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> if you have aluminium Where are you going to get that, or any other raw material? Robot miners? We don't have those on Earth yet. How do you purify it?

> if you have aluminium Where are you going to get that, or any other raw material? Robot miners? We don't have those on Earth yet. How do you purify it? All our chemical processes require huge quantities of free air, and of very cheap water, neither of which you have on Mars. Where do you get the power for all of this? Solar panels don't behave well during sandstorms, the sun isn't very bright there, and how many solar panels can we really fly to Mars? It's a pipe dream. We will destroy our ecosystem long before we manufacture even one thing on Mars.

ben_w 4y ago
> Where are you going to get that, or any other raw material? Bootstrap with whatever the initial mission payload is. It's not like anyone is proposing magically teleporting there without stuff, IIRC even Musk's optimistic idea is still several no-humans flights for each passenger flight. > Robot miners? We don't have those on Earth yet. Sure we do. TBMs. Not all of which are manned. A few of the missions on Mars right now are taking rock samples with drills. (Honestly, I'm mainly thinking of the moon, but Mars has moons too. No idea if any of Mars, Demios, or Phobos have significant easy access to aluminium oxides). > Where do you get the power for all of this? Solar panels don't behave well during sandstorms, the sun isn't very bright there, and how many solar panels can we really fly to Mars? Sure, PV. They do suffer as you say, but that's not a critical failure when bootstrapping a colony or whatever, especially when you're in the "robotic labor only" phase that (a) is a prerequisite and (b) Optimus Prime or whatever random pop culture reference Musk named that middling demo after. While I don't have any reason to actually trust Musk's "million people" number as anything more than a nice round number, at that kind of scale you necessarily have a lot of PV. Like, "tens of square km" is the minimum baseline. How much is made locally vs sent by Starship depends what can be made locally vs. what can't. Plus, a Mars colony is one of the few situations where orbital solar via microwave isn't obviously worse than "a big wire to the other side of the planet". As Starship has ~100T payload, and this PV is 120 W from 5.2g, given 50% reduction in sunlight relative to Earth, even if all the semiconductors have to be shipped from Earth, it's only a few flights out of what you need just to get the people, never mind the other bootstrap equipment you also want: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ultrathin-solar-cells-for-lightweight-and-flexible-applications- https://spectrum.ieee.org/ultrathin-solar-cells-for-lightwei...
- giantrobot 4y ago
  > Sure we do. TBMs. Not all of which are manned. To ignore the massive difference in scope and scale between a space probe with a tiny rock drill and a tunnel boring machine, TBMs require literal tons of lubricants/coolant to operate. Even if you had a 100% electric TBM none of its parts are going to move without lubrication. Even "unmanned" TBMs aren't fully autonomous, they have a small army of squishy people in hard hats adjusting fasteners, checking feed lines, repairing damage, and generally maintaining the machine. TBMs also going to be orders of magnitude more difficult to build for use on the Moon or Mars. They're incredibly dry environments, dryer than most places on the surface of the Earth. The dust is electrostatically charged and literally creeps along surfaces into seams and seals. The dust is also incredibly abrasive. Machinery does not like dust, machinery will hate Lunar and Martian dust. In actual operation machinery does not look showroom pristine. It gets dirty and needs to be bathed in lubricants and coolants. Dust, dirt, and shavings get everywhere except in the cleanest of cleanroom environments and those take tons of effort to maintain. Everything around you was manufactured with a very long tail of infrastructure. You can't just build a PV factory on Mars. You need to first build the infrastructure to build infrastructure before you can lay the first 3D printed brick for a factory. Even if you've got that infrastructure and factory you need a whole supply chain of refined materials to feed the factory to get solar panels. It's not a handful of unmanned Starship missions, it's a hundred missions with no failures landing billions of dollars of basic infrastructure just to start building more infrastructure. The whole endeavor also needs to use technology like autonomous robotic mining rigs and autonomous mining rig support robots that don't even exist on Earth. I honestly don't understand trivializing the amount of infrastructure and complexity required to manufacturer things here on Earth let alone anywhere else in the solar system.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    > You need to first build the infrastructure to build infrastructure before you can lay the first 3D printed brick for a factory While I disagree with the specific claim here (bricks are easy mode, sand sintered with a fresnel lens brought from Earth), for the general point you're otherwise making: Yes, and? Depending on which bit you're pointing at, "a few" was just for the PV for everyone, or just per manned flight. For the "million colonists" (again, no idea if that's a well thought out number) that's thousands to tens of thousands of manned flights, and 3000 to 50000 unmanned flights each with about 100 tons of payload depending on which random early stage wild guess you use to calculate from. 5 million tons of stuff from Earth may or may not be enough to bootstrap, I wouldn't know. (Does anyone?) But your specific criticisms… don't feel like they're aware of the scale Musk is aiming for. On a separate point: I have read of both liquid CO2 and graphite (which can obviously be made from that) being used as lubricants, but I'm emphatically not suggesting they're drop-in replacements. Obviously one would have to design mining equipment specially to use them, likewise for thermal issues. Given who owns The Boring Company, this is probably already being researched.

