Nibb31

No it doesn't. You actually need a dedicated satellite network like NASA's TRDS or ground stations sprinkled around the globe, but those are not available for commercial usage. TRDS doesn't provide anything like high-speed broadband (it's around 3Mbps with a very high latency). You can't skype from the ISS, but you can transfer files.

Actually, we don't know any of that. Anything you hear about the BFR or MCT at this stage is pure speculation.

I don't think that space tourism is such a huge market. Suborbital 5-minute joyrides will be for the Jet Set, which will earn bragging points for the first couple of people who do it. But in the Jet Set, nobody want's to be the second best, so it will wear off once all of the Kardashians have done it. I don't think that's a sustainable business model. Beyond that, who wants to sell their house for a 5 minute joyride ? As for orbital hotels, they are even less sustainable. People like rich businessmen aren't usually interested in taking long vacations (otherwise they wouldn't be rich), unless they can combine them with business trips. Space isn't the best place to conduct business, and unless they are real space geeks (most of them aren't) they will still prefer touring the Bahamas or the French Riviera on a super-yacht and partying with super-models. Floating in zero-g and looking at the Earth out of a porthole probably gets old after a few days if you have nothing else to do.

Why would a company pay half a million dollars per employee to expatriate a workforce that costs them a fraction of that amount per year? What sort of business justifies that kind of cost and long-term planning? Why couldn't they figure out a way that doesn't involve sending hundreds of people, like using robots, or settling an off-shore company on Earth? It doesn't make sense.

The analogy with the colonization of America comes up often, typically due to cultural bias. But it's very wrong. Exploration and settlement was typically funded by governments, who saw a way of extending their sphere of power by grabbing land and resources before their rivals. The actual countries had reasons for colonization , and they didn't know that it would end with all those colonies going independent. Having independent colonies wasn't a goal. Today, there is no incentive for governments to start a colonization effort. There is no economical or political gain, and we are aware that if a colony ever becomes self-sufficient, it is likely to push for political independence, which means that the whole effort would be lost for the country sponsoring it. The economical motives existed, and they were basically based on trading local resources from the old world to the new world, or triangle commerce. There are no rare resources on Mars, there is no possible trade other than importing everything at a huge expense. People didn't migrate "for the heck of it", except for some excentric adventurers. But those weren't actual migrants, but more thrill-seekers who planned to return to civilization to sell books or give lectures. The real migrants left because they were persecuted or poor and looking for a better life. Humans have always migrated to improve their confort or their safety and to get a better life for their children. That still applies today, but it doesn't work for a Mars colony, which would be dangerous and unconfortable. Also, if you can afford a ticket for Mars, then you can also afford a decent life of leisure in many places on the planet. There was also the fact that they were poorly qualified and they knew that they could find jobs with low qualification requirements. They knew that they could set up a homestead and live off the land. A Mars colony would need highly trained personel for maintenance work or farming. That sort of profile doesn't typically fit the "persecuted and poor" description. If you're good enough at a job to be useful on a Mars colony, there are chances that you have a pretty decent job on Earth and you will have a lot to lose by moving your family to Mars. Space colonies are fun plot devices for science fiction stories, but they don't work in reality because there are no actual economical incentives to send thousands of humans to another planet, and because there is no way it can be an attractive place to want to settle and raise kids. The entire business case for a space colony simply doesn't add up.

Not very many people would go on a million-dollar cruise where they are stuck inside a 737 cabin with 100 other people for a year long round trip with nothing to look at most of the time. The idea is that people will go there to stay, because the trip won't be a joyride.

I wouldn't say it "just worked". It was a very complex piece of machinery, much more expensive and complex than Soyuz, with plenty of failure modes. And it was as over-engineered for LEO work as Orion MPCV would be for ISS resupply runs.

Hehe... I haven't had much doubts that they will finally get the technical details of recovering rocket stages ironed out. It's the economical viability of reusable stages that I'm doubtful about, and the actual ability to cut launch prices by an order of magnitude based on that capability. And all the Mars colony stuff...

Those were the plans before CRS-7. At this point, it would be bad taste to announce a grandiose plan before RTF. You don't announce an overambitious mega-project when you're still recovering from a failure. My guess is that he will probably even wait until after a successful CRS-8, so that he's back on track with NASA supply runs first.

I don't think that not being able to hover is a big issue. There is no reason hoverslam can't be made to work. You know your thrust, you know your altitude, and you know your weight. It's just a matter of plugging those 3 parameters into a calculator and you get your burn parameters. Previous failures were mostly due to landing on a small platform in the sea. I'm pretty sure that they can get it work on land with only some minor tweaking.

Earth [Urth] (noun) Mostly harmless.

2024 or 2028 if extended (which seems unlikely at this point). The plan is to deorbit. Please let's not get into a "why don't we boost it to a graveyard orbit so that it can become a museum" debate. We've had those already and we've explained plenty of times why it's not possible. Use the Search.

