8 ms·

Mars has a lot of problems to solve, but as far as freight goes starship seems totally adequate to me. What exactly is the problem?

ncmncm 4y ago
Starters, it takes a hell of a lot more than freight to make a colony. Starship is wholly inadequate to take more than 17 crew to Mars; that would be if you don't mind some killed on the way there. So, you send 4 or 5 cargo ships, 500 tons of stuff, and two ships swinging on the ends of a cable, so their bones don't melt on the way there. (Which, BTW, takes 9, not 6, months.) Maybe one is a spare, with everything duplicated. The main ship fits 8 crew with just-tolerable comfort, with stuff you will actually need for 9 months unimaginably distant from all possibility of help. Change of underwear, you think? Water, food. Air? Space suits, to go outside when they arrive? Maybe a hand truck. They get there, and now have to unship and set up 500 tons of crap. It only weighs 170-some tons, which is not much better. Set up a massive solar farm and methane and oxygen factory. Debug it. Assemble vehicles, freight handlers, bulldozer and excavator. Individual pod huts, so crew can sometimes get away from others they have come to detest. Look around and think, "This place is a dump." Because every last detail is way worse than the worst place on Earth. Cold, dim, featureless, bone dry, dusty. The dust sticks to everything, seemingly leaping up to soil any clean surface. Enough is enough, but nobody can go home until the launch window opens, and the fuel is banked.
- ericd 4y ago
  Sounds like you probably don't want to be a settler, which is fine, most people don't. Some people are into that kind of thing.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Rather more think they are into that kind of thing, until they get there, and find out what it is really like.
    - ericd 4y ago
      Yeah, for sure. Would be useful to have an Earth-side demo that a settler could try out for a month.
      - hunterb123 4y ago
        We already do: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/27/this-is-the-true-story-of-six-strangers-picked-to-live-in-a-nasa-dome/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
        ncmncm 4y ago
        That has not turned out well.
- hunterb123 4y ago
  I'd think most people would be living indoors in a controlled climate and wouldn't suffer the adjectives you threw out. Is it much different than those who volunteer to live on the ISS? The difference is instead of walking out in space every now and then you occasionally work outside in an alien world. The dust storms would be intense, you probably wouldn't leave shelter then, but if you've ever been out in the desert, it can be really beautiful. Personally give me internet and A/C and I can stay anywhere for years, outside time or not, it's what I do now essentially. The alien backyard work is a bonus. Different strokes for different people. You don't seem to have a settler attitude, and that's okay.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    You would live in the ship, stationary on the ground. The terrain is not desert so much as rock and dust.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Because in a real desert, you have air?
      - oneoff786 4y ago
        More so the radiation. Air isn’t that hard to solve with a suit.
- ben_w 4y ago
  None of that makes Starship an inadequate part of the plan, especially given the vision of making a very big fleet of them and the colony taking the best part of a century to establish. (To add to your list: I wouldn’t want to be stuck somewhere where Musk was in change, but again, that’s not a Starship problem per se).
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    It means there is no physical way just with Starship to get even a million colonists there. And, a million colonists is nowhere near self-sufficient anyway.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      The minimum colony size I might believe (I think Musk was fairly clear that number was a wild guess), but you really need to do more than merely assert your claim that Starship can’t get a million people to Mars. 8 people per Starship (which you have not justified, given its 100-150 tons to LEO design and refuelling in LEO for such missions and the 1000m^3 interior volume; I’ve shared a 70m^3 apartment with another person comfortably for longer than the trip duration, and that’s 14 such units and 28 people in the same volume, and my university accommodation was much denser even than that, so what machinery fraction do you imagine?), and let’s say they can transit