To everyone who asks questions like, "Why send people when robots are better/cheaper" and "Isn't it too dangerous", I would reply, "Stay here".
It is only a recent phenomenon in human history, in the last few hundred years, that all the places in the world are known. For hundreds of thousands of years, there have always been new lands and oceans for our kind to explore. Indeed, until the last ~20k years, we all existed in a near constant wandering state. Thats how we survived, and the lifestyle is still practiced today, albeit only in very tiny numbers in remote places.
Even with civilized life, i.e. villages, towns, and cities, for thousands of years people have jumped on ships or made years-long treks across oceans and continents to build new lives. Some of this was the desire to be free, or it was forced, or it was from desperation, or it was simply to explore.
Simply because we almost all live in a vastly interconnected world now doesn't mean that any of those reasons have disappeared, or that the kinds of people willing to take such risks have died out. We're still here, if latent, amongst the masses.
Many of us spend our youth traveling the world, climbing the next mountain. Many others lose themselves in vast game worlds where we can, for short times, satisfy the need to explore and build new lives. Some games such as WoW, Eve Online, Secondlife, and Civilization are so popular in part of because of these desires and needs.
So when you ask, "Why?", I say "Why not?". You are free to stay here. I want to go see what's out there.
For me, at least, it's only a small part of a greater question: Why do anything that robots do better and cheaper?
It seems to me that the best thing for us as a species is to let robots that do the things robots are good at, like translating in physical space, moving objects, manipulating matter, et cetera, and let humans spend their time doing the things that humans are good at: art, culture, coming up with novel behaviors for robots.
You get excited about exploration-- that's great. I get excited about post-scarcity. Because that will mean that everyone gets to do what they're excited about.
No matter how hard they try you can't live on Mars via a robot. Ultimately it's about adventure, experience, and colonization. Robots are great for science, but there's more to space exploration than just science.
Edit: There will come a time in the near future, probably by 2050 but certainly before 2100, when the idea of "space" evaporates away. Space is just a place. Mars is just a place. It's just as much a place as the street right outside your doorway or the grocery store just down the road. It's a place we can visit, experience, and a place where we can live. Once people start living off of Earth I think that artificial barrier will come down and people will begin accepting the idea that the Earth is just a part of the Universe. We have come to split up the Universe into two parts: the Earth, and everywhere else. But this is a false dichotomy due only to the particulars of history, there is only one Universe.
The difference now is it is no longer just governments looking into space, but rather the private sector. That will drive things at a pace that hasn't been seen in space exploration yet (SpaceX is a great glimpse into it though!).
I upvoted you even though I disagree with your conclusion.
"Why do anything that robots do better and cheaper?"
That is a question that is going to be very very interesting in the rapidly approaching future. Robotics is really a game changer. It has already changed out lives for the better and will only continue to do so. The answer to "Should robots do this?" should always be a resounding "Yes.", where it serves to improve our lives.
However I refuse to continue that answer with "...and humans should not." Some of us feel comfortable that our particular niche is safe from obsolescence. What those people are good at and what they want to do happen to overlap.. at the present. But what of the people for whom that is no longer the case? Should they, in a post-scarcity society, be denied the opportunity to do what they want to do?
Yeah I was backing up your point. Robots can do almost anything, but they cannot live human lives. Let robots do the dirty, dangerous work of making Mars livable for humans, then let humans do the living.
Robots are currently unable to be autonomous in any meaningful way. They still have a limited ability to perceive because computer vision is not good yet. They lack the ability to act sensibly in novel environments. Building such robots is the holy grail of AI, and it'll take a while before they are built.
I guess I feel that space is so huge and has so much stuff in it that any progress in exploring it brings us closer to post-scarcity, whether it's humans or robots or both. Humans on Mars will always be able to respond to things much faster than humans on Earth monitoring robots on Mars, for one.
> It seems to me that the best thing for us as a species is to let robots that do the things robots are good at, like translating in physical space, moving objects, manipulating matter, et cetera
But I like walking around. I don't need or want a robot to do that for me. I am more than my brain; I am also my body.
Seeing just how risky the Curiosity landing was reminded me just how far away we are from landing on Mars. I now seriously doubt I'll see such a landing in the next 30-50 years.
And with respect to "we've already explored this planet, let's go to Mars" I'd offer the following: let's see someone successfully colonize the bottom of the ocean or antartica and then I'll believe we're ready to colonize Mars.
Operations in space tend to follow a pretty strict tradeoff between mass and complexity. The more mass you can throw at the problem the less complex the solutions you can come up with. In the case of the Curiosity rover the mass was constrained by the launch vehicle used (Atlas V 541) and they wanted to maximize the amount of payload dedicated to the rover systems, which resulted in the complex landing scheme. With a manned landing the system would be a lot more massive and generally far more straightforward.
