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I am one of the people skeptical about Elon’s specific claims of Starships abilities specifically about his Mars ambitions. Today’s test, if the Starship reentr

I am one of the people skeptical about Elon’s specific claims of Starships abilities specifically about his Mars ambitions. Today’s test, if the Starship reentry is as successful as the booster soft landing will be absolutely a great achievement and a 100% mission success. This demonstration keeps SpaceX on schedule for their part of the Artemis 3 mission. Keeping the mission parameters simpler (no “refueuling” or door bay demonstrations as far as I am aware, just orbital insert and reentry) definitely shows they are capable of the basic ideas of how they want Starship to work, especially for Starlink missions. The team should be proud.

me_me_me 2y ago
Anything Mars is pure BS. Just anything and everything. The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon. Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial. Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
- zpeti 2y ago
  > Landing and then what you plan a flag and die? Pretty much, why do you think columbus set off? And he didn't even know if he'd actually find anything. I don't understand your attitude and people like you, human beings have been explorers forever, and seem to value exploring even over survival potentially. I'd say it's pretty obviously evolutionarily coded into us. Maybe not you, but into many people.
  - simiones 2y ago
    Columbus very very much didn't plan to die (though he very much would have if he didn't get lucky that there was a whole new continent there). His plan was to land in India, which he thought he would reach around the time he actually reached the new continent, because he had a completely wrong idea of how large the globe actually was (he alone had this wrong idea; the actual circumference of the globe was pretty well understood by this point). In general, human-based space exploration makes 0 sense. We have robots that can do everything a human in a life-support suit can, and don't need to carry 100 times their mass just to not day on the way there and back. Doing a few experiments with humans in space, like we do on the ISS, is indeed worth it for exploring the unknown unknowns of biology. Maybe some day, far in the future after we have explored Mars with many hundreds of robots, it will even make sense to send a human there. But until then, it's just a waste of everything.
    - zpeti 2y ago
      Ok great, you’re definitely right, let’s not do it. What now? Will Elon stop? If Elon doesn’t stop, does that make you right?
      - simiones 2y ago
        I'm not saying it's impossible to send people to Mars and even bring them back. I'm saying there is no point whatsoever right now, at least no material or scientific purpose. Of course, building a "city" on Mars is well beyond our capabilities, so that will either not be attempted at all, or it will fail. Maybe by 2124, but more likely 2524.
        avmich 2y ago
        > I'm saying there is no point whatsoever right now, at least no material or scientific purpose. "No point" here means "no reasonable goal". In this case reasonability is subjective - somebody sees obvious reasons why Mars colony could be useful for humanity, somebody doesn't. Pro arguments are science, learning how to live off another planet, certain insurance against planet-wide cataclysms, general progress in space engineering. There are contra arguments as well, but which are more important is also subjective - we don't have hard data or commonly accepted facts which would solve this arguments one way or another, so, to some, it's natural to investigate the matter further...
        fwip 2y ago
        It's difficult to imagine any cataclysm that would result in the Earth being less habitable (even for us squishy humans) than Mars already is.
        avmich 2y ago
        It's really a matter of imagination :) . I learned about the existence of the Institute of the Problems of Asteroid Hazards long time ago, which suggested to me it's not a black-and-white type of question.
  - Ajay-p 2y ago
    I think it is the indelible human nature, to go the furthest we can because it's there. At first I didn't agree with going to Mars, but if you think of it as the furthest place we know we can land on, and explore, then it makes sense. If we can safely land, and return from Mars, then it makes going even further a possibility.
    - throw310822 2y ago
      Yes indeed. But still, nobody is building residential neighborhoods on the top of the Everest or in the middle of Antarctica. Exploring for the sake of it is indeed a human instinct. The idea that we should build settlements for people who would live there permanently is plain silly. We have the obsession of repeating the Age of Discovery- but people should get the difference between discovering the Americas, with their wealth of plants, animals, land and waters, and settling a planet where there isn't a sign of life, not even air to breathe.
      - fwip 2y ago
        And peoples.