one way on each conjunction even though that’s probably only true for the first few trips before fuel generation and storage is done reliably prior to arrival, is still 200 per vehicle-in-the-fleet per century, or million people in a century with a fleet of 5000 Starship-equivalent vehicles. Which is a lot of Starships, but there are more 737s, so it’s not like aerospace can’t be built at this scale. Now, criticism of Musk’s target price per seat given your beliefs of the maximum occupancy per vehicle to Mars, that would make more sense. As would arguing that once you have Starship as a launch vehicle, it would make more sense to use it to build some Aldrin cyclers rather than use Starship for everything. Oh, and we may ban it from operation at that scale because of the environmental concerns. That’s certainly possible. But that’s not what it looks like you’re doing, it looks like you’re saying it can’t rather than it will be too expensive or that its mere existence creates better solutions or it might be held back for legal reasons.
- skissane 4y ago
  > Starship is wholly inadequate to take more than 17 crew to Mars > The main ship fits 8 crew with just-tolerable comfort, From where do you get these numbers? Your own private analysis, or a published source? How can we verify these claims you make?
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    I was unable to find actual published numbers. The only figure I found is that a starship spec’d specifically for comfortably carrying crew members can carry about 100 people. I think the reason I can’t find an answer to the general case is that you wouldn’t typically have any crew on board a starship that’s designed for cargo.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      The 100 number is another lie. It has enough room for 200 on a transatlantic flight, but for a 9-month flight in space, you you need to carry a very great deal more stuff along. An overhead luggage bag each does not suffice. NASA figures are a maximum of 17 in that volume, and then only if you leave behind, e.g., spacesuits, and they sleep the whole way.
      - oneoff786 4y ago
        Source?
        ncmncm 4y ago
        Really? I need a source to explain why provisioning for a 9-month one-way spaceflight is different from a transatlantic flight with food and air where you open the door 8 hours later?
        skissane 4y ago
        When you make claims about “NASA figures”, it’s reasonable to ask you to cite/link to where those figures are published.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  They’ve been pretty transparent that the plan is for hundreds of starships. Not just one. Obviously they can’t do it with just one ship. A lot of the issues you’re referencing decrease dramatically with every additional ship. Hundreds of tons of cargo to unload? Not really an issue if you give them a lot of heavy equipment. Energy requirements would be pretty small. Oxygen and water for a few dozen people is a solved problem on subs. Radiation is sort of solved if you live on the ship after landing. You’ll still probably die of course but the point stands that the logistics side of the equation seems fine with startships.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    You need the hundreds of ships just to get the fuel for a few Mars ships to orbital refueling depots. If one crewed ship of 8 colonists needs, say, five cargo ships for support equipment for that population on Mars, and a seventh as counterweight for centrifugal gravity en route, that is 77 launches. The six that land on Mars don't get re-used, although their superheavies do. The point here is that you need an absurdly large number of launch events just to provide for 8 colonists. Multiply that out to a million colonists, and you exceed the industrial capacity of the world. And, even a million colonists is very, very, very far from self-sufficient.
    - oneoff786 4y ago
      77 launches isn’t absurd. It is BELOW what spaceX is planning for. There’s nothing remotely sensible about a million colonists, so that’s a pointless straw man. Lastly, the necessities to support 8 people aren’t that different from the necessities to support 100. They scale wayyy better than linearly. Again, the issue with supporting people on mars is not the vehicles to get there.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        10 superheavy launches per colonist does not admit 1M colonists, and 1M colonists is at least two orders of magnitude short of self-sufficient. It is very far from clear that Mars can physically support 100M inhabitants.