With respect to the idea that we should colonize the bottom of the ocean first I'd say: why do we have to do only one or the other?
Landing the same rover using the same process on the moon would have been almost as difficult. The difficulty being in the skycrane assembly and not having the option of manual control. A manned mission would be landed more similarly to landing the Eagle on the moon, and would have the option of realtime manual landing. It wouldn't take 14 minutes for the crew to find out if it landed safely or not.
That's true, but don't forget that the skycrane was necessary because it's Mars. The atmosphere is thick enough to be a problem, but thin enough that you can't just use parachutes, and the gravity is high enough that only lightweight things can use airbags. Skycrane seems great...but even it is not good for something as heavy as a manned landing. We don't have a good way to land humans on Mars.
Although I would argue that Mars is a poor choice for a backup. It is fairly inhospitable and relatively close to earth. I think generation ships would be a better investment if this is our goal. Although Mars would be a good stepping stone.
How would a space vessel be more hospitable than a planet with water, a partial atmosphere, caverns below solid rock, a small magnetosheath, and 62% of Earth's gravity?
*Edit: Instead of sending tonnes of metal into Earth's orbit from Earth, would it be more efficient to set up shop on Mars? Mine Mars and build space vessels in Martian orbit. Launching materials into Martian orbit should be relatively trivial compared with Earth.
The end goal of the generation ship would be to colonize a planet in a far flung solar system. I would imagine that with the number of planets in existence, we could find one that was more hospitable than mars. This would also provide a more robust 'backup' for our species, in the case that the extinction event was solar system wide.
Once again, I think Mars is a good stepping stone (for reasons that you mention), but I also imagine that a lot of the technology that would allow us to establish a sustainable colony on Mars would also allow us to develop robust generation ships.
I'm not saying we should or shouldn't go. I'm just responding the comparison that this is just like the early explorers. I don't think that is a proper comparison. The early explorers didn't have to contend with vastly different atmosphere's. Life in the New World was much like the old, with negligible differences compared to what awaits on Mars. The expense is also much, much more.
Nevertheless, I think travel to Mars is an inevitability but I think it represents a much deeper and dangerous proposition than what the early explorers had to face.
If anything I'd say exploring Mars is easier today than early exploration was.
In either case it's necessary for people to rely on technology in order to survive. In one case it's the technology of pressure hulls, electronics, CO2 scrubbers, and so on. In the other case it's the technology of boats, preserved food, hunting, weapons, etc. But as a practical matter we know that the latter technologies often failed and people died.
I think it's easy to forget just how massively daring a lot of exploration in human history has been. We know that stone age peoples who had only just recently developed the rudiments of agriculture traveled through Europe and Asia to set up colonies. Imagine what it must have been like to take your tiny stock of seeds and tools and maybe one or two families and trek through primordial forest and travel hundreds of miles before choosing to settle down. Or think about the later bouts of colonization during the bronze age. Folks in tiny boats without maps or compasses sailing across oceans (the South Pacific) or the Mediterranean and colonizing far away lands. The city of Marseilles was founded as a trading post by greeks from the coast of Turkey, 2600 years ago. That's a journey of about 2,000 miles by boat. And then imagine what it was like to explore new territory, set up lonely habitations of only a handful of humans many days walk away from any neighbors and to live in fear of bears, packs of wolves, and the violence of fellow humans.
Four thousand years ago early bronze age tribes in southeast Asia set out and colonized Indonesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar. And they did it using nothing more than outrigger canoes with crude sails.
In comparison, colonizing Mars with all of our modern technology is easy mode.
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.
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.
I think this post is an odd response and just proves my point. Most of this is an appeal to how amazing ancient people were. That's great. They were.
You claim stone age people did a lot of exploration .... But yet you say early exploration was harder than Mars exploration. I find this humorous.
Stone age people could never explore Mars, we can explore Europe and Asia just fine. Which one is more difficult? I'm being serious ... You could say "oh but it was hard because they were stone age" or whatever, but the fact is, though it was hard, it was not so hard that it huge economic factors, advanced life support, contend with temperatures very extreme, etc, etc. When you say "it was amazing what they did in the bronze age with just sails," I say "Yes it was amazing and all they really needed was sails." Well, it's going to take much more than sails to explore Mars.
It is just an entirely different thing. It doesn't seem like a very controversial view.
