What do SpaceX actually plan to do if they get to Mars

[xenomorph555]

ESA has a plan to build hab modules from robots. Well... at least they are interested in the technology. You probably heard about it already, but here it is:

http://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/building-a-lunar-base-with-3d-printing/

Yeah I've read that, personally I think 3d printing is the BIG tech that we need for a lunar base. Of course you have to test to see if regolith is strong enough on it's own or wait for refinery's to turn it into titanium/aluminium.

[fredinno]

Thinking about that might be a bit soon since SpaceX are just starting to perform commercial LEO launches, have never sent any astronaut in space, and have only the F9 as a rocket...

Pretty much this. SpaceX should build solid blueprints and plans for the conceptual Falcon XX Mars Launcher before thinking too hard about all the other stuff

[Superluminaut]

SpaceX has been clear on the Mars objective from day one, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it. Tourism.

[jwenting]

SpaceX has been clear on the Mars objective from day one, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it. Tourism.

Tourism needs a lot of infrastructure... It needs people in place to act as hosts and do all the other jobs that a tourist industry requires. Cooks, cleaning staff, entertainment, taxi drivers?, etc. etc..

This isn't going to be your 2 day hop to the ISS, it's going to be a trip lasting years. Your super rich tourist will want his luxuries and service during that period.

No, tourism alone isn't going to work. It'd cost billions per person for the trip. You'd need to latch the tourist on to a mission going there anyway for something else, something highly profitable, to keep the cost down.

[Stargate525]

Tourism needs a lot of infrastructure... It needs people in place to act as hosts and do all the other jobs that a tourist industry requires. Cooks, cleaning staff, entertainment, taxi drivers?, etc. etc..

This isn't going to be your 2 day hop to the ISS, it's going to be a trip lasting years. Your super rich tourist will want his luxuries and service during that period.

No, tourism alone isn't going to work. It'd cost billions per person for the trip. You'd need to latch the tourist on to a mission going there anyway for something else, something highly profitable, to keep the cost down.

Wrong kind of Tourist. We aren't talking about the ones who stay in a Hilton fifty feet from the beach and whose definition of 'roughing it' is skipping their morning Mai Tai.

We're talking about the playboy millionaires who climb Everest for fun, or backpack to remote jungles to look at wildlife. Largely they are their own cooks and entertainment, don't need hosts... Really, hook em up with a connection to the net (which shouldn't be THAT hard to piggyback) for e-mail and they should be fine.

And if you want to be highly cynical about it... There's a lot of potential profit to be made on research avenues which aren't entirely legal (or safe) on Earth. Genetic testing, nuclear engineering... Mars is one HELL of a quarantine.

Less cynically, you're further removed from radio noise and light pollution; stick a telescope array on there, link it up with one on earth, and that's a MASSIVE virtual aperture size. You want resolution, that's how you get resolution.

[cpast]

Wrong kind of Tourist. We aren't talking about the ones who stay in a Hilton fifty feet from the beach and whose definition of 'roughing it' is skipping their morning Mai Tai.

We're talking about the playboy millionaires who climb Everest for fun, or backpack to remote jungles to look at wildlife. Largely they are their own cooks and entertainment, don't need hosts... Really, hook em up with a connection to the net (which shouldn't be THAT hard to piggyback) for e-mail and they should be fine.

There aren't that many of those, and they do need other stuff (like a sense that they probably aren't going to die). The people who have many millions of dollars are generally not the people who are willing to take a decent risk of death in such a mission. The intersection of people with the technical ability to troubleshoot issues, the physical and mental attributes required to go on a Mars mission (particularly an early one), the willingness to brave the risk that something will go wrong and you *cannot* be rescued by anyone, the willingness and ability to spend at least a year without personal contact with anyone back home, and the money to pay for such a mission is not very large.

And people who go on trips like that *don't* generally go alone -- they have guides, who are competent professionals. Space tourists these days go as one person on a capsule with at least 2 competent and qualified astronauts who can deal with issues. So you need to reduce the paying passengers on your Mars mission to account for the people who know what they're doing.

As for pricing: Millionaires wouldn't be able to afford a seat. It costs over $50M for a single seat on a Soyuz to the ISS. That's per one seat, to LEO, as part of a well-tested system that has paid off its development costs. It would be reasonable to assume a Mars seat would cost at least an order of magnitude more, significantly reducing the number of people who could pay for it. Space tourism really isn't likely to be an avenue for initial missions somewhere.

