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Wait a few years and NASA will probably just be able to order some from the SpaceX online store.

by efitz 2y ago

ceejayoz 2y ago
Honestly, I think this is the most likely scenario. Congress doesn't have the stomach for long-term planning; one only has to look at Constellation/Artemis/SLS for an example.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  Most of congress seems more interested in preserving jobs at Boeing, Lockheed, Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman. Commercial Resupply and Commercial Crew are among the best things to happen to NASA: NASA can request funds for two competitors, everybody imagines the money will go to their favorite, and then the actual proposals and performance can decide who gets the money.
- efitz 2y ago
  I said it kind of tongue-in-cheek but I think it would be wasteful and duplicative to do much robotic science on Mars since SpaceX is trying really hard to get there and could be paid a little on the side to return some samples. Undoubtedly they’ll send robots to Mars before they send humans.
1970-01-01 2y ago
There is a fair possibility this becomes true! Elon Musk wants hundreds of starships to visit Mars on a regular schedule. Beating him to the punch by a few years would result in a Pyrrhic mission for JPL.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  With the current Starship that seems unlikely to be viable. But with iterative improvements similar to those between the first Falcon 9 and the Falcon 9 flying today it might be. I could see SpaceX sending one or two Starships every launch window (so every two years) by 2035, and human landings by 2050. Around that time you would start massive cargo deliveries for a colony, provided SpaceX can get the funds for that somehow (presumably that's what Starlink tries to do). That timeline is still ambitious, but I believe Musk is genuine when he says he does SpaceX mostly to drive Mars exploration. And time for him will eventually run out. He doesn't have another 50 years.
  - esotericimpl 2y ago
    [dead]
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > could see SpaceX sending one or two Starships every launch window (so every two years) by 2035 I could see this by the 2026 window. Unmanned, granted, but there is a lot we need to learn about Mars, and Starship upgrades us from a horse to a train. (I’d also move up human landings to the 2030s. This is hard, but not unfathomably hard.) Where I think you’re off is colonisation in the 2050s. City on Mars is a good summary, but in short, we have a lot of problems to solve before permanent settlement (versus a permanent base with a rotating crew à la the ISS) is in reach. (For starters, we have zero trauma medicine for low gravity, we don’t know how to build closed-loop environmental systems, the Martian surface is essentially a planetwide superfund site, et cetera.)

Wait a few years and NASA will probably just be able to order some from the SpaceX online store.

by efitz 2y ago

Wait a few years and NASA will probably just be able to order some from the SpaceX online store.

Honestly, I think this is the most likely scenario. Congress doesn't have the stomach for long-term planning; one only has to look at Constellation/Artemis/SLS for an example.

wongarsu 2y ago
Most of congress seems more interested in preserving jobs at Boeing, Lockheed, Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman. Commercial Resupply and Commercial Crew are among the best things to happen to NASA: NASA can request funds for two competitors, everybody imagines the money will go to their favorite, and then the actual proposals and performance can decide who gets the money.
efitz 2y ago
I said it kind of tongue-in-cheek but I think it would be wasteful and duplicative to do much robotic science on Mars since SpaceX is trying really hard to get there and could be paid a little on the side to return some samples. Undoubtedly they’ll send robots to Mars before they send humans.

1970-01-01 2y ago

There is a fair possibility this becomes true! Elon Musk wants hundreds of starships to visit Mars on a regular schedule. Beating him to the punch by a few years would result in a Pyrrhic mission for JPL.

wongarsu 2y ago
With the current Starship that seems unlikely to be viable. But with iterative improvements similar to those between the first Falcon 9 and the Falcon 9 flying today it might be. I could see SpaceX sending one or two Starships every launch window (so every two years) by 2035, and human landings by 2050. Around that time you would start massive cargo deliveries for a colony, provided SpaceX can get the funds for that somehow (presumably that's what Starlink tries to do). That timeline is still ambitious, but I believe Musk is genuine when he says he does SpaceX mostly to drive Mars exploration. And time for him will eventually run out. He doesn't have another 50 years.
- esotericimpl 2y ago
  [dead]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > could see SpaceX sending one or two Starships every launch window (so every two years) by 2035 I could see this by the 2026 window. Unmanned, granted, but there is a lot we need to learn about Mars, and Starship upgrades us from a horse to a train. (I’d also move up human landings to the 2030s. This is hard, but not unfathomably hard.) Where I think you’re off is colonisation in the 2050s. City on Mars is a good summary, but in short, we have a lot of problems to solve before permanent settlement (versus a permanent base with a rotating crew à la the ISS) is in reach. (For starters, we have zero trauma medicine for low gravity, we don’t know how to build closed-loop environmental systems, the Martian surface is essentially a planetwide superfund site, et cetera.)