> Right now we're in a similar phase for Mars as we were for the Moon in the early days of Apollo.
We're not. The longest Moon landing was 12 days. The goal of the Apollo mission was not to colonize the Moon. There's no Moon colony or any current plans for one.
If the goal was simply to visit Mars, that might be viable. But the goal of "let's make life interplanetary" is currently a pipe dream at best, a religious cult at worst.
Because nobody wants one. That’s not an understatement. We have the resources to begin colonising the Moon. But nobody wants to. People want to colonise Mars.
> there are people working on rockets and talking about Mars…it’s 100% vaporware
Methane engines and atmosphere-agnostic propulsive recovery are far from vapourware. It’s not a launch schedule. But that’s a straw man requirement for “working on” something.
> not a straw man when you don't trust the word and good faith
Then don’t.
Do you dispute that those technologies exist, and were developed by people dreaming of colonising Mars? The “when is the Mars launch” standard for “working on” something is a straw man because, by that definition, nobody is working on fusion energy or Alzheimer’s disease.
You're talking about rocket technology. I already said, "If the goal was simply to visit Mars, that might be viable." The question is a permanent, self-sustaining Mars colony, where the biggest problem is not "Methane engines" but rather breathing oxygen, drinking water, eating food, not getting irradiated, not getting poisoned, not having circulatory problems, reproducing, and surviving in general.
I've been dreaming about getting dirty with young Cleopatra. Expect a working time machine any day now. All I'm currently missing are a flux capacitor and working out some details.
Intentionally. Hackers dream. I have a background in aerospace engineering. That doesn’t mean I know how to solve the problems of permanent habitation. But it gives me a sense of where the edges are, and while some problems are super difficult (toxicity) others are wildly exaggerated (radiation) and none are blocking. Moreover, many of the processes we’ll need to develop have obvious counterparts on Earth, most interestingly, energy and fuel generation.
The author of the article wants an annual JWST or Cassini. I’d love that. But we aren’t getting it. De-funding Mars means going back to a post-Apollo NASA budget.
SpaceX doesn't seem to have done any work on actually living day to day on Mars. Not even colonizing, just living. Where's the airlock that will reliably blow the perchlorate filled dust off spacesuits? A toilet that will work reliably and not fill a ship with aerosolized feces? Shit how about an actual static demonstrator for a Martian lander version of Starship? A working model methane processor demonstrating that fuel could be generated from Mars' atmosphere and stored for the duration of a launch window.
I'm sure they've got some engineering schematics for some of those things or re-warmed NASA papers about those topics floating around. But talking about Martian colonies without talking about the things that would just keep a couple of people alive is just bullshitting.
You're serious about an endeavor when you want to talk about the boring aspects of it. Talking up the exciting aspects is just bullshitting.
> SpaceX doesn't seem to have done any work on actually living day to day on Mars
Agreed. Most of the serious work on establishing visits is at NASA. But getting there and back sustainably is a big part of the problem. To borrow another comment’s analogy, we’re not going to establish a permanent presence (whether with a rotating cast of astronauts or permanent population) with the astrophysical equivalent of triremes.
This is yet another SpaceX, or rather a Musk, problem when it comes to Mars. Even the mission profile of Starship is talking about as-yet unproven claims about sustainability. The current profile for Starship is to launch an unmanned refueler and a trans-Mars ship. They rendezvous in Earth orbit, refuel, and the trans-Mars ship flies off for a Mars injection orbit.
Not only is Starship not currently flying but there's been no demonstrations of their in-orbit refueling, not even between two Dragon capsules. There's also been no demonstration of in-orbit engine reignition. No demonstration of multiple engine reignitions. These are all necessary components of any Starship mission. Starship must always have fuel for landing as there's no capability for it to do an unpowered landing.
This means without an in-orbit refueling its payload lift is massively compromised. It also doesn't have the fuel to get out of LEO without refueling.
Starship is currently making tiny baby steps towards launching while people talk it up like it's doing regularly scheduled launches. There are a lot of major unknowns in the Starship mission profile and there's no guarantee it can or will work as advertised. Even if it technically works the idea there's going to be daily launches is currently a pipe dream.
They're still working on the means to get there - which will set the limits on everything else - so it's pretty ridiculous to be arguing that they aren't serious because they haven't gotten to the rest of the work.
> so it's pretty ridiculous to be arguing that they aren't serious because they haven't gotten to the rest of the work
Not in the slightest. SpaceX's proposed Starship design has known mass and envelope limits. All of the required support systems can be designed with those limits (or subset thereof) as part of the constraints. In fact now is the best time to start designing those because it can inform design criteria or mission profiles for Starship. Having those as handwave-y unknowns while talking about colonies is just absurd.
A manned landing on Mars requires they have months worth of reliable support infrastructure available. None of that is just going to appear. It all needs to be built and landed with or before humans. It needs to be repairable with tools on hand. It must power on an be functional on Day 1. You're not serious about landing people on Mars let alone building a colony without talking about the "boring" infrastructure that will keep everyone alive.
Even Starship's exact payload capability isn't set in stone just yet (the stated numbers are targets requiring optimization of the design beyond what the current prototypes have), nor is the amount of refueling needed. Even the fuel transfer system hasn't been concretely settled on yet. While they are working on catching, there isn't enough certainty on its reliability (particularly for the ships).
