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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.
...
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: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday January 18 2020, @06:22PM (19 children)
If a Starship ends up costing less than Falcon 9 to make, as has been hinted, that could really help.
The number is too ambitious IMO. Living on Mars is a raw deal compared to Earth. Even if you get a Mars One sized group of applicants capable of paying a $1,000,000 ticket and home price, many would and should chicken out. 10,000 sounds more realistic for 2050. That's much larger than McMurdo Station.
Musk seems to be indicating a 1 month travel time to Mars. Other people have come up with estimates this low before, but that's the first time I've heard it from SpaceX/Musk. Turns out that you can get a lot of delta-V by refueling in orbit. 3-6 month travel time would be for losers.
Jobs? We'll have to see about that. I think participants would be paying most of their expenses up front. A lot of the work could end up being done by robots, with a gig economy forming (but nobody starving, hopefully).
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @07:52PM (8 children)
Try to get a robot to build a basic home on Earth. As close as we've come is a literally on-rails brick-layer that does half ass job. And something like this would be a million times easier on Earth than Mars.
I expect very near 100% of the work on Mars will be done by humans. Doesn't hurt that an average man will also be able to casually handle objects and hardware weighing hundreds of pounds! The first habs? What's spacious, pressurized, provides life support, is resistant to radiation and other outside forces? Flip a Starship on its side and give mobile home a whole new meaning. Mars is going to be an immense amount of work.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 18 2020, @08:11PM (7 children)
Maybe you don't use robots because it's necessarily easy, but because you want as much work finished as possible prior to the first people arriving.
Expect some progress on 3D printing structures in the interim between now and anything of note being done on Mars:
https://www.businessinsider.com/3d-homes-that-take-24-hours-and-less-than-4000-to-print-2018-9 [businessinsider.com]
Unrelated to SpaceX plans, there has been development of a concept Mars structure that would be built robotically before any crew arrives:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/a-new-home-on-mars-nasa-langley-s-icy-concept-for-living-on-the-red-planet [nasa.gov]
If lots of human labor is needed, that's just fine. I just don't believe that Settler #150,000's labor would be crucial whatsoever. At some point, most of the colony could run out of things to do (scientists would have no shortage of work since they have an entire planet to study).
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday January 18 2020, @08:48PM (6 children)
3D printing has potential, though it is likely to have issues with tensile strength, which is a major problem when trying to contain an atmosphere.
Also - consider that The Boring Company is a spin-off of SpaceX - and I doubt underground highways are his primary interest. If a single semi-autonomous boring machine can dig and line hundreds of feet of tunnel per day, you're most of the way to building enormous amounts of habitat quickly and cheaply. Add an airtight liner and you've got a nearly indestructible habitat shell completely shielded from radiation and meteor impacts. Multiple semi-parallel tunnels with doors between them would allow for roads and houses. Or perhaps a long spiral tunnel for houses, intersecting radial "spokes" for roads? Such a structure could potentially grow to enormous total size quite easily, with sectors being sealed off and pressurized as needed, and additional spirals being dug beneath each other offset as horizontal sprawl becomes an issue.
Heck, in a pinch pressurized "tents" in unsealed tunnels would be a fast and easy way to establish temporary habitats - no need for all the many complicated layers of a Bigelow inflatable habitat, just enough puncture and abrasion resistance to avoid catastrophic atmosphere loss.
And as an interesting coincidence, you could fit a triangular trio of 12' diameter boring machines inside one 9m diameter Starship, with an extra half-meter around the edges for bracing, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @10:52PM (5 children)
How about the supply of cutting teeth, replacement curtains, curtain functionality without atmosphere, the soils removal gear, etc...
I think it's totally feasible to get hundreds or thousands of people to Mars. But getting the *SUPPLIES* needed to rapidly expand a living space sufficient for them all, plus the boring/mining/industrial equipment required to actually line such tunnels, ensure materials to seal any wear or fitment issues in agridomes, etc.
Even if it is doable, I see it costing a lot more than a million per person just in the resources required to not only make a liveable space for them, but also to excavate and extract sufficient mineral resources to being working towards being a self-sustaining colony. Because if it's not self-sustaining, as soon as something back here on earth, we'll have another ghost colony, just like happened to so many places across the American West during the last land rush. Only little chance of the natives giving us a hand this time, if there are any and if they saw what we did on Earth the last time.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:43AM (1 child)
The ones who get there first get to eat the ones who arrive later
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:02PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Monday January 20 2020, @02:59AM (2 children)
Those are no doubt engineering challenges - and I suspect ones that are being considered. What is a curtain in that context? If it's just dust containment, it should work much the same, only with an easier job since there is no air to help keep dust aloft.
