Nibb31

If that's the only technobabble that you have trouble with in Star Trek, especially TOS, then your suspension of disbelief is remarkable.

Ariane 5 was planned to be man-rated for Hermes, but Hermes was cancelled before development started on Ariane 5 and no provisions for man-rating Ariane 5 were ever included.

That's pretty amazing. And when it realizes that it's going to lose at Tetris, it pauses the game, so that it never loses. That's creepy.

Have you actually read this thread before jumping in ? Price depends on volume. Volume depends on demand. Demand depends on price and lots of other things. Musk can only sell cheap tickets once somebody has built a colony and there is a market large enough to send people by thousands. Thousands of people can live on Mars only when there is large enough self-sustaining colony. Designing a spaceship is the easy part (and even then, the ITS design has many fundamental flaws) but nobody seriously believes that Musk can build interplanetary spaceships for cheaper than a Boeing 737, which is what Musk bases his ticket price on. However, the main problem is that nobody is addressing the hard part, which is actually building the colony, because there is no business case or political motivation to do it. Only if you drink the Kool Aid.

When you are spending billions of taxpayer/stockholder money, you bet you need a justification. But there isn't a will. Mars colonization doesn't even register on the list of voter preoccupations. It isn't part of anyone's political platform. Most people on the street don't even know about the ISS or believe in the moon hoax. You might think it's important, but "Flayer wants a Mars colony" isn't going to get Congress to start throwing money at NASA. I have no doubt people will plant a flag on Mars before the end of the century, and maybe set up a permanent government-funded science outpost with crew rotations every two years. But colonization makes absolutely no sense.

Depending on the inclination, you might have to wait several days for the satellite to line up. Domino's is faster.

I don't think that anyone is against colonization of Mars. It's just that there is no justification for colonizing Mars, or even for "loveing our way through the galaxy". Science fiction is cool and all, but so is Lord of the Rings. When it comes to the real world, you need some sort of justification for such massive investments. So it failed because the economics and politics didn't pan out. Case in point. Facts contradict nothing. It's an illustration of why an actual business model is required and how colonization is doomed if it isn't backed by economics. Your claims are usually a mix of conjecture, wishful thinking, and biased opinion. You have been asked plenty of times to back up your assertions with evidence, but you just switch subjects or move the goalposts. To claim that you have a scientific background is baffling and pretty much all of your ad hominem attacks apply to you without any rewording.

Urban legend: http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp

You are confusing general concepts and engineering designs. There are artists impressions galore, and a handful of trade studies. There is zero R&D effort. Study reports and powerpoints are cheap. It's in engineering where the major effort lies and where it gets really expensive, and there are zero organisations working on the problems of colonization. Instead of calling others liars, why don't you show us some evidence of a working Mars basecamp that is ready to pack up and go. One of the reasons why the analogy doesn't work. Thousands of people dying, although the actual living conditions were much easier then than those of Mars colonists today, is hardly an example that we want to compare with or follow. No, because there were actually decades of planning and billions of dollars spent on designing and building the ISS before people were sent. Who is going to spend a proportional number of billions for hundreds of people to live on Mars ? Hint: Musk isn't. The exact same thing can be said for you. There is zero evidence coming from your side of the argument. You see? Another false statement. The ISS works because it has a continuous supply line to bring in fully disposable supplies. They don't even have a washing machine for clothes and towels. Only the air and water is partially recycled, and the system still needs topping up. It is far from requiring "no resources". No it isn't. Even if it's freezing outside, your garden shed is less hostile than a tent in the desert of Gobi because it receives power and water from your house and you can easily leave your shed and return home. Cosmic radiation is stronger on Mars than it is on the ISS, which is inside the Earth's magnetosphere. How much would that cost? What sort of investment in R&D, equipment, and transportation would that need? Who is going to pay for it? Under what business model is that support provided? What is going to attract migrants? What does Mars offer in terms of a better life than Earth does.

