7 ms·

I'm not saying it would be the most pleasant thing in the world, but a 6-month interplanetary trip on Starship (with iPads, unlimited entertainment, a variety o

by samr71 4y ago

I'm not saying it would be the most pleasant thing in the world, but a 6-month interplanetary trip on Starship (with iPads, unlimited entertainment, a variety of food, video games, and even almost real-time communication with Earth) doesn't seem anywhere near as unpleasant as a 3-month trip on the Mayflower. People seemed to handle that OK though.

ncmncm 4y ago
Notwithstanding Musk's continuous lying about it, Starship would take nine months to get there, not six. Once there, of course, after a single trip around the hab can (can hab?), you would start counting days ... sols ... until you could go home. Presuming it would be possible and permitted. If not, sucks to be you. Mars is a frozen wasteland with nothing of enduring interest. The only export of any value conceivable would be excess Raptor engines taken off of landers, with their bells cut off.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
  I wonder if they'd have some pseudo-restaurants in the habitation area, to help simulate some sense of normalcy. If they do, and if you then saw one of your fellow travelers eating an interesting-looking sandwich, and you wanted to find out what it was, you would have the rare perk of walking up and dropping a pun that's been decades in the making: "Can hab cheeseburger?"
- notfish 4y ago
  Nine months is the duration of a Hohmann transfer to mars, not necessarily the shortest possible for starship - since starship has ~6900 m/s delta v ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1151300180148252674 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1151300180148252674 ) and an earth-mars transfer only requires 3900m/s I think 6 months is well within the realm of plausible.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    There is no possibility of a lone can blasting out there, whatever the delta-V it could muster. You need, at least, two cans to swing at ends of a boom so your crew does not arrive unable to walk. You might want something attached at the axis, besides. That thing might do all the boosting, with the cans' Raptors used just to land with. ISRU fantasies notwithstanding, they need to carry enough fuel to blast off again, come time to go home. The cans get benefit of aerobraking on the way down. The mainframe will need to shed its excess velocity some other way. There's nothing else near enough by to swing around. It will need to have brought along enough fuel to boost home, besides. Maybe it used ion thrusters all the way out, and can use them to creep back to Mars in time to pick up the cans and head home. An alternative is that there is no mainframe, just the boom, and you re-fold and stow it before arrival. Somebody else would have boosted your cans out there, maybe a pair of Superheavys, so your cans won't have to arrive empty. I wonder if a Superheavy with no can stacked on could make it to orbit in one stage. Probably you would unship their engines on orbit, and install a couple of vacuum Raptors in their place before sending them careering out of the solar system.
- bryananderson 4y ago
  I don’t know the numbers for Starship specifically, but this is a matter of how much fuel you have available to burn, and six months has long been considered reasonable. For a free-return trajectory (end up back at Earth if you’re not willing or able to conduct a Mars entry burn), the minimum-energy trajectory takes 250 days (8.3 months) and requires 3.34 km/s delta-V. Getting it down to 180 days takes 5.08 km/s, so about 50% more delta-V (and fuel). Getting there faster is possible but starts to run into diminishing returns, especially because it makes aerobraking at Mars more and more difficult, requiring even more fuel for slowing down on arrival. These numbers are from Robert Zubrin’s “The Case for Mars” (1996) which assumed a six-month transit time would be the norm for human missions. Fantasies of moving to Mars to escape climate change are stupid—even under the best terraforming projections and the worst climate change projections, Earth will be several orders of magnitude more habitable for centuries at least. But the scientific return from a once-warm-and-wet world is more than enough reason to go. Someone like NASA’s Jessica Watkins, who did her dissertation on Martian geology at Caltech, certainly would not be counting down the sols.
bee_rider 4y ago
Whaling ships could spend years out in the ocean (although I guess they must have hit ports along the way). The main problem of Mars is that there's nothing on it. If you have a ship that can get you to Mars, you might as well stay on it: the view is better, you don't have to live like a mole person, and you aren't at the bottom of a giant gravity well. Go checkout some asteriods or something.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- safety1st 4y ago
  I think for an average Martian Joe any type of outdoor recreation would be a rare thing. Rip your suit in this rugged rocky landscape and almost immediately you start to develop serious injuries, pass out and die. And what if you vomit? How do you pee? Cheaply protecting someone from radiation, near-vacuum, and below freezing temperatures while keeping them comfortable is way beyond our current level of tech. Most likely if we actually built a city of people on Mars, life would be similar to living on an earth city but with low-G and you never go outdoors. We'd replicate typical earth city attractions and add a low-G spin where it was appropriate. Access to nature would be a problem (expensive fake Earth hab dome, dangerous outdoor games, no unfiltered sunlight on your skin, etc.) Elon's ravings notwithstanding, what makes sense to me is extensive robotic exploration of Mars, perhaps operated by a skeleton crew of people who don't need quite the extensive training and qualifications of an astronaut. With enough exploring, experimenting and digging and we're likely to find something very exciting.
nrclark 4y ago
I feel like it doesn't make sense to colonize Mars while we have any unused land on this planet. The worst deserts on this rock still have gravity and oxygen, and they aren't a rocket trip away. If you'd have to recycle your water and raw materials anyways, why not do it someplace where a dome crack won't kill everybody?
- bckr 4y ago
  Interesting, I hadn't actually thought of this. I think we should go to space (in O'Neil cylinders), but I'm going to spend some time thinking about desert wasteland arcologies.
- XorNot 4y ago
  The worst deserts on Earth are still the sovereign territory of other governments, and if you do anything to make them not deserts there'll be a lot of people interested in the environmental impact or planning to come and take/ruin it. Mars is appealing partly because it'll be a long time before it's crowded enough for any of that to matter.
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  It makes sense from the point of acquiring the expertise to build and essentially building an outer world haven in case a global catastrophe takes place.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  If we stick around on Earth only, eventually something will wipe us out. Asteroids hit roughly every 60 million years (we are already overdue on this one), super-volcanoes can be much more frequent, ie once every million years. There are cosmic events that we have no clue about, ie some hypermassive gamma ray burst cone sterilizing Earth (and probably rest of solar system, but most probably not hitting nearby stars). Or we will just fuckup environment so much we will make it completely unlivable for higher life, ie runaway greenhouse effect. Even if mankind is quite resilient, our current society is super fragile to much smaller catastrophe, and we may actually loose the ability for inter-planetary travel easily. We really need to diversify our location. That's not the goal of this century, and probably not even the next one, but to have some skeleton seed of civilization elsewhere than here is a logical must, and Mars is easiest and closest one. So better start doing some baby steps towards that direction immediately when we can, rather than pour trillions into more than useless warfare. I used to think we should fix issues here on Earth before moving elsewhere, but the problem is, we won't. Its dangerously naive idea. Rather we should accept that mankind is flawed and accept and work with flaws, compared to wait for some utopia to happen here and then expand.
xtiansimon 4y ago
Hmm. I’ve mused about this before. Right now my thought is this: the Earth is like our home. Sounds, smells, gravity, light, and proximity to other living things is all familiar to our bodies. Put a human in the alien landscape of space (not to mention far away planets) and you may discover new (maddening) sensations. Like being heavily dosed on a narcotic cocktail. Disorientation. Detachment. Oh wait. That’s Burning Man. Haha
imtringued 4y ago
We have had people spend more time in space stations than it would take to go on a trip to mars. The biggest problem is that space radiation and hazardous dust are far more dangerous than psychology.

