-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Elon Musk to announce SpaceX's Mars colonization plans at IAC on Tuesday (Sept. 27)
- Thread starter HellBlazer
- Start date
- Status
AngmarsKing701
Member
This will be an explosive announcement
D1renegade
Member
Is this how Aldnoah Zero starts?
Shhhh. you shouldn't say these things outside our house. Don't wanna spook the locals.��
Ozzy Onya A2Z
Member
One BFSM
Big Fucking Space Mission
Insane Metal
Member
*Marine
Ozzy Onya A2Z
Member
Touché.
AuthenticM
Member
"big fucking rocket"
"big fucking spaceship"
"big fucking spaceship"
killer rin
Member
Musk is fucking awesome. Lets go to Mars!
RyanardoDaVinci
Member
This pisses me off so much -- for nearly 30 fucking years we've had the capability but we ain't done shit.
Just_myles
Member
Cool, how is he going to fund it?
Dastardly Jerks
Banned
Hey, we're fucking up one planet. Why not fuck up another, rite?
I'll drop this link in here from waitbutwhy for people who want to read up on it some more;
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html
It's a great write up with a pretty broad scope.
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html
It's a great write up with a pretty broad scope.
The dude is "leading" the push in three different fields:
- Renewable energy (solar power: collection and storage) - Solar City
- Electric cars - Tesla
- Rocket/Space industry - SpaceX
(And he's the one or part of the group that "kickstarted" the hyperloop initiative)
I'm not gonna argue here if he's delivering or under delivering.
The dude is waking up stagnent industries/fields and giving them a kick in the arse.
Even if you don't like the dude, I think we can all at least thank the man for all these new cool things that are happening (making people excited again about new technology/space travel) and accelerating innovation in a lot of these fields.
From what I've read is that the first people arriving will be "stuck" there for a while and that they build up the colony and when it's grown enough they can opt to get a return trip to Earth again. (see the waitbutwhy link I posted earlier)
HellBlazer
Member
Well I mean, it's certainly true that he tends to underestimate the time it takes to do things. Both SpaceX and Tesla have had numerous milestones slipped and delayed. Though I really hope he succeeds, I have to take the 2018 and 2024 dates with a grain of salt due to that.
That said, he does get his results eventually, and I don't think he has given up on anything he claimed he would do. Both SpaceX and Tesla are making great progress, if not quite at the rate Musk anticipated. I would definitely not bet against him getting to Mars. Even if he's a few years late on his schedule, it would still be before any governmental agency is close to sending people over there.
I don't know about SpaceX's plans specifically, but more generally, Robert Zubrin estimated around 6 months.
Earth and Mars are aligned correctly for transfer every 26 months, so people sent over there could get a ride back 2 years later, if they're tired of the martian life.
In Musk's own words: "These spaceships are expensive, okay, they're hard to build. You can't just leave them there. So whether or not people want to come back or not is kind of like they can jump on if they want, but we need the spaceship back."
It would be rather hard to "fuck up" Mars, and any notion of ruining a planet is a subjective human one. These giant rocks do not actually care what happens to them; any environmental concerns only extend as far as they affect sentient life.
You want to get there in 6 months, no matter how fast your rocket can go theoretically.
6 months is a low energy transfer , but that's not the important bit. The important bit is in the event of an aborted mars landing, a 6 month minimum energy transfer you get a free gravity assisted return trajectory that gets you back to where you left exactly 2 years later, which means the earth will be there to catch you.
Anyone who has watched Apollo 13 will realize why this is important for safety reasons.
If the rocket is more powerful than you need, you want to use it to carry more stuff with you, not to get there faster. It is not worth losing the free return trajectory to get there faster.
Edit: faster trips also have other problems. Notably that in a fast mars trip, the return journey takes you dangerously close to the sun(ie. within the orbit of Venus)
Another great vid about how SpaceX will get us to Mars;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?annot...&feature=iv&src_vid=SMTLBhoCM8k&v=txLmVpdWtNc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?annot...&feature=iv&src_vid=SMTLBhoCM8k&v=txLmVpdWtNc
I agree that he's adding excitement to industries that have been long stagnant, even to the point of kickstarting innovation that normally might not have happened. That's something legitimately to his credit.
What I disagree is whether he is capable of achieving the near impossible like he claims. I've done enough research to know that he really just borrowed or stole a bunch of ideas, like the tzero car which was the truly originator of lithium-ion powered electric cars, and the DC-X was the originator of the idea of landing a rocket after it had launched. It's not clear at all if he can do things no one have ever done before. Also, all of his companies are currently in financial crisis in one way or another, suggesting that he's actually pretty lousy at running a business.
Dynamite Shikoku
Congratulations, you really deserve it!
Let's do it
Exxon Mobil invented the lithium ion battery. The "idea" isn't the only important part. the tzero and the model s aren't equivalent machines. He also is spending heavily to aggressively expand his companies. It's not financial crisis but a calculated risk.
