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There is no market for Mars. No one needs, or even really wants, to build anything on Mars. Taking a human there just to show that we can might be a cute public

There is no market for Mars. No one needs, or even really wants, to build anything on Mars. Taking a human there just to show that we can might be a cute publicity stunt, but that's the only possible rational motivation for Mars in the next 500 years or so.

dyauspitr 2y ago
Nonsense. I can definitely see completely sealed habitats buried underground in mars.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  You can imagine them, but they are not actually realizabile with current technology, and there is 0 purpose to actually doing it. Making them self-sustaining to act as a safeguard if the Earth is destroyed is also way, way beyond our current technology.
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    Why? 150 metric tons of concrete (what one starship can carry), is enough to build 4 single family homes. A standard excavator is 10-20 tons so you can carry 10-15 on one starship. It doesn’t take much more than that to build a deep hole and make a concrete hab. These would have to be modified for mars but not significantly. I’m not sure what this technology is that we don’t have. It sounds like you could have a functional research lab on mars with less than 5-10 starship trips. Purpose is purely subjective. You could have said the same thing about the ISS before it was built but it has been invaluable.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      First, starship is not a working rocket today. It will be made to work, but that's still in the future. They are now at a stage where they can take one completely empty rocket and put it in LEO, with a little bit of fuel left over for descent. Getting a fully loaded rocket in LEO, then sending another twenty rockets to refuel it in space, then powering it on a trajectory to Mars, with enough fuel left over that it can safely land on Mars, is still probably around a decade away. And then getting it to launch again from Mars and land back on the Earth is a whole other can of worms, especially if you want it to leave with living humans on board. Secondly and more importantly, we don't have the robotics knowledge to do arbitrary construction projects in this way. Digging through frozen rocky terrain in the extreme conditions of Mars is not easy, and we don't even do that autonomous here on Earth. The Mars Rovers are at the forefront of technology in this area, and they can just about move over the rocky terrain. And of course, sending people there to operate the machines without first having a shelter is not an option, they will likely die of radiation poisoning long before they finish the project - the thin metal walls of a rocket are not a good radiation insulator.
aspenmayer 2y ago
Elon has publicly stated that he wants to die on Mars. Considering that SpaceX has already launched a Tesla into an orbit that intersects that of Mars, it's not too farfetched to say that it's an attainable goal for him by EoL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk%27s_Tesla_Roadster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk%27s_Tesla_Roadster
- plorkyeran 2y ago
  There's an implied part where there's some living on Mars first and his goal isn't just to die in a crash landing shortly before he was going to die to life support systems giving out. Merely getting to Mars is difficult but plausibly attainable within his lifespan, but that is likely to turn out to be the easy part.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    People would pay money to go explicitly to take part in than challenge.
- rasz 2y ago
  >Elon has publicly stated that he wants to die on Mars. Will an inn called Mars do? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Twardowski#Legend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Twardowski#Legend
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Elon has publicly stated many things that were outright lies, and many more things that were extraordinarily optimistic timelines (FSD next year, hyperloop, starship earth to earth, extremely cheap tunnels, Covid respirators, etc). His public statements mean less than nothing overall.
friend_and_foe 2y ago
There was no market for a second global internet either, it already existed. If you build it they will come. I think we see it time and time again, the steam engine, the internet, when you create something that enables radically new possibilities, people find ways to put them to profitable uses. The people inventing them have vision, they have ideas about what they could be used for, but ultimately nobody can predict how things will be used. We will probably be pleasantly surprised by the ways people are going to use mass scale space travel.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  There may well be a use case for cheap plentiful space flight. That doesn't mean that there exists a market for taking things to Mars.
  - friend_and_foe 2y ago
    If there are people there there will be a market there. I do expect that there will be people there within 100 years, probably sooner, if not for any reason, because a really rich guy that runs the most capable space launch company wants to make it happen.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      Rich and powerful people have wanted many things to happen throughout history. A lot of those things did not happen. And a few dozen people living in a high tech cave is not a market.
adastra22 2y ago
Mars One demonstrated the demand. An immigration ticket to Mars costing $500k to $1M would be profitable for SpaceX, and there are probably 100k - 1M people worldwide willing and able to do that. If this seems crazy to you, well you’re just not in the target market.
- yread 2y ago
  There are 1 million people who have $1M of spare cash who want a one way ticket to Mars and die there? Why?
  - adastra22 2y ago
    There are too many bad assumptions baked into that question to attempt a meaningful answer. I don’t even know if you’re being serious or taking the piss.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      What's the bad assumption in that question? Is the ticket going to come with a cure for aging too?
      - adastra22 2y ago
        1. If you’re going on a one-way ticket to another planet, you don’t need $1m in spare cash. You just need everything you own (house included) to sum to $1m, which is an easier hurdle for an early career engineer, and Mars will want young engineers. In actuality you probably just need a down payment and premiums for an insurance contract. Costs could be closer to $100k. 2. Trips will be two-way with an included but unscheduled return ticket. Orbital dynamics make this not expensive to do. People who take advantage of that and who got part of their trip out on credit would find themselves deeply burdened in debt, but survivable. The gamble being made (and hedged with insurance) is that most colonists would stay. 3. “and die on Mars” can be literally interpreted as old age, but given the aggressive responses in this thread the underlying assumption I believed was that they’d die from lack of food/water/air, too much radiation, life support failure, etc. in other words the “mars is harder than you think and the colonists will die” tired assumption. In reality ISS research has demonstrated what is required to keep humans alive and healthy, and literal decades of preparation has been done on designs for early bases that exploit local resources to reduce external dependency. If you’re actually interested in this, Zubrin’s The Case for Space is a good introduction.