      - aperrien 2y ago
        > But still, nobody is building residential neighborhoods on the top of the Everest or in the middle of Antarctica Nobody is permitted to build permanent habitats in either of those areas, even though they might be feasible.
  - me_me_me 2y ago
    > Pretty much, why do you think columbus set off? And he didn't even know if he'd actually find anything. hahahah Columbus set of because he wanted money, wealth for the crown. not because he was explorer. Columbus, Vasco Da Gama, Cortez et al were not dreamers but entrepreneurs. >> Landing and then what you plan a flag and die? Nobody (within reasonable definition of nobody) wants to go to Everest to die on top. Nobody wants to dive to Marianas trench to get crush to death. Who would go to Mars without a way back?
    - trafficante 2y ago
      >> Who would go to Mars without a way back? For a reasonable chance of being forever immortalized as one of the first humans to step foot on another planet? Granted, I myself will never get the opportunity so it’s easy for me to say “oh hell yes I’d sign up in a heartbeat”.
  - rtkwe 2y ago
    You're misremember the actual history of Columbus which makes sense it's been mistaught and mythologized for a very long time. Columbus thought he would reach Asia, both because there were reports from Marco Polo that Asia was much larger than it turned out to be and some mistakes about the size of the Earth. He didn't think he was sailing off into nothingness hoping to find land, he was hoping to find a better trade route to Asia than going around the Horn of Africa or overland.
- thegrim33 2y ago
  "Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial." It's pretty trivial. Put mass in between you and space. It's already been researched to death and we have many years worth of data about the subject.
  - malfist 2y ago
    It's trivial in the sense that telling people trying to lose weight to just eat fewer calories is trivial. Simple idea, hard to execute.
  - me_me_me 2y ago
    > It's pretty trivial. Put mass in between you and space. Seems like you quite confident. So go on. Expand on that a bit... its trivial after all. You will teleport all that mass to ELO? Or use tracker beam to capture asteroid and space mine it to smelt shielding. I am super curious how you solve it trivially. edit: You downvote but dont explain this trivial solution. Am I asking too much? Calling someone out to explain something is offensive or something?
    - phkahler 2y ago
      We've had people in space for close to a year, so the trip to Mars shouldn't kill them. Once on mars they'll still need shielding. One option for shelter might be to bore some underground tunnels. A smallish electric tunnel boring machine that could fit in a starship might just be the ticket to building sheltered habitats on Mars. Funny that Elon already has another company that makes these.
      - rtkwe 2y ago
        The ISS is situated safely deep inside the Earth's magnetic sheath which protects you from a lot of high energy radiation though. You can use mass for shielding but you also desperately need that mass for cargo too and most cargo isn't going to be as dense as water which makes good shielding. The ISS has some fancier lightweight shielding but has issues with secondary radiation from particles hitting the metal skin of the modules which we'd expect to see on Starship too but higher since it'd be in interplanetary space instead of nicely close to Earth like the ISS.
- indoordin0saur 2y ago
  Ramsar, Iran has similar levels of background radiation as being on the surface of Mars. And people live completely healthy long lives there. Chronic low-level radiation isn't nearly as bad as we once thought. It's acute high-level doses or consuming radioactive substances that you really need to worry about. Mars really won't be bad at all with some easily implemented mitigation measures.
  - hackernudes 2y ago
    The commenter is talking about the 6 month trip to Mars in space, not on the surface.
    - indoordin0saur 2y ago
      On that, if you orient the ship so that the rear is pointed directly at the sun (trivial to do once you're coasting) you'll have a hundred feet of liquid fuel and other solid material which will block the primary source of radiation (the sun).
      - matthewpick 2y ago
        I too, read Project Hail Mary (great book btw).
      - backwardsmoo 2y ago
        I was always led to believe that the primary source of radiation we need to worry about for space travel was Cosmic Radiation [1]. The shielding requirements for CR relative to solar radiation requires much more material, to protect from rays from every angle. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/missions/analog-field-testing/why-space-radiation-matters/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/analog-field-testing/why-space...
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      It's not that different between the two; Mars lacks a magnetosphere, so the planet itself is left to block about half of what'd hit you in interplanetary space.