And if you want to be highly cynical about it... There's a lot of potential profit to be made on research avenues which aren't entirely legal (or safe) on Earth. Genetic testing, nuclear engineering... Mars is one HELL of a quarantine.

The issue with that is that you need to take a lot of infrastructure along to do those activities, and (for legality) unless the people in charge go along also, they aren't exactly immune from laws on Earth.

Safety is a different matter; leaving aside ethics of contaminating Mars, it is a pretty good quarantine, so things might well be better there than on Earth if they're risky.

Less cynically, you're further removed from radio noise and light pollution; stick a telescope array on there, link it up with one on earth, and that's a MASSIVE virtual aperture size. You want resolution, that's how you get resolution.

True, but why's that need to be a manned mission?

[Superluminaut]

Tourism needs a lot of infrastructure... It needs people in place to act as hosts and do all the other jobs that a tourist industry requires. Cooks, cleaning staff, entertainment, taxi drivers?, etc. etc..

This isn't going to be your 2 day hop to the ISS, it's going to be a trip lasting years. Your super rich tourist will want his luxuries and service during that period.

No, tourism alone isn't going to work. It'd cost billions per person for the trip. You'd need to latch the tourist on to a mission going there anyway for something else, something highly profitable, to keep the cost down.

Wrong kind of Tourist. We aren't talking about the ones who stay in a Hilton fifty feet from the beach and whose definition of 'roughing it' is skipping their morning Mai Tai.

We're talking about the playboy millionaires who climb Everest for fun, or backpack to remote jungles to look at wildlife. Largely they are their own cooks and entertainment, don't need hosts... Really, hook em up with a connection to the net (which shouldn't be THAT hard to piggyback) for e-mail and they should be fine.

And if you want to be highly cynical about it... There's a lot of potential profit to be made on research avenues which aren't entirely legal (or safe) on Earth. Genetic testing, nuclear engineering... Mars is one HELL of a quarantine.

Less cynically, you're further removed from radio noise and light pollution; stick a telescope array on there, link it up with one on earth, and that's a MASSIVE virtual aperture size. You want resolution, that's how you get resolution.

There aren't that many of those, and they do need other stuff (like a sense that they probably aren't going to die). The people who have many millions of dollars are generally not the people who are willing to take a decent risk of death in such a mission. The intersection of people with the technical ability to troubleshoot issues, the physical and mental attributes required to go on a Mars mission (particularly an early one), the willingness to brave the risk that something will go wrong and you *cannot* be rescued by anyone, the willingness and ability to spend at least a year without personal contact with anyone back home, and the money to pay for such a mission is not very large.

And people who go on trips like that *don't* generally go alone -- they have guides, who are competent professionals. Space tourists these days go as one person on a capsule with at least 2 competent and qualified astronauts who can deal with issues. So you need to reduce the paying passengers on your Mars mission to account for the people who know what they're doing.

As for pricing: Millionaires wouldn't be able to afford a seat. It costs over $50M for a single seat on a Soyuz to the ISS. That's per one seat, to LEO, as part of a well-tested system that has paid off its development costs. It would be reasonable to assume a Mars seat would cost at least an order of magnitude more, significantly reducing the number of people who could pay for it. Space tourism really isn't likely to be an avenue for initial missions somewhere.

The issue with that is that you need to take a lot of infrastructure along to do those activities, and (for legality) unless the people in charge go along also, they aren't exactly immune from laws on Earth.

Safety is a different matter; leaving aside ethics of contaminating Mars, it is a pretty good quarantine, so things might well be better there than on Earth if they're risky.

True, but why's that need to be a manned mission?

A few years ago Musk released a statement in which he said they had done the calculations and believe a round trip ticket for mars would cost about $500,000.

[Nibb31]

Musk says many things and changes his mind a lot. He's human, just like you and me, and he's pragmatic. There is no reason to take everything he says as gospel.

[AngelLestat]

If the elon musk claim does not include a time period about when this will happen, then it has a 100% chance to become true some day.

[SargeRho]

"Within 10-15 years" I think - so the late 2020s.

[FishInferno]

"Within 10-15 years" I think - so the late 2020s.

Which is totally doable

[Moar Boosters]

I wonder what the market would be like for commercial missions to the moon or mars. I know every time probes have been sent in the past by national agencies the instruments on board go through a very strict selection process, and many experiments don't make the cut and are left out. India made their recent mars probe useful by including experiments that didn't make the cut on NASA's MAVEN orbiter.

