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SpaceX organizes inaugural conference to plan landings on Mars
No one can deny that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has thought a lot about how to transport humans safely to Mars with his Big Falcon Rocket. But when it comes to Musk's highly ambitious plans to settle Mars in the coming decades, some critics say Musk hasn't paid enough attention to what people will do once they get there.
However, SpaceX may be getting more serious about preparing for human landings on Mars, both in terms of how to keep people alive as well as to provide them with something meaningful to do. According to private invitations seen by Ars, the company will host a "Mars Workshop" on Tuesday and Wednesday this week at the University of Colorado Boulder. Although the company would not comment directly, a SpaceX official confirmed the event and said the company regularly meets with a variety of experts concerning its missions to Mars.
This appears to be the first meeting of such magnitude, however, with nearly 60 key scientists and engineers from industry, academia, and government attending the workshop, including a handful of leaders from NASA's Mars exploration program. The invitation for the inaugural Mars meeting encourages participants to contribute to "active discussions regarding what will be needed to make such missions happen." Attendees are being asked to not publicize the workshop or their attendance.
The meeting is expected to include an overview of the spaceflight capabilities that SpaceX is developing with the Big Falcon rocket and spaceship, which Musk has previously outlined at length during international aerospace meetings in 2016 and 2017. Discussion topics will focus on how best to support hundreds of humans living on Mars, such as accessing natural resources there that will lead to a sustainable outpost.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:32AM
There's a case to send only women on the initial manned science missions to Mars. Women typically weigh less and require less calories, meaning less mass on the spaceship.
For a colonization effort, you could continue to send mostly women, with cold storage semen for insemination. Or you could just use artificial wombs and related technologies, which I imagine will be available by the time any serious colonization effort could be mounted. Best case scenario, you don't even need to send frozen sperm/eggs, just transmit digitized genomes.
Bad personalities can be screened out to an extent when applicants are chosen. Since we won't be sending millions of people there anytime soon, and they can just reproduce when they get there, you can afford to be choosy. To help avoid one crazy killing everybody, you could build multiple separate habitats/buildings and other redundancies. For example, make it so that if one room gets punctured, others seal off automatically.
Of course, all long-term manned science or colonization efforts ought to be leaning heavily on robots.
Every technology needed for good VR (headsets, panels, GPUs, storage) will greatly advance during this time frame. Even the most optimistic mission date, SpaceX's 2024-2026 missions, gives a massive 6-8 years of improvement (Oculus was founded in 2012, Rift consumer version released in 2016). NASA wants a manned Mars mission by around 2035 but the details have not been worked out and it could be delayed until the 2040s if SpaceX doesn't propose "use our BFR". I wouldn't expect any serious colonization before 2050. That's over 30 years, enough time to switch to 3D CPU/GPUs, have neuromorphic chips powering AI NPCs, and maybe a post-post-NAND memory or holographic storage, good for carrying a decent copy of the Internet to Mars (and also providing more detail for the VR).
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