by samr71 4y ago

ncmncm 4y ago

Notwithstanding Musk's continuous lying about it, Starship would take nine months to get there, not six. Once there, of course, after a single trip around the hab can (can hab?), you would start counting days ... sols ... until you could go home. Presuming it would be possible and permitted. If not, sucks to be you. Mars is a frozen wasteland with nothing of enduring interest. The only export of any value conceivable would be excess Raptor engines taken off of landers, with their bells cut off.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
I wonder if they'd have some pseudo-restaurants in the habitation area, to help simulate some sense of normalcy. If they do, and if you then saw one of your fellow travelers eating an interesting-looking sandwich, and you wanted to find out what it was, you would have the rare perk of walking up and dropping a pun that's been decades in the making: "Can hab cheeseburger?"
notfish 4y ago
Nine months is the duration of a Hohmann transfer to mars, not necessarily the shortest possible for starship - since starship has ~6900 m/s delta v ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1151300180148252674 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1151300180148252674 ) and an earth-mars transfer only requires 3900m/s I think 6 months is well within the realm of plausible.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  There is no possibility of a lone can blasting out there, whatever the delta-V it could muster. You need, at least, two cans to swing at ends of a boom so your crew does not arrive unable to walk. You might want something attached at the axis, besides. That thing might do all the boosting, with the cans' Raptors used just to land with. ISRU fantasies notwithstanding, they need to carry enough fuel to blast off again, come time to go home. The cans get benefit of aerobraking on the way down. The mainframe will need to shed its excess velocity some other way. There's nothing else near enough by to swing around. It will need to have brought along enough fuel to boost home, besides. Maybe it used ion thrusters all the way out, and can use them to creep back to Mars in time to pick up the cans and head home. An alternative is that there is no mainframe, just the boom, and you re-fold and stow it before arrival. Somebody else would have boosted your cans out there, maybe a pair of Superheavys, so your cans won't have to arrive empty. I wonder if a Superheavy with no can stacked on could make it to orbit in one stage. Probably you would unship their engines on orbit, and install a couple of vacuum Raptors in their place before sending them careering out of the solar system.
bryananderson 4y ago
I don’t know the numbers for Starship specifically, but this is a matter of how much fuel you have available to burn, and six months has long been considered reasonable. For a free-return trajectory (end up back at Earth if you’re not willing or able to conduct a Mars entry burn), the minimum-energy trajectory takes 250 days (8.3 months) and requires 3.34 km/s delta-V. Getting it down to 180 days takes 5.08 km/s, so about 50% more delta-V (and fuel). Getting there faster is possible but starts to run into diminishing returns, especially because it makes aerobraking at Mars more and more difficult, requiring even more fuel for slowing down on arrival. These numbers are from Robert Zubrin’s “The Case for Mars” (1996) which assumed a six-month transit time would be the norm for human missions. Fantasies of moving to Mars to escape climate change are stupid—even under the best terraforming projections and the worst climate change projections, Earth will be several orders of magnitude more habitable for centuries at least. But the scientific return from a once-warm-and-wet world is more than enough reason to go. Someone like NASA’s Jessica Watkins, who did her dissertation on Martian geology at Caltech, certainly would not be counting down the sols.