The bottleneck is currently the launches. There's plenty of experiments we want to send to mars, so presumably if SpaceX was able to built a system that can reliably put stuff into Martian orbit or better, then I'm sure they would get custom from nations or academic institutes who can't afford a launcher themselves. Obviously something like Mars One is ridiculously over ambitious, but I could see a group of countries or universities clubbing together in a similar way they do for multi-satellite launches.

[fredinno]

A few years ago Musk released a statement in which he said they had done the calculations and believe a round trip ticket for mars would cost about $500,000.

I doubt this would be feasible within the first half of the 21st century.

[Stargate525]

True, but why's that need to be a manned mission?

Because you can't just DROP a radio telescope onto the surface. You'd have to be there at least once to install the thing, and go back to regularly maintain it.

[fredinno]

Because you can't just DROP a radio telescope onto the surface. You'd have to be there at least once to install the thing, and go back to regularly maintain it.

Wouldn't it just be better to make a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon instead?

[Newt]

Wouldn't it just be better to make a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon instead?

Yes, that would have a similar effect, but not at the same scale. The original mention was to use the Earth and Mars based telescopes as an array. Being on Mars would have an advantage of distance as well as noise.

That said, there are tons of places that are easier to get to than Mars. Why build a telescope on a planet (often, there is, well, this big lump of rock that makes it hard to look at half the sky, you know), when you could build in Earth Sun L5, for instance? more reliably distance, no need for large return rockets that can blast through an atmosphere, no wait for launch windows, and a huge visible mass of sky avaliable at all times. And you could build it so much bigger.

Musk says many things and changes his mind a lot. He's human, just like you and me, and he's pragmatic. There is no reason to take everything he says as gospel.

This is one thing that too few people seem to notice. Many people, Musk among them, make suggestions of possibilities, and, at least in the case of Musk, many people take those possibilities to be statements of commitment (or visions from an oracle). If all such statements were truth, we would have landed on Mars in the 70's, been on massive space colonies in the 90's, launched some interstellar spacecraft by now.... SpaceX has acheived some things, but it seems that at present one of their cheif products is hype.

Which is totally doable

I do not disagree that it is doable, but I am doubtful that it shall be done. As always, there are many possible things to do, and only a few options are ever actually done. Could we have landed humans on Mars in 1980? If we started activley after Apollo, I have very little doubt that it was possible. But it was halted by lack of will, and there is little reason at present to beleive that, at this time, SpaceX is not proven to be capable of completing this very lofty goal. The main issues are not technical, rather political and economical.

[Bobnova]

In answer to the first post, what SpaceX plans to do on mars when they make it to mars is to be on mars.

[Nibb31]

Wouldn't it just be better to make a radio telescope on the far side Oron instead?

Or just leave it in orbit. Mars surface, with it's murky atmosphere is just about the worse place to put a telescope.

[Hunting.Targ]

Yes, that would have a similar effect, but not at the same scale. The original mention was to use the Earth and Mars based telescopes as an array. Being on Mars would have an advantage of distance as well as noise.

That said, there are tons of places that are easier to get to than Mars. Why build a telescope on a planet (often, there is, well, this big lump of rock that makes it hard to look at half the sky, you know), when you could build in Earth Sun L5, for instance? more reliably distance, no need for large return rockets that can blast through an atmosphere, no wait for launch windows, and a huge visible mass of sky avaliable at all times. And you could build it so much bigger.

Boy, you said it right there. I do understand that there are object in semi-stable 'horseshoe' orbits near L3, L4, and L5, but that would be a very sensible suggestion, since it would remove a degree of rotation and reduce the complexity of observational calculations.

There are observations that Hubble did quite effectively using just its earth orbital parallax, and that saved a great deal of time over doing them over doing it on a solar orbital parallax. Doing things such as parallax ranging on a solar orbit would make a daunting mission schedule; each ranging would need to be done at orbital antipodes, which would lead to a LOT of repositioning. It would also greatly increase the complexity of maintenance missions; travelling much farther than lunar orbit would 1) take longer, 2) require a radiation-hardened craft, since it would be travelling outside the earth's magnetosphere, and 3) be significantly more since it would involve a non-conic transfer from earth orbit around a positive gravitational influence to a null point between influences.

So; trade-offs. Still a worthwhile idea.

This is one thing that too few people seem to notice. Many people, Musk among them, make suggestions of possibilities, and, at least in the case of Musk, many people take those possibilities to be statements of commitment (or visions from an oracle). If all such statements were truth, we would have landed on Mars in the 70's, been on massive space colonies in the 90's, launched some interstellar spacecraft by now.... SpaceX has acheived some things, but it seems that at present one of their cheif products is hype.

