5 ms·

There's also that the whole plan of Starship colonizing Mars is wildly impractical and all the numbers Musk throws out don't work; the second you try to start f

by rtkwe 3y ago

There's also that the whole plan of Starship colonizing Mars is wildly impractical and all the numbers Musk throws out don't work; the second you try to start fitting the supposed 100 passengers in to Starship for example there's just not room even if you halve the NASA recommended space per person. Once you account for keeping them alive once they get there it makes the slave trade ships look luxurious. SpaceX is doing really neat stuff just dragged down by Elon's overhyping sales pitches.

generalizations 3y ago
Far as weight goes, wouldn't 1-2.5 tons of payload capacity per person be enough? And as far as volume is concerned, I'm pretty sure there's lots of ways to increase that dramatically while you're in space (e.g. inflatable habs). All you really have to do is figure out how to keep them comfortable until the starship is outside the atmosphere and whatever larger spaces have been constructed/inflated.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lmm 3y ago
  > Far as weight goes, wouldn't 1-2.5 tons of payload capacity per person be enough? IIRC you need 6 tonnes of food and oxygen just to keep them alive for the transit.
  - namibj 3y ago
    Solar-powered electrochemical synthesis of small energy source molecules like glucose or acetate might reduce that substantially. If you supply 80% of the energy demand that way, you'd easily half the "proper food" mass that you need to ship.
    - lmm 3y ago
      > Solar-powered electrochemical synthesis of small energy source molecules like glucose or acetate might reduce that substantially. Has that ever been done for human consumption before? Relying on a novel technology in a setup where, if it breaks, everyone on board dies, seems rather dubious.
    - rtkwe 3y ago
      That's not even being studied right now so give it 20-25 years before it's even considered as a long term diet. Also we have to keep them sane as well as simply alive and good food is a big part of long term mood maintenance. You're going to be asking people to eat this for at least 7 months if it's a 1 way trip and you have a working food system on the other side.
      - namibj 3y ago
        https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00530-x https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00530-x feeds nutritional algae, yeast, and a variety of mushrooms ( pearl oyster, blue oyster, elm oyster, coral tooth and enokitake), though the mushrooms were tested with a simulated (I assume this means petrochemically derived, purified, and reconstituted to match the real mixture) analog of the real electrochemical acetate feed, which they tested with the first two organisms. There were also experiments with "undifferentiated lettuce tissue", using C13-labeled acetate to investigate whether crop plants are able to properly feed off of acetate as their main food source, instead of photosynthesis-based small molecules. What I'm suggesting is, roughly, to replace the base starch and maybe (some amount of) base fat in a diet (think a typical Asian diet's rice, or wheat in (historic) European bread+beer[0] diets), so that the overwhelming amount of calories won't need to be supplied in advance. Yeah, that'd likely involve feeding some algae or so with the e.g. synthesized acetate, due to yielding nicer nutrition molecules than e.g. simple glucose, which would be comparatively feasible to synthesize without having to use a bio reactor. Worst case you'd have more sleep in place of productive work for energy conservation reasons, if you need to partially fall back on shipped food due to the food synthesis machines breaking. Recent space fairing history has shown that we can make machines very reliable, especially if they're pretty self-contained, not exposed to/operated in vacuum, and straight-forward to test on earth and in low earth orbit. The ISS crew is just too small to warrant as much of a kitchen facility as needed for incorporating something like "algae-based rice-substitute" or "mushrooms" into their meals, but if Starship works well enough to deploy an unmanned algae production machine for a few months (with solar panels and thermal radiators), before transferring the produce to the ISS to test zero-G food preparation... [0]: that beer was really low %ABV, and more comparable to eating bread with 1:1 watered-down beer to wash it down.
- usrusr 3y ago
  For an Apollo-grade flag selfie and back? I'd say 1-2.5 tons are plenty. Anything more than that, certainly not.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
brandonagr2 3y ago
Just imagine only sending 20 people instead of a theoretical 100 people in a single starship out of an armada of starships to mars. Would it even be worth the trip if we landed only 20 people per ship? That would make actually landing on mars such a failure
- imtringued 3y ago
  The problem is that you won't get to send twenty people either...
baq 3y ago
Yeah. Sending 3 is reasonable and would advance Mars science by 100x (10x the first day with a shovel) but dude rants about cities. Nice to have a vision, I guess? But maybe let’s try with 3 first.
- mjevans 3y ago
  Send a pile of good robots and tools there first. Build a lab. Run it with things that we hope are good enough, but don't value enough to get home (back to earth) safely. If we're really smart we can even use the whole thing to bootstrap a useful environment to get to and a far easier environment to get back from.
  - mjevans 3y ago
    It's been 12 hours, so rather than an edit to elaborate I'm adding a reply. I mean very different robots from the rovers we've sent to date. Maybe not even more complex robots but definitely bigger (and smaller too) robots. Their task not to survey with minimal disruption, but to actively disrupt. To build, to transform materials (lab), to create the base buildings and infrastructure of civilization. So there's somewhere with resources to better support humans.
- cnlevy 3y ago
  Until now, rockets have been produced "by hand", one by one. And you get handcrafted prices for rockets. To lower pricing, and revolutionize space travel, you need a production line of rockets. What will you do with 100s of rockets of this factory ? Also, you need a vison to advance things. Millions of electric cars ? 10 years ago it would have been a joke
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > Millions of electric cars ? 10 years ago it would have been a joke Viable electric cars were a thing even way back in the late 19th century [1]. The problem was that burning oil was cheaper (as the users had to pay none of the externalities for decades), and so it lost out for a good while despite being more efficient (i.e. energy contained in the fuel vs distance driven) on paper. On top of that came the massive, decades-long lobbying efforts of the fossil fuel industry to get rid of public transit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle#First_full-scale_electric_cars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...
a257 3y ago
I love the idea of humanity expanding out into the cosmos, it feels like space exploration is "the Future." But I can't see how SpaceX's Mars colonization plan makes economic sense in the current day. No matter what technical advances they come up with in getting people to Mars, it doesn't change the fact that it is an inhospitable planet. What unique resources are on Mars that makes it more profitable than say, colonizing the Sahara desert?
- kubanczyk 3y ago
  People can do both. And more.