bee_rider 4y ago

Whaling ships could spend years out in the ocean (although I guess they must have hit ports along the way). The main problem of Mars is that there's nothing on it. If you have a ship that can get you to Mars, you might as well stay on it: the view is better, you don't have to live like a mole person, and you aren't at the bottom of a giant gravity well. Go checkout some asteriods or something.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
safety1st 4y ago
I think for an average Martian Joe any type of outdoor recreation would be a rare thing. Rip your suit in this rugged rocky landscape and almost immediately you start to develop serious injuries, pass out and die. And what if you vomit? How do you pee? Cheaply protecting someone from radiation, near-vacuum, and below freezing temperatures while keeping them comfortable is way beyond our current level of tech. Most likely if we actually built a city of people on Mars, life would be similar to living on an earth city but with low-G and you never go outdoors. We'd replicate typical earth city attractions and add a low-G spin where it was appropriate. Access to nature would be a problem (expensive fake Earth hab dome, dangerous outdoor games, no unfiltered sunlight on your skin, etc.) Elon's ravings notwithstanding, what makes sense to me is extensive robotic exploration of Mars, perhaps operated by a skeleton crew of people who don't need quite the extensive training and qualifications of an astronaut. With enough exploring, experimenting and digging and we're likely to find something very exciting.

nrclark 4y ago

I feel like it doesn't make sense to colonize Mars while we have any unused land on this planet. The worst deserts on this rock still have gravity and oxygen, and they aren't a rocket trip away. If you'd have to recycle your water and raw materials anyways, why not do it someplace where a dome crack won't kill everybody?

bckr 4y ago
Interesting, I hadn't actually thought of this. I think we should go to space (in O'Neil cylinders), but I'm going to spend some time thinking about desert wasteland arcologies.
XorNot 4y ago
The worst deserts on Earth are still the sovereign territory of other governments, and if you do anything to make them not deserts there'll be a lot of people interested in the environmental impact or planning to come and take/ruin it. Mars is appealing partly because it'll be a long time before it's crowded enough for any of that to matter.
forgotpwd16 4y ago
It makes sense from the point of acquiring the expertise to build and essentially building an outer world haven in case a global catastrophe takes place.
saiya-jin 4y ago
If we stick around on Earth only, eventually something will wipe us out. Asteroids hit roughly every 60 million years (we are already overdue on this one), super-volcanoes can be much more frequent, ie once every million years. There are cosmic events that we have no clue about, ie some hypermassive gamma ray burst cone sterilizing Earth (and probably rest of solar system, but most probably not hitting nearby stars). Or we will just fuckup environment so much we will make it completely unlivable for higher life, ie runaway greenhouse effect. Even if mankind is quite resilient, our current society is super fragile to much smaller catastrophe, and we may actually loose the ability for inter-planetary travel easily. We really need to diversify our location. That's not the goal of this century, and probably not even the next one, but to have some skeleton seed of civilization elsewhere than here is a logical must, and Mars is easiest and closest one. So better start doing some baby steps towards that direction immediately when we can, rather than pour trillions into more than useless warfare. I used to think we should fix issues here on Earth before moving elsewhere, but the problem is, we won't. Its dangerously naive idea. Rather we should accept that mankind is flawed and accept and work with flaws, compared to wait for some utopia to happen here and then expand.

xtiansimon 4y ago

Hmm. I’ve mused about this before. Right now my thought is this: the Earth is like our home. Sounds, smells, gravity, light, and proximity to other living things is all familiar to our bodies. Put a human in the alien landscape of space (not to mention far away planets) and you may discover new (maddening) sensations. Like being heavily dosed on a narcotic cocktail. Disorientation. Detachment. Oh wait. That’s Burning Man. Haha

imtringued 4y ago

We have had people spend more time in space stations than it would take to go on a trip to mars. The biggest problem is that space radiation and hazardous dust are far more dangerous than psychology.