I would suggest that there is some hindsight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight) creeping in to your statement. Using your example of the new world, explorers had to at least deal with ocean voyages, new diseases, and possibly dangerous flora and fauna. All of these dangers were unknown until they were known. In the same vein, the dangers of a "vastly different atmosphere" were unknown, but are now know via experiments in deep sea diving, not to mention going to the moon. Death via exploration in a new environment (ocean, deep earth, space, etc) is certainly not a new risk. Looking back from this point in time in history, it is easy to suggest that those risks were minimal.
Your examples are not very good comparisons. We can't breath Martian air, temperatures are extreme, radiation, etc, etc.
This is vastly different from "Oh, that's a strange plant" or scurvy or whatever you're coming up with.
Deep ocean exploration is an interesting point, we haven't really done much of that and I promise you Hernando Cortez didn't either.
The fact is, comparison to early explorers is misplaced, at least as put in what I responded to. I mean it's sort of funny. The explorers were going places that humans already lives. The inhabitants were more impacted than the explorers. I can poke holes in this all day. No hindsight, just common sense. :)
Same argument applies for life extension, or any other radical change like that. Nobody forces you to follow in the wake of the pioneers. You can always just stay behind.
You got it perfectly. I want to go for the experience and opportunity. But I also want to build something for the future. No one remembers the people that stay behind and live out their lives, but the names and deeds of the founders of Pensacola, St. Augustine, and Jamestown are taught and remembered.
Another reason to settle other places in the solar system is that we can do so without guilt. In America, we have remember the atrocities commited during the building of the USA. On Mars, the moon, and anywhere else it's all fresh and no one is there.
I don't have my own family yet, so the idea of literally building a new world where my kids and grandkids grow and thrive has a strong attraction too. Maybe they would hate that they were born on Mars with little or no chance of returning to Earth, but I have to hope that they see it as their world and their future.
When I went to sleep after the Curiosity landing, I had a dream that I was on Mars with a group of colonists. I "overheard" someone say "this is the first child born outside of Earth". Imagining someone who is a citizen (by virtue of their parents) of a country they've never seen, on a planet they've never visited... I woke up in wonderment that this is going to happen some day. I hope I'm around to see it.
You're quite right. But in the past pioneers didn't expect me to pay for their adventures through taxation. I'm all for colonizing mars when we have the technology to do so, but we don't and we won't for hundreds of years. There's no reason to send people there now.
>Last time I checked SpaceX was a private company, either profitable already, or on track to become so pretty soon.
SpaceX is a private company, sure, but so is Boeing. Much of the funding for their current activities comes from NASA. The easiest business in the world to be profitable in is government contracting.
>And even if you were talking about the NASA mission, I'm still all for it, no matter what Zombie Ayn Rand is mumbling in the basement.
Great. Why don't you pay for it then, and leave the rest of us out? There isn't any reason to send people to Mars, and the effort will cost over a trillion. It's hard to imagine a use for that money that wouldn't be more productive.
I would also point out that when people did first start exploring our own world, it was fraught with peril. Many died as they settled new areas and explored.
So, obviously we see what happened as we explored our own world and some of the benefits it has reaped (opening up new resources, etc.). So why WOULDN'T we want to explore other worlds?
Your argument is illogical. From "exploration is desirable" you conclude "humans should explore"; but this doesn't refute "humans should explore using robots as sensory extensions" like you imply in your first paragraph.
I hate to be that guy, again, but I still feel like I haven't seen a very clear explanation of why this is a good idea. It'd be a great tourism experience, but what's the ultimate value to humanity?
Especially in light of Curiosity, why is it assumed that the logical next step after sending a robotic lab is to send a person, rather than sending a few dozen more robots? For a fraction of the cost of sustaining human life on another planet, we could construct a huge automated research complex capable of doing everything a human would want to do -- even golf -- and that would be valuable research toward developing the fully-autonomous robotic scientists which are definitely the only way we're going to have real long-term exploration of the outer solar system and beyond.
Basically, I can understand why someone might want to go to Mars, but I'm not sure why someone else would want to send them.
Ah what is the value to humanity? What is the value to humanity of a stadium, of the Olympics, of a monument, of a great piece of art or a beautiful performance? What is the value to humanity of entertaining blockbuster movies, fun video games, comics and science fiction?
What is the value to humanity of inspiration?
Right now science is held almost in contempt, all its wonders are subtle - appreciable only to the trained mind. Such an accomplishment would be large and obvious. The peripheral effect in inspiring young minds cannot be overestimated. One of those may one day go on to develop powerful DNA repair mechanisms because their imagination was captured at a young age by space travel and wanted to do something useful to that. Let alone the boon to cancers.