Shipping a stack of cutting teeth, and even digging shields, is potentially going to be a lot cheaper than shipping all the materials necessary to build an above-ground pressure vessel (though tough "balloons" coated in concrete might be an interesting option)
Material removal is greatly facilitated when that material is in the form of endless stacks of giant compressed-earth "lego bricks" which can be used for above-ground construction. Even if they won't contain an atmosphere without a lot more work, they still provide great radiation and weather shielding. Mortared brick constructs with enough weight on them (a few meters of rock) could even contain atmospheric pressure through sheer mass, needing only an air-impermeable layer in their inner construction. At some point you could probably even stop with the bricks and dump loose material on top. And if you're containing Earth air pressure by weight, you get Earth-normal radiation shielding automatically.
Digging is energy intensive though - so it'd mean lots of solar panels or nuclear reactors. How many of those 10kW NASA Kilopower reactors needed to power a tunnel boring machine? Might be rough for the initial outpost, but probably quite attractive for ongoing construction once a reliable foothold is established.
How many minerals do they need to be a self-sustainging colony? To grow? Absolutely. But just to sustain, so long as they focus on easily recyclable technology they shouldn't actually need much. And there is work being done on extracting oxygen from Moon and Mars regolith, leaving a metallic alloy "soup" behind, which should be a valuable mineral source, including silicon for all those solar panels you're gong to want. And of course, with some luck and planning you may be able to dig some of those tunnels through relatively mineral-rich ground.
What they will need in endless supply is biological support - air, water, and food. Water ice is plentiful if you build your colony in the right place. Purification may be a challenge, but we're seeing some huge advances in the technology for unrelated reasons here on Earth. And if you have water, plus abundant ambient CO2 just waiting to be pressurized, all you need is light and the right "primordial soup" to rapidly and robustly generate food, oxygen, fuel, and with the right equipment, a nigh endless supply of incredibly versatile, food-safe industrial micro- and nano-celluose.
You're likely to get awful sick of eating algae, etc., but it'll go a long way toward keeping you alive, and is great feedstock for a more sophisticated ecology. With crop generations measured in hours, even devastating blows to your "herds" can be recovered from in days. And with minimal and low-tech mechanical components there's a lot less to go wrong, and it's easily fixable when it does.
It is likely to be expensive though, and I'm not sure there's enough wealthy hardworking dreamers to realistically pull it off without several orders of magnitude cost reduction.. Personally I suspect actual colonization (as opposed to a research outpost) will have to wait until after asteroid mining has become routine and driven down the cost of the necessary technologies dramatically. In the mean time a lunar outpost seems likely to have far more Earth-centric commercial applications to justify early investment, while also dramatically reducing the risks and travel times enough to be a viable tourism destination. It doesn't have the abundant ecological feedstock of Mars, but it'd still be a great technological testbed, and if nothing else a convenient source of fuel and radiation shielding for orbital construction. Not to mention the far side is an excellent location for radio telescopes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @05:24AM (1 child)
An airlock. But you can simplify: this word means anything that isn't a Martian rock - spacesuits, clothes, food, heat, air, waste disposal, the living facility, instruments, spare parts, power sources...
Not super likely, as above ground pressure vessel can be very thin and weigh a few tens of kg. However a TBM and expendable parts for it are extremely heavy. For example [efunda.com]:
Then you write:
Remember that all those books were written nearly a century ago. Back then the lower strata of the working class was larger, and writers logically assumed that in the future hungry and dirty miners will be getting subsistence money for working asteroids. However even today a human on a mining ship is a liability. He needs life support, he cannot work 24/7, he needs risk pay, and every ship has to carry a human at all times. It's more practical to have robot ships with remote control from the base. Miners, a few of them, will be on the base, assuming control of a ship when it arrives at the destination and releasing it to ship's autopilot when a boring trip from point A to point B is needed.
Not only minerals. They also need such natural resources as air and water, in huge amounts. But even worse is the fact they need to duplicate a good deal of Earth's technologies in a short time. Chemistry requires specific catalysts and large reaction vessels, that requires stainless steel, that requires all the additives, a smelter, a converter or an inert gas electric arc processing... such plants took decades to build on Earth, where everything is available. Some materials will not be available. Take oil, for example. Probably Mars has no oil, if it is a dead planet. If so, organic chemistry is out if the window - drugs, paints, sealants... There will be no CT and MRI scanners on Mars, they are too heavy and too fragile. Medicine will fall a century back; even bandages have to come from Earth.