- basil-rash 2y ago
  If it’s a one way trip, the cancer might end up being a blessing.
- mlindner 2y ago
  > Anything Mars is pure BS. Just anything and everything. It is until it suddenly isn't. Just because it's very far out still and any timelines mentioned are wrong, doesn't make it 'pure BS'. It very much has been the goal of SpaceX from the day it was founded to encourage human travel to Mars, and we're getting closer every day.
- askvictor 2y ago
  Even landing will be a huge problem. Think about the difficulties with the launch pad on Earth (engineering a launch pad for a heavy rocket is almost as hard as engineering the rocket itself). Well, to land a heavy rocket using retrofiring engines will require an engineered landing pad. Probably not quite as fancy as a launch pad, but you've got humans on the ship, so it will need to not bury itself completely, or melt the surface and weld itself to it, etc etc. And that's before you start to think about a launch pad for the return mission. So you'd probably need to have launch a series of robots and factories to build this in advance. Maybe, but we haven't even come close to robots building something of that magnitude on Earth, let alone a planet that's quite different. So, never say never, but it's a _long_ while off yet; long enough that social upheaval due to climate change will probably put a pause on any efforts for quite some time.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Maybe next time you could do some research before making a bunch of claims. > The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon. From an energy perspective its not that much more complex. And from a living perspective, yes it is an order of magnitude, but guess what, the ship is also an order of magnitude bigger. Meaning that for a small crew you have enough space for training rooms, labs, living quarters and medical facilities and so on. > Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial. That's mostly wrong. The cosmic radiation isn't much of a problem. The only issue is the solar radiation. And solar radiation is very low most of the time. That can be measured and if its detected, the crew can go into a radiation shelter for a while. But its not like if they are exposed to solar radiation for a few minutes, they will grow cancers instantly. > Landing and then what you plan a flag and die? No. the plan is to send robotic ships first to deploy infrastructure. The atmosphere has useful stuff in it. And then you need to get water from the ice. With water and the atmosphere you can make rocket fuel and other useful materials, such as drinking water, plastics and so on. Of course that requires development of methods to gather water and of course development of chemical or biological reactors to transform the material. We are pretty sure we can build that stuff technically speaking. The other big issue is energy to run these processes. We either need a shit ton of solar or a deploy-able nuclear reactors. Then you wait until the earth comes back around and fly back. And hopefully other people are arriving again. So you can continuously have an occupied base that you are building up over time. The whole point of what SpaceX is trying to build is a railroad to Mars. The opposite of flags and footprints.
  - me_me_me 2y ago
    I am reading this and I can't believe it. Was this written by chatgtp? > From an energy perspective its not that much more complex. As in what exactly? Its not much more complex because you have to 'burn to moon' and 'burn to mars' which is pretty much the same because you need energy to do both?? Here, have a look at required deltaV. https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of_the_solar_system/#lightbox https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of... how is this 'From an energy perspective its not that much more complex.'? >And from a living perspective, yes it is an order of magnitude, but guess what, the ship is also an order of magnitude bigger. Meaning that for a small crew you have enough space for training rooms, labs, living quarters and medical facilities and so on. What ship?!? Labs, medical facilities wtf r u smoking. https://www.humanmars.net/2021/01/cutaway-schematic-of-spacex-starship.html https://www.humanmars.net/2021/01/cutaway-schematic-of-space... here is spaceX graphics? Are you talking about facilities for an ant farm? And why dont you mention how many fueling launches you need to go to the moon in an essentially 'space liferaft' vs an actual spaceship needed to get to mars?? hm? > No. the plan is to send robotic ships first to deploy infrastructure. The atmosphere has useful stuff in it. And then you need to get water from the ice. With water and the atmosphere you can make rocket fuel and other useful materials, such as drinking water, plastics and so on. How? Just how is that infrastructure going to get there deploy itself and... it boggles my mind how you handwave the solutions to colonising a fucking planet. Sure mate, you played minecraft and all you need is a crafting table on mars and whabang infrastructure poof icewater mining and puryfing faclities "shazam* and your farm is ready! So easy, who thought. > The whole point of what SpaceX is trying to build is a railroad to Mars. The opposite of flags and footprints. Who is going to pay for all of it, and why would you do it in a first place? Cuz you are not setting up a colony, you are setting up the most expensive treehouse.