They want to travel to and live on another planet with low gravity and scant atmosphere. How could they possibly do that without spurring the invention of a lot of amazing things as a side-effect?
I've mentioned my hypothesis that it would have positive effects on geopolitics by making it possible to view Earth as a locality. But.
Most of all it would at once be an incredible piece of science and the greatest piece of art ever created. For what is art but a celebration of humanity and human ability?
The medical field is replete with examples of clinically-beneficial products that would never have existed without fundamental 'basic science' research that was, at one point, 'frivolous' and without a clear benefit.
Consider the frailty of our planet. The speck of dust that it is compared to the depths of the universe. If we don't start colonizing other planets, and gain the experience on how to do so, we'll essentially become extinct quite rapidly.
Forget the robots. We need the experience in sending actual humans there. This has to happen sooner or later if we want to ensure that our race lives on, after our planet becomes inhabitable.
With all this in mind, it's better to do this sooner rather than later. And why not start in 12-15 years? I hope you can see the value now.
The experience is not only necessary for survival, but also will lead to new opportunities. Once there is a market for interplanetary transport, experience will lead to innovations that we can't think of today. One huge example that is already being explored is asteroid mining. Add the business case to the point you made about our species becoming more resilient by turning multi-planetary, and there the case for Mars is strong.
I think the best reason for wanting to do this is that the rover's top speed is around 2in / second, it requires significant man power on the earth to drive/control, and they have a limited toolset with few ways to augment what it starts with. Over the course of 6 years the two rovers had only covered 13 miles collectively.
All of these things can be overcome with time, money, science, engineering, etc.
In the short term, for a relatively large amount of money -OR- the acceptance of deaths, we can put a human on that same surface who can cover miles per day, autonomously explore and discover, use new tools as soon as they arrive, can deal with unexpected circumstances, and make suggestions about what would be useful to have to do more science/work.
All that said - it is hard issue and I think it more likely a commercial effort will send a human before the government.
> It'd be a great tourism experience, but what's the ultimate value to humanity?
Survival. We will go extinct at some point if we stay on Earth. The more spread out we are, the less likely any single catastrophe is to wipe out the entire race.
In the more near term... Do we really need more motivation than "because it's there"?
Yes, but not in the next twenty years. Or the next hundred years. Or the next thousand years.
A nuclear holocaust would not kill all the humans. A major asteroid strike would not kill all the humans. A super-flu pandemic would not kill all the humans. A single short circuit, puncture, or virus could kill all the humans on Mars.
The Earth is the perfect place for humans to live, out of the entire universe. If we can't figure out how to survive long-term on this planet, that's why we'll go extinct.
"Because it's there" is a great reason for an explorer to want to go somewhere. But that doesn't automatically have value for the future of humanity.
> A nuclear holocaust would not kill all the humans. A major asteroid strike would not kill all the humans. A super-flu pandemic would not kill all the humans. A single short circuit, puncture, or virus could kill all the humans on Mars.
Terraforming Mars would prevent a 'puncture' or 'short circuit' from wiping out its population. The goal isn't to only spread human life but all of life.
You don't? That assumption is extremely obvious to me. Most people don't care about Mars right now - in fact, most Americans are against space travel because they think it's expensive. So, terraforming Mars is seen by people (including those with money) as ridiculous. But if SpaceX puts a team on Mars for less money than, say, making a blockbuster film, an obvious result is massive increase in space travel, colonization, etc.
Progress is progress. Choosing to make progress accelerates the process, especially when the progress we're talking about would be the first humans on another planet (and the first known life on Mars).
And if Mars had an oxygen atmosphere, protection from solar radiation, a fully self-sustaining human-compatible ecology and a number of extant human civilizations that might be relevant somehow.
The risk of death was very real for the explorers of past.
> Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.
Dead is dead, whether it is by the hands of a vacuum or starvation in the bitter cold.
Earth stops being perfect after a rock hits us. This has apparently already happened more than once, and there's no assurance a breeding population would survive. I agree wiping ourselves out is currently the largest risk, but in the limit, we can always make redundancy with uncorrelated failure modes less risky than a single point of failure.
> Survival. We will go extinct at some point if we stay on Earth. The more spread out we are, the less likely any single catastrophe is to wipe out the entire race.
Indeed. Think of it as a really good remote backup plan. Colonizing another solar system would be an even better one.
Who is "we" exactly? Go back in time far enough and you will find your ancestors are of a different species. So why are we throwing a pass to some future "alien" species? Is this some sort of cosmic chain letter we just received?
The arguments I hear on this subject really sound more like a guy talking himself into buying that Porsche (or Tesla!) than anything else.