CosmicGroinPull
Member
Thank you Interstellar.
Fallout-NL
Member
Man, a nod to Doom with an actual mission to Mars. How cool is that.
Whitebison
Member
Man I enjoyed a lot reading it, thanks!
Subpar Scrub
Banned
That's not weird at all, there's plenty of people who do that everyday for other types of work.
The whole site is pretty amazing.
Would definitely recommend some of the other stuff on there as well;
About A.I. ;
Part 1 - The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence
Part 2 - The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction
About Musk and his companies (the one you read is part of a bigger whole);
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html
About the Fermi Paradox;
http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
Have fun!
I just read through some articles. This site is fkin awesome! Thank you!
The Elite
BOSS
No.
Jezbollah
Member
No problem man, share the knowledge, the site deserves more attention IMO ;-)
Don't need a fictional super-ore, the potentially huge amounts of rare minerals on Mars will eventually be a big enough draw for these companies -even though operating a mining operation on Mars might be too expensive for the moment
I recommend checking out the novel Red Mars, which describes a fairly realistic take on how we could colonize Mars
killer rin
Member
This image is awesome, Any idea if there is a larger scale version that shows all the major bodies in the solar system?
I am all for this but... isn't this putting the cart before the horse? A lunar colony makes more sense in the short and long term to build first before going all the way to Mars. I mean Mars is the sexy option but I think more their is more to be learned and gained by setting up shop on Luna first.
CyclopsRock
Member
I don't think this is particularly fair. For starters, you'll note that the DC-X never actually existed, it was simply an idea that never came to fruition (so when you say that you don't know if he can do things that 'no one has ever done before', I don't really know what you mean). I don't think anyone's ever claimed that Elon/SpaceX came up with the idea of a landing rocket (I mean, the Lunar Lander in the late 60's was an application of a retro-propulsion rocket landing, albeit on the Moon). But more importantly, it wasn't about just having the idea of what it could be, but a) how to actually make it and b) how to make it commercially viable. Even today, Airbus have said that they don't think Reusable first stages are commercially viable for their Ariane rocket family, so it's not like Musk is simply standing on the shoulders of giants and taking all the credit. The fact is that before SpaceX no one ever landed an orbital rocket on earth, and now they have. This is absolutely vital experience to anyone trying to land something of significant weight on Mars (the Space-Crane that delivered Curiosity was incredible but fraught with potential error, and that was with something that weight many, many times less than 100 tons).
Musk and SpaceX set incredibly short deadlines that they almost always miss, and despite this they've done more to move forward the space launch market in the last ten years than the "big boys" have in the last 30 put together. The other suppliers, many of whom are very reliable, have been content to tinker here and there, where as SpaceX are the only ones truly advancing the capability. You can't advance markets with things that don't exist.
Like what, though?
That's the thing;
It's not though, there's not really a reason to set up a colony there because it wouldn't be able to be self-sustaining at one point and there's nothing there but moonstones/dust.
What I've read in some of the articles / seen in some videos is that the Mars colony could at a point in the future become self-sustaining as they can extract; oxygen, water and fuel (not oil) from the atmosphere/planet itself.
It'll ofcourse still be depending on Earth at the beginning for supplies, etc, but they suspect they can make it self-sustaining compared to a Lunar base where you would just need to be sending them "shit" all the time since there's nothing there.
Read some of the articles/watch some of the vids posted earlier in this thread.
This vid tells you some basic stuff about it;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMTLBhoCM8k
The moon does not help you get anywhere aside from the moon. If you have a rocket that can get you to the moon, you can go to Mars, where there are easily reachable resources that can be used for further exploration. The moon has none of that shit, and is in the wrong direction:
You also can't aerobrake to lower your ∆v budget on a trip to the moon. Realistically Deimos or Phobos would be a better halfway stop for a Mars mission than our own moon would be, but even then it's still a shitty idea.
Man, that's a neat map. Very informative.
-----
I haven't really been following Musk recently apart from the safe landings of the rockets and such but I really want this to succeed. I'm not gonna watch the live stream but I'll definitely catch up after the live stream. Dude has interesting ideas.
They just fired a prototype version of their raptor engine yesterday and it has a lot of rocket enthusiasts excited because of its burn specs. It is a very strong/efficient rocket with different propellant. Elon confirmed that the scaled up version should be around 14 feet wide, so with that knowledge expect the BFR to live well up to its name today.
I think space enthusiasts are expecting a more technical conference today, which will confirm/disprove at least a few spec rumors
I think space enthusiasts are expecting a more technical conference today, which will confirm/disprove at least a few spec rumors
The DC-X very much existed and flew 12 times, sometimes with turnaround of one day.
It was a suborbital demonstrator though. Along the lines of Blue Origin's New Shephard (several key members of the DC-X team went on to work at BO).
Maybe you're thinking of the X-33?
- Status