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Ask HN: Does SpaceX have a chance at making life multiplanetary?

7 points by quickaskq 4y ago

Hey HN. There’s not much reliable / unbiased analysis of SpaceX’s mission statement of making humanity multiplanetary. So, what are the chances? I’ve been following spacex for a while and, ignoring all the elon shenanigans old and new, they do incredible stuff. Docking with the space station, humans on the space station, reusable rockets launching more than weekly… it’s insane. The progress they’ve made in the last 15 years is unheard of, only rivaled by the Apollo program. But a self sustaining civilization on Mars? I’m skeptical. Yes, it’s physically possible. And spacex seems to be heading in the right direction. But the sheer difficulty of the problem I think is sometimes understated. Elon’s rough estimates on what it’ll take to create a self sustaining civilization vary from interview to interview. One quote: “Roughly 800 to 1000 per year. That’s about what’s needed over ten years to create the fleet to build a self-sustaining city on Mars” More than 3 launches per day for 10 years? That’s where the impossibility of it all starts to seep in. Many seemingly unsolvable problems also arise. Where does the money come from? How will we make the Martian surface habitable? Even if getting launch costs down to 2 million as Musk stated once is possible (hard to believe, Falcon 9 is nowhere near that today), the amount of peripheral costs (maintenance, staffing, logistics, training, the list goes on) is extraordinary. I’m pretty sure they’ll get to mars in the next 10 years. And they even have a good shot and doing that multiple times. But based on the sheer amount of payload that needs to get to Mars, it seems like a mission that will exceed the lifetime of SpaceX.

deleted 4y ago
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metadat 4y ago
No, if mullosk was serious they should've started with Moon colonization. Worst case: It's a huckster distraction while the public gets robbed. Best case: He's an idiot huckster taking the public and his cultists for a spin. Initially we were excited about the SpaceX plan but now it's revealed to be largely a sham. Human interest is apparently not the end-game.
- quickaskq 4y ago
  Yeah, there are faint mentions of moon colonization from Musk, but more often than not he talks about Mars. I do agree more and more that Musk is a grifter (look no further than Twitter), but SpaceX seems to be one of his ventures that’s not a grift. The technology actually works (falcon 9 works, dragon works, Starlink works), and I don’t see what kind of financial gain he has in going to Mars. Possibly hoping the government subsidizes his Starship rockets that he then will use for contracts?
gregjor 4y ago
You can find reliable analysis of the SpaceX Mars plans. See the Common Sense Skeptic YouTube videos. Not a fan of Musk, but the skeptic gets into details about the physics, logistics, and physiology problems that Musk glosses over. Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere, for one thing, so radiation is a big problem Musk already dismissed. We already know human bodies lose muscle and bone after just a few weeks in space. The rockets Musk has presented don't have room for the water and food needed for 100+ people. Many other issues. Not to mention terraforming is science fiction right now.
- quickaskq 4y ago
  I’ll give that video a watch, thanks for the rec. Yeah, getting to Mars as a human presents a whole load of problems, let alone living on Mars. Elon loves the self deprecating talking point of saying how terrible the journey will be, but I get the feeling it may be more than terrible, if may be simply infeasible. A Starship will have to be like a mini space station during the ~7 months it takes to get to Mars. From the Elon interviews I’ve listened to he describes it like packing many people into a single starship, but it may be only possible to house 5-10 given the amount of support they’ll need to and on Mars. Edit: I actually watched parts of those videos months ago and just watched some more. Good stuff, though sorry to say but fairly biased reporting with a lot of opinions and theories thrown in there. Nonetheless informative and entertaining, just… the YouTuber clearly has it out for Musk.
  - gregjor 4y ago
    It works both ways. Musk frequently exaggerates, makes ridiculous claims, and offers fact-free promises. I don't take him at his word either.
- JoshCole 4y ago
  Would be really great to hear someone who isn't trying to build a brand around Elon Musk hatred dig into the details. For myself, I've grown very tired of CSS. It is clear he does a lot of research - which makes his tendency to lie about facts and photoshop his sources to hide the contradiction disturbing to me. https://littlebluena.substack.com/p/common-sense-skeptic-debunking-starlink https://littlebluena.substack.com/p/common-sense-skeptic-deb...
iab 4y ago
Absolutely; by completely disregarding planetary-protection protocols and taking bacteria etc. inadvertently would be my bet
- joshenders 4y ago
  How do you take humans and avoid taking bacteria?
mikewarot 4y ago
We'll be quite lucky if we can build a colony on the moon, and that's a far closer goal. We know people don't do well in zero gravity, it remains to be seen how well we hold up in 1/6 gravity. It might be enough to keep the worst of the effects from happening. Anything we do on the moon is going to have to be sub-surface to get away from the radiation and dust problems. I don't see us getting a colony on Mars without non-chemical propulsion.
dswilkerson 4y ago
It doesn't matter how many people you send to Mars, you cannot live there. See the videos by Common Sense Skeptic. Mars (and Venus) do not have a magnetosphere to protect you from radiation. The gravity is the wrong amount, so your bones will dissolve. Mars itself is poisonous. Write down every aspect of living someplace that you need: gravity, water, temperature, lack of radiation, etc. and in every way Antarctica is as nice or better than Mars. I don't see people clamoring to live in Antarctica. One nice feature of Antarctica: if you want to go home, you can do so in a normal ship: no space ship required.
freemint 4y ago
Multi planetary? No. I do not think so. Musk will run out of money before he comes anywhere close to landing a few thousands tons of cargo on mars. Self sustaining moon base? Possible. Huge autonomous telescope on the moon? Really cool, possible but not a priority.
mlindner 4y ago
Yes they do. But before that a transportation system needs to exist. Starship needs to be easily and quickly reusable and that's a necessary step to becoming multiplanetary or it will simply forever remain too expensive. > Where does the money come from? The goal of SpaceX is to make all of what you describe possible within or slightly above NASA's spaceflight budget as well as within the price range of a pioneer who wants to give up everything on Earth and move to Mars. > How will we make the Martian surface habitable? The surface will not be habitable by anyone within our lifetimes. People will live in structures that are either underground or partially buried. > Even if getting launch costs down to 2 million as Musk stated once is possible (hard to believe, Falcon 9 is nowhere near that today) Falcon 9 throws away carefully engineered and built hardware every single launch. It was never going to get down to those price levels. That's why you need a fully reusable vehicle.

