We'll see the first man on Mars in a few short years.

[Richy teh space man]

Id bet if NASA had proper funding we could be on mars in 2-5 years.

Yup, if mankind spent on space exploration what it spends on wars we\'d be terraforming Mars by now

[Rascal Nag]

Yup, if mankind spent on space exploration what it spends on wars we\'d be terraforming Mars by now

Actually, I disagree to an extent. NASA isn\'t only poorly funded but poorly structured. Look at SLS. It\'s just tweaked old stuff that\'s unnecessarily expensive. It not only needs better funding but also needs to rely on private companies much more. They always say that 'Oh we\'re interacting with this and that and blah blah blah' But it\'s in such a controlled manner that it might as well just be NASA doing it alone. Private space companies need to be able to compete for NASA contracts. NASA needs to be in place for when new exploration must be done, exploration that is too much of a risk for a private company. But that exploration should be done with craft built by private companies, so that competition makes sure the product is cheaper and yet better than what we have now. NASA could certainly develop it\'s own technology for stuff, but NASA also can\'t take the reins of everything.

[NovaSilisko]

Don\'t think for a second that KSP is anything like real life. You can\'t just stick bits together and launch, it takes years and years and years of hard work, testing, experimentation to make sure it will work. Even SLS, made of components that we\'ve been using since the 80s, will take as much testing as a 100% new vehicle - because, for all intents and purposes, it is.

[Rascal Nag]

Don\'t think for a second that KSP is anything like real life. You can\'t just stick bits together and launch, it takes years and years and years of hard work, testing, experimentation to make sure it will work. Even SLS, made of components that we\'ve been using since the 80s, will take as much testing as a 100% new vehicle - because, for all intents and purposes, it is.

I know this. But the problem is not with the time. They of course need to test it like a new rocket. The problem is that it\'s using parts from the 80s that we know will give it high operation costs after all that testing. An entirely new rocket would probably need more testing of course, but in the long run, it could have substantial financial advantages. Instead of throwing away an entire first stage, which is planned for SLS, and rebuilding it you could have one that is almost fully reusable, cutting off a huge amount of costs right there. Instead of funding research on technology that would be essential for exploration beyond the sphere of SLS, we\'ll be spending all that money on SLS itself. We have to actively be working on the next era of space exploration during the current one, not using up all our resources on the current and having another one of these situations where everyone thinks that NASA is dying after the shuttle.

[NovaSilisko]

Oh, I wasn\'t responding to you, Rascal. It was a general response to the thread.

[VincentMcConnell]

Don\'t think for a second that KSP is anything like real life. You can\'t just stick bits together and launch, it takes years and years and years of hard work, testing, experimentation to make sure it will work. Even SLS, made of components that we\'ve been using since the 80s, will take as much testing as a 100% new vehicle - because, for all intents and purposes, it is.

Yeah... We know...

[GOOMH]

Maybe this can lit a fire under NASA\'s bum so they can start actually trying to get a man on Mars. Personally, I much rather see NASA be the first it could even be a joint venture between government and private companies. But after listening to Elon Musk I like his attitude and his ambitions and I wouldn\'t be extremely disappointed if Space X does it. Now if China or Russia makes it you might as well just sell NASA.

[Rascal Nag]

Oh, I wasn\'t responding to you, Rascal. It was a general response to the thread.

Ah, sorry about that then.

[RedDwarfIV]

Go, go, ESA! Go, go, ESA!

[mincespy]

I htink the fact that SpaceX is doing more on a few million than NASA is doing on a few billion really shows... something.

[Johno]

It shows the weaknesses of anything run by a government. Any government.

It is this - it turns into a massive bureaucracy.

This is important because it raises the costs of doing anything - because bureaucrats, once they\'re there, have to be paid regardless of what the organisation is doing.

By contrast a private corporation will go bankrupt if it keeps employing people for nothing.

All things being equal, we can expect SpaceX to be able to launch a spacecraft cheaper than NASA.

[Majiir]

With $100M in starting capital and $800M total expenditure during the lifetime of the company, SpaceX managed to develop four engine lines, two rockets and a capsule, making nine launches so far from two different launch sites. Oh, and a third is under construction for the Falcon Heavy.