Hell, as it stands it isn't even clear if initial vehicles will need auxiliary thrusters to avoid digging up a hole upon landing. Even NASA seems to be uncertain about that one.
So yes, it is ridiculous to argue that they aren't serious about setting up a colony based on what they're doing right now.
Beyond that though, they're working on the spacesuits (granted, they're so early into that they're nowhere near ones usable on Mars) and they have demonstrated the ability to perform some amount of important maintenance on the Starship vehicles without needing machinery that isn't easy to bring along.
> They're still working on the means to get there - which will set the limits on everything else
It doesn't. The Martian environment sets the limits on everything else. You could drag the entire Earth over next to Mars, and people still couldn't live there.
The irony is that the hypothetical "What if the Earth became uninhabitable?" is effectively the same as "What if the Earth became just like Mars?"
People want to colonize mars because they don’t grasp how much it would utterly suck to go to mars. Mars missions make the Apollo program look like a luxury cruise.
The majority of the population on Earth doesn't need to want to go to Mars, only a small minority does. That small minority has to overlap with those who can actually fund it.
Much of the small minority would change their mind when faced with the reality of it. Assuming you actually make it there alive, it will be physically and mentally grueling to continue to exist there. Colonization is a significantly different scenario than manned mission to plant a flag in the ground.
If you asked the early Europeans coming over from Europe to North America if they regretted leaving I'm sure many would say that they did, and in fact many did return. That doesn't change the fact that a substantial number of those early arrivers did stay for the long run.
There may even be failed attempts where everyone dies in an accident as there were failed colonies.
So imagine you're a European in the new world... but also you can't breathe the air, go outside your tiny room, and are constantly being bombarded with radiation.
More like stay and die there. How are you going to refuel on mars? You aren't going to build an entire pipeline of industries in just a couple years to get off Mars, and shipping that much fuel to Mars would be ridiculous. They better start sending fuel now if they expect to have enough to make it back.
The only reasonable method of shipping rocket fuel to Mars or anywhere else in the solar system is to mine and refine it off the moon or an asteroid, which means a moon base or mostly self-sustained asteroid colony would need to exist first.
And where is that raw methane going to come from? Its not like there is a lake of methane you can just suck up on Mars. What about the oxygen needed to burn that methane?
You are going to need to produce 10,000x more energy than your fuel contains to make the fuel, and that energy has to come from somewhere.
> And where is that raw methane going to come from? Its not like there is a lake of methane you can just suck up on Mars. What about the oxygen needed to burn that methane?
Are you even attempting to Google these questions before posting them here with such an aggressive tone? Manufacturing oxygen on Mars is demonstrated engineering [1]. Manufacturing methane, theoretically sound and demonstrated in the lab [2].
This is what I meant by the aggressive strain of ignorance having overtaken the science with popular astronautics [3]. Some folks read a hot take on Musk and what Hawthorne hasn't done, ignore the thousands of scientists demonstrating actual technology a hundred million miles away, and then assume they're vindicated when the rest of us get tired of arguing with willful denseness.
Even your sources are giving multiple years of 24/7 operation under ideal conditions to produce what is necessary for a single launch, that doesn't seem very reasonable to me. How much energy are we able to actually generate on Mars? From what I understand solar panels are not that great in the Mars environment. And any sort of material processing is going to take a whole lot of energy.
I just don't see a Mars colony as a reasonable goal without sending potentially thousands of rockets full of tools and materials, which is too expensive to do without an already existent space mining and processing industry.
> > and not on say crypto or ad serving or military pursuits, is still a net win
We are not in the 1960s anymore, the US should do better than just an Apollo program 2.0, going into crazy Mars expenditures without a plan would guarantee you just that.
The inspiration should be the Manhattan Project and the Marshall Plan.
In both instances the super-geniuses with type-A personality got you to the Promised Land, but then what happens? They move on the next shiny thing. Nonetheless The Manhattan Project and the Marshall Plan were able to continue because once the super-geniuses got the US to the Promised Land there were operators who got to keep the project going.
Generals, admirals, ambassadors were more than willing to dedicate their lives as operators to make sure that the U.S. Govt and its citizens would actually get a ROI on the 2 endeavours. You can say it's patriotism, status-seeking, the thrill to have authority over powerful weapons, borders and huge economic resources. Whatever the reason there were operators at the helm once the super-geniuses got out of the picutre.
The Apollo Program had the same amount of super-geniuses but no operators to take the helm to secure ROI, that's the reason why the U.S. Govt. had to pull the plug on the whole program.
Operators are not interested in writing their name in history books, they need enemies and competition to beat and take resources away from them. Said resources would then be paraded around and shown to citizens in order to both show the competence of said operators and improve the quality of life of American citizens.
What resources can be extracted from Mars and given to citizens in order to propel their quality of life?
If you think the infamous "We are there for the oil!" was bad then I guarantee you that "We don't know why we are there at all!" is much worse.
The former people will understand the rationale and even accept it, while being openly critic about it in public they'd be at peace with it while in the privacy of their homes with the curtain closed. The latter, not so much.
We're not. The longest Moon landing was 12 days. The goal of the Apollo mission was not to colonize the Moon. There's no Moon colony or any current plans for one.
If the goal was simply to visit Mars, that might be viable. But the goal of "let's make life interplanetary" is currently a pipe dream at best, a religious cult at worst.