I do not disagree that it is doable, but I am doubtful that it shall be done. As always, there are many possible things to do, and only a few options are ever actually done. Could we have landed humans on Mars in 1980? If we started activley after Apollo, I have very little doubt that it was possible. But it was halted by lack of will, and there is little reason at present to beleive that, at this time, SpaceX is not proven to be capable of completing this very lofty goal. The main issues are not technical, rather political and economical.

Indeed. As far as going to Mars; there's a thing about habitability; there may be more technical challenges to surviving and pioneering on Mars, however, it has key similarities to Earth that are relevant for living creatures:

=> It has more than double the size and gravity of the moon. Living on Mars would be less disorienting aesthetically and kinesthecially, especially to mammals.

=> It has a comparable rotational period. No major adjustment of circadian rythyms would be needed, and the health effects of a different gravity level would be less pronounced than living on the moon, which has a surface gravity of about .16Gs (only 1.57 ^m/_s²). So to maintain a physique that could survive re-entry and return to earth's surface (if that eventuality were planned for) would require a less taxing daily regimen.

=> There are pre-organic compounds on Mars. There is the potential to encapsulate and process land mass into biomass, for use in farming, composting, and grading for permanent structures. And given the weather on Mars, permanent, even perhaps subterranean structures would be at least strongly advisable, if not essential.

The moon, while not having any weather, also has no dirt, dust, or other materials that could potentially be chemically treated and then processed by microorganisms or plants. There's just dust, sand, and rock. So BYOB (Bring your own Biomass), unless you want to ship space food to a moon base 1-4 times a month (now does that sound cost-effective?)

So It's a trade-off. I don't look at either as being inherently 'better' or 'more worthy' than the other; they each have their own unique challenges.

[Stargate525]

Or just leave it in orbit. Mars surface, with it's murky atmosphere is just about the worse place to put a telescope.

Radio telescopes don't give a damn about atmosphere.

[Hunting.Targ]

I do have to say, though, that I feel this is being approached the wrong way - by NASA, SpaceX, MarsOne, the whole lot of them. Star Trek had one thing right about spacecraft design; if we're going to travel between stars and planets, we don't need the same ship to do everything. Having a starship with atmosphere-capable shuttles is a close parallel to the idea of a naval ship with longboats; you don't take the ship right up to shore, there's too many difficulties and risks.

In the same way, putting more and more requirements on a single spaceframe will geometrically increase the cost and complexity of such a vehicle, especially if it is expected to lift-off through and re-enter atmosphere.

SO, having said that, here's how I feel the challenge of interplanetary travel should be tackled:

-> We have the ISS in Low Earth Orbit. This is a functional staging point for personnel to go to further mission sites.

--> Build another station in Geosynchronous orbit, inclined perhaps 12 - 25° and position it over Europe, so it can communicate directly with mission sites of NASA, ESA, Russian Federal Space Agency (FSA), and JAXA (Japanese Aerospace eXploration Agency). Progressively outfit it with power, command, habitation/recreation, construction/repair, and flight & mission control facilities.

=> Locate two small asteroids, one ore-rich, one mostly ice (preferably in solar orbits not too different from Earth's), and build a mission to relocate each to a parking orbit either in high earth orbit, lunar orbit, or an earth-moon LaGrange point ( L₄ or L₅ ). I would speculate a combination of nuclear and ion engines, and possibly a gravity tractor probe.

---> While the above is in transit, build a basic moon base, one that would be supervised and directed by the high-orbit station.

==> As each asteroid approaches its parking orbit, install facilities either on the asteroid or in lunar orbit that can sample and process ore into alloys and water into fuel (LH₂ and LO₂, or potentially Hydrocarbons such as Hydrazine or Kerosene). Also add capabilites to either the space station or mining stations to do high-quality materials fabrication in microgravity, such as microcircuits, gem crystals, and large-scale solid-state devices.

===> Having done all that, build a proper moon base on the dark side that can do exotic and dangerous things like process nuclear material (there are several inactive Russian satellites with actual reactors in high parking orbits whose cores could be processed) and engage in subassembly fabrication for transport back to an assembly site, either at the high-orbit station or elsewhere in the earth-moon system.

====>> THEN you build an interplanetary transit vehicle, which is resilient, robust, and redundant enough to stay in space for its operational lifetime, which will hopefully be 2-5 decades.

That's my plan to put humans on other planets.

