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You seem pretty contentious here; I'm just making a case that Mars makes sense as a destination, not trying to convince you that this is something you need to p
by mannerheim 5y ago
You seem pretty contentious here; I'm just making a case that Mars makes sense as a destination, not trying to convince you that this is something you need to pay for. IMO, the numbers work out for it being a hub for traffic to the belt and outer planets. Maybe you don't agree. That's fine. Again, I'm not asking you, personally, to start backing this. Just stop spouting off nonsense like 'if you can't get somewhere from Earth, you can't get there from Mars'. It's a matter of fact that delta v requirements from Mars are lower than they are from Earth, and this would have been obvious if you had thought just for a second about any of this.
> You start by shipping a million tons of freight to Mars
The equipment for generating the electricity to perform ISRU on Mars is supposedly within the payload capabilities of a single Starship, 100-150 tons, not a million, and this should be enough for a ton per day, enough to resupply in the 26 month launch window. The equipment for collecting water and CO2 is another matter, and I don't see estimates on that, but with the above and some engineering margin, it seems plausible that this operation can get off the ground in under ten ship-trips to Mars.
- ncmncm 5y agoI have said nothing even vaguely like that, and cannot guess where you got it from. But it is a simple fact that: Any trip to the outer Solar System that stops at Mars is, energetically, much more costly that one which does not stop at Mars. In addition, getting stuff to Mars is itself a huge expense that completely swamps any imagined benefit of extracting fuel and launching it to stop by for. If you want to go to Mars, go without promoting obvious falsehoods about any value it has as a transport hub. It has none. Period. If, to make sense, your Mars story needs for Mars to be a useful transport hub, then it fails, and you need a different story.
- mannerheim 5y agoThis is what you said: > If you can't get there without a stop at Mars, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at Mars. Stopping at Mars costs extra. This is as asinine as saying, if you can't get somewhere without a stop at the gas station, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at the gas station. Stopping at the gas station costs extra. After all, it costs fuel to take an exit on the freeway and go to the gas station. It costs fuel to leave and go back on the freeway. It costs extra! Energetically, any trip where you have to make a detour to a gas station, costs more than a trip where you don't make a stop there.
- ncmncm 5y agoI am going to leave this here for you to be, on your own schedule, gravely embarrassed at having written it.