panick21_ 2y ago
I mean of course Mars colonization is crazy. Being skeptical is reasonable, even Musk himself is skeptical and gives it a low chance of success. But we know for sure we will not get there if we don't try. That the ship in principle is capable of landing on Mars doesn't seem that crazy. They are designing with that in mind from the beginning. Again, that's difficult but very possible with current technology. The more difficult problem would get to get the energy on Mars and the necessary water to do the chemical processing. But all of that of course is only even worth really investing in fully if you can get some significant payloads to the surface.
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  I still think: Starship Moon Base Orion Pulse Nuclear ships launched from the Moon Mars Base Is the winning formula, because the Orion payloads are so huge and the transit time so greatly reduced.
  - proaralyst 2y ago
    I strongly suspect the chances of Orion-style propulsion happening are close to zero. I think we're much more likely to see fission engines (where the heat from a conventional fission reactor is used to superheat water, which then goes through a conventional nozzle), or something a little more exotic like pulsed fusion (where little capsules of lithium containing deuterium go through a magnetic pinch and fuse, again in a more-or-less conventional nozzle) are more likely. They also have very high ISP but with much lower abuse risks (can you see any government agreeing to have a giant stockpile of nukes in space?)
    - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
      You are probably correct, but it still remains that fuel exists in stockpiles and it isn't a particularly complicated spaceship design for the phenomenal payload and "extremely high performance". One starship trip could probably transport enough "fuel" for a midsize orion trip to mars and back (I haven't run the numbers, but 150 tons of fissile nuclear fuel is pretty effing compact. The "Super Orion" 8 million ton ship uses 3,000ton bombs.... but most of the bomb is the inert propellant that can probably be obtain from regolith. And the Moon could probably have a nuclear launch cannon pretty easily to reduce the payload or initial acceleration. Politically it sounds dangerous putting nuke bombs on the moon, but frankly it is safer having them there than on Earth. You know, as long as a mass driver catapult doesn't send them back .... Oh, but to your point, one of my ideas for Starship is to design an antimatter catcher from the solar wind: https://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/1107Jackson.pdf https://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/1107Jac... So you could probably do the antimatter catalyzed drives a lot more feasibly in space, but its still a lot more complicated than dumb bombs on pusher plates.

me_me_me 2y ago

Anything Mars is pure BS. Just anything and everything. The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon. Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial. Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?

zpeti 2y ago
> Landing and then what you plan a flag and die? Pretty much, why do you think columbus set off? And he didn't even know if he'd actually find anything. I don't understand your attitude and people like you, human beings have been explorers forever, and seem to value exploring even over survival potentially. I'd say it's pretty obviously evolutionarily coded into us. Maybe not you, but into many people.
- simiones 2y ago
  Columbus very very much didn't plan to die (though he very much would have if he didn't get lucky that there was a whole new continent there). His plan was to land in India, which he thought he would reach around the time he actually reached the new continent, because he had a completely wrong idea of how large the globe actually was (he alone had this wrong idea; the actual circumference of the globe was pretty well understood by this point). In general, human-based space exploration makes 0 sense. We have robots that can do everything a human in a life-support suit can, and don't need to carry 100 times their mass just to not day on the way there and back. Doing a few experiments with humans in space, like we do on the ISS, is indeed worth it for exploring the unknown unknowns of biology. Maybe some day, far in the future after we have explored Mars with many hundreds of robots, it will even make sense to send a human there. But until then, it's just a waste of everything.
  - zpeti 2y ago
    Ok great, you’re definitely right, let’s not do it. What now? Will Elon stop? If Elon doesn’t stop, does that make you right?
    - simiones 2y ago
      I'm not saying it's impossible to send people to Mars and even bring them back. I'm saying there is no point whatsoever right now, at least no material or scientific purpose. Of course, building a "city" on Mars is well beyond our capabilities, so that will either not be attempted at all, or it will fail. Maybe by 2124, but more likely 2524.
      - avmich 2y ago
        > I'm saying there is no point whatsoever right now, at least no material or scientific purpose. "No point" here means "no reasonable goal". In this case reasonability is subjective - somebody sees obvious reasons why Mars colony could be useful for humanity, somebody doesn't. Pro arguments are science, learning how to live off another planet, certain insurance against planet-wide cataclysms, general progress in space engineering. There are contra arguments as well, but which are more important is also subjective - we don't have hard data or commonly accepted facts which would solve this arguments one way or another, so, to some, it's natural to investigate the matter further...
        fwip 2y ago
        It's difficult to imagine any cataclysm that would result in the Earth being less habitable (even for us squishy humans) than Mars already is.
        avmich 2y ago
        It's really a matter of imagination :) . I learned about the existence of the Institute of the Problems of Asteroid Hazards long time ago, which suggested to me it's not a black-and-white type of question.
- Ajay-p 2y ago
  I think it is the indelible human nature, to go the furthest we can because it's there. At first I didn't agree with going to Mars, but if you think of it as the furthest place we know we can land on, and explore, then it makes sense. If we can safely land, and return from Mars, then it makes going even further a possibility.
  - throw310822 2y ago
    Yes indeed. But still, nobody is building residential neighborhoods on the top of the Everest or in the middle of Antarctica. Exploring for the sake of it is indeed a human instinct. The idea that we should build settlements for people who would live there permanently is plain silly. We have the obsession of repeating the Age of Discovery- but people should get the difference between discovering the Americas, with their wealth of plants, animals, land and waters, and settling a planet where there isn't a sign of life, not even air to breathe.
    - fwip 2y ago
      And peoples.
    - aperrien 2y ago
      > But still, nobody is building residential neighborhoods on the top of the Everest or in the middle of Antarctica Nobody is permitted to build permanent habitats in either of those areas, even though they might be feasible.
- me_me_me 2y ago
  > Pretty much, why do you think columbus set off? And he didn't even know if he'd actually find anything. hahahah Columbus set of because he wanted money, wealth for the crown. not because he was explorer. Columbus, Vasco Da Gama, Cortez et al were not dreamers but entrepreneurs. >> Landing and then what you plan a flag and die? Nobody (within reasonable definition of nobody) wants to go to Everest to die on top. Nobody wants to dive to Marianas trench to get crush to death. Who would go to Mars without a way back?
  - trafficante 2y ago
    >> Who would go to Mars without a way back? For a reasonable chance of being forever immortalized as one of the first humans to step foot on another planet? Granted, I myself will never get the opportunity so it’s easy for me to say “oh hell yes I’d sign up in a heartbeat”.
- rtkwe 2y ago
  You're misremember the actual history of Columbus which makes sense it's been mistaught and mythologized for a very long time. Columbus thought he would reach Asia, both because there were reports from Marco Polo that Asia was much larger than it turned out to be and some mistakes about the size of the Earth. He didn't think he was sailing off into nothingness hoping to find land, he was hoping to find a better trade route to Asia than going around the Horn of Africa or overland.
thegrim33 2y ago
"Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial." It's pretty trivial. Put mass in between you and space. It's already been researched to death and we have many years worth of data about the subject.
- malfist 2y ago
  It's trivial in the sense that telling people trying to lose weight to just eat fewer calories is trivial. Simple idea, hard to execute.
- me_me_me 2y ago
  > It's pretty trivial. Put mass in between you and space. Seems like you quite confident. So go on. Expand on that a bit... its trivial after all. You will teleport all that mass to ELO? Or use tracker beam to capture asteroid and space mine it to smelt shielding. I am super curious how you solve it trivially. edit: You downvote but dont explain this trivial solution. Am I asking too much? Calling someone out to explain something is offensive or something?
  - phkahler 2y ago
    We've had people in space for close to a year, so the trip to Mars shouldn't kill them. Once on mars they'll still need shielding. One option for shelter might be to bore some underground tunnels. A smallish electric tunnel boring machine that could fit in a starship might just be the ticket to building sheltered habitats on Mars. Funny that Elon already has another company that makes these.