gregjor 4y ago
It's hard to refute the logistics issues CSS raises. Or the radiation and lack of gravity problems. Musk frequently changes his promises so it's hard to keep up. Full self-driving? Tesla semi? Hyperloop? Solar roof tiles (since you brought up lying and faking)? Musk deserves the critics he gets.
- mlindner 4y ago
  There has never been long term studies on the effects of low gravity. On the radiation aspect, the radiation is not significant and simply increases your long term risk of cancer. It's not a show stopper by any means. It's also mostly mitigated with minimal shielding.
- JoshCole 4y ago
  I agree that there are real logistical issues. that is why I really would love to hear someone more honest dig into the details. I think there are real logistical issues here. My problem is that I know that CSS just starts with a narrative and lies about facts as he moves through his narrative. I'd like to know the places where the planning fallacy is likely to be blinding people working on these problems. His estimate of Starlink projected costs is three orders of magnitude higher than reasonable estimates I've seen. You don't get three orders of magnitude off by accident. If someone asks you to estimate the cost of a car for example and its true cost is $10,000 and you guess $10,000,000 that is really surprising - so surprising that I find it be an error term, not a surprise term to correct on. I'd like to hear more from the people that guess $10,000, not someone whose error term is being maximized because surprising things are more engaging. This is actually material relevant to the question of his helping us to reason about these issues, because clearly funding for the travel ought to be up there as one of the single most important issues. But he's giving us three orders of magnitude of error in this central issue. Elon Musk claims one year and than it takes like five. Three orders of magnitude is different. Three orders of magnitude would be someone saying it takes one year, but then it takes 1000 years. The difference between "honest planning fallacy" and "making stuff up" seems kind of easy to discern to me. I don't know, maybe others disagree, but it doesn't feel so hard to tell the difference. I also hold very different standards for claims about the future than I do for claims about the present and past made after research on the subject. I don't consider people who don't claim to be prophets to be required to meet the always predicts the future successfully bar; it seems kind of silly to expect that. However, it does seem pretty important that someone reporting on say, the price of a service, to give an honest price after months of research - which CSS doesn't. I'd hold a different standard for CSS if these were off the cuff videos or sharing - more like tweets - because then getting some stuff off would be reasonable. But lying about stuff that is so easily verified and photoshopping evidence to preserve the lies? Just reeks malice to me. If he was actually honest - why does he try to hide the lies?
HWR_14 4y ago
> someone who isn't trying to build a brand around Elon Musk hatred dig into the details Isn't everyone who regularly publishes "trying to build a brand". And isn't everyone who covers Elon Musk critically trying to incorporate that into their brand? How do you distinguish between "I analyze Elon Musk's statements for accuracy" and "Elon Musk hatred"?
- JoshCole 4y ago
  Well, he names himself Common Self Skeptic, but he has only videos about Elon Musk rather than videos about skepticism. And he just blatantly lies about facts - for example, speed test numbers, service prices, and so on. The thing that makes it really easy to distinguish though is that facts are entangled. That ends up making lies contagious. So when he starts talking about a government conspiracy and my surprise goes way up, it becomes pretty easy to check his facts, and realize the reason I'm so surprised is because he is lying. As another example of the contagious nature of lies, when he lies about the projected cost of Starlink, the natural result is that anyone who thinks Starlink could be profitable is insane - it costs more than the economy, according to him, since he gave an estimate that was three orders magnitude higher than reasonable estimates. Therefore, when he moves forward to talk about Shotwell, he gets put in a situation where making his claims seem reasonable requires he continue to keep up the lies. So instead of calling her a good executive he makes sexists arguments as to to why she is so stupid. His previous lies were contagious and so he was forced into sexism in order to cover them up, because the entangled fact of a good executive having been involved in the business decisions would cast a lot of doubt on his claims. And... it isn't that hard to criticize Elon Musk without lying? He isn't perfect, at all. I don't think its necessary for a critic to invent things to criticize rather than to just tell the truth?
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    I took your original post to be two different complaints. You don't like CSS because he lies and you want someone who provides details without building a brand around "Musk hatred" I'm completely neutral to CSS. If he lies, that's bad. If he's not lying, that's not bad. I don't watch his videos. But I think there's nothing wrong with someone who is trying to build a brand (what many content creators are trying to do) taking a firm Elon-love or Elon-hate stance. That's what I was responding to. > it isn't that hard to criticize Elon Musk without lying I think that's very true. I also think people who praise him lie almost as often. I don't understand why. There is plenty to criticize or praise him on that's true.

