industry in the direction Musk needs for his Martian colony to exist. In the case of solar panels, this turns out to have been redundant (China poured a hundred times more money into that than even Musk could plausibly dream of), but electric cars would not be where they are today if not for Tesla. I don't mean that the auto manufacturers couldn't do it, but they had no incentive to -- at some point California made them try via a regulation and they not only got the regulation repealed, but physically crushed every electric car that was built.

And we'll definitely need both solar panels and electric vehicles on Mars. As far as we can tell, there are no fossil fuels there and if we transport the gasoline from here, the cost is tens of thousands of dollars per gallon. Nuclear fuel has a much higher energy density, but you'd need to either transport or build a reactor and nobody wants to do the first or can do the second. Any Martian colony will be solar powered and that means the vehicles must run on electricity.

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, Leap said:

Seems to me that SpaceX will merely be initiating and facilitating the colonisation effort rather than attempting to arbitrate it. The initial pioneers will probably act under some sort of UN mandate for the sake of convenience, but as soon as it's clear the creation of a permanent base is happening, I can only imagine that local sovereignty will take effect in some fashion or another. That will probably be really hard to organise until things begin to settle down though, which may take a while.

Maybe. My suspicion is that early on it'll act like the laws around Antarctica outposts do - as a multigovernmental shared organization overseen by something like the UN. 

It's going to be a long time before it matters who gets to 'own' it.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Yeah, who "owns" a colony will not matter until the colony is self sustaining such that it needs no support from home to maintain and support its population.  Once that is the case I suspect the Colony will own itself.

[A True Kaniggit]

I wonder what the citizenship rules would be for people born on mars. Would Earth governments give children born to its colonists citizenship, even though said child might live its whole life without ever stepping foot in Earth?

And we'll know when the colony thinks it doesn't need Earth anymore, when they start shooting our tea out the airlocks.

 

[Kalbear]

10 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

I wonder what the citizenship rules would be for people born on mars. Would Earth governments give children born to its colonists citizenship, even though said child might live its whole life without ever stepping foot in Earth?

Typically when a child is born in a non-national place (such as on an intercontinental flight, or in Antarctica) they are subject to the citizenship rights and rules of the parent's citizenship. I would imagine the same rules would apply. 

 

[SpaceChampion]

He said it would take $10B to design and build and test the vehicles.   SpaceX already has a $10B backlog of launches on its manifest and over the next ten year it'll probably double that, while vastly lowering the per pound cost to space.

Actually sending ships to Mars will just be the cost of fuel, which for that size rocket is about $3 million per flight.  He doesn't need to make back his development costs, but he will over the lifetime use of the vehicles, whic is particularly important if just to be able to afford to build additional ships so he can increase the number of passengers.

The additional costs of living and working on Mars would be paid by whoever goes.  Presumably it'll be private companies designing, building and shipping those equipments and tools to Mars on his ships.  If it takes an additional $100B for those things then they're just asking to be undercut in price.  I don't think solar power systems and Tesla vehicles on Mars, or access to the satellite internet he'll build, will cost billions.

Companies like Bigelow Aerospace can provide a habitat & lab space equivalent to the ISS in one inflatable vessel, and it'll fit easily inside the spaceship.  Bigelow has the tech already, has just been waiting years for a ride to space.  As a few months ago an inflatable was attached to the ISS to add space to it.  These are vastly cheaper than  NASA's modules.

[Free Northman Reborn]

It is a rather sad state of affairs that a guy who created a social networking system that allows you to share pics of your cat, and to mindlessly regurgitate fortune cookie sayings, can be worth $50bn - enough to pretty much fund a substantial portion of the entire Mars project. This while the man who is building rockets that can fly to space and survive a re-entry burn into the atmosphere and then land propulsively back on earth, is only worth $11bn.

One man is allowing us to narcissistically obsess about our meaningless social lives online, and he is growing vastly richer by the day. The other is on a quest to make us a multi-planetary species, to save the light of consciousness from being snuffed out in the Universe - and he has to beg for people to buy into his vision.

We may well only have a century long window to achieve this, before something potentially happens to remove our technological or economic ability to ever make this leap off our home world. And instead, our resources are being channelled ever more towards a quest for entertainment and social gratification.

It is rather pathetic, if one thinks about it. What Musk is doing is so much more impressive and vastly more important than developing a new, more stylish looking IPhone, or coming up with new ways of improving your  self absorbed Facebook experience.