ben_w 4y ago

> Where are you going to get that, or any other raw material? Bootstrap with whatever the initial mission payload is. It's not like anyone is proposing magically teleporting there without stuff, IIRC even Musk's optimistic idea is still several no-humans flights for each passenger flight. > Robot miners? We don't have those on Earth yet. Sure we do. TBMs. Not all of which are manned. A few of the missions on Mars right now are taking rock samples with drills. (Honestly, I'm mainly thinking of the moon, but Mars has moons too. No idea if any of Mars, Demios, or Phobos have significant easy access to aluminium oxides). > Where do you get the power for all of this? Solar panels don't behave well during sandstorms, the sun isn't very bright there, and how many solar panels can we really fly to Mars? Sure, PV. They do suffer as you say, but that's not a critical failure when bootstrapping a colony or whatever, especially when you're in the "robotic labor only" phase that (a) is a prerequisite and (b) Optimus Prime or whatever random pop culture reference Musk named that middling demo after. While I don't have any reason to actually trust Musk's "million people" number as anything more than a nice round number, at that kind of scale you necessarily have a lot of PV. Like, "tens of square km" is the minimum baseline. How much is made locally vs sent by Starship depends what can be made locally vs. what can't. Plus, a Mars colony is one of the few situations where orbital solar via microwave isn't obviously worse than "a big wire to the other side of the planet". As Starship has ~100T payload, and this PV is 120 W from 5.2g, given 50% reduction in sunlight relative to Earth, even if all the semiconductors have to be shipped from Earth, it's only a few flights out of what you need just to get the people, never mind the other bootstrap equipment you also want: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ultrathin-solar-cells-for-lightweight-and-flexible-applications- https://spectrum.ieee.org/ultrathin-solar-cells-for-lightwei...

giantrobot 4y ago
> Sure we do. TBMs. Not all of which are manned. To ignore the massive difference in scope and scale between a space probe with a tiny rock drill and a tunnel boring machine, TBMs require literal tons of lubricants/coolant to operate. Even if you had a 100% electric TBM none of its parts are going to move without lubrication. Even "unmanned" TBMs aren't fully autonomous, they have a small army of squishy people in hard hats adjusting fasteners, checking feed lines, repairing damage, and generally maintaining the machine. TBMs also going to be orders of magnitude more difficult to build for use on the Moon or Mars. They're incredibly dry environments, dryer than most places on the surface of the Earth. The dust is electrostatically charged and literally creeps along surfaces into seams and seals. The dust is also incredibly abrasive. Machinery does not like dust, machinery will hate Lunar and Martian dust. In actual operation machinery does not look showroom pristine. It gets dirty and needs to be bathed in lubricants and coolants. Dust, dirt, and shavings get everywhere except in the cleanest of cleanroom environments and those take tons of effort to maintain. Everything around you was manufactured with a very long tail of infrastructure. You can't just build a PV factory on Mars. You need to first build the infrastructure to build infrastructure before you can lay the first 3D printed brick for a factory. Even if you've got that infrastructure and factory you need a whole supply chain of refined materials to feed the factory to get solar panels. It's not a handful of unmanned Starship missions, it's a hundred missions with no failures landing billions of dollars of basic infrastructure just to start building more infrastructure. The whole endeavor also needs to use technology like autonomous robotic mining rigs and autonomous mining rig support robots that don't even exist on Earth. I honestly don't understand trivializing the amount of infrastructure and complexity required to manufacturer things here on Earth let alone anywhere else in the solar system.
- ben_w 4y ago
  > You need to first build the infrastructure to build infrastructure before you can lay the first 3D printed brick for a factory While I disagree with the specific claim here (bricks are easy mode, sand sintered with a fresnel lens brought from Earth), for the general point you're otherwise making: Yes, and? Depending on which bit you're pointing at, "a few" was just for the PV for everyone, or just per manned flight. For the "million colonists" (again, no idea if that's a well thought out number) that's thousands to tens of thousands of manned flights, and 3000 to 50000 unmanned flights each with about 100 tons of payload depending on which random early stage wild guess you use to calculate from. 5 million tons of stuff from Earth may or may not be enough to bootstrap, I wouldn't know. (Does anyone?) But your specific criticisms… don't feel like they're aware of the scale Musk is aiming for. On a separate point: I have read of both liquid CO2 and graphite (which can obviously be made from that) being used as lubricants, but I'm emphatically not suggesting they're drop-in replacements. Obviously one would have to design mining equipment specially to use them, likewise for thermal issues. Given who owns The Boring Company, this is probably already being researched.