You appear to be missing my point. I am not criticizing your lack of apathy for people in the absurdly distant future. Rather I am puzzled that you are even thinking along those lines.
acomar was discussing extinction events and you seem relate that to billions of years in the future. I find that rather incredibly odd. Is it optimism?
Elon Musk does not want to just send someone over on a holiday -- the stated goal of SpaceX is to put a permanent, self-sufficient colony of people on Mars.
So my proposal is this: Spend a lot less money building a much larger, much more durable self-sufficient colony of robots. Once that's going good and strong, maybe we program the robots to produce the oxygen and water and complex organic molecules and radioactive shielding we need in a reliable enough way that it's worth sending people. If that all doesn't quite work out, well, we still got a self-sufficient colony of robots.
Right. We attempted to put a self-sufficient colony in the American Southwest and still failed.
Surely it's fair to extrapolate our inability to succeed there into an inability to succeed in a far more harsh and remote locale.
Keep in mind that this isn't to say we could never succeed. Just that this is a very, very difficult problem that we don't even talk about seriously today, let alone study and pursue. Yet everyone just assumes it's somehow trivial and automatic once we decide to try.
"For a fraction of the cost of sustaining human life on another planet, we could construct a huge automated research complex capable of doing everything a human would want to do"
No, we couldn't.
It's a common refrain, but there's no evidence of it. Where on Earth are these robots that are as productive as humans?
> You'll find those productive robots in every modern factory in the world, building everything from cars to candy more efficiently than humans.
Doing one pre-programmed thing, and they they can't automatically adjust the feed rate as the drill bit wears down, or pick up the bit they drop when their suction pump jams, or change their own electrodes when their spot weld quality drops.
Automated factories take vast human effort to set up and are extraordinarily sensitive (i.e. prone to breaking) to unexpected inputs or deviations in operating environments.
This is not a good line of reasoning when arguing for their suitability for exploring an unknown planet, though I appreciate you might just be specifically addressing your parent's point.
What if we found a bacteria that would spread on Mars and create an atmosphere? There are so many questions like that. Science for science sake, art for arts, because dammit, we are alive!
A: terraforming is slow, but we're trying -- see the Sahara Forest Project
B: the Sahara desert is the biggest rain-shadow in the world. It's between the Atlas Mountains in Morrocco on the north, the Cameroon volcano chain in the southeast, and the Red Sea hills to the northeast. To make things worse, the year-round trade winds prevent Atlantic storm systems from going aground in Africa -- instead we get a hurricane season in Florida. The result is a magical place where it never rains:
> As Neil Tyson says, we can't even accurately predict the weather a week down the road, you want to terraform something?
Did he really say that? I'd think NDT would be acutely aware of the difference between short-term weather and long-term climate, given that he gets to fight climate change denialists using that absurd misunderstanding on a regular basis.
We're doing science. There's a whole science lab on Mars, right now, rolling around doing science. That's super valuable. What does it need a human for?
> We're doing science. There's a whole science lab on Mars, right now, rolling around doing science. That's super valuable. What does it need a human for?
Sending humans is an intrinsic goal, worth accomplishing for itself. It's like producing a great work of art.
(You're wrong to think that the robotic missions can be justified instrumentally. The science being done by Curiosity is kinda interesting, but it's hardly $2.5 billion worth of interesting. We could do much more important science on Earth with that money.)
Especially in light of Curiosity, why is it assumed that the logical next step after sending a robotic lab is to send a person, rather than sending a few dozen more robots?
Why not both? Humans are infinitely more versatile than a robot, unless of course, you build the robotic equivalent of a human being.
"It'd be a great tourism experience, but what's the ultimate value to humanity?"
If you realize that our destiny on this planet is to be wiped out then it seems prudent to be able to leave it and live elsewhere nearby. Sure there have been 5 mass extinctions and hundreds of smaller ones, not to mention almost doing ourselves in in the 60's over Cuba or perhaps in future due to climate change.
"It'd be a great tourism experience, but what's the ultimate value to humanity?"
Developing the future technology to accomplish this feat would be worth it already. Furthermore, being the first company/country to send a human to Mars would be an enormous achievement. The number of people this would inspire to pursue this field in our current and future generations is not something that can be measured.
the best reason I can come up with is meteors. and although taking the michael bay movie armageddon as a reference seems kinda unscientific, it's still an actual (although quite unlikely) threat. I think of mars as a backup in case something terrible happens to earth.
Btw. the video in the report mentions Elon Musk designing the rocket himself, I assume that's BS?
The common sense part of me says this is far too optimistic. After all, we haven't put people on the moon in nearly 40 years.