by rtkwe 3y ago

generalizations 3y ago

Far as weight goes, wouldn't 1-2.5 tons of payload capacity per person be enough? And as far as volume is concerned, I'm pretty sure there's lots of ways to increase that dramatically while you're in space (e.g. inflatable habs). All you really have to do is figure out how to keep them comfortable until the starship is outside the atmosphere and whatever larger spaces have been constructed/inflated.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lmm 3y ago
> Far as weight goes, wouldn't 1-2.5 tons of payload capacity per person be enough? IIRC you need 6 tonnes of food and oxygen just to keep them alive for the transit.
- namibj 3y ago
  Solar-powered electrochemical synthesis of small energy source molecules like glucose or acetate might reduce that substantially. If you supply 80% of the energy demand that way, you'd easily half the "proper food" mass that you need to ship.
  - lmm 3y ago
    > Solar-powered electrochemical synthesis of small energy source molecules like glucose or acetate might reduce that substantially. Has that ever been done for human consumption before? Relying on a novel technology in a setup where, if it breaks, everyone on board dies, seems rather dubious.
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    That's not even being studied right now so give it 20-25 years before it's even considered as a long term diet. Also we have to keep them sane as well as simply alive and good food is a big part of long term mood maintenance. You're going to be asking people to eat this for at least 7 months if it's a 1 way trip and you have a working food system on the other side.
    - namibj 3y ago
      https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00530-x https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00530-x feeds nutritional algae, yeast, and a variety of mushrooms ( pearl oyster, blue oyster, elm oyster, coral tooth and enokitake), though the mushrooms were tested with a simulated (I assume this means petrochemically derived, purified, and reconstituted to match the real mixture) analog of the real electrochemical acetate feed, which they tested with the first two organisms. There were also experiments with "undifferentiated lettuce tissue", using C13-labeled acetate to investigate whether crop plants are able to properly feed off of acetate as their main food source, instead of photosynthesis-based small molecules. What I'm suggesting is, roughly, to replace the base starch and maybe (some amount of) base fat in a diet (think a typical Asian diet's rice, or wheat in (historic) European bread+beer[0] diets), so that the overwhelming amount of calories won't need to be supplied in advance. Yeah, that'd likely involve feeding some algae or so with the e.g. synthesized acetate, due to yielding nicer nutrition molecules than e.g. simple glucose, which would be comparatively feasible to synthesize without having to use a bio reactor. Worst case you'd have more sleep in place of productive work for energy conservation reasons, if you need to partially fall back on shipped food due to the food synthesis machines breaking. Recent space fairing history has shown that we can make machines very reliable, especially if they're pretty self-contained, not exposed to/operated in vacuum, and straight-forward to test on earth and in low earth orbit. The ISS crew is just too small to warrant as much of a kitchen facility as needed for incorporating something like "algae-based rice-substitute" or "mushrooms" into their meals, but if Starship works well enough to deploy an unmanned algae production machine for a few months (with solar panels and thermal radiators), before transferring the produce to the ISS to test zero-G food preparation... [0]: that beer was really low %ABV, and more comparable to eating bread with 1:1 watered-down beer to wash it down.
usrusr 3y ago
For an Apollo-grade flag selfie and back? I'd say 1-2.5 tons are plenty. Anything more than that, certainly not.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