ROI for private investors can only be about economical. The ROI for government spending can be economical or political interest. There is no evidence of any colonization plan that provides any kind of ROI, either economical or political. Sure, it can create jobs, but so does military spending or any infrastructure building program, and those things provide direct benefits. You keep on saying that governments should chip in to pay for colonization, and at the same time, you claim that it will end in hundreds (or thousands) of deaths. Maybe it wasn't a big deal in the 17th century, but in today's environment, the PR and legal repercussions would be huge, and would effectively put an end to the whole effort. Having people die in the process is simply not an option in today's world. And if you really want to use the analogy of colonization of the Americas, look how it turned out for European governments. It inevitably ended with colonial wars and independance, with those governments losing everything they built and paid for. So remind me how any of that profits the taxpayer again.

If your return is less than your investment, then you have a negative ROI, which is pretty much the same as no ROI. When we say there is no ROI on Mars, what it means is that the investment is orders of magnitude higher than any return you can reasonably expect. Which explains why the private sector isn't interested. Musk isn't interested in ROI. He's motivated by a philantropic vision, not by economics, but he's an exception to the rule. That is not how capitalism works, and no rationally run business can get away with spending shareholder money just for a vision. This is why we aren't seeing any other corporations jumping on the Mars bandwagon to build Mars habs, Mars mining equipment, Mars buldozers, Mars greenhouses, Mars power plants, and so on. In your dreams. Again, you are speculating. There is no marketing data that proves that statement. It's the only space-related business that has an actual tangible ROI and an established market. No. They will have opened up a route. The market only exists if somebody makes a business case for going there. If that doesn't happen (and there is zero evidence that it will) then SpaceX ITS is a bridge to nowhere. It's like setting up an A380 airline airline from London Heathrow to Tristan DaCunha island. Creating a route does not create demand for that route. The Heathrow-DaCunha route would not create much demand to go there (although it's a much more attractive destination than Mars). You probably wouldn't return the investment of building an airport and operating an A380. Absolutely not. It's not the competency of the SpaceX engineers that is in discussion. They do what they are paid for, and they are obviously driven by wacky requirements. It's the business plan behind it, which Musk himself admits that is lacking (illustrated by his famous slide about stealing underwear). And here we go again with the colonization of America analogies... *yawn* Mars is nowhere like the American Frontier. People migrated to America for a safer or more comfortable life to themselves or their families. In no way will Mars ever be safer or more comfortable than anywhere on Earth. And for the umpteenth time, prices will not be $200K before many decades. That price only works if there are thousands of people queueing up to board a thousand ITS waiting in orbit, when an actual interplanetary spaceship is cheaper to build and operate than an A320 is today. In other words, after the end of the colonization phase. During the actual colonization, it will be orders of magnitude more expensive. Based on marketing data from the 17th century that doesn't apply here.

What Gaarst said. In addition, the side tanks (they are not boosters) were originally cannibalized from an existing ICBM design.

The "DC-3" Shuttle was Max Faget's design. It was called that because it had stubby wings instead of delta wings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_DC-3

Pretty much all of the vital equipment is similar in that regard. Designing and running machines in a near vacuum, extreme cold, environment with low maintenance, is going to require a huge engineering effort. You can't just buy an off-the-shelf Caterpillar or A/C unit and adapt it to Mars conditions. The problem is that nobody has any plans to invest an R&D effort into those things, including habitation pressure vessels. Without life support, mining equipment, ISRU generators, habs, and so on, a colony is non-starter. Also, that toxic dust and will get everywhere.

The "backup population" scenario is only (flawed) rationale than space cadets use to justify colonization. If Martians can't return to Earth, the whole plan falls apart.

Again, we know absolutely zero about partial gravity. I really don't know where you're pulling these claims from. Pure conjecture. It might be an educated guess, but it's still complete guesswork.

ITAR maybe.

Why would you want to use SRBs when you have the Falcon Heavy ?