However, the hopeful part of me thinks it's possible. In 10 years SpaceX has gone from nothing to launching capsules into space and docking them with a space station.
Even it it takes 40 years, it's good to have someone pushing things forward. I really hope I live to see the first human walk on Mars.
There are a lot of risks. NASA's attitude to human spaceflight has been to move into a state of permanently studying the risks. If Musk is going to face the risks, he may be able to pull it off.
SpaceX really needs to start launching some rotating craft.
2025 is 13 years from now. With any luck SpaceX will have proven its heavy lift launcher within the next year and its manned capsule within the next few years. More so, they are poised to rake in billions of dollars in profits from commercial satellite launches and NASA contracts in the next decade alone.
Combine that capability plus R&D money and you have a potent mix.
Getting to Mars isn't actually that difficult, we already have a lot of the technical details worked out. The biggest element that adds cost and complexity is launch, which is precisely where SpaceX excels.
>>> Getting to Mars isn't actually that difficult, we already have a lot of the technical details worked out <<<
What I'm worried about aren't the mechanics of going there. It is the radiation. The Constellation program apparently planned to use high-density polyethylene to act as a shield in the case of a solar flare or any anomalous activity, but the trip would still expose any human being to large doses of radiation and the best methods for shielding are too heavy and hence cost too much right now.
Even if we set up a colony on mars that problem will be ever-present for anyone living there and constructing any long term colony would probably require large amounts of regolith, or maybe a tank of water repurposed as a shield (which might cause processing issues)
Hopefully solving for cost should make a lot of schemes possible, but I'm not so sure about that because there is an implicit requirement of other infrastructure that needs to be solved which no one seems to be tackling. (I might be wrong over here)
Radiation is by far the biggest concern. To some degree there's a bit of a guinea pig aspect for any early Mars astronauts. We do have the ability to at least ensure that the astronauts will survive the trip there and back. The best way to do that is with a combination of shielding around the outer hull as well as a "storm shelter" in the interior of the spacecraft surrounded by lots of water (such as the crew's water and food supply as well as their waste) for sitting out solar flare events. We can monitor solar flares quite well these days so we can keep overall radiation doses in check.
Beyond that we could look at other technologies such as artificial magnetospheres. That sort of thing would probably come into use by the time there are dedicated flights between Earth orbit and Mars orbit.
That makes sense. I'm sure that plenty of people (including me) would still sign up independent of such concerns.
Re: artificial magnetospheres; Wouldn't there be side effects for humans to live within a powerful magnetic field? For starters blood is ferromagnetic... I'm guessing shielding with either something diamagnetic or something like mu-metal is an assumption, but either scenario would be difficult to implement if I'm picturing it right.
What do you think needs to exist to make it viable? Because there is this entire supply chain involved over here which people seem to assume will spring up for such a program. I think that for something so audacious it's a limiting reagent which needs to be taken into account and, hopefully, solved for.
I've read your comments and I hope you don't mind, but I have a silly question for you, do you think it's possible to make a launch system by pumping something cryogenic through a diamagnetic material and using a linear accelerator to accelerate a pellet(large or small) to escape velocity? Such a system would be extremely expensive to set up, but it would be very reusable and it should pay itself back...
The biggest requirement is power, though it's within the capabilities of a large sized solar array. In terms of exposure to the crew, the actual magnetic field experienced within the cabin would probably not be that high (since the magnet itself would likely be on an external boom).
As far as bulk material launch, I don't think there's a ton of value in launching unprocessed raw materials into orbit. There's only a narrow time window where that's actually useful, because once you have built up even a moderate off-Earth industrial base then it becomes easy to produce things like bulk metals and whatnot. The biggest need will always be in complete, manufactured items, and I suspect more or less conventional launch vehicles will probably be the way that happens well into the era where off-Earth colonization is underway.
There have been a lot of studies on this in the international space station and there is essentially a good enough answer for this which involves exercise and physiotherapy once the person is back on Earth.
I would imagine the most complex element is landing on Mars safely at low Gs, or even travelling for years in a spaceship moving through a hostile environment. Getting stuff into orbit seems easier to me.
Landing on Mars is a more or less solved problem, if you can throw enough mass at the problem. Launching stuff from Earth is also a solved problem, but it's hugely expensive. Landing humans on Mars is well within our technological capability, but because of the cost of launch it would be hugely expensive and nobody's put up the cash yet.
The reason SpaceX is in a perfect position here is because they've dropped the cost of space launch dramatically. So if it takes SpaceX fewer billions to get to Mars than it would anyone else then they are poised to get there sooner.
