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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday January 18 2020, @05:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-are-here dept.

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.
...
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.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 18 2020, @08:11PM (7 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday January 18 2020, @08:11PM (#945066) Journal

    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)

    by Immerman (3985) on Saturday January 18 2020, @08:48PM (#945079)

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @10:52PM (#945120)

      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)

        by MostCynical (2589) on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:43AM (#945172) Journal

        The ones who get there first get to eat the ones who arrive later

        --
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        • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:02PM

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:02PM (#945278) Homepage
          The ones who get there later get to eat the now-seriously weakened survivors who remain from the earlier parties?
          --
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      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Monday January 20 2020, @02:59AM (2 children)

        by Immerman (3985) on Monday January 20 2020, @02:59AM (#945629)

        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)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @05:24AM (#946188)

          What is a curtain in that context?

          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...

          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

          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]:

          The mass of a 2m TBM varies depending on the ground that it will be boring through, the distance it needs to bore and the type of machine. A recent machine at 2.2m dia. that bored in Youngstown, OH for an 800 ft long tunnel weighed in at nearly 150,000 lbs.

          Then you write:

          Personally I suspect actual colonization (as opposed to a research outpost) will have to wait until after asteroid mining has become routine

          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.

          How many minerals do they need to be a self-sustainging colony?

          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

            by Immerman (3985) on Friday January 24 2020, @05:00PM (#948007)

            - 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.)