You must be trolling here, right? Sending instable personalities to Mars and giving them guns? What could possibly go wrong? The people sent to Mars in the construction phase are going to be highly skilled and trained engineers and techs. Unless a government suddenly gets politically pressured into the venture (I don't see how that could happen), these people will be corporate employees. They will also be highly paid, because a tour of several years on Mars is going to be dangerous and hard emotionally. Sending them there is going to be super expensive. Keeping them alive there is going to cost even more. Do you really think that people can't be locked up for a year without going bonkers and killing each other? What kind of world do you live in? There will be no guns, because that would be a waste of payload and also because guns are a stupid idea when you live in pressurized hab modules. The main driver for peacekeeping in those stages will be peer-pressure, and unless something goes dramatically wrong in the hiring process, that should be more than enough.

Because spending billions to send potentially uncooperative and unskilled labor to build and maintain vital equipment in a high-tech space colony is a recipe for disaster.

NASA defines technology maturity with the TRL scale. TRL 8 or 9 means that you can use it for vital purposes on manned flights. Anything lower simply doesn't provide enough confidence. Actually we do. As you say, we do not live in the same world as the generations before us. Legal, ethical, political, and PR constraints are just as important today as the economical and technical ones. You can't handwave them away. Unless you are drinking Musk's KoolAid, until there is a large sustainable settlement and a fleet of ships and thousands of people going back and forth, people won't be buying tickets and going on their own dime. For the first decades of exploration, the people who will go to Mars will be selected and sent by corporations and government institutions. As such, they will be under the responsibility of those organisations, so it is the duty of those organisations to ensure that they do everything they can to keep them healthy. The PR and legal backlash of losing people because you didn't do the proper research is simply too much of a risk and could actually jeopardize the whole effort. That's the world we live in, now. People aren't the ones investing billions of dollars here. If anyone does, it's going to be corporations or governments. When people start landing on Mars, they will do so as employees, not as private citizens.

I admire your certainty. Especially from someone who claims to have a scientific background. What you have is a hypothesis. Without experimentation, it has no more value than an opinion. We simply don't know what the effects of a martian environment on biological functions are, and we won't know until we go through that exploration phase with people living on mars in a temporary outpost. Any talk about colonization is just premature wishful thinking until we actually demonstrate that we can live and work there and that our assumptions are correct. There is A LOT of research and engineering to be done before we get to the level of confidence that is needed to send families for permanent settlement, and nobody seems to be interested in investing in that development work. It goes against all scientific method to claim the contrary.

I think everybody has been pretty aware of that from the start. It's pretty much the centerpiece of the plan. I don't think there really is more to reveal. Despite what Musk said about the BFS shown as being the exact same design that will fly, we all know that it's just a notional concept at this time. Many of the engineering decisions in the design design make absolutely no sense or are badly thought out. The rest of the plan is just handwaving and wishful thinking really.

We had this thread a while back:

So what is it then ? Are we talking colonization (which is a long term goal that won't happen until we actually develop the technology to make it possible) or are we talking short term outpost/exploration (which involves temporary stays, huge construction efforts and high upfront costs). No children specifically rules out colonization. It's one or the other. You can't have it both ways. There are at least two major phases to this so-called colonization effort. The one that Musk talks about is when there are thousands of BFS with an actual destination already built and a low ticket price where people settle on Mars with their families, which is at best decades away. This is the building phase, where cost and risk are high, where infrastructure, supply chains, and a whole economy need to be built from scratch. And this is all handwaved away. The funny thing is that Musk's ITS is specifically aimed at the 2nd phase. It's rather suboptimal for the 1st phase, which incidentally is the one that he will be facing first and is likely to last for decades. He's building a jumbo jet for settling the far west. More handwaving. We simply don't know what the biological risks are because we haven't even had people living more than a year or two exposed to low gravity, isolation, and cosmic radiation. Radiation is only one of the unknowns, and it will have an effect. For all we know, it simply might not be possible to have children on Mars, which will make the whole colonization idea moot.