Musk isn't interested in bringing people back. (And honestly, neither am I.) People didn't care too much about coming back from the 'New World' back in the day, and we need more of that attitude today.
I'd think its much more likely we'd be sending people to Mars on a regular basis if we found out there is something valuable there. If space tourism was sufficient to foot the bill for space travel, we'd be sending school field trips to the moon by now.
The people who colonize Mars probably won't make a profit off of it. It will be consumption spending, like funding a yachting team. If it ever turns out to be profitable in a pure economic sense, it will take a long time for that to happen.
The value of materials on Mars will need to take into account the incredible expense of moving the material off planet. It's unlikely that will ever be cheaper than recycling the materials we have here on Earth.
This is especially true if Planetary Resources succeeds in mining asteroids. If we can get cheap resources from our asteroids, getting them from Mars will be out of the question.
Orbital mining and habitat construction is roughly similar level of difficulty and much more economically viable. If we go to Mars (and we should), it won't be for pure economic reasons.
I've got a hunch this is why Curiosity is equipped with a high-tech geology kit.. "If we find traces of life, wonderful! But if we find large quantities of easily retrievable oil, precious metals or rare-earth minerals? We're in business!"
Exactly. The race to the moon was justified by national security, but really there isn't much economic incentive to explore Mars... yet. NASA needs to find good reasons to keep going back.
Unless we invent a much faster engine, traveling to and back from Mars is practically impossible. In the 16 months it takes to get there and return the amount of radiation that will be received from humans could pose significant health risks. It's not surprising that NASA's plans about a manned mission to Mars talk about a one way trip and building some kind of habitat there where they will stay permanently.
Astronauts spend 6+ months at a time on the space station, without protection from the Earth's atmosphere. I'm told the magnetosphere is only helpful against solar flares, not cosmic rays, and you can shield against solar flares with a storm shelter on the vehicle.
Also, you can do a one way trip in 6 months if you're willing to spend a bit more fuel. So 12 months total in space.
A trip to Mars today, given our present state of knowledge, would be safer than Apollo was given our knowledge at the time.
It has long been Musk's contention that going to Mars would mean moving there, at least initially. He places less value on the return trip than NASA seems to.
Yeah, unless something changes in the time it takes us to put a manned mission together it's pretty much a given that the first trip will be one way only. It greatly simplifies things not having to worry about how to get back.
"Our motto was 'Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970'", recalls Dyson. Orion would have been more akin to the rocket ships of science fiction than to the cramped capsules of Gagarin and Glenn. One hundred and fifty people could have lived aboard in relative comfort; the useful payload would have been measured in thousands of tons. Orion would have been built like a battleship, with no need for the excruciating weight-saving measures adopted by chemically-propelled spacecraft.
I know the article isn't really the main attraction here, but what is up with this?
"He also laughs that the biggest payload on the Dragon Capsule that flew a mission to the International Space Station was a wheel of cheese."
I am pretty certain that capsule was stuffed. Didn't it take them days to unload it? Is this just a terribly worded sentence saying that the previous load was cheese?
I got the feeling that the segment with Musk was filmed a year or two ago, despite the new stuff from the MSL landing. They talk about SpaceX accomplishing the feat of taking a man-safe craft into orbit and back to Earth, which would refer to the (unmanned) cheese mission, when SpaceX has since done the bigger feat of docking with the ISS.
I would personally rather see something like a space habitat before colonizing Mars.
If we can artificially replicate Earth's environment in space, then we're set, we could drift through space when our solar system becomes too hot and ensure our race can live on . We wouldn't need planets anymore.
So, instead of having to adapt to Mars' conditions (low gravity and little atmosphere), we would build something capable of sustaining life as we know it.
Much more valuable if you ask me.
But still, going to Mars is great science and will give us very valuable experience.
> If we can artificially replicate Earth's environment in space, then we're set, we could drift through space when our solar system becomes too hot and ensure our race can live on . We wouldn't need planets anymore.
That's a few billion years off, so let's do the easier one first. Plenty of time to learn space habitats (and presumably a few billion years from now they'll seem pretty quaint).
An extremely noble goal, but I'd say it was unlikely for a reason not mentioned in the article, but heavily implied: this would be a one-way trip.
Whilst creating and maintaining a Mars base would be one of humanity's crowning achievements, I don't the proposed journey would pass the moral and ethical objections from the general public.
Many would have ethical objections, but I think a lot of sane people would volunteer to be the first person on Mars even if it was understood to be a one-way mission.
Would you really? I see all these people say they would volunteer, but I have my doubts. The novelty of being on Mars would wear off in a couple years and the isolation and so forth ... I just don't buy that there are really many people willing to do that.