- - - Updated - - -

Radio telescopes don't give a damn about atmosphere.

No, not atmosphere. But the annual dust storms that cover up to 1/3d of the planet and easily match the wind velocity of a class 5 hurricane might be something to consider.

[prophet_01]

Does wind velocity matter as much if the atmosphere's density is this low?

Also, this kind of infrastructure would be needed to build a real colony that has a chance of bcoming self sustaining at some point. Most other proposals like 3d printing everything or the idea to use a couple of dragon capsules for long term habitation seems way too optimistic. For a real infrastructure on mars or moon we are talking about thousands of tons of payload. Even if you use materials on site to construct basic habitats and radiation shielding, it's still not realistic to think that high tech equipment or vehicles will be printed and constructed by using 3d printing and some lightweight hand tools. Especially return crafts (to keep an bare minimum level of safety) or the tons of food and water you need to ship to a colony would make an orbital infrastructure usefull if not required. Even if a sufficient food production is possible, it's unlikely to work from day one or even a year after the first landing.

Although it might have some advantages, I doubt that a moon colony is required to expand to mars. I'm quite confident when it comes to orbital refueling and using water from asteroids for multiple applications. However, the ore mining, refinement and construction in space seems way too ambitious. We are going to rely on launched equipment for a long time. The construction of the ISS was already a huge task that took decades and a huge part of the funding of the bigest space agencies, and it's still not finished. And even this project was mostly done with modules and equipment that were especially designed and constructed for that task. It's not easy to build equipment like that on earth and it gets even more expensive and complex to do that in space.

Your proposal seems to leave out the costs and the fact the nuclear propulsion is very unlikely to happen due to political restrictions. If the question at hand would be "how to build up a large scale colony as quickly and reliably as possible at any costs?", I think this is a good strategy. But it's seriously ambitious at best, even if you sould have the support of the most capable nations worldwide. A number of the concepts would likely need a decade or more to develop and test.

At the end of the day it also comes down to the launch costs. And as long as they don't drop by at least one order of magnitude a self sustaining colony seems out of the question. A usefull longterm colony would need a 'basic' industry (hard to call something basic that is able to maintain, refuel and at some point build a spacecraft). It would need to at least maintain and repair the delivered infrastructure and create a minimum growth with a reliable way to exchange wares. I don't even know how much mass is required once we have all the necessary technologies.

A colony is not nearly the same as a (large scale) outpost, especially in an enviroment that requires high tech equipment to even keep you alive and for every basic activity.

Anyone else lacks optimism at this point? So no, I doubt that SpaceX will be able to construct a colony. Offering the service to deliver equipment to mars or setting up a small outpost that is highly dependent on regular resuply flights might be doable. But that won't be realised by tourists' money.

A true colony that is able to build up an industry is out of theire reach within the next couple of decades. Colonial expansion on earth is not the same as building habitats this far away.

Edited May 12, 2015 by prophet_01

[jwenting]

Radio telescopes don't give a damn about atmosphere.

No, but they do need to be carefully guided down and placed. Just dumping them isn't going to do them much good, it's going to do serious damage to them (to put it mildly).

[Technical Ben]

Indeed. As far as going to Mars; there's a thing about habitability; there may be more technical challenges to surviving and pioneering on Mars, however, it has key similarities to Earth that are relevant for living creatures:

=> It has more than double the size and gravity of the moon. Living on Mars would be less disorienting aesthetically and kinesthecially, especially to mammals.

=> It has a comparable rotational period. No major adjustment of circadian rythyms would be needed, and the health effects of a different gravity level would be less pronounced than living on the moon, which has a surface gravity of about .16Gs (only 1.57 ^m/_s²). So to maintain a physique that could survive re-entry and return to earth's surface (if that eventuality were planned for) would require a less taxing daily regimen.

=> There are pre-organic compounds on Mars. There is the potential to encapsulate and process land mass into biomass, for use in farming, composting, and grading for permanent structures. And given the weather on Mars, permanent, even perhaps subterranean structures would be at least strongly advisable, if not essential.

The moon, while not having any weather, also has no dirt, dust, or other materials that could potentially be chemically treated and then processed by microorganisms or plants. There's just dust, sand, and rock. So BYOB (Bring your own Biomass), unless you want to ship space food to a moon base 1-4 times a month (now does that sound cost-effective?)

So It's a trade-off. I don't look at either as being inherently 'better' or 'more worthy' than the other; they each have their own unique challenges.

As much as travelling to the centre of Jupiter has trade offs compared to travelling to the centre of the sun.