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> What would be the goals of the mission? Showing that's it's possible right now within reasonable budget. That's the fundamental difference in logic here. T

> What would be the goals of the mission? Showing that's it's possible right now within reasonable budget. That's the fundamental difference in logic here. The goal is to get people to Mars as soon as possible. Not to delay it for as long as possible. > Exactly - hence why humans shouldn't be going to Mars until we have studied the hell out of any possible local life and become convinced we have learned all we can on the subject. This is never going to happen. Even on Earth people are not 100% convinced that "shadow biosphere" doesn't exists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_biosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_biosphere > It's far less likely that it's possible to reach the level of cheapness you talk about at all Starship HLS right now is being build with aim at 100 metric tonnes to the Moon vs. NASA requirement of 2 metric tonnes. Starship HLS allows to take 50x spares of everything NASA thought would be required for the Moon landing. And it's costing NASA as much as gross earning of the Avatar movie - $2.9B.

tsimionescu 4y ago
> The goal is to get people to Mars as soon as possible. Not to delay it for as long as possible. To what end? We could send a few suicidal people to Mars today for little more than the cost of a satellite launch if we don't care about their survival - hell, they don't even have to be suicidal, get some people who recently died, strap them in a rocket, and send them to Mars. Instead, you have to set an actual short term and longer term mission goal - say, you want a mission that can prove that X people can survive for Y months on Mars without external help, with a longer term goal of hauling them back to Earth at the next launch window or something. But for this type of mission, you actually need extremely sane people who greatly value their lives and those of their colleagues, otherwise you'll just have a few corpses sitting on Mars like in my initial example. And more importantly, again, given current technologies, the actual result of the experiment is already known: those people will simply die if sent to Mars with currently known life preservation methods. > This is never going to happen. Even on Earth people are not 100% convinced that "shadow biosphere" doesn't exists. Then never send people to Mars - at least not until we have a very clear path to actually establishing a self-sufficient colon on Mars, for which there is plenty of research that can be done on Earth (and in LEO). > Starship HLS right now is being build with aim at 100 metric tonnes to the Moon vs. NASA requirement of 2 metric tonnes. Let's see it fly and let's see the total budget before such hopeful conclusions. Let's also see it actually successfully do orbital refueling, which would be a prerequisite for even getting to the moon with the proposed design, not to mention Mars. And even if Starship achieves all of its goals, it will be nowhere near the ability to send resources to Mars outside the existing launch windows in anything approaching economic efficiency.
- Isinlor 4y ago
  You are arguing against strawman. I'm telling you that there is willingness to accept as high risk as it is necessary. Not that we should be aiming at sending suicide squads to Mars. > for which there is plenty of research that can be done on Earth (and in LEO). Everybody is welcomed to do the research on Earth. And Starship will make LEO based research some 100x cheaper. $100B for ISS vs. ~$1B for Starship in a pessimistic scenario. ISS and Starship have similar usable internal volume. > Let's also see it actually successfully do orbital refueling, which would be a prerequisite for even getting to the moon with the proposed design, not to mention Mars. Exactly. Working hardware silences detractors better than anything. SpaceX won that contract including all the legal challenges a bit over a year ago. Give them some time. > Let's see it fly and let's see the total budget before such hopeful conclusions. It's a fixed cost contract, not cost+ like SLS which BTW costs NASA 4 billions per launch all things considered according to their own estimates.

tsimionescu 4y ago

> The goal is to get people to Mars as soon as possible. Not to delay it for as long as possible. To what end? We could send a few suicidal people to Mars today for little more than the cost of a satellite launch if we don't care about their survival - hell, they don't even have to be suicidal, get some people who recently died, strap them in a rocket, and send them to Mars. Instead, you have to set an actual short term and longer term mission goal - say, you want a mission that can prove that X people can survive for Y months on Mars without external help, with a longer term goal of hauling them back to Earth at the next launch window or something. But for this type of mission, you actually need extremely sane people who greatly value their lives and those of their colleagues, otherwise you'll just have a few corpses sitting on Mars like in my initial example. And more importantly, again, given current technologies, the actual result of the experiment is already known: those people will simply die if sent to Mars with currently known life preservation methods. > This is never going to happen. Even on Earth people are not 100% convinced that "shadow biosphere" doesn't exists. Then never send people to Mars - at least not until we have a very clear path to actually establishing a self-sufficient colon on Mars, for which there is plenty of research that can be done on Earth (and in LEO). > Starship HLS right now is being build with aim at 100 metric tonnes to the Moon vs. NASA requirement of 2 metric tonnes. Let's see it fly and let's see the total budget before such hopeful conclusions. Let's also see it actually successfully do orbital refueling, which would be a prerequisite for even getting to the moon with the proposed design, not to mention Mars. And even if Starship achieves all of its goals, it will be nowhere near the ability to send resources to Mars outside the existing launch windows in anything approaching economic efficiency.

Isinlor 4y ago
You are arguing against strawman. I'm telling you that there is willingness to accept as high risk as it is necessary. Not that we should be aiming at sending suicide squads to Mars. > for which there is plenty of research that can be done on Earth (and in LEO). Everybody is welcomed to do the research on Earth. And Starship will make LEO based research some 100x cheaper. $100B for ISS vs. ~$1B for Starship in a pessimistic scenario. ISS and Starship have similar usable internal volume. > Let's also see it actually successfully do orbital refueling, which would be a prerequisite for even getting to the moon with the proposed design, not to mention Mars. Exactly. Working hardware silences detractors better than anything. SpaceX won that contract including all the legal challenges a bit over a year ago. Give them some time. > Let's see it fly and let's see the total budget before such hopeful conclusions. It's a fixed cost contract, not cost+ like SLS which BTW costs NASA 4 billions per launch all things considered according to their own estimates.