In contrast, a single Shuttle launch cost about $1B. Yes, government is horribly inefficient, and SLS is just following in the Shuttle\'s expensive footsteps. That said, don\'t think that means SpaceX will be putting people on Mars next year. They need to prove Dragon in a couple weeks, and if anything goes wrong there you can bet they\'ll have big delays. They need to turn Falcon+Dragon into a profitable cargo service so they can afford test flights for the launch abort and life support systems. Then, they might start putting crew into low orbit.

Dragon is a great concept, but you\'ll need a whole lot more than a Dragon capsule to take you to Mars. SpaceX will need to develop another whole spacecraft, one much larger than Dragon. They\'ll need to develop docking, not just berthing. They\'ll probably want to deploy an unmanned Dragon capsule to Mars first. It\'s a long way to go, and unless the U.S. government radically changes its role in space exploration (I\'m talking Newt Gingrich level of space radicalism here) it won\'t happen quickly.

[RedDwarfIV]

Launch all the beaurocrats into space on an evacuation Ark like the one from The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe that carried all the telephone sanitizers and such away from their home planet because they weren\'t wanted by society.

Only this time, there won\'t be the problem of everyone dying of diseases spread by unsanitised telephones.

[Endeavour]

We need to get a self-sustaining colony somewhere other than Earth before we blow ourselves up. This looks promising. I like SpaceX so far.

[thorfinn]

Guys, SpaceX is able to do what it does (and I\'m happy of their success) because government-funded scientists have already solved all the hard problems for them.

They are making conventional rockets with LOX-Kerosene engines: it\'s a 50 years old technology by now, with lots of public domain material you can learn from. Had they started from REAL scratch, they would have had their own Vanguards, their own dozens of stupid accidents where they discovered the quirks of rocket science one by one, and they almost certainly wouldn\'t have been profitable.

I don\'t remember where, but I have read an interesting piece about commercial launch companies starting with 'simple, streamlined' payload and vehicle processing routines, and then rapidly approaching the government ones after a couple of 'freak, unlikely accidents' that the older operators had experienced before them.

The private sector has a wonderful capability to improve technologies that are readily marketable, but the beginning of big innovations usually isn\'t profitable; look at the Internet for an example... it started as little more than a game for scientists, military or not, then had all its seminal and organizative work done by universities and the DoD, which means on a not-for-profit basis, and only after that it became a business. And even then, at the start, everybody relied on the National Science Foundation backbone.

Even in the old West, it was the Federal government that built the railroads...

[StelarCF]

Didn\'t they say the same thing about the Space Shuttle? It\'d be awesome if they actually pulled it off, but I\'m skeptical.

Also:

I want to know which country this guy lives in so that I can move there immediately. I suspect he lives on another planet entirely, though. At least in his head.

each Dragon vehicle can carry 7 people

so 142\'857 $ each person.

Not EXTREMELY much....

let\'s say you gain 7000$ each month (Not sure if you do, just an estimate) and you save 1000$ out of that then you could go to mars after 11 years...

At least you won\'t go to mars after 300 years

[Sordid]

let\'s say you gain 7000$ each month (Not sure if you do, just an estimate) and you save 1000$ out of that then you could go to mars after 11 years...

I don\'t think $7,000 a month qualifies as average income in any country in the world.

[Johno]

Thorfinn: A good analogy.

However, you\'ll notice that most of the world\'s railways rely heavily on private companies now. So too with space.

Government is great at starting things, but they\'re hopelessly inefficient at running them.

[thorfinn]

Government is great at starting things, but they\'re hopelessly inefficient at running them.

This is something I could get behind

We could make the case that once something becomes 'easy', the government should reduce or even drop its interest in it... and conventional rocketry probably has reached the 'easy enough' point.

The bureaucrats should understand that, even if this is true, the world isn\'t going to run out of hard problems or unprofitable things that we deem important anyway anytime soon, so it\'s not like they will become redundant...

[AD-Edge]

The problem I have with this thread is the title - \'a few short years\'

It will more than likely be a few short (wha?) decades before any human really makes progress towards Mars. Id happily be proven wrong, but its unlikely.