O'Neill Cylinders

>for a plethora of reasons.
State them retard
How is shipping tonnage to an orbital destination, which will ALWAYS be more delta V than going to a planet with atmosphere, cheaper than shipping machinery to mars or venus or europa/callisto/titan

This machinery then allows you access the millions of tons of useful material on the planet.

>State them

You do realize a Mars colony will need more than a few tents, right?

You realize a mars colony will need less tonnage than an o'neil cylinder
Have access to a whole WORLD of resources
And be easier to reach as long as your space station is somewhere outside LEO
???

Honestly, I can't imagine any legitimate colony on Mars, even one that isn't designed to be generational, before asteroid mining is achieved.
Once we can aquire resources in outer space and find a way to manufature stuff then there's literally no good reason no to just colonize in spacestations.

Planetary colonisation is a myth within this century.

If we can build these, we can build rotating slanted rings on Mars.

The question is whether mining is cheaper on Mars or in the asteroid belt.

??
Why do you believe mining on asteroids is easier than mining on mars
When you could have automated trucks, railroads, diggers, etc bringing iron ore to refineries on mars.

Do you not understand what "delta v" means?

The asteroid belt is very hard to get to

Mining on near earth asteroids, which are easier to get to, would be for bringing tonnage back to earth, not to aid any martian colony.

There's nothing standing in the way of automating asteroid mining.

Just like with Mars, once you've gotten the utility there you can leave it alone.
Especially if it's self-sustaining.

The reason I say that asteroid mining is likely to be realised before a 100+ people colony on Mars is because by the time we've gotten around to sending that many people there someone's going to realise it isn't much harder to send bots on solar sails to the asteroid belt and refine the materials on site.
From there you can send them wherever and start building a station.

Sending materials back to Earth is just the first, short-term stepping stone.
Sure re-entry is as hard as attaching a parachute module and to hell with the burnt off material- it's plentiful, afterall but solar panels charging lasers that melt the ore and allow for 3-d printing metal structure within a lattice-framework spacefactory? Now that's just too cool not to be implemented.

Can you imagine over a dozen people in a Mars dome this century?

Except you conveniently dodge the fact that it takes double the delta v to reach the asteroid belt, as compared to mars. Along with a much longer travel time.

That never goes away
For the foreseable future, all outer solar system missions will be exploratory.

Production of things is a little more involved than just "3d printers"

Except I'm not sending people to the asteroid belt. No life support systems. Not care about g-forces that are pitifully low. And most importantly absolutely no concern whether it takes 2 months or 10. Oh and because losing a drone or 10 is nowhere near as bad as losing a person there will be more attempts because lower saftey margins.

We're very good at getting around "a little more involved"

We should do both.

youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ

If you love America, you throw money in its hole.

Go to an investor, and ask them whether return on investment is "absolutely no concern"
Trips to the asteroid belt will be 3+ years.

Why invest this money in the belt for mining, when there is unused land/ocean here on Earth?
Why send it to belt instead of mars? or the moon?

All of this shit needs to be profitable for it to be done, not a government makework program.

A Mars colony is not and will not be profitable. It cannot be profitable this century. They're gonna have a hard time being self-sufficuent for the first few decades after establishment.

Asteroid mining might take more time but it is 100% more likely to be profitable sooner.

First of all: Yes I expect it will be profitable, or at least it can sustain itself.
Secondly: Musk will finance & do it all himself so that doesn't matter.

Musk has no interest in going to the asteroid belt, unless someone paid him.

>Have access to a whole WORLD of resources

You are forgetting something here. Those resources have to be mined and refined. Then they need to be manufactured into usable things. To do all that you need factories and a massive support system. For Mars, you have to transport factory pieces first. That will take an absurd amount of time and money.

Earth already has all that and more ready to go. The resources are already refined. The factories are already built. The parts can be flown up already created for the end result.

That is why it is cheaper to make an O'Neill Cylinder than to build a colony on Mars.

Even Musk doesn't have that much money. Though he might after SpaceX but he wants to nuke the planet first. Personally I think crashing Phobos into it would work better.

It's far easier to make an automated mining facility that profitably returns resources to Earth on one of Mars' moons in which case a spacestation nearby is simply a better option if you absolutely must have human beings nearby.

>spend a few billion $ to mine make even more billions beyond that
>do it with automation

asterank.com/

>Sum of material to build O'Neill cylinder >>> Sum of materials to build functional factories on Mars including extraction and refining

Without a spaceelevator it's unfeasible to construct a colony sized spacestation with material fr Earth. If anything, we'll mine our Moon first

>crashing Phobos
And this is why it needs to be illegal for madmen to gain space access, even if they pay for it themselves.

Screwing up the solar system, weaponizing the gravity well, obviously this needs to be illegal.

>he wants to nuke
topkek

>gizmodo.com/elon-musk-clarifies-his-plan-to-nuke-mars-1734457751
Close enough

Crashing Phobos will do the same job and add some mass to Mars.
What's the worst that can happen?

Incorrect. It doesn't need to be absurdly massive. A colony doesn't need to be very large to be a colony.

Doesn't change my statement.
Still way more resources

He is well past the point where he any limits on his financing
Now his companies are growing as fast as they can hire/build factories.

He now essentially has a monopoly on electric cars
Soon he'll have a comsat constellation.
I'm sure he'll have plenty of business for his