So when all this can be overcome? With our today's technology... probably never. The lifeline to Earth is too thin, too expensive, too subject to political whims. My guess is that at some point the colonists will be brought back and the colony abandoned. It's even hard to imagine what colonists must produce to make the whole thing profitable - an elixir of eternal youth, perhaps? Everything else can be cheaper obtained on Earth. But even a functioning trade does not guarantee that colony will one day become industrialized. They need enough people, they need enough tools, and they need specific, very expensive parts from Earth (with full support.) Earth may be not interested in allowing the colony become self-sufficient!
(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.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @08:52PM (7 children)
I'd volunteer for Mars, but no way would I pay to go. Risking my life is one thing, but...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday January 18 2020, @09:09PM (5 children)
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/29/business/elon-musk-spacex-mars-starship-cost/index.html [cnn.com]
There's an estimate of $200k per person. Just bump that up to $1 million. You are obviously going to be paying for some sort of accommodations.
$1 million is comparable to what some people are paying for homes in expensive cities, although the median home price in the U.S. is more like $225,000. So some people would consider that a reasonable price for going to Mars and buying a home on Mars. If the price was $20-50 million, like what a Falcon 9 trip and vacation at the ISS would currently cost, that would not be reasonable for most people.
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(Score: 2) by deimtee on Sunday January 19 2020, @04:22AM (4 children)
It's very likely it would be a one way trip. You are emigrating, not visiting. What would be the point of leaving assets on Earth?
You would buy your ticket and spend the rest of your total net worth on high-value/useful items and extra baggage allowance to carry them there.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 20 2020, @05:28PM (3 children)
While that makes plenty of sense, Musk has indicated that anybody who goes can get a free return trip. Which makes sense if the plan is to send back the Starships for continual reuse. Just put passenger(s) on one.
Elon Musk considers move to Mars despite 'good chance of death' [theguardian.com] (Nov. 2018)
Elon Musk: Moving to Mars will cost less than $500,000, ‘maybe even below $100,000’ [cnbc.com] (Feb. 2019)
The tweet mentioned:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1094796246613516289?lang=en [twitter.com]
So people who want to chicken out or have a medical non-emergency could hitch a ride back. There may be problems with the synodic period timing. Maybe it's possible to refuel with Mars-origin propellant and get more delta-V than you would from leaving Earth, shortening the return trip.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 24 2020, @05:35PM (2 children)
The Mars-to-Earth delta-V is the same in either direction, though Musk has clearly stated that the plan is to far exceed that for a faster trip (a minimum delta-V Hohmann transfer takes almost 9 months). Though while he has also said that a Starship could return to Earth directly from the surface of Mars, an orbital refueling their would certainly let the trip be shortened.
There is however no real solution for the 26 month synodic period. If the planets aren't in the proper alignment it's going to take a LOT longer for the trip - even traveling at many times the minimum necessary speed. Long enough that it's probably worth just waiting until the proper alignment is close before you launch. It's going to be something really urgent to be worth spending several extra months being blasted by radiation in a steel can, rather than waiting twice as long for the alignment and quick flight.
As for the free return trip - I suspect that would be necessary to get *any* sane person to consider immigrating. Dreams are nice and all - but committing to spending the rest of your life in a likely extremely limited and austere community, sight unseen? Many Europeans did something similar for the Americas, but that was mostly the poor and persecuted moving to a lush new paradise. And for colonizing Mars we're not going to need much manual labor, but instead the more marketable skills that would earn people a comfortable life here on Earth.
Plus if you're returning the rockets to Earth for reuse anyway, a few passengers doesn't change the cost much, so why not? Of course, with the move to stainless steel that becomes far less attractive, especially early on - they're a lot cheaper to "throw away", and the steel pressure vessels are going to be valuable raw materials on Mars, while the fuel to send them back will be eating into the colony's energy budget. It seems quite likely to me that they'd end up leaving many/most of the rockets there, though perhaps send back the expensive engines for re-use.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 24 2020, @06:13PM (1 child)
That is what I meant, obviously. Actually you have to start with having it fully refueled on the surface, using propellant produced on Mars. Then you have to have one or more additional Starships capable of doing the in-Mars-orbit refuel. They may be limited by the propellant production rate or storage.
In the short term, we'll just respect the synodic period and launch at the optimal time unless it's absolutely necessary. Later developments (nuclear rockets?) should speed things up. Also, cargo shipments might be sent at any time and any velocity as long as the cost to launch does not go up.
As I said in another comment, we should expect 10,000 Martians in the near future, not a million. I don't think it will be too difficult to find people who are relatively stable, can do some work, and would not mind dying on Mars. The age may be skewed towards older individuals.
