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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 Immerman on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:41PM (4 children)
Why would you expect not much internet access? Sending data to Mars is a LOT cheaper than sending anything else. Obviously they wouldn't be browsing on the original servers on Earth - that 6-to-44 minute round-trip lag time would get obnoxious fast. However, local caches of popular sites would be relatively easy to maintain, and who cares if they're hours out of date? Of course personalized and interactive sites like Facebook, SoylentNews, etc. would be more problematic since they can't be effectively cached as-is, those sorts of sites would likely need to operate local servers on Mars.
We'd need to actually establish high-bandwidth data-links to Mars, along with at least one L4/L5 relay station for the times when the sun is between the planets, but we have the basic technology, and several terabytes of caching would be energy-cheap, and adequate for an outpost.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:26PM (2 children)
Sending data is, indeed, cheaper. But the lag is bad enough to make the web impossible. Even the other parts of the net would have problems, but just imagine using this web page with 8 minutes (minimum) between each click or keystroke and the response.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 10 2018, @03:49AM (1 child)
Read my comment again. More carefully this time.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 10 2018, @05:39PM
OK. Point. Now read my GGGP comment. Your cache is hosted on the local nodes I was talking about.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 10 2018, @01:56PM
Ha ha ha ha!
I beg to diff.
AT&T says otherwise. They will charge by the killogram multiplied by the mile. Data rate will be strictly limited to some arbitrary killograms per second.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.