ncmncm 4y ago

Starters, it takes a hell of a lot more than freight to make a colony. Starship is wholly inadequate to take more than 17 crew to Mars; that would be if you don't mind some killed on the way there. So, you send 4 or 5 cargo ships, 500 tons of stuff, and two ships swinging on the ends of a cable, so their bones don't melt on the way there. (Which, BTW, takes 9, not 6, months.) Maybe one is a spare, with everything duplicated. The main ship fits 8 crew with just-tolerable comfort, with stuff you will actually need for 9 months unimaginably distant from all possibility of help. Change of underwear, you think? Water, food. Air? Space suits, to go outside when they arrive? Maybe a hand truck. They get there, and now have to unship and set up 500 tons of crap. It only weighs 170-some tons, which is not much better. Set up a massive solar farm and methane and oxygen factory. Debug it. Assemble vehicles, freight handlers, bulldozer and excavator. Individual pod huts, so crew can sometimes get away from others they have come to detest. Look around and think, "This place is a dump." Because every last detail is way worse than the worst place on Earth. Cold, dim, featureless, bone dry, dusty. The dust sticks to everything, seemingly leaping up to soil any clean surface. Enough is enough, but nobody can go home until the launch window opens, and the fuel is banked.

ericd 4y ago
Sounds like you probably don't want to be a settler, which is fine, most people don't. Some people are into that kind of thing.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Rather more think they are into that kind of thing, until they get there, and find out what it is really like.
  - ericd 4y ago
    Yeah, for sure. Would be useful to have an Earth-side demo that a settler could try out for a month.
    - hunterb123 4y ago
      We already do: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/27/this-is-the-true-story-of-six-strangers-picked-to-live-in-a-nasa-dome/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        That has not turned out well.
hunterb123 4y ago
I'd think most people would be living indoors in a controlled climate and wouldn't suffer the adjectives you threw out. Is it much different than those who volunteer to live on the ISS? The difference is instead of walking out in space every now and then you occasionally work outside in an alien world. The dust storms would be intense, you probably wouldn't leave shelter then, but if you've ever been out in the desert, it can be really beautiful. Personally give me internet and A/C and I can stay anywhere for years, outside time or not, it's what I do now essentially. The alien backyard work is a bonus. Different strokes for different people. You don't seem to have a settler attitude, and that's okay.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  You would live in the ship, stationary on the ground. The terrain is not desert so much as rock and dust.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Because in a real desert, you have air?
    - oneoff786 4y ago
      More so the radiation. Air isn’t that hard to solve with a suit.
ben_w 4y ago
None of that makes Starship an inadequate part of the plan, especially given the vision of making a very big fleet of them and the colony taking the best part of a century to establish. (To add to your list: I wouldn’t want to be stuck somewhere where Musk was in change, but again, that’s not a Starship problem per se).
- ncmncm 4y ago
  It means there is no physical way just with Starship to get even a million colonists there. And, a million colonists is nowhere near self-sufficient anyway.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    The minimum colony size I might believe (I think Musk was fairly clear that number was a wild guess), but you really need to do more than merely assert your claim that Starship can’t get a million people to Mars. 8 people per Starship (which you have not justified, given its 100-150 tons to LEO design and refuelling in LEO for such missions and the 1000m^3 interior volume; I’ve shared a 70m^3 apartment with another person comfortably for longer than the trip duration, and that’s 14 such units and 28 people in the same volume, and my university accommodation was much denser even than that, so what machinery fraction do you imagine?), and let’s say they can transit one way on each conjunction even though that’s probably only true for the first few trips before fuel generation and storage is done reliably prior to arrival, is still 200 per vehicle-in-the-fleet per century, or million people in a century with a fleet of 5000 Starship-equivalent vehicles. Which is a lot of Starships, but there are more 737s, so it’s not like aerospace can’t be built at this scale. Now, criticism of Musk’s target price per seat given your beliefs of the maximum occupancy per vehicle to Mars, that would make more sense. As would arguing that once you have Starship as a launch vehicle, it would make more sense to use it to build some Aldrin cyclers rather than use Starship for everything. Oh, and we may ban it from operation at that scale because of the environmental concerns. That’s certainly possible. But that’s not what it looks like you’re doing, it looks like you’re saying it can’t rather than it will be too expensive or that its mere existence creates better solutions or it might be held back for legal reasons.
skissane 4y ago
> Starship is wholly inadequate to take more than 17 crew to Mars > The main ship fits 8 crew with just-tolerable comfort, From where do you get these numbers? Your own private analysis, or a published source? How can we verify these claims you make?
- oneoff786 4y ago
  I was unable to find actual published numbers. The only figure I found is that a starship spec’d specifically for comfortably carrying crew members can carry about 100 people. I think the reason I can’t find an answer to the general case is that you wouldn’t typically have any crew on board a starship that’s designed for cargo.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    The 100 number is another lie. It has enough room for 200 on a transatlantic flight, but for a 9-month flight in space, you you need to carry a very great deal more stuff along. An overhead luggage bag each does not suffice. NASA figures are a maximum of 17 in that volume, and then only if you leave behind, e.g., spacesuits, and they sleep the whole way.
    - oneoff786 4y ago
      Source?
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Really? I need a source to explain why provisioning for a 9-month one-way spaceflight is different from a transatlantic flight with food and air where you open the door 8 hours later?
        skissane 4y ago
        When you make claims about “NASA figures”, it’s reasonable to ask you to cite/link to where those figures are published.
oneoff786 4y ago
They’ve been pretty transparent that the plan is for hundreds of starships. Not just one. Obviously they can’t do it with just one ship. A lot of the issues you’re referencing decrease dramatically with every additional ship. Hundreds of tons of cargo to unload? Not really an issue if you give them a lot of heavy equipment. Energy requirements would be pretty small. Oxygen and water for a few dozen people is a solved problem on subs. Radiation is sort of solved if you live on the ship after landing. You’ll still probably die of course but the point stands that the logistics side of the equation seems fine with startships.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  You need the hundreds of ships just to get the fuel for a few Mars ships to orbital refueling depots. If one crewed ship of 8 colonists needs, say, five cargo ships for support equipment for that population on Mars, and a seventh as counterweight for centrifugal gravity en route, that is 77 launches. The six that land on Mars don't get re-used, although their superheavies do. The point here is that you need an absurdly large number of launch events just to provide for 8 colonists. Multiply that out to a million colonists, and you exceed the industrial capacity of the world. And, even a million colonists is very, very, very far from self-sufficient.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    77 launches isn’t absurd. It is BELOW what spaceX is planning for. There’s nothing remotely sensible about a million colonists, so that’s a pointless straw man. Lastly, the necessities to support 8 people aren’t that different from the necessities to support 100. They scale wayyy better than linearly. Again, the issue with supporting people on mars is not the vehicles to get there.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      10 superheavy launches per colonist does not admit 1M colonists, and 1M colonists is at least two orders of magnitude short of self-sufficient. It is very far from clear that Mars can physically support 100M inhabitants.