Maybe the first 20-50 or so Starships will definitely stay there for use as habitats and scrap*. But if the number of Starships landing there reaches into the hundreds, there could be an effort to cycle them between Mars and Earth. Sending back a single one loaded with engines as cargo is a neat idea... hopefully it reaches the surface of Earth safely. Note that the target [twitter.com] for Raptor engines is about $200k each, so it might not matter that much.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday January 24 2020, @08:20PM
Well, *all* the Starships going to Mars will be capable of (receiving) orbital refueling, since they had to do it on the Earth side to get there. And from the early discussion it sounds like it will likely be a symmetrical process, i.e. any two Starship-class vehicles will be able to transfer fuel in either direction - though I wouldn't be all that surprised if that ends up being more challenging than planned.
Wow, I hadn't realized that Raptors were targeted so cheap, that's barely more than $1M for the Starship's full set! If the full ship costs ~$60M it'd probably barely be worth salvaging just the engines. (though as they say: A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you're talking real money)
And I suppose, if we use the payload-to-orbit as a baseline for payload-to-Mars, the ship will mass roughly the same as its payload, so shipping rolls of steel (etc) might well be much more cost effective than recycling the rockets. Once adequate fuel production is established on Mars of course.
Now I'm curious - let's run the numbers. On the Earth side, 1200t LNG in a fully fueled Starship = 60,000MBTU At current spot prices of $2/MBTU = $120,000 of fuel per launch. Plus at least 12 additional launches to fully refuel the ship in orbit (100t payload = refueling fuel, per launch) = at least $1.6M worth of fuel to get to Mars. So, yeah - if the rockets are reusable enough that fuel is the primary cost, or even just a large fraction, it should be substantially cheaper to send raw materials than cannibalize the ships. I'm a bit surprised.
>...nuclear rockets...
They could speed things up - but you're still talking about ~5x the distance between nearest and furthest approach. Not to mention that pesky sun in your path when you're in opposition - in fact it's incredibly energy expensive to get anywhere near the sun, so your opposition trip distance might be pushing 4-5x your conjunction trip distance, so you're probably looking at at least twice the travel time (at much greater cost). Of course if that just means weeks instead of days... maybe not so bad.
I'm inclined to agree - though the governance might be a sticking point. It could be be hard hitting those numbers if you effectively became corporate slave labor. But having the option to return to Earth would be a major consideration - especially if Earth abandoned the colony. Which I think is quite likely to happen - it'll be expensive, and there's not really anything in it for Earth. Profits make the world go round - and while supporting a research outpost is one thing, supporting a colonyis quite another. Especially when as far as we know, there's nothing on Mars worth the cost of shipping to Earth to rectify the trade imbalance. Short of discovering unobtanium deposits, a Mars colony is likely to be an expensive multi-century charity project. I suppose artists, software developers, researchers, etc. could ship their wares to Earth for Earth currency - but for the most part the minute a colonist steps on the ship to Mars, they have all the Earthly wealth they'll ever have, and it becomes a question of how to fund the Earth-imports that they and their children will need to survive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @03:49PM
This is normal. I half suspect there is something genetic within us in relation to exploration.
I am one of the ones that would happily sell everything I have to afford a ticket to Mars just to go work my ass off even more once there. I'm also the sort of person that was perfectly happy in the US, but curiosity and adventure led to me living and traveling half way around the world. And no, I didn't come from money to say the least - so it was always extremely difficult.
And today I'm not in the least bit unhappy or discontent or anything like that. I just have this insatiable urge to explore new places and engage in new 'adventures.' I never feel attached to my place in life so selling it all to start all over again is not an issue. Just so happen to also be blessed with a wife who's of the same mindset as well.
So it just changes the queue. The first arrivals will be folks like me. If you're willing to exchange go into labor debt for your ticket, then I imagine there will be a huge demand for laborers within a matter of years after the initial settlements.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday January 19 2020, @03:57PM (1 child)
Has Mr Musk been secretly working on nuclear rocket engines?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday January 19 2020, @04:29PM
I have to find the right links, but no, you can theoretically do this with just chemical rockets like Starship. Musk was already anticipating 30-day (one-way) trips back during the ITS days:
Powerful rocket missions to Mars in 30 days one way and fast mission to other solar system destinations [nextbigfuture.com]
The big difference between Starship and conventional chemical rockets is that you can get the Starship into low-Earth orbit or even higher, and fill it right back up with propellant using in-orbit refueling. As if it was sitting on the pad fully fueled, except in space. This is a major advantage that could allow you to slash the travel time to Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, etc. If each Starship costs about $2 million to launch, it doesn't matter if you have to launch 10+ Starships to deliver diminishing amounts of propellant to the Mars-bound ship.
The estimate assumes an optimized launch date to take advantage of the Earth-Mars synodic period. So there would be a 26-month gap between waves of launches.
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