The inflatable decelerator isn't really a heatshield. It's more of an inflatable hypersonic parachute, and it has yet to actually work properly ! The HIAD is struggling to get through TRL6, and it needs to reach TRL9 before it can used for a manned mission, which means that it needs at least a couple of actual tests on Mars probes. Since there are no plans to use it for any currently planned missions (Mars 2020 uses the same "skycrane" technique as MSL), I don't see how it could be demonstrated before at least 2025, which means that there is no way the technology can be used for a manned mission before 2030 at best. So on that part alone, a Mars Direct mission in 10 years isn't realistic. The same is true for all the other key technologies involved, including ISRU.

I don't think they ever had any real plans. The Russian space industry issues lots of statements about plans and projects, but very little of it is actually funded or even supported by Roskosmos.

Again, Mars One applicants didn't have to pay for their ticket. Most of them were young dreamers who had no knowledge of what living on Mars would actually be like. I doubt many of them could actually scrounge up a million bucks. People who want to emigrate usually do so because of promises of a better life, either because their life is crappy, or because they (very wrongly) think that the grass is greener elsewhere. People who have million dollar homes to sell typically aren't persecuted outcasts with no job, no friends or relatives and a bleak future. In general, if you have that sort of estate, you are also a pretty well-established member of society with a lot more to lose than to gain.

I was referring to the Spruce Goose.

Like Howard Hughes, or more recently like Branson and Paul Allen

He wants people to pay $500.000 for a one-way ticket. That's $50 000 000 for a 100 passenger launch. I believe that's wildly optimistic, but that's his plan. The problem is that if you have that sort of money, it's not very likely that you have anything to gain by emigrating to Mars to become a janitor or a cook. The intersection of: people who are rich enough to buy the ticket, and people who are desperate enough that living on mars represents a better life for them, and people who have useful skills to establish a viable colony isn't big enough to make a sustainable business model, IMO. That's all assuming that we can actually live, reproduce, and develop normally on Mars, which is decades away in terms of biological research. The whole colony thing is where Musk's plans break down. He is a billionnaire, but he isn't that rich. His fortune is "only" 12 billion, which is actually less than NASA's annual budget (not a good comparison of course, but just to show the order of magnitude). You can't just spend away that kind of money without expecting a return on investment. Also, most of that money is actually tied up in his companies. He can't sell his shares, or their value will collapse. So like most billionnaires, he borrows money for his day-to-day expenses and investments. Finally, those businesses aren't that successful anyway. He has revolutionized the orbital launch industry by cutting prices by 50%. I don't think there is much more to gain at this stage through reusability, because SpaceX is already pretty much as lean as it can be, but I wish him well. However, he is certainly not immune to failure, and the colony stuff is simply an unrealistic bridge to nowhere. He certainly won't be the first billionnaire visionnary to be wrong...

Yes, I think that the Semi-Direct mission was much more realistic.

Please don't post stuff from NasaSpaceFlight.com's L2 forums. There are several reasons for the information on there to remain behind a paywall. If people start leaking stuff from it, then it won't last.

A couple of things have always bugged me about the Mars Direct plan. First of all, what's the point of the tether induced gravity for a 6 month trip. ISS crew routinely spend 6 months in space without any major side-effects. And only the MTV ship has it, the MRV doesn't, so it can't be that essential. Also, that MRV seems excessively small for a direct interplanetary transfer. It looks smaller than a S-IVB, while it has to contain accomodation for 4 crew members for 6 months. Also, it has a nuclear reactor on Mars, but how is it powered on the way home? Then, that MRV is a marvel of technology. It is quite small, yet it has to carry enough dV for a launch from Mars and the TEI burn, a couple of course corrections, and it also has to be able to reenter and land at Earth from a high-velocity trajectory. That also assumes that the heatshield doesn't suffer from being exposed to 6 months in space, a first reentry, and a year or two in Mars' surface. It also assumes that the nuclear-powered ISRU system works exactly as planned. There are all sorts of redundancy measures that need to be built-in: what happens if one of the ramps for the nuclear-reactor robot gets jammed? what happens if Martian dust clogs up the ISRU system ? The problems aren't insurmountable, but to imagine that we can design such a spacecraft (which is much more complex than the Shuttle or even Orion) in less time, and get it all right the first time without any technology demonstrators first, is delusional. Before you send the first man-rated MRV, you're going to need several generations of technology demonstrators to test the inflatable heatshield, the ISRU system, the life support system, etc... With a lead time of 10 years for a new vehicle, I doubt you could do it in less than 30 years on current budget constraints.

Isn't Pegasus pretty much dead? They haven't launched since 2013 and their L1011 seems to be in dry storage.

The excessive price is mainly because of the ground-breaking design work that went into that stealthy hull and its active electronically scanned radar. The problem is that nobody seemed to point out that a stealthy ship with a state-of-the-art active radar might be a bit pointless. Especially when it can be seen on the horizon with a pair of binoculars. And especially when destroyers are usually part of a larger task force that won't have anything stealthy about it. There's also the fact that nobody has any experience with the stability of modern tumblehome ships, and especiallyin cases where the hull is damaged...

I always have a towel with me, in my office and in my car, just in case...

There are quite a few languages that don't have the "th" sound. French people for example simply can't pronounce "three" properly.