dyauspitr 2y ago

Nonsense. I can definitely see completely sealed habitats buried underground in mars.

tsimionescu 2y ago
You can imagine them, but they are not actually realizabile with current technology, and there is 0 purpose to actually doing it. Making them self-sustaining to act as a safeguard if the Earth is destroyed is also way, way beyond our current technology.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Why? 150 metric tons of concrete (what one starship can carry), is enough to build 4 single family homes. A standard excavator is 10-20 tons so you can carry 10-15 on one starship. It doesn’t take much more than that to build a deep hole and make a concrete hab. These would have to be modified for mars but not significantly. I’m not sure what this technology is that we don’t have. It sounds like you could have a functional research lab on mars with less than 5-10 starship trips. Purpose is purely subjective. You could have said the same thing about the ISS before it was built but it has been invaluable.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    First, starship is not a working rocket today. It will be made to work, but that's still in the future. They are now at a stage where they can take one completely empty rocket and put it in LEO, with a little bit of fuel left over for descent. Getting a fully loaded rocket in LEO, then sending another twenty rockets to refuel it in space, then powering it on a trajectory to Mars, with enough fuel left over that it can safely land on Mars, is still probably around a decade away. And then getting it to launch again from Mars and land back on the Earth is a whole other can of worms, especially if you want it to leave with living humans on board. Secondly and more importantly, we don't have the robotics knowledge to do arbitrary construction projects in this way. Digging through frozen rocky terrain in the extreme conditions of Mars is not easy, and we don't even do that autonomous here on Earth. The Mars Rovers are at the forefront of technology in this area, and they can just about move over the rocky terrain. And of course, sending people there to operate the machines without first having a shelter is not an option, they will likely die of radiation poisoning long before they finish the project - the thin metal walls of a rocket are not a good radiation insulator.

aspenmayer 2y ago

Elon has publicly stated that he wants to die on Mars. Considering that SpaceX has already launched a Tesla into an orbit that intersects that of Mars, it's not too farfetched to say that it's an attainable goal for him by EoL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk%27s_Tesla_Roadster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk%27s_Tesla_Roadster

plorkyeran 2y ago
There's an implied part where there's some living on Mars first and his goal isn't just to die in a crash landing shortly before he was going to die to life support systems giving out. Merely getting to Mars is difficult but plausibly attainable within his lifespan, but that is likely to turn out to be the easy part.
- adastra22 2y ago
  People would pay money to go explicitly to take part in than challenge.
rasz 2y ago
>Elon has publicly stated that he wants to die on Mars. Will an inn called Mars do? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Twardowski#Legend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Twardowski#Legend
tsimionescu 2y ago
Elon has publicly stated many things that were outright lies, and many more things that were extraordinarily optimistic timelines (FSD next year, hyperloop, starship earth to earth, extremely cheap tunnels, Covid respirators, etc). His public statements mean less than nothing overall.

friend_and_foe 2y ago

There was no market for a second global internet either, it already existed. If you build it they will come. I think we see it time and time again, the steam engine, the internet, when you create something that enables radically new possibilities, people find ways to put them to profitable uses. The people inventing them have vision, they have ideas about what they could be used for, but ultimately nobody can predict how things will be used. We will probably be pleasantly surprised by the ways people are going to use mass scale space travel.

tsimionescu 2y ago
There may well be a use case for cheap plentiful space flight. That doesn't mean that there exists a market for taking things to Mars.
- friend_and_foe 2y ago
  If there are people there there will be a market there. I do expect that there will be people there within 100 years, probably sooner, if not for any reason, because a really rich guy that runs the most capable space launch company wants to make it happen.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Rich and powerful people have wanted many things to happen throughout history. A lot of those things did not happen. And a few dozen people living in a high tech cave is not a market.

adastra22 2y ago

Mars One demonstrated the demand. An immigration ticket to Mars costing $500k to $1M would be profitable for SpaceX, and there are probably 100k - 1M people worldwide willing and able to do that. If this seems crazy to you, well you’re just not in the target market.

yread 2y ago
There are 1 million people who have $1M of spare cash who want a one way ticket to Mars and die there? Why?
- adastra22 2y ago
  There are too many bad assumptions baked into that question to attempt a meaningful answer. I don’t even know if you’re being serious or taking the piss.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    What's the bad assumption in that question? Is the ticket going to come with a cure for aging too?
    - adastra22 2y ago
      1. If you’re going on a one-way ticket to another planet, you don’t need $1m in spare cash. You just need everything you own (house included) to sum to $1m, which is an easier hurdle for an early career engineer, and Mars will want young engineers. In actuality you probably just need a down payment and premiums for an insurance contract. Costs could be closer to $100k. 2. Trips will be two-way with an included but unscheduled return ticket. Orbital dynamics make this not expensive to do. People who take advantage of that and who got part of their trip out on credit would find themselves deeply burdened in debt, but survivable. The gamble being made (and hedged with insurance) is that most colonists would stay. 3. “and die on Mars” can be literally interpreted as old age, but given the aggressive responses in this thread the underlying assumption I believed was that they’d die from lack of food/water/air, too much radiation, life support failure, etc. in other words the “mars is harder than you think and the colonists will die” tired assumption. In reality ISS research has demonstrated what is required to keep humans alive and healthy, and literal decades of preparation has been done on designs for early bases that exploit local resources to reduce external dependency. If you’re actually interested in this, Zubrin’s The Case for Space is a good introduction.