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I pretty much agree with everything you say, but I would caution against thinking its too easy. This is a very hard, very expensive problem. Your other comment

by geuis 14y ago

I pretty much agree with everything you say, but I would caution against thinking its too easy. This is a very hard, very expensive problem. Your other comment about mass/weight ratio is spot on. What we're lacking in space is industrial capacity. We have to build and test everything on the ground, and the it can easily get lost on the way up. Very expensive eggs in highly fragile and expensive baskets, as it were. One thing I've not really heard talked about is orbital industry. What I envision would be factories in orbit that do everything from processing raw materials to making finished products. Typically people assume that those facilities would only support resources mined from the moon and asteroids. But as an early step, what about just launching raw materials into orbit. Build cheap, reliable rockets. Stuff them full of cheap, bulk materials. Iron, aluminum, copper, etc. If 10% of launches fail, it's not cheap but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than losing high end equipment and people. In many cases, it might even be feasible to scavenge some of the raw materials on the ground after an accident. This might be a good way to bootstrap a reliable orbital infrastructure. Build stuff in space so it can be cheaper, bigger, and more robust. If your ship to Mars doesn't need to land, and makes the trip many times, the lifetime cost of such vehicles drops dramatically.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
It's a fairly hard problem. But on the scale of problems that have been tackled by humans in the past, say, 50 years, it's not that hard. Mostly it's just engineering. Bootstrapping colonization is a slightly harder problem but there are some promising signs for that. First, research on reusable launch vehicles is coming along (at SpaceX for example), and if that works out it should lower launch costs by a factor of 10 to 100. Add to that the ability to use local resources on Mars and things start to get a lot easier. Within the earliest generation of manned missions to Mars we will likely have infrastructure for manufacturing rocket fuel (methane + oxygen) as well as producing building materials (concrete) and iron based materials (such as sintering iron rich regolith to manufacture rectenna arrays). That infrastructure will develop fairly rapidly and in a few years we'll start to see a real industrial and agricultural base develop on Mars. Of course the more mass we can throw at the problem early on the easier it will be to bootstrap. One of the exciting things about Mars colonization is that it would likely serve as a proving ground for many technologies that could have applications on Earth. For example, solar power satellites are one of the best methods for providing power to a Mars base/colony. They're also one of the most promising technologies for Earth-based power generation, but the barrier to entry and the perceived financial risk has been too high.

by geuis 14y ago

InclinedPlane 14y ago

It's a fairly hard problem. But on the scale of problems that have been tackled by humans in the past, say, 50 years, it's not that hard. Mostly it's just engineering. Bootstrapping colonization is a slightly harder problem but there are some promising signs for that. First, research on reusable launch vehicles is coming along (at SpaceX for example), and if that works out it should lower launch costs by a factor of 10 to 100. Add to that the ability to use local resources on Mars and things start to get a lot easier. Within the earliest generation of manned missions to Mars we will likely have infrastructure for manufacturing rocket fuel (methane + oxygen) as well as producing building materials (concrete) and iron based materials (such as sintering iron rich regolith to manufacture rectenna arrays). That infrastructure will develop fairly rapidly and in a few years we'll start to see a real industrial and agricultural base develop on Mars. Of course the more mass we can throw at the problem early on the easier it will be to bootstrap. One of the exciting things about Mars colonization is that it would likely serve as a proving ground for many technologies that could have applications on Earth. For example, solar power satellites are one of the best methods for providing power to a Mars base/colony. They're also one of the most promising technologies for Earth-based power generation, but the barrier to entry and the perceived financial risk has been too high.