 

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

5 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

It is a rather sad state of affairs that a guy who created a social networking system that allows you to share pics of your cat, and to mindlessly regurgitate fortune cookie sayings, can be worth $50bn - enough to pretty much fund a substantial portion of the entire Mars project. This while the man who is building rockets that can fly to space and survive a re-entry burn into the atmosphere and then land propulsively back on earth, is only worth $11bn.

One man is allowing us to narcissistically obsess about our meaningless social lives online, and he is growing vastly richer by the day. The other is on a quest to make us a multi-planetary species, to save the light of consciousness from being snuffed out in the Universe - and he has to beg for people to buy into his vision.

We may well only have a century long window to achieve this, before something potentially happens to remove our technological or economic ability to ever make this leap off our home world. And instead, our resources are being channelled ever more towards a quest for entertainment and social gratification.

It is rather pathetic, if one thinks about it. What Musk is doing is so much more impressive and vastly more important than developing a new, more stylish looking IPhone, or coming up with new ways of improving your  self absorbed Facebook experience.

 

That's true. But if we are really serious about space exploration then it makes far more sense for national governments to handle it rather than relying on private entrepreneurs. Because Elon Musk is while not at the absolute top still one of the wealthiest individuals in the world, and even he does evidently not have the resources to handle these sorts of projects on his own. 

Meanwhile if for example the USA was willing to go back to spending about as much money on NASA as it was doing during the space race era (so about 1% of GDP) that organization could get an annual budget of  $180bn. Meaning that it could finance a new project the size of Musk's every single year, and still have four times as much money as their entire current budget left for financing other posts. China and the EU have comparable economic resources to the USA, and so should be able to maintain their own similarly sized space programs if they wanted to. 

1% of GDP is not an insurmountably high cost either. It would require some tax raises and/or cuts in government spending across the board, but not at unbearable levels (USA spends about 4% of its GDP on the military right now and reached 7-8% during the Reagan years for example).

So if we are really considering this a question of paramount importance to the survival of humanity then the costs for national governments to solve it aren't high at all. 

Due to this I think it is not entirely fair to put the blame on people like Zuckerberg, when the priorities and political views of the general populace really are the main obstacles. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

17 minutes ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

That's true. But if we are really serious about space exploration then it makes far more sense for national governments to handle it rather than relying on private entrepreneurs. Because Elon Musk is while not at the absolute top still one of the wealthiest individuals in the world, and even he does evidently not have the resources to handle these sorts of projects on his own.

Meanwhile if for example the USA was willing to go back to spending about as much money on NASA as it was doing during the space race era (so about 1% of GDP) that organization could get an annual budget of  $180bn. Meaning that it could finance a new project the size of Musk's every single year, and still have four times as much money as their entire current budget left for financing other posts. China and the EU have comparable economic resources to the USA, and so should be able to maintain their own similarly sized space programs if they wanted to.

1% of GDP is not an insurmountably high cost either. It would require some tax raises and/or cuts in government spending across the board, but not at unbearable levels (USA spends about 3.5% of its GDP at the military right now and was at 7-8% during the Reagan years for example).

So if we are really considering this a question of paramount importance to the survival of humanity, then the costs for national governments to solve it aren't high at all.

Due to this I think it is not entirely fair to put the blame on people like Zuckerberg, when the priorities and political views of the general populace really are the main obstacles.

KDNW,

Exploration and colonization didn't really get started until private interests were doing it.  As such I see Musk's efforts as, hopefully, the starting point for true Human exploration of outer space.

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

3 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

KDNW,

Exploration and colonization didn't really get started until private interests were doing it.  As such I see Musk's efforts as, hopefully, the starting point for true Human exploration of outer space.

Do you mean historically? 

There is a pretty big difference between what we are colonizing now versus what the West was colonizing then though. The Americas, Asia, Africa and so on where very bountiful regions either in terms of farmland for settlers (Americas) or markets for trade (Asia and Africa, though very different kinds of goods in each). Meaning that there were lots of things that private interests could make money out of, and thus were willing to invest the necessary capital in. 

Space on the other hand is completely uninhabited and desolate. At least the parts we could realistically go to in the near future. Hence why the entrepreneurs that are active in the space sector seem to be so more out of altruism and personal interests than for profit. Which is absolutely fine of course, but we shouldn't expect that the results they can produce ought to be anywhere near what could be achieved if governments actually got serious about having space programs again. Because the amounts of resources that would be available then would just be on a completely different level than what a handful of billionaire intellectuals can provide even if they are willing to spend their entire fortunes on it. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

KDNW,

If people can find a way to make money in space, space exploration will ramp up.  Depending on government largesse is always dangerous.

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

33 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

KDNW,

If people can find a way to make money in space, space exploration will ramp up.  Depending on government largesse is always dangerous.

Of course, but money is hardly the reason for why Elon Musk is doing what he is doing. What is the monetary gain from a Mars expedition that would pay back a hundred billion dollar investment?

If you are talking about far into the future where technological advancement has made it profitable to mine minerals out in the solar system and transport them back to Earth for consumption or something, then it's a different question. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Musk is doing this because he thinks it is imporant and he wants to.  That said Musk is helping to create infrastructure that could make Space profitable.  If Space becomes profitable it will truely become a new frontier.

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Musk is doing this because he thinks it is imporant and he wants to.  That said Musk is helping to create infrastructure that could make Space profitable.  If Space becomes profitable it will truely become a new frontier.

Kinda. Musk believes that space has to be profitable in order for it to drive the kind of levels that he needs to make the human race multiplanetary. If it is a net major drain on the economy to ship a person off of earth, it simply won't happen. He has a lot of ideas on how to do that, mind you - space tourism, mineral use, jobs on outposts, social media, research and development - but it's a cornerstone of the plan that it is worthwhile doing it from an actual profit perspective. 

He doesn't care about his own profit mind you, and his biggest concern is that if he dies, whoever takes over may not care as much about the end goal of being multiplanetary and will instead seek profit as the major concern. But being able to profit from it is an important step in making it actually happen. Just like it was with SpaceX in general, and just like it was with Tesla. 

[Free Northman Reborn]

42 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Kinda. Musk believes that space has to be profitable in order for it to drive the kind of levels that he needs to make the human race multiplanetary. If it is a net major drain on the economy to ship a person off of earth, it simply won't happen. He has a lot of ideas on how to do that, mind you - space tourism, mineral use, jobs on outposts, social media, research and development - but it's a cornerstone of the plan that it is worthwhile doing it from an actual profit perspective. 

He doesn't care about his own profit mind you, and his biggest concern is that if he dies, whoever takes over may not care as much about the end goal of being multiplanetary and will instead seek profit as the major concern. But being able to profit from it is an important step in making it actually happen. Just like it was with SpaceX in general, and just like it was with Tesla. 

He simply knows that if you can't profit from it, people won't do it. And in the modern age of entitlement, governments are increasingly pressured to spend taxes on social upliftment, rather than on grandiose long term projects like the colonization of Mars. So no one except billionaires like Musk can step into the gap to push this agenda forward.

[felice]

On 29/09/2016 at 8:13 AM, Altherion said:

Any Martian colony will be solar powered and that means the vehicles must run on electricity.

How efficient is solar power that much further away from the sun?

[Altherion]

34 minutes ago, felice said:

How efficient is solar power that much further away from the sun?

There are two competing effects here: on the one hand, Mars is further from the sun, but on the other, there is practically no atmosphere there. The first effect wins out, but not by all that much. I've heard it described as similar to Earth under light clouds that completely cover the sky. The big problem with solar panels on Mars is that you have to put them somewhere without dust storms -- not only does the dust block out the light, but, as we know from one of the landers, it sticks to the panels and permanently degrades performance until cleaned. There are places with no dust storms, but this creates yet another priority for the colony location site (in addition to, say, somewhere near a water source).

[Free Northman Reborn]

37 minutes ago, Altherion said:

There are two competing effects here: on the one hand, Mars is further from the sun, but on the other, there is practically no atmosphere there. The first effect wins out, but not by all that much. I've heard it described as similar to Earth under light clouds that completely cover the sky. The big problem with solar panels on Mars is that you have to put them somewhere without dust storms -- not only does the dust block out the light, but, as we know from one of the landers, it sticks to the panels and permanently degrades performance until cleaned. There are places with no dust storms, but this creates yet another priority for the colony location site (in addition to, say, somewhere near a water source).

That is a temporary problem, though. Once humans land, they can clean the panels regularly.

[Which Tyler]

Although avoiding dust-storms would be preferable anyway TBH

[Kalbear]

Also, unlike the movie dust storms on mars aren't particularly forceful; there's simply not enough atmosphere to make them hit hard. Between that and that you can put out a LOT of solar panels, electricity really shouldn't be that much of an issue. 

Furthermore, there will be ways to generate fuel that is combustible - there has to be, in order to refuel the rockets coming back. So things like fuel cells that run on hydrogen are another possibility.