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What can we send to Mars on the first Starships? – Casey Handmer's blog
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- PaulHoule 2y agoOne thing I find disappointing about Casey's blog is his hand-waving treatment of nuclear power (which appears in a few quadrant diagrams that he draws) In particularly he doesn't have any model for it that is better thought out than "let's break down an AP-1000 into a 1000 Starship loads and construct it over there", which runs into the problems that (a) many of those parts are too big, and (b) that's roughly how we try to build AP-1000s here on Earth and it doesn't go that well here. [1] The question of a nuclear reactor built to fit inside a Starship is an interesting one and so are the question of how we manage the things. It's tempting to say that a closed fuel cycle is hard enough to do on Earth that its the last thing we need to try to do on Mars, but I suspect the politics of Mars colonization is that (a) you can't possibly bring anything back from Mars that makes Martian colonization profitable as seen from Earth, so (b) Martians will expect that every spacecraft launched from Earth could be the last, and (c) will prioritize self-sufficiency much more than Casey thinks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal