Elon Musk: “We’re going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.”

What to make of Musk's comments that are critical of NASA's lunar plans?

See full article...

 

[stormcrash]

The issue is that it is the same boring conversation in every article. It goes something like this.

Musk Haters (MH): Musk is an asshole.

Almost everyone else on here (All): We agree.

MH: Therefore everything he has ever done or is doing is either bad or else not really his doing. He's a con artist who has kept none of his promises, except all those he did keep, which remember are actually somebody else's achievements by my decree.

All: Attempts nuanced discussion...

MH: YOU'RE ALL ELONSTANS WHO ARE [somehow?] SUPPORTING HIM BY DARING TO NOT AGREE WITH EVERYTHING I SAY WHILST ON MY SOAP BOX!

All: You are the one who insists on doing nothing but talk about the guy, whether the article is on point or merely tangentially related to him. Have you considered you are just giving him oxygen?

MH: FASCIST SPACE NERDS, YOUR FUHRER WILL NEVER BUY YOU A PONY!*

Rinse, repeat. These conversations don't bring anything new to the table from a practical, political or technical perspective. It's all just pretty much noise. I personally agree that Musk was pretty much always an ass hat, and now he's fallen down the right wing rabbit hole and is digging himself ever deeper. At least for now the companies that he started are still a net positive for civilization, whether he will manage to screw that all up is still an open question in my mind. You may not agree with that, but you don't change minds with endless strings of ad hominems, unsupported assertions, and misleading to downright false facts. I'm all for civil debate supported by facts, I don't come on here to just hear from people who agree with me and have the same knowledge, what would be the point? Bring something novel and interesting to the table is all I ask.

*Incidentally the amount of implied pony hate on here is pretty disturbing, did you all learn nothing from Seinfeld?

The ends do not justify the means, and none of the output of any of musks companies comes close to justifying continuing to empower a delusional egomaniac fascist, and that’s before we get to the sins of the companies themselves, from labor abuse to flouting public safety, regulatory authorities, failing to protect national security and more

 

[beb01]

The ISS has been continuously crewed for over 20 years. What do you mean "off-planet habitation is something we've never done before."?

The only significant differences between living on the ISS versus living on the Moon are dust and logistics cost. Adding 1/6g helps and makes things easier.

The ISS is supplied several times a year. It is not an example of a closed environment. Stations on the moon or on Mars will not have the advantage of frequent supply missions. They will need to be actual closed systems. It will be easier to develop those on the moon which is close to earth and emergency supplies than on Mars,

 

[Uragan]

It's only a straw man if it isn't true, and did I ascribe the rhetoric in my little playlet to any specific poster (yourself included)? No. But the problem I was dramatizing is real and serious enough to prompt a content moderation policy change on this site.

Uh... there's a lot that isn't true with what you posted. And you don't have to ascribe your fever dream to anyone specifically for it to be a strawman. Additionally, leave the moderation to the mods, that's what they're here for. (And just report the posts if you think they're violating some of the guidelines.)

This is the comment I was replying to:

I don't know how you interpret that, but to me it basically reads like a promise to spam these articles comment until they are unreadable.

That's not what that poster said and that's you injecting your own meaning and intent behind their words.

Which is what is happening, what else did we expect indeed. The space nerds epithet has been thrown around a couple of times in this comment section at least, and although I didn't see the one about Elon not buying you a pony in this one I've seen it a more than few times before.

I mean, people are going to call out other posters for basically writing hagiographies about Musk and/or SpaceX's capabilities. That does not mean that SpaceX hasn't accomplished interesting/good things nor does it mean that Musk is worse than Hitler. However, that doesn't mean one should oversell what SpaceX has done or wax poetic about what SpaceX has promised in the future (i.e. “past performance is not indicative of future results”) nor should one ignore that Musk has become increasingly unhinged from reality and is courting some of the worst elements of humanity. Is the increasingly likely descent into an illiberal plutocracy really worth going to Mars over? The ends do not always justify the means.

There was even someone one here saying that since right likes to lie we might as well do it (throw to the strike zone the ump is calling was I believe the phrase). I invite you to go through my comment history and find where I am engaging in ad hominem attacks.

You're literally attacking the character of those you're arguing against with your little "playlet". That's an ad hominem.

 

[Wickwick]

The ISS is supplied several times a year. It is not an example of a closed environment. Stations on the moon or on Mars will not have the advantage of frequent supply missions. They will need to be actual closed systems. It will be easier to develop those on the moon which is close to earth and emergency supplies than on Mars,

We've never sent emergency supplies to the ISS as far as I'm aware. Mounting an expedition to the moon with emergency supplies outside of a planned launch would take many months. What sort of supplies are you imagining would be needed within months that constitutes an emergency? If we send 5,000 tonnes of goods* to Mars before the first astronaut arrives, I think they'll be fine on supplies. There's no need for a base on Mars or the moon to be any more closed than the ISS.

* not including the tonnes of high-quality stainless steel that could be extracted from some of the Ships themselves.

 

[llanitedave]

Where in history do we actually have record of that happening? Humans spread across the world before written history, and usually even before oral history. The first colonists are often oppressed, but always alongside the aborigines.

The first colonists ARE the aborigines.

 

[Dtiffster]

You're literally attacking the character of those you're arguing against with your little "playlet". That's an ad hominem.

An ad hominem is an attack against a person rather than their position. The subject under discussion is the rhetoric these posters are using. People are defending their obnoxious postings as the ends justify the means. Me parodying that rhetoric isn't an ad hominem, I'm squarely tackling the root of the disagreement. The only thing in that entire post that could be interpreted as an ad hominem is me labeling them as Elon haters, which I guess if that offends you I am sorry.

 

[Fritzr]

I think the adversaries LOVE the idea of the US sinking trillions of dollars into a Mars settlement.

The US isn't sinking a penny into Mars beyond the cost of the various science probes & landers (on which they are saving billions by hiring SpaceX launch services)

Of course you could consider SpaceX contracts to be USG spending on Mars as the profits on these commercial contracts are part of the Mars project funding. Good luck convincing anyone in US that profits earned from doing work & providing a service are a subsidy though.

 

[llanitedave]

I would say it's an order of magnitude more expensive to run a Mars mission than the ISS. The Station is really freaking expensive.

And with the return that we might find life on Mars vs. ??? (what have we found in LEO?), the cost is absolutely worth the potential to find off-world life.

Were we to find off-world life, the first thing we would do is endanger it.

 

[Fritzr]

If there's an "emergency" on Mars... any mission to get there to help out will be far too late to actually do anything meaningful. Flights to Mars from Earth take between a year or longer.

Missions to the Moon would take days, which while faster, may not be fast enough depending on the emergency.

Anyone on a lunar or Martian mission would need to be aware that they may be on a one-way mission when they sign up.

SLS rescue missions require a year or two to finish the rocket for the next launch, a few months of launch preparation and only then does it take a few days. SpaceX has changed that, but it still hasn't sunk in with our political leaders. All they see is a loss of vote buying resources.

This is why NASA allowed a Shuttle to return to Earth knowing full well it could not survive reentry. Before SpaceX, a rescue mission required nearly a year to plan, prepare, and execute, possibly as fast as six months with emergency acceleration of work. SpaceX could in theory do it in around a week as they have launch ready rockets in storage and most of the delays are government mandated licenses and permissions.

Apollo 13 was an anomaly. They rescued themselves with only advice over radio as outside assistance.

 

[Mradyfist]

There's an awful lot of speculation in this comment thread around Antarctic stations as an analog to human habitation on Mars. I spent four summer seasons and one winter season at Amunden-Scott South Pole Station with the United States Antarctic Program (USAP), and was on the emergency response team as a firefighter during my winter, so I have a lot of context on how the station operates.

Some important points:

• Contract lengths - Others have mentioned that USAP participants are generally limited to about 14 months of maximum time on station, as a way of claiming that it's too difficult to live there for longer. That limit is entirely due to the way the US interprets the Antarctic Treaty's prohibition on permanent settlement on the continent; I knew many Polies who would have stayed on-station indefinitely if they were allowed to, and it would have saved the program a lot of work and money.
• Accessibility - South Pole Station is "closed" for 8 months each winter, with no flights in or out, and logistics are planned around that. Up until 2016 with the first successful winter medevac, we were there under the assumption that there was no recourse if you developed a medical condition that couldn't be treated on-station, an assumption which was tested in 2011 when the station manager demanded (and was denied) a midwinter medevac after having a possible stroke. It's much faster to medevac from the ISS, and depending on when you are in the Mars synodic period it could actually be faster to return to Earth from Mars in an emergency.
• In-situ resources - South Pole Station actually has much less ability to use ISRU, because of two factors. One is that there are simply no building materials accessible that aren't liquid at human habitation temperatures, as the station sits on top of two miles of solid ice. Forget about soil having contaminants, there's no soil. Making bricks from Martian regolith is untested, but it will never happen at the south pole. It also has no viable year-round energy source, as solar panels are useless for the half of the year you'd need them most, and we have yet to develop a wind turbine that can stay lubricated at the temperatures necessary (there was a frozen test turbine there when I did my contracts). Everything on station is imported via a multi-year logistics chain except technically water, but since that can only be made by melting the ice and the energy to do so has to be imported, you can think of it as being at the cost of a given amount of precious imported jet fuel.
• Cargo dimension limits - Up until the start of the South Pole Overland Traverse in 2005, all the supplies and construction materials for the station had to be flown in. There have been three distinct main stations at the site dating back to 1956, and it has been continually human-occupied since that year. The current main station (the elevated station) was built entirely from materials that had to fit in an LC-130 Herc cargo bay, 41 feet by 9 feet by 10 feet. Starship's payload fairing is roughly 30 feet in diameter and 60 feet long, significantly better than the largest materials that could be brought to the South Pole for each station's construction.
• Survivability - Regardless of the differences in atmospheric pressure between the South Pole and Mars, South Pole Station is not survivable without a lot of machinery functioning, and humans can't live without the polar equivalent of a pressure suit (ECW, or extreme cold weather gear) for a meaningful amount of time outside of the station or ancillary buildings. Yes, you can briefly run outside naked (I did join the 300 club), but you will become maimed by frostbite or die if you aren't effectively "suited up". Whether that time is measured in seconds (as in Mars' atmosphere) or minutes (extreme cold and 1 bar) isn't really that important.
• Atmosphere - A not-so-fun fact that follows logically from the premise that in order for anybody to survive there the station has to be functioning is that for critical life-safety systems like the power plant or the satellite ground stations, Pole has CO2-based fire suppression systems. These will kill anyone unfortunate enough to be working in one of these spaces if they go off, as breathing in a single lungful of dense CO2 displaces oxygen in your lungs, and you suffocate. Similarly, a fire in a non-life-safety area of the main station could render the interior atmosphere unbreathable, and we didn't really have a viable backup beyond the emergency pod, which is just a sealable section of the main station itself.
• Incentive - South Pole Station has no direct economic incentive to exist, and never will. Extracting useful resources from its location is prohibited by the treaty, but it's also physically impossible because there are no resources that aren't covered by 2 miles of ice. It's there because of national pride, as a foil for other countries that might eventually decide not to re-up the treaty and start defending territorial claims, and as a pleasant bonus we also get some incredible abstract scientific research done there; nothing that translates back to the real world in any useful way though.

In my opinion, South Pole Station is far and away the closest test of human habitation on Mars that can be done anywhere other than Mars. The challenges are more similar between the two than between Mars and the moon, or Mars and the ISS, and we've had humans living there for multiple generations now.

 

[stormcrash]

We've never sent emergency supplies to the ISS as far as I'm aware. Mounting an expedition to the moon with emergency supplies outside of a planned launch would take many months. What sort of supplies are you imagining would be needed within months that constitutes an emergency? If we send 5,000 tonnes of goods* to Mars before the first astronaut arrives, I think they'll be fine on supplies. There's no need for a base on Mars or the moon to be any more closed than the ISS.

* not including the tonnes of high-quality stainless steel that could be extracted from some of the Ships themselves.

Because the plan for ISS in an emergency is get in the capsule as a lifeboat, detach, and deorbit

 

[stormcrash]

The first colonists ARE the aborigines.

Which is why the UK has such a strong claim to the Falkland Islands and the UN decolonization office and Argentina don’t have a leg to stand on demanding the UK give up sovereignty over the islands

 

[Fritzr]

Actually, I’m quite aware of that and it doesn’t negate my point. Did you even read the article you linked to?

In two years, MOXIE was able to generate enough oxygen for a small dog to breathe for 10 hours. How much larger a system do you need to scale up to in order to continuously run to support an entire colony of humans?

What happens when you run out of repair parts? If it takes anywhere between a year and over two years to get to Mars from Earth… better be able to hold your breath for a long time, I suppose.

And it’s estimated that lunar water could be near the surface, just like on Mars… so I’m not sure why you think it would be easier on Mars.

The solution to parts failure is called spares inventory redundancy.

The solution to the low production of the prototype is to build a sufficiently large plant for the needed amount and a separate redundant plant that share the load until one breaks down, then the other one works near full capacity until repairs are completed.

Expect triple to quad redundancy to be preferred wherever lives depend on unbroken operation.

 

[Delerious]

And with the return that we might find life on Mars vs. ??? (what have we found in LEO?), the cost is absolutely worth the potential to find off-world life.

Would that be the microbial life they destroy during decontamination or the little green men they bring back?

 

[TVPaulD]

An ad hominem is an attack against a person rather than their position. The subject under discussion is the rhetoric these posters are using. People are defending their obnoxious postings as the ends justify the means. Me parodying that rhetoric isn't an ad hominem, I'm squarely tackling the root of the disagreement. The only thing in that entire post that could be interpreted as an ad hominem is me labeling them as Elon haters, which I guess if that offends you I am sorry.

“I’m not doing an ad hominem, I’m just building a straw man” isn’t as good a defence of your position as you seem to think it is.

 

[Wolfie2]

Like the middle of the ocean or the vacuum of space or Antarctica?

People who are critical of a mission to Mars don't see the base at McMurdo as an analog. And environmentally, there's very little similarity. The similarity is the reliance on technology and a continuous supply chain. For nearly half a year, McMurdo is cut off from supply lines. It's on its own. It cannot extract useful resources from the environment (except oxygen!). If there were to be a heater failure in one hab, the residents would have to relocate to another and wait.

We have underwater dwellings that are even less hospitable that are continuously inhabited and are totally reliant on their supply chain and technology to keep the people inside alive.

And finally, we have a space station where we've had people living for 20+ years. The only resource they can utilize locally is sunlight. Even the oxygen they breathe has to come from the surface. We could send supplies quite often, but we don't. A supply ship shows up every 45 days or so and there are supplies on-board to that were no supply ships to show up for 180 days, everyone would be fine.

A permanent base on Mars need not be self sufficient. It needs to be efficient and resourceful. No, we can't send a supply ship every 45 days. But we don't need to. The supplies we're discussing aren't perishable. They're oxygen, (nonperishable) food, CO2 scrubber cartridges, and the like. They can be stockpiled. It's efficient to send ships about every two years rather than 45 days. That's only about 15 times longer than intervals between Station supply vehicles. So rather than stockpiling a reserve of half a year of consumables, one might stock eight (earth) years' worth.

This isn't a technological hurdle. This is a logistics problem. There are lots of studies of what it takes to keep someone alive. A single Starship would be able to pre-position enough consumables for an 8-year stockpile without any recycling for 10 people. On the ISS we know that water is 98% efficiently recycled and even half of the breathed-out CO2 is converted back to oxygen (not including what the plants take up).

Of course, the ISS has nothing going for it in terms of resource utilization. As discussed up-thread, we can utilize the Martian atmosphere and/or water to make even more oxygen. We don't need to tap that 8-year supply if things are going well. This is the bit about a Mars habitat being resourceful and it's not something possible on the ISS. The sooner local water and oxygen are supplied then the non-recycled requirements drop from 5.74 kg/(person*day) to 2.39 kg/(person*day). And if one is able to grow any amount of edible food, the requirement drops further.

You're right. Humans that expanded into new biomes had the advantage of all the oxygen they wanted. But they still had to live off the land. So we've got eons of experience doing that. We also have several decades of experience living in environments that are possible only through our technology and continuous supply lines. A habitat and then eventually a colony on Mars (or the moon) will be the first opportunity to marry the two.

Yes, there are technical and logistical challenges to work out, but for the first time since the dawn of spaceflight it appears that they are the two largest hurdles. For the first time ever, it appears that the economics of such an endeavor are not the gating step. And that is due entirely to the decreased cost and massive increase in cadence of scale of launch.

I’m only really adding this comment to say thank you for a superb analysis and report.

A solitary anonymous upvote seems wholly inadequate to acknowledge the depth and breadth of the scenarios you’ve covered.

There are obviously many here who still can’t or won’t see the analogy, but it’s not for want of clear explanation, as in your comment. The rest of us can enjoy the accelerating march to historically exciting times.

 

[Fritzr]

Could it be that he can string out going to Mars for at least a decade whilst receiving government money. Whereas he is actually expected to deliver on going to the moon in the near future?

What government money is he receiving other than payment for services rendered? That income I would assume he hopes lasts at least until the grandkids retire and turn the companies over to their kids.

 

[Fritzr]

And before anyone points at McMurdo as an example of just such an experiment, it’s worth noting there is an insanely rampant culture of sexual harassment down there.

So it is successfully educating us about the non-technological challenges a remote colony will face, but the results aren’t good.

Unfortunately, no one does much about it on Earth, where we’re most able to do something about it. A Mars colony run by Elon Musk and his acolytes would be a Black Mirror-esque hellhole for a woman.

So you're saying it is manned and operated by a representative mix of Americans?

All the social problems you mention have been present in the USA from 1776 onwards and in human society in general for longer than recorded history. Being on Mars will not cause the people who live and work there to stop behaving like humans.

 

[Wickwick]

There's an awful lot of speculation in this comment thread around Antarctic stations as an analog to human habitation on Mars. I spent four summer seasons and one winter season at Amunden-Scott South Pole Station with the United States Antarctic Program (USAP), and was on the emergency response team as a firefighter during my winter, so I have a lot of context on how the station operates.

Some important points:

• Contract lengths - Others have mentioned that USAP participants are generally limited to about 14 months of maximum time on station, as a way of claiming that it's too difficult to live there for longer. That limit is entirely due to the way the US interprets the Antarctic Treaty's prohibition on permanent settlement on the continent; I knew many Polies who would have stayed on-station indefinitely if they were allowed to, and it would have saved the program a lot of work and money.
• Accessibility - South Pole Station is "closed" for 8 months each winter, with no flights in or out, and logistics are planned around that. Up until 2016 with the first successful winter medevac, we were there under the assumption that there was no recourse if you developed a medical condition that couldn't be treated on-station, an assumption which was tested in 2011 when the station manager demanded (and was denied) a midwinter medevac after having a possible stroke. It's much faster to medevac from the ISS, and depending on when you are in the Mars synodic period it could actually be faster to return to Earth from Mars in an emergency.
• In-situ resources - South Pole Station actually has much less ability to use ISRU, because of two factors. One is that there are simply no building materials accessible that aren't liquid at human habitation temperatures, as the station sits on top of two miles of solid ice. Forget about soil having contaminants, there's no soil. Making bricks from Martian regolith is untested, but it will never happen at the south pole. It also has no viable year-round energy source, as solar panels are useless for the half of the year you'd need them most, and we have yet to develop a wind turbine that can stay lubricated at the temperatures necessary (there was a frozen test turbine there when I did my contracts). Everything on station is imported via a multi-year logistics chain except technically water, but since that can only be made by melting the ice and the energy to do so has to be imported, you can think of it as being at the cost of a given amount of precious imported jet fuel.
• Cargo dimension limits - Up until the start of the South Pole Overland Traverse in 2005, all the supplies and construction materials for the station had to be flown in. There have been three distinct main stations at the site dating back to 1956, and it has been continually human-occupied since that year. The current main station (the elevated station) was built entirely from materials that had to fit in an LC-130 Herc cargo bay, 41 feet by 9 feet by 10 feet. Starship's payload fairing is roughly 30 feet in diameter and 60 feet long, significantly better than the largest materials that could be brought to the South Pole for each station's construction.
• Survivability - Regardless of the differences in atmospheric pressure between the South Pole and Mars, South Pole Station is not survivable without a lot of machinery functioning, and humans can't live without the polar equivalent of a pressure suit (ECW, or extreme cold weather gear) for a meaningful amount of time outside of the station or ancillary buildings. Yes, you can briefly run outside naked (I did join the 300 club), but you will become maimed by frostbite or die if you aren't effectively "suited up". Whether that time is measured in seconds (as in Mars' atmosphere) or minutes (extreme cold and 1 bar) isn't really that important.
• Atmosphere - A not-so-fun fact that follows logically from the premise that in order for anybody to survive there the station has to be functioning is that for critical life-safety systems like the power plant or the satellite ground stations, Pole has CO2-based fire suppression systems. These will kill anyone unfortunate enough to be working in one of these spaces if they go off, as breathing in a single lungful of dense CO2 displaces oxygen in your lungs, and you suffocate. Similarly, a fire in a non-life-safety area of the main station could render the interior atmosphere unbreathable, and we didn't really have a viable backup beyond the emergency pod, which is just a sealable section of the main station itself.
• Incentive - South Pole Station has no direct economic incentive to exist, and never will. Extracting useful resources from its location is prohibited by the treaty, but it's also physically impossible because there are no resources that aren't covered by 2 miles of ice. It's there because of national pride, as a foil for other countries that might eventually decide not to re-up the treaty and start defending territorial claims, and as a pleasant bonus we also get some incredible abstract scientific research done there; nothing that translates back to the real world in any useful way though.

In my opinion, South Pole Stations is far and away the closest test of human habitation on Mars that can be done anywhere other than Mars. The challenges are more similar between the two than between Mars and the moon, or Mars and the ISS, and we've had humans living there for multiple generations now.

Well, the oxygen is plentiful!

But yeah, the logistics challenges are similar if not the technical ones. It's an excellent point that power is a consumable. Solar power isn't useful (though I'm surprised the katabatic winds aren't harnessed for generation). A Martian base is likely to have an excess of solar power most of the time (to account for loss of power during storms). 8 months is about half the time that a Mars base would expect to not be receiving shipments, but I doubt you're receiving a hundred tonnes of goods in one shot (that would be five C-130's after all). Stockpiling is a thing. You obviously took advantage of that on Antarctica. A Martian base would also take advantage of that.

 

[Wickwick]

Would that be the microbial life they destroy during decontamination or the little green men they bring back?

If I knew the answer to that we wouldn't need to go.

 

[Fritzr]

Because the plan for ISS in an emergency is get in the capsule as a lifeboat, detach, and deorbit

The plan for the stranded pair is to hope there isn't a need for a lifeboat. Theirs was sent back to test whether or not they could safely use it.

 

[Fritzr]

There's definitely something like "too much" science fiction in someone's diet.

You needn't be so skeptical. You are living the 1960s SF fantasy of life on Earth

 

[Fritzr]

Sure, we should definitely let people who aren't in their right minds decide to go on suicide missions. Nothing unethical about that, no sir.

Years ago registration was opened for a one way trip to a Mars colony. They got sufficient response to man their colony, but the project just faded away and is now just another failed dream.

With the billions of people on Earth staffing a Mars settlement with even a few thousand volunteer settlers who do not expect to be able to return and pass psychological screening is easily done.

 

[Wickwick]

I’m only really adding this comment to say thank you for a superb analysis and report.

A solitary anonymous upvote seems wholly inadequate to acknowledge the depth and breadth of the scenarios you’ve covered.

There are obviously many here who still can’t or won’t see the analogy, but it’s not for want of clear explanation, as in your comment. The rest of us can enjoy the accelerating march to historically exciting times.

Thanks. It's difficult to separate people from their Musk-hate, but the potential expansion of humankind to other planets (and beyond) is one of those historic events on-par with the first modern human walking out of Africa.

There are certainly unsolved technical challenges, but it's not like people that know a shit-ton more than anyone commenting in this thread (including me) haven't been studying the issue for decades. And the feedback from those experts is that a Mars mission is possible, it's just too expensive. And the vast majority of the expense has been launch and the added cost of lightening everything to the last possible gram. Cut the launch costs by 95% and remove the engineering of every last item for lightness and suddenly a Mars mission might look downright affordable.

We don't have all the final engineered solutions, but that's the great thing about sending fleets of Starships ahead of time. One can send multiple types of solutions to each problem along with tools and spare parts to modify the system on-site. The only really pressing concern is not having a ride home ready the minute you land. In fact, one might not have a ride home for a decade or more. I've observed earlier that the first wave of astronauts are effectively signing up for a one-way trip. That's not necessarily to suggest that their life will be artificially short, but that they may not medically be able to return to 1 g. Even with that understanding, who's to stop volunteers for training for such a mission?

 

[MNAK]

The ISS has been continuously crewed for over 20 years. What do you mean "off-planet habitation is something we've never done before."?

The only significant differences between living on the ISS versus living on the Moon are dust and logistics cost. Adding 1/6g helps and makes things easier.

And the shielding ISS get for free by being in low earth orbit.

 

[Fritzr]

Uh, there’s a big difference between happenstance disasters and putting yourself in a situation where the odds of disaster are much greater.

Skydiving for example?
Mountain climbing maybe? (Check the death statistics for Everest where there is a long line of climbers at the mountain and many more hoping to get a spot in that line)
Crab fishing in the Bering Strait? (Should be banned if reducing deaths is a priority)
High speed car racing? (No matter how much they improve safety, deaths are guaranteed)

Now where do you draw the line?

 

[Wickwick]

Skydiving for example?
Mountain climbing maybe? (Check the death statistics for Everest where there is a long line of climbers at the mountain and many more hoping to get a spot in that line)
Crab fishing in the Bering Strait? (Should be banned if reducing deaths is a priority)
High speed car racing? (No matter how much they improve safety, deaths are guaranteed)

Now where do you draw the line?

You forgot being an astronaut. The design target for Dragon and Starliner was a 1 in 270 loss-of-crew event. Which is actually a bit safer than being a climber on Everest, but quite on-point with the idea of sending a crew to Mars.

 

[wagnerrp]

And the shielding ISS get for free by being in low earth orbit.

Pretty much every plan for long term habitation starts with eliminating the radiation risk (and the meteorite risk) by burying your habitat under a few meters of soil.

 

[Mradyfist]

Well, the oxygen is plentiful!

But yeah, the logistics challenges are similar if not the technical ones. It's an excellent point that power is a consumable. Solar power isn't useful (though I'm surprised the katabatic winds aren't harnessed for generation). A Martian base is likely to have an excess of solar power most of the time (to account for loss of power during storms). 8 months is about half the time that a Mars base would expect to not be receiving shipments, but I doubt you're receiving a hundred tonnes of goods in one shot (that would be five C-130's after all). Stockpiling is a thing. You obviously took advantage of that on Antarctica. A Martian base would also take advantage of that.

The most pertinent issue with wind turbines there was the lubricant gelling at winter temperatures, but also even if we could solve that and install enough wind capacity to matter relative to the main power plant, we'd still need to stockpile fuel and maintain the generators for any time that the wind wasn't sufficient, so it was a bit of a dead end.

That's one thing that I think a lot of forget about, as we've moved into an era where many people never have to stockpile anything, so concepts for a station on Mars that depend on it seem unworkable. Mars would also have one of the same benefits Pole has when it comes to stockpiling - infinite freezer space! At Pole we had the berms, huge lines of triwall cardboard boxes stacked on top of pallets outdoors, with food and equipment literally decades old inside them.

It wouldn't be fun, but if the station somehow stopped getting food resupplies we'd still have enough calories to stay alive for at least 5 years, probably more. I remember discovering 50 suckling pigs listed as being out on the berms in our inventory system, purchased and delivered in the 1990s, and I don't think a single one had been pulled in to station yet.

Once the South Pole Overland Traverse started, we were actually doing something similar to Mars in terms of cargo weight and frequency - SPOT runs once a year in the summer, and delivers almost 250 metric tons of cargo and fuel. Of course the LC-130s would also run during the summer on top of that, but my understanding is that a majority of the fuel for the year was delivered via the traverse.

 

[Pat_Murph]

Weren't we supposed to already be there according to his original promise?

 

[Pat_Murph]

Considering that the concept of “IQ” was based on racist notions and is basically bullshit… why worry about what his IQ is? He’s a racist piece of shit either way.

How looks like you triggered a lot of Elmo's boot lickers.

 

[Feanaaro]

I would say it's an order of magnitude more expensive to run a Mars mission than the ISS. The Station is really freaking expensive.

And with the return that we might find life on Mars vs. ??? (what have we found in LEO?), the cost is absolutely worth the potential to find off-world life.

I mean... you can say whatever you wish, you can even say that it is cheaper to go to Mars than to the ISS. The reality, though, is that the distance from Earth to Mars can be anywhere from 33.9 million miles (54.6 million km) to 250 million miles (401 million km), whereas the ISS is only 254 miles up from here. The amount of energy, time, and money, needed to reach Mars, let alone establish a colony on it, is MANY orders of magnitude larger than anything having to do with the ISS.

 

[stormcrash]

Thanks. It's difficult to separate people from their Musk-hate, but the potential expansion of humankind to other planets (and beyond) is one of those historic events on-par with the first modern human walking out of Africa.

Just when I think the space nerds can’t get any more delusional and and self deluded the universe proves me wrong with nuggets of gold like this

 

[Fritzr]

I think the main issue is that we won't have Earth level medical facilities on Mars for a long time. My wife discovered a cancerous lump in her breast in 2020 and had a series of CT scans and other advanced diagnostics followed by major surgery a month later and six months of recovery. If she were on the moon when she discovered the lump, she'd fly back to earth soon after and get treated. If she were on Mars she'd likely be stage 4 or dead by the time she could return to earth.

The closest analog I can think of is wintering over at the South Pole but even then you can usually get a flight in between storms for an emergency evacuation. It would be really tough to see an early Mars settler die from a disease that could have been treated if they'd been able to return to earth within a few weeks rather than potentially many months.

I'm not versed in medicine enough to know how hard it would be to send enough medical equipment to cover 90% of potential issues but it will definitely be a major concern. And I'd expect early settlers will not only need a clean bill of health but also no close family history of cancer or similar.

I hate to point out the obvious, but the closest analog is being poor in the US with the wonderful medical insurance system designed in the 1800s to allow easy denial of medical services to non-whites.

Medical assistance in most developed countries requires visiting a hospital. US is the exception. You can get hospice care through various charities but forget about the cutting edge medical procedures.

A health insurance CEO was murdered recently to try to get the news media to report on this problem.

Single payer insurance is not the perfect solution, but it would reduce costs and make life-saving medical intervention accessible even to the poor.

Being poor in US is equivalent to being stranded on Mars. The help exists, but is inaccessible.

 

[Me Myself And I1]

Do they have governemnt subsidies on Mars?

 

[mmurray]

The plan for the stranded pair is to hope there isn't a need for a lifeboat. Theirs was sent back to test whether or not they could safely use it.

Crew 9 went up with two empty seats. That is their lifeboat and their return ride when Crew 9 returns.

I think there was a gap between Starliner coming back and Crew 9 going up and the plan for an emergency then was bringing them back in an overloaded Crew 8.

 

[Fritzr]

Nop

So he's giving back all the money NASA is paying him to build a moon lander?

Nope. NASA has a contract with a private company and is paying for product and services provided by that company. It might surprise you that commercial government suppliers expect to get paid for what they supply.


There are clawback provisions in the contract in the event SpaceX defaults and provisions to ensure SpaceX is not out of pocket due to a change on the NASA side. The big difference between SpaceX and old space is he doesn't repeatedly ask for more money because the funding ran out before NASA gives up waiting and cancels. Boeing bid their capsule on the basis of asking for future handouts because unavoidable delays they fully expected. Unfortunately for them it was a fixed price contract. On the flip side it was a milestone payment contract so they can keep what they've already been paid even if they never deliver (the old space standard)

 

[Fritzr]

I wonder if SpaceX is feeling it increasingly unlikely that they won't meet their obligations under the Artemis contract on time. What better way to shield from that then throw away the existing plan and punt to Mars in 10 years.

More likely is they will be left with completed hardware and no where to use it because NASA relied on old space companies for the rest of the pieces. That's fine though, SpaceX will get paid and may even get to take over the unfinished contracts

 

[Wickwick]

I mean... you can say whatever you wish, you can even say that it is cheaper to go to Mars than to the ISS. The reality, though, is that the distance from Earth to Mars can be anywhere from 33.9 million miles (54.6 million km) to 250 million miles (401 million km), whereas the ISS is only 254 miles up from here. The amount of energy, time, and money, needed to reach Mars, let alone establish a colony on it, is MANY orders of magnitude larger than anything having to do with the ISS.

The ISS costs ~$4B per year to operate.

A minimal mission to Mars (based on Starships) is somewhere around $50B.

But that said, what the hell does the distance to Mars have to do with anything? it's not like driving a car. You're not spending gas each mile. You have to pay the price to achieve certain velocity changes, then you coast. Sure, you've got to consume life support in transit, but those same people are going to need life support once they land on Mars too. Who cares that they spend 8 months on the spaceship on the way there?

Finally, NASA missions to Mars have been pegged in the $1 trillion (or much more) range and have therefore never been funded at a level that would make them a reality. That number is two orders of magnitude more than the ISS. At that price, it's never been economically feasible.

If a Starship-based mission is that price, SpaceX and Elon Musk can't afford it and we don't go. Fine. By the anthropic principle, a SpaceX-lead mission to Mars must be only an order of magnitude (plus or minus) or it just won't happen. It's that simple. Nobody is willing to pay a trillion for a Mars mission. But a $100B mission is actually something that can be considered.

 

[Fritzr]

It could happen in the next 4 years - if you were willing to accept a "flags, footprints & corpses" outcome.

US once had that space exploration culture then as American attitudes towards space changed it died