Topic: SpaceX and the prospects of Mars colonization. - page 11. (Read 31904 times)

Why ever would they stay there for 20-40 years? Are they seriously planning to make ships that would only go one way? If I were going to Mars, I'd want a round-trip ticket. I don't think anybody's talking about leaving people up there for that long. I don't remember who threw out the numbers of it taking 2-3 years to get to Mars, but that's not what Google is telling me. Here is how long it took for historic missions to reach Mars:
    Mariner 4, the first spacecraft to go to Mars (1965 flyby): 228 days
    Mariner 6 (1969 flyby): 155 days
    Mariner 7 (1969 flyby): 128 days
    Mariner 9, the first spacecraft to orbit Mars (1971): 168 days
    Viking 1, the first U.S. craft to land on Mars (1975): 304 days
    Viking 2 Orbiter/Lander (1975): 333 days
    Mars Global Surveyor (1996): 308 days
    Mars Pathfinder (1996): 212 days
    Mars Odyssey (2001): 200 days
    Mars Express Orbiter (2003): 201 days
    Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (2005): 210 days
    Mars Science Laboratory (2011): 254 days
It doesn't look like it's even going to take a year. That seems much more bearable. So, you could actually go to Mars, do some work there and come back within a few years.

Come on and think a little.

Going to Mars might take 2 or 3 years. A teenager might be older than 22 when he gets to Mars. This is because he is in training now, as a teenager, but won't lift off for as many as 5 years or more.

Once he gets to Mars, he won't simply jump out of the lander and build a house and plant a garden. He might remain in the lander as long as a year, familiarizing himself with the terrain and climate, and sending out robot vehicles to get a clearer picture of what Mars really is.

Once the semi-robotic habitats are set up, and reasonable certainty has been made that they will support human life, then the teenager(s) might finally transfer to the habitats.

Then there's the setting up of the greenhouses, and finding out what kind of food will truly grow on Mars.

And on and on. It will be surprising if the kids haven't reached 50 years by the time that they are settled into "colony" life on Mars. But if things don't go smoothly, they might be 70... or they might be dead.

And what if there is war on Earth, and they have to reproduce on Mars, so that their kids and grandkids can possibly come back... after mining Mars for supplies to refuel the lander and orbiter. Will they be ready to avoid the radiation hot spots on earth from the home planet nuclear wars?

Sounds like science fiction, right? Well, it is. That's why teenagers... so they can live a long life out there if necessary.

They tell me the small twinkling orange light in the sky called Mars is a giant heavy ball and that a man named Musk is going fly a rocket there and grow red potatoes.

We can't even get back to the moon (not sure if we ever made it there in the first place) and some of you guys think we can actually get to Mars? Doubtful.  USA has to spend 600billion + a year on its military instead. sigh

How does that explain that "Past candidates have ranged in age from 26 to 46, with the average age being 34"? If you get less stupid the older you get, then, by your logic, the age of astronauts should be much younger. It's interesting that she's learning Chinese, French and Spanish. Seems like the Russians are getting left out on future space travel. I had no idea that Spanish speakers are playing a bit role in space. I remember when Cirque du Soleil's founder, Guy Laliberte, went to space, he had to study Russian beforehand. It seems pretty ambitious to say you're going to Mars in 2033, when you don't even have the rockets to do it yet: "NASA is currently in the early stages of planning its first manned mission to Mars, with experts developing new rockets capable of getting a spacecraft there - and back to Earth again." I guess time will tell.

That's why they are training teenagers for Mars... and also, because the kids look at the glory, not having had experience of life enough to understand the stupidity.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/991538/space-news-mars-manned-mission-alyssa-carson-nasa-astronaut

What do you mean by that? Everything this is moving? You mean that Mars is getting farther away? Isn't that always changing? Sometimes it's actually getting closer. It's also very possible that we could make ships that travel faster, couldn't we? That would also reduce travel time. 2-3 years to get to Mars does sound like a whole lot of time though. That's certainly no trip the corner store!

The whole Mars thing is stupid. If we wanted to go, we could have done it back in the 1960s. See: To the stars by atom bomb: The incredible tale of the top secret Orion Project - https://newatlas.com/orion-project-atom-bomb-spaceship/49454/. We have had the ability for decades.

Probably so. But in space, everything is moving, so "further" means "longer." For example, the relatively huge ship displayed in "The Martian" is not unrealistic for a 2-3 year voyage for a half dozen people.