brandonagr2 3y ago

Just imagine only sending 20 people instead of a theoretical 100 people in a single starship out of an armada of starships to mars. Would it even be worth the trip if we landed only 20 people per ship? That would make actually landing on mars such a failure

imtringued 3y ago
The problem is that you won't get to send twenty people either...

baq 3y ago

Yeah. Sending 3 is reasonable and would advance Mars science by 100x (10x the first day with a shovel) but dude rants about cities. Nice to have a vision, I guess? But maybe let’s try with 3 first.

mjevans 3y ago
Send a pile of good robots and tools there first. Build a lab. Run it with things that we hope are good enough, but don't value enough to get home (back to earth) safely. If we're really smart we can even use the whole thing to bootstrap a useful environment to get to and a far easier environment to get back from.
- mjevans 3y ago
  It's been 12 hours, so rather than an edit to elaborate I'm adding a reply. I mean very different robots from the rovers we've sent to date. Maybe not even more complex robots but definitely bigger (and smaller too) robots. Their task not to survey with minimal disruption, but to actively disrupt. To build, to transform materials (lab), to create the base buildings and infrastructure of civilization. So there's somewhere with resources to better support humans.
cnlevy 3y ago
Until now, rockets have been produced "by hand", one by one. And you get handcrafted prices for rockets. To lower pricing, and revolutionize space travel, you need a production line of rockets. What will you do with 100s of rockets of this factory ? Also, you need a vison to advance things. Millions of electric cars ? 10 years ago it would have been a joke
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Millions of electric cars ? 10 years ago it would have been a joke Viable electric cars were a thing even way back in the late 19th century [1]. The problem was that burning oil was cheaper (as the users had to pay none of the externalities for decades), and so it lost out for a good while despite being more efficient (i.e. energy contained in the fuel vs distance driven) on paper. On top of that came the massive, decades-long lobbying efforts of the fossil fuel industry to get rid of public transit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle#First_full-scale_electric_cars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...

a257 3y ago

I love the idea of humanity expanding out into the cosmos, it feels like space exploration is "the Future." But I can't see how SpaceX's Mars colonization plan makes economic sense in the current day. No matter what technical advances they come up with in getting people to Mars, it doesn't change the fact that it is an inhospitable planet. What unique resources are on Mars that makes it more profitable than say, colonizing the Sahara desert?

kubanczyk 3y ago
People can do both. And more.