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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.
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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @07:58PM (8 children)
When wagon trains settled the western US, a family could take a wagon full of stuff and some livestock and have enough to live indefinitely.
Perhaps 500 pounds of family and 5000 pounds of support stuff.
For a trip to the Earth's South pole, I can't recall anybody trying to get self sufficient.
But what is the transport weight to support one person there for a year?
Given there is no land, the North pole is probably harder.
Given that scale, how does Mars fit in?
Well, without seeing some sort of plan for creating self-sufficiently, I don't even have a frame of reference to judge.
Which says to me that this may be fun to talk about, but it seems only a dream for now.
That said, there is nothing wrong with doing first steps, to learn what the steps to make a colony that works might be.
Instead of talking about sustaining 100k or even 1k folks, let's actually get 10 working.
That would be in impressive lifetime accomplishment.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Saturday January 18 2020, @08:17PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_transportation_infrastructure#Mars_early_missions [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by istartedi on Saturday January 18 2020, @11:57PM (6 children)
For a trip to the Earth's South pole, I can't recall anybody trying to get self sufficient.
Interesting thought. Overall, Mars is more challenging than Antarctica but it beats our polar regions in one interesting way: You get daily Sun exposure, unless you're a real masochist and land in the Martian polar regions. The Martian day is even comparable to ours in length! The cold is worse on Mars, but getting a daily shot of solar energy makes things easier--no need to lug tons of propane, not that it would burn on Mars anyway.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:56PM
Understanding "Why?" should drive the choice of many folks to send first.
There's a list above that may miss the point of why?
(Primary reasons overpopulation underemployment, etc)
I think the starting point is that humans learn a lot like other animals by trying random stuff and occasionally getting lucky.
It's probably in our genes, perhaps from hunter/gather?
Sometimes we can think thru a situation and find a solution, but for really new stuff dumb luck seems a primary algorithm.
That makes exploration a key driver. We want to go to new places because we are driven to go learn something useful.
There are examples where this drive can be stronger than hunger.
I think the top reasons for doing this are more like:
1) Exploration - to see what's there
2) Challenge - because we can
3) Exploitation - we found something there we need here
4) Colonization - we want a new place to call our own
Given the history of space exploration, it would be hard to say that there is not a bit of this well
0) Sell the dream - because we can make profit here by getting folks to dream of going there
Historically, a nation state has been able to get to step 3, but to get to deeply into step 3 and to 4 requires crowdsourcing.
That required some sort of individual incentive more than exploration or challenge.
I don't see this in the talk of 100k?
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday January 19 2020, @05:08PM (4 children)
You also get dust storms that last for months and cut the amount of solar energy arriving at the surface way down. Long term they're going to need something like nukes to supply steady energy.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday January 20 2020, @07:50AM (3 children)
That's an excellent point, which might be addressed here. [universetoday.com]. The gist is that if somebody is there to clean the panels the dust is less of a problem, and that you can avoid most of the dust storms by avoiding the regions that have stormy climates. Initially though, you'd probably want a few RTGs too. You'd want more power than you need, and to use the excess power to store energy somehow. Perhaps we'll be able to split H2O, or some other molecule we find, or maybe even some day we'll manufacture batteries there. Then we'll be able to explore the stormy parts of Mars more easily.
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(Score: 2) by dry on Monday January 20 2020, @06:36PM (2 children)
Remember when Mariner 9 arrived at Mars and the whole planet was covered with dust with only the peak of Olympus Mons visible for months? I wonder how much light reaches the surface during one of these planet wide storms that seem to happen on average, every 3rd year. Being able to wipe the panels will help but there has to be reduced power output.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#Dust_storms [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 24 2020, @08:46PM (1 child)
Production will certainly be reduced - but that's why you install way more generating capacity than you need for survival, and then dial back fuel production, expansion, and other energy-intensive objectives during the storms.
Nuclear will no doubt eventually play a major role, but right now NASA's kilopower reactors are pretty much the only realistic option on that front, and even the high-end 10kW reactor isn't all that impressive when it comes to powering a colony. I mean that's what, a 10x10m solar array? Well, maybe 3 or 4x that once you factor in the continuous energy production. Maybe 2-3x that during dust storms.... probably a good supplement, but they'd look a lot better if almost all that 10x100m solar area couldn't be ultralight mylar reflectors concentrating power onto relatively small panels. Without meaningful wind* or other weather, you don't need anything like the structural supports and durability you'd need on Earth - just abrasion resistance for the sandblasting.
* Mars does sometimes see some really high wind speeds during storms, but they mostly top out around 60MPH, and the *force* of the wind depends on the mass as well as the speed of the air, with Force= speed^2*Air_mass. At 1% the pressure of Earth's atmosphere, a 60MPH Martian wind will hit with roughly the same force as a 6mph Earth wind.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday January 24 2020, @09:15PM
Good points. Another advantage of solar is it can be close to where needed, stringing up power lines seems difficult on Mars.