Haha, good question. This reminded me of a Buzzfeed article I saw a while back. They are saying that air travel was actually better in the 1960s: https://www.buzzfeed.com/gabrielsanchez/air-travel-was-way-better-in-the-1960s. It did seem more spacious and fancy. I'm assuming it was much more expensive back then to fly relative to inflation than it is now. For the most part air travel doesn't seem to have changed that much, but I guess the planes have gotten bigger and they don't need to stop to fuel up like they used to usually. That last point is pretty significant in comparison to space travel. If planes can fly further now than they could 50 years ago, then maybe in 50 more years the spaceships will be able to fly further.

Well, how different is air travel 1968 - 2018?

Cool. Thanks for sharing. It's nice to talk to somebody who seems to know so much. It's really interesting that it requires less rocket energy to get to Mars than to the moon. Does this mean that we could have landed on Mars already instead of the moon? It would kinda be funny if we had already been on another planet before we were on our moon. It would be interesting if we could just skip ahead 50 years and see if there will actually be any breakthroughs in space travel in the near future.

Hell no.

Because they have an 18th century concept of colonization.

The 21st century of space colonization will be massive numbers of robots and production facilities FIRST. This will happen with simultaneous creation of an economy on Mars.

After suitable industry and human habitats are built, after chemical and industrial stocks are in place, after some forms of food production have been proven for a decade or two, then and only then some people go.

The moon has some very interesting aspects but it is depleted in certain key elements of the periodic table such as H, C, N. That being the case means the Moon cannot support life by itself, and also means many things cannot be natively manufactured there. (plastics, carbon steel, ...)

Mars does have a full set of elements. It is farther away, but the rocket energy required for Mars is a bit less than the Moon.

This all sounds pretty fascinating. I had never heard about He3 specifically. Am I wrong in assuming that it should be much easier to travel to an land on the moon than on Mars? I think it's fine that some people dream of going to Mars, but wouldn't it be a good idea to trying landing on the moon again first. It seems ridiculous that people are actively working on visiting another planet, when we haven't even been able to visit the moon more than once.

Do we actually have a complete picture of all the resources available on Mars? It seems like there is often talk of them possible discovering water there. This leads me to believe that there very well may be resources there that we don't know about yet. Maybe it could becomes more plausible, when we have more info about what's up there.

I'm okay with that wording. By the way, this has been gone through pretty exhaustively with respect to He3 on the surface of the Moon. There, it's well known that it's worth shipping it back to Earth. It's a fusion fuel which pretty much does not exist here. And because the Moon has no atmosphere and a low gravity, means of practical return-tank-to-earth exist.

Because of the heat/cold cycles of Lunar day, and the complete vacuum, there may well come to be various scientific experiments on the Moon for which it is desirable to return samples to earth.

There could also be scientific experiments on Mars for which sample return to Earth was plausible. Not that it would be economically efficient, just that some guys here wanted those samples at any cost.

But in terms of traditional materials production, metals, plastics, for example, there is nothing so rare or valuable that it could be returned to Earth for profit. I can envision some electronics being left out in the open on Mars, and then a solar storm occurring, and it being desirable to return the circuitry to Earth for detailed examination (learn how to make it better, right?)

Easy solution. make the hashtag: '#MarsOverWars' viral

I guess it's just a question of semantics. You said, "There are no materials which are cheap enough on Mars and expensive enough on Earth to every make freight plausible." Typically, when you said something is cheap or expensive somewhere, you are referring to the price it costs to purchase it. When you say something is cheap on Mars it seems strange to me. Everything is free on Mars, since as far as we know, there's nobody up there claiming they own it already. The thing that is not free, would be to extract these materials. We would have to spend a lot of currency here on Earth to purchase needed materials and motivate people to do the necessary work. Maybe it would be better to say, "There are no materials which would be cheap enough to extract on Mars and valuable enough on Earth to every make freight plausible."

Those are confused ideas and trains of thought.

Every robot probe sent to Mars (or anywhere) is a complex exercise in economics.  

An assumption was made earlier by someone that a functioning economy on Mars that would require goods shipped back to Each. That is a false premise. Jus think about it. Consider a small machine that made a wheel from local materials. Future missions could buy wheels from that operation. Send two rovers instead of one because the payload is lighter since you don't need to take wheels.

That's a local economy on a small scale. And on the other side, a decision to build and send totally self contained rovers maximizes income and work for Earth bound aerospace companies. That's nothing BUT a decision based on economics.

Having said that, it's worth noting that colonization of Mars does not start when people are sent there. It starts with simple attempts to isolate raw materials with robotic operations, materials of which the extraction of is essential to human life.  In the chemical industry these would be called "pilot plants." The likes of NASA and Musk is not competent to send and operate these types of facilities.