I'm not really interested in some new adventurous experience. I'd like to help build something like a new colony on Mars, even if it's far down the line and all I'm really doing is taking care of the first steps of on-the-ground planning.
It's a claim that has the safety of there not actually being any plan or need for me to prove my claim. But for what it's worth, I've also taken the same attitude towards startups I'm impressed by. It's not really about me and what I want, so much as there's this big thing that I want to happen and if I can shovel some dirt and bring us a step closer, I'm in.
Resources on Earth are limited, space has unlimited resources. So if we want to have abundance for all humans we must expand into space. It's that simple. And we can't bring everything back to Earth, so some have to leave Earth to enjoy those space resources.
"If you look at something like a Boeing 747 -- that's over a quarter of a billion dollars, buying a 747," he said. "You need two of them for a round trip. But nobody is paying half a billion dollars to fly from L.A. to London. It's a few thousand dollars, and that's because you reuse that aircraft multiple times, you use it thousands of times."
Airlines have always been subsidised by taxpayers, in fact air travel has never been super profitable even with the subsidies.
Plausible but the timetable is too soon, maybe 2050.
I mean it's possible by then the USA still doesn't have healthcare as a right, but the top 2% will always be able to do such trips as a lark (and write it off on their taxes?) however there will have to be a revolutionary leap in a powersource.
Personally I think the idea of hobbyists having their own bots on the moon by 2025 is more realistic and interesting.
The health care system is so complex that where would you even begin? With car and/or space, you can just throw money at building something to compete, but it would be difficult to disrupt health care by starting a new insurance company or hospital.
I mean it's possible by then the USA still doesn't have healthcare as a right
I don't care about healthcare being a right. It's a meaningless gesture when we're talking about the most screwed up system of healthcare to ever evolve.
But I do care about healthcare improving to the point that everyone can afford it and everyone will survive. We need a Henry Ford, an Elon Musk, or anybody who's ambitious enough to transform the world's healthcare systems from mediocre to an unprecedented level of quality, scale, and cheapness. Then you can slap "healthcare is a right" because it doesn't really take much to care for sick human beings anymore.
Oh boy, the greatest adventure ever and 95% percent of the world's engineers have to watch -and all they can do is root and hope, because they are not american citizens.
Heck, if only there was a new Operation Paperclip [1], people would sign up to become "Nazis".
Perhaps this is pedantic of me, but the article is mistitled. Musk is sending someone to the moon in 12-15 years. They're not going to have someone on the moon in 12-15 years. This makes a difference because I'm assuming the trip to Mars won't be short.
It's really cute how you guys think this is even remotely possible. Heard about peak {oil, coal, gas, phosphorous, rare earths, iron} and AGW? It'll make his and your dreams short-lived. Sorry!
SpaceX's contract is unique among contractors in that they are responsible for overruns.
Now, you could say they will change their mind when they run out of money, but frankly I would respond by pointing out that Elon really doesn't seem to be in it for the money, but rather despite the money.
I recall in one of the interviews he said he <inexact quote, summarized>
"I do appreciate money and it is needed to invest in ventures, but I personally I'm not in it for the money. I can already buy everything I could want."
EDIT: I am just supporting parent post's claim that
"but frankly I would respond by pointing out that Elon really doesn't seem to be in it for the money, but rather despite the money."
That would imply that in his personal life he does not need or want more money, since he is already incredibly wealthy. However, personal wealth will not be enough to fund SpaceX indefinitely. The system needs to be balanced.
It is only a recent phenomenon in human history, in the last few hundred years, that all the places in the world are known. For hundreds of thousands of years, there have always been new lands and oceans for our kind to explore. Indeed, until the last ~20k years, we all existed in a near constant wandering state. Thats how we survived, and the lifestyle is still practiced today, albeit only in very tiny numbers in remote places.
Even with civilized life, i.e. villages, towns, and cities, for thousands of years people have jumped on ships or made years-long treks across oceans and continents to build new lives. Some of this was the desire to be free, or it was forced, or it was from desperation, or it was simply to explore.
Simply because we almost all live in a vastly interconnected world now doesn't mean that any of those reasons have disappeared, or that the kinds of people willing to take such risks have died out. We're still here, if latent, amongst the masses.
Many of us spend our youth traveling the world, climbing the next mountain. Many others lose themselves in vast game worlds where we can, for short times, satisfy the need to explore and build new lives. Some games such as WoW, Eve Online, Secondlife, and Civilization are so popular in part of because of these desires and needs.
So when you ask, "Why?", I say "Why not?". You are free to stay here. I want to go see what's out there.