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CNet:
The first aren't even built yet, but [Elon Musk] already has big plans for his company's spacecraft, which includes turning humans into an interplanetary species with a presence on Mars. He crunched some of the numbers he has in mind on Twitter on Thursday.
Musk doesn't just want to launch a few intrepid souls to Mars, he wants to send a whole new nation. He tossed out a goal of building 100 Starships per year to send about 100,000 people from Earth to Mars every time the planets' orbits line up favorably.
A Twitter user ran the figures and checked if Musk planned to land a million humans on Mars by 2050. "Yes," . The SpaceX CEO has suggested this sort of . This new round of tweets give us some more insight into how it could be done, though "ambitious" doesn't do that timeline justice. Miraculous might be a more fitting description.
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fans, rejoice. there will be plenty of jobs on Mars. When asked how people would be selected for the Red Planet move, , "Needs to be such that anyone can go if they want, with loans available for those who don't have money." So perhaps you could pay off your SpaceX loans with a sweet terraforming gig.
Terraforming the planet should be easy if Quaid can get past Cohagen and start the reactor.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 24 2020, @05:00PM
- Pressure vessels
If you're talking "balloon" pressure vessels, then yes - they can indeed be very thin and light, and I'm a big fan, but they're only step one. Unless you have convenient natural caves or tunnels to inflate them in, you still need a lot of heavy machinery to build radiation shelters around them. Which probably means shipping earth-movers and some sort of "cement" binding agent for rigidity, unless you want to count on air pressure alone to keep your structure from collapsing. Though hopefully some locally sourced binding agent can be developed in short order. Ice might be a wonderful one, but requires insulating it from the habitat inside. Which means you need either strong insulation that won't be crushed by the weight, or a "vacuum gap" that prevents using air pressure to help support the structure.
They also have the problem that it's likely to be a long time before you have the industrial capacity to make them on site - which means shipping them from Earth for every new structure for the indefinite future. *Excellent* for starting out - less attractive in the mid-term.
They're also liable to be considerably less light than you'd think . Unless you can sandwich them between layers of local concrete without inviting problems, they'll need to be thick enough to be extremely resistant to abrasion and punctures. It can be done, but you're talking something like the kevlar-armored inner wall of a Bigelow inflatable space station, not just a simple pressure balloon.
Definitely a great option - but if you're looking to make habitats and connecting tunnels for millions of people, having more than one option is a great idea.
It's also worth considering that there are almost certainly massive natural caves and lava tubes on Mars that would make excellent early habitat locations - and a tunnel boring machine would allow you to connect them efficiently
- Asteroid mining
I fully expect it will be mostly automated. But I find it extremely unlikely that it will be *fully* automated - you'll still want human ingenuity and dexterity on site to solve problems if nothing else. Even then it will likely mostly be telepresence operated robots doing the work, while operators remain safe in habitats, but you need low latency for that. And the asteroid belt has ping times to Earth in the range of 17 minutes to over an hour. It's commonly claimed that all the surface research we've done on Mars to date could have been done better in a single week with boots on the ground. You really think an asteroid mining company is going to want to try to do evaluation, diagnostics, and maintenance on those kind of time-scales while expensive mining equipment sits idle?
I doubt it - so I suspect we'll see (initially) limited-scale habitats attached to mining outposts, staffed by engineers, or at least technicians, and potentially researchers as well, working out ways to utilize all the waste materials (probably mostly gravel and huge quantities of iron) to build and expand mining infrastructure habitats - after all, the amount of resources are nigh-unlimited, and your profits depend on how quickly you can ship valuable ones back to Earth (or develop technologies and equipment to sell to others)
-Resources
I already addressed those - water and air is available on Mars in nigh-unlimited quantities, requiring only (presumably) some level of filtering, and plants to convert the CO2 to breathable air. And biotechnology can supply most of the rest. Algae being particularly good since it can grow so insanely fast - the biomass can double in 3 to 8 hours under ideal circumstances. That is in fact one of the things that makes Mars so much more appealing than almost anywhere else in the solar system - mild temperatures, unlimited air and water, and a day almost exactly the same length as Earth's.
We'd still need a source of trace minerals, but those can largely be recycled - the cellulose you'd extract as a raw material is made entirely from water and CO2, and are very useful: nanocellulose = gas impermeable "transparent aluminum", and fibrous algaes area potentially a candidate for making stronger-than-steel "superwood". Meanwhile clothing, bandages, etc - all easily made from plants long before we harnessed metals, and often to better effect - we largely use plastics because they're so cheap, not because they're actually better. Meanwhile all that biomass is also an extremely rich source of organic chemistry precursors. You want oil? Grow the right algae - some of them are almost half lipids by mass. Ditto for many other chemical feedstocks.
And of course stainless steel will be available in large quantities early on - after all, if a Starship is cheaper to build than a Falcon 9, it's unlikely to make sense to send a Starship back to Earth unless it's carrying passengers - all the supply rockets become so much raw material, conveniently pre-assembled into large pressure vessels, but easily reprocessed into pretty much anything else. And of course iron is everywhere on Mars, that's why it's red. And we know how to electro-refine oxides into raw metal. And of course silicates are pretty much everywhere, conveniet for solar panels and other semiconductors (though advanced things like CPUs will likely be imported from Earth for a long time to come. Fortunately they last almost forever with basic care).
MRIs? Perhaps you haven't seen the "miniaturized" versions available these days. Fragility could be an issue for launch - but only because they're not designed to survive such stresses. Remove what components can't be reinforced to containers that support them effectively, and re-assemble on delivery. And actually I'm not even sure they're not designed to survive such stresses - tap a screwdriver on something like a hard drive you'll subject it to dozen's of G's - far higher than you'll see during launch (though admittedly not sustained, and without the vibrations)
We converted the United states to a technological powerhouse in only a couple centuries, using far less technology than we have now, and very little imported hardware. The shipping times were even similar to what they'll be for Mars. Mars has the raw materials, what it's lacking is a friendly ecosystem - and that can be created with locally source pressure vessels and biotechnology that's mostly been around longer than primates, coupled with modern knowledge that lets us harness it efficiently and tweak it as needed without relying on selective breeding. (though between the breeding and mutation rates in above-ground algae farms, there's probably lots of potential for that as well.)