ActorNightly 4y ago

I think Musk's stance on Mars is that Space X tech is necessarily gonna be the thing that makes living there happen, but the idea is that humanity needs to spend resources to get there within its capability because every minute we don't sets us "backwards"

gregjor 4y ago
You don't need to interpret what Musk might mean. Musk publicly predicted people on Mars by 2025, then 2026, then 2029. He predicted a million people living on Mars by 2050. He has been specific, if not consistent. I don't see how humanity will go backward if we don't colonize Mars. That's the kind of thing a cult leader says. In the meantime Musk is squandering $44bn to buy Twitter just to show that he can.
- ActorNightly 4y ago
  He didn't predict any of those. He said something that sounded like a prediction in an interview, and media outlets, knowing people like you will surely click on a clickbait anti-Musk article, picked it up and ran with it. Saying "I think this is possible in x years" is not the same thing as saying "Space X will deliver in x years"
  - gregjor 4y ago
    Fortunately it’s very easy to find almost everything Musk has said or tweeted. He has made multiple specific predictions. 2029 for humans on Mars and 2050 for a million people were indeed widely-reported and may have had clickbait titles, but they quote Musk’s public pronouncements and Tweets. You can read his statements as predictions or wishes. If Musk was just musing on his aspirations why has he repeatedly given specific dates? The people who were promised full self-driving Teslas and paid for that didn’t interpret specific delivery dates and promises of features as mere possibilities.
  - quickaskq 4y ago
    He never fully predicts or promises, but we all know the infamous Musk time, where he says one of his inventions will be ready “next year”. for the last 8 years Musk has been promising FSD and that it will be ready next year.
    - gregjor 4y ago
      He promises things people want to believe. Like fortune tellers, psychics, and astrologers. Because it's clothed in "tech" it seems believable to the ignorant and hopeful. Musk may believe what he says, I don't know. He has a history of self-serving bullshit.
  - taf2 4y ago
    Funny I’ve found in my position to say “I think we can” to consistently be translated into you said “you can”… everyone seems to just disregard the think park …