    - rtkwe 2y ago
      The ISS is situated safely deep inside the Earth's magnetic sheath which protects you from a lot of high energy radiation though. You can use mass for shielding but you also desperately need that mass for cargo too and most cargo isn't going to be as dense as water which makes good shielding. The ISS has some fancier lightweight shielding but has issues with secondary radiation from particles hitting the metal skin of the modules which we'd expect to see on Starship too but higher since it'd be in interplanetary space instead of nicely close to Earth like the ISS.
indoordin0saur 2y ago
Ramsar, Iran has similar levels of background radiation as being on the surface of Mars. And people live completely healthy long lives there. Chronic low-level radiation isn't nearly as bad as we once thought. It's acute high-level doses or consuming radioactive substances that you really need to worry about. Mars really won't be bad at all with some easily implemented mitigation measures.
- hackernudes 2y ago
  The commenter is talking about the 6 month trip to Mars in space, not on the surface.
  - indoordin0saur 2y ago
    On that, if you orient the ship so that the rear is pointed directly at the sun (trivial to do once you're coasting) you'll have a hundred feet of liquid fuel and other solid material which will block the primary source of radiation (the sun).
    - matthewpick 2y ago
      I too, read Project Hail Mary (great book btw).
    - backwardsmoo 2y ago
      I was always led to believe that the primary source of radiation we need to worry about for space travel was Cosmic Radiation [1]. The shielding requirements for CR relative to solar radiation requires much more material, to protect from rays from every angle. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/missions/analog-field-testing/why-space-radiation-matters/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/analog-field-testing/why-space...
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    It's not that different between the two; Mars lacks a magnetosphere, so the planet itself is left to block about half of what'd hit you in interplanetary space.
basil-rash 2y ago
If it’s a one way trip, the cancer might end up being a blessing.
mlindner 2y ago
> Anything Mars is pure BS. Just anything and everything. It is until it suddenly isn't. Just because it's very far out still and any timelines mentioned are wrong, doesn't make it 'pure BS'. It very much has been the goal of SpaceX from the day it was founded to encourage human travel to Mars, and we're getting closer every day.
askvictor 2y ago
Even landing will be a huge problem. Think about the difficulties with the launch pad on Earth (engineering a launch pad for a heavy rocket is almost as hard as engineering the rocket itself). Well, to land a heavy rocket using retrofiring engines will require an engineered landing pad. Probably not quite as fancy as a launch pad, but you've got humans on the ship, so it will need to not bury itself completely, or melt the surface and weld itself to it, etc etc. And that's before you start to think about a launch pad for the return mission. So you'd probably need to have launch a series of robots and factories to build this in advance. Maybe, but we haven't even come close to robots building something of that magnitude on Earth, let alone a planet that's quite different. So, never say never, but it's a _long_ while off yet; long enough that social upheaval due to climate change will probably put a pause on any efforts for quite some time.
panick21_ 2y ago
Maybe next time you could do some research before making a bunch of claims. > The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon. From an energy perspective its not that much more complex. And from a living perspective, yes it is an order of magnitude, but guess what, the ship is also an order of magnitude bigger. Meaning that for a small crew you have enough space for training rooms, labs, living quarters and medical facilities and so on. > Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial. That's mostly wrong. The cosmic radiation isn't much of a problem. The only issue is the solar radiation. And solar radiation is very low most of the time. That can be measured and if its detected, the crew can go into a radiation shelter for a while. But its not like if they are exposed to solar radiation for a few minutes, they will grow cancers instantly. > Landing and then what you plan a flag and die? No. the plan is to send robotic ships first to deploy infrastructure. The atmosphere has useful stuff in it. And then you need to get water from the ice. With water and the atmosphere you can make rocket fuel and other useful materials, such as drinking water, plastics and so on. Of course that requires development of methods to gather water and of course development of chemical or biological reactors to transform the material. We are pretty sure we can build that stuff technically speaking. The other big issue is energy to run these processes. We either need a shit ton of solar or a deploy-able nuclear reactors. Then you wait until the earth comes back around and fly back. And hopefully other people are arriving again. So you can continuously have an occupied base that you are building up over time. The whole point of what SpaceX is trying to build is a railroad to Mars. The opposite of flags and footprints.
- me_me_me 2y ago
  I am reading this and I can't believe it. Was this written by chatgtp? > From an energy perspective its not that much more complex. As in what exactly? Its not much more complex because you have to 'burn to moon' and 'burn to mars' which is pretty much the same because you need energy to do both?? Here, have a look at required deltaV. https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of_the_solar_system/#lightbox https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of... how is this 'From an energy perspective its not that much more complex.'? >And from a living perspective, yes it is an order of magnitude, but guess what, the ship is also an order of magnitude bigger. Meaning that for a small crew you have enough space for training rooms, labs, living quarters and medical facilities and so on. What ship?!? Labs, medical facilities wtf r u smoking. https://www.humanmars.net/2021/01/cutaway-schematic-of-spacex-starship.html https://www.humanmars.net/2021/01/cutaway-schematic-of-space... here is spaceX graphics? Are you talking about facilities for an ant farm? And why dont you mention how many fueling launches you need to go to the moon in an essentially 'space liferaft' vs an actual spaceship needed to get to mars?? hm? > No. the plan is to send robotic ships first to deploy infrastructure. The atmosphere has useful stuff in it. And then you need to get water from the ice. With water and the atmosphere you can make rocket fuel and other useful materials, such as drinking water, plastics and so on. How? Just how is that infrastructure going to get there deploy itself and... it boggles my mind how you handwave the solutions to colonising a fucking planet. Sure mate, you played minecraft and all you need is a crafting table on mars and whabang infrastructure poof icewater mining and puryfing faclities "shazam* and your farm is ready! So easy, who thought. > The whole point of what SpaceX is trying to build is a railroad to Mars. The opposite of flags and footprints. Who is going to pay for all of it, and why would you do it in a first place? Cuz you are not setting up a colony, you are setting up the most expensive treehouse.

panick21_ 2y ago

I mean of course Mars colonization is crazy. Being skeptical is reasonable, even Musk himself is skeptical and gives it a low chance of success. But we know for sure we will not get there if we don't try. That the ship in principle is capable of landing on Mars doesn't seem that crazy. They are designing with that in mind from the beginning. Again, that's difficult but very possible with current technology. The more difficult problem would get to get the energy on Mars and the necessary water to do the chemical processing. But all of that of course is only even worth really investing in fully if you can get some significant payloads to the surface.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
I still think: Starship Moon Base Orion Pulse Nuclear ships launched from the Moon Mars Base Is the winning formula, because the Orion payloads are so huge and the transit time so greatly reduced.
- proaralyst 2y ago
  I strongly suspect the chances of Orion-style propulsion happening are close to zero. I think we're much more likely to see fission engines (where the heat from a conventional fission reactor is used to superheat water, which then goes through a conventional nozzle), or something a little more exotic like pulsed fusion (where little capsules of lithium containing deuterium go through a magnetic pinch and fuse, again in a more-or-less conventional nozzle) are more likely. They also have very high ISP but with much lower abuse risks (can you see any government agreeing to have a giant stockpile of nukes in space?)
  - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    You are probably correct, but it still remains that fuel exists in stockpiles and it isn't a particularly complicated spaceship design for the phenomenal payload and "extremely high performance". One starship trip could probably transport enough "fuel" for a midsize orion trip to mars and back (I haven't run the numbers, but 150 tons of fissile nuclear fuel is pretty effing compact. The "Super Orion" 8 million ton ship uses 3,000ton bombs.... but most of the bomb is the inert propellant that can probably be obtain from regolith. And the Moon could probably have a nuclear launch cannon pretty easily to reduce the payload or initial acceleration. Politically it sounds dangerous putting nuke bombs on the moon, but frankly it is safer having them there than on Earth. You know, as long as a mass driver catapult doesn't send them back .... Oh, but to your point, one of my ideas for Starship is to design an antimatter catcher from the solar wind: https://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/1107Jackson.pdf https://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/1107Jac... So you could probably do the antimatter catalyzed drives a lot more feasibly in space, but its still a lot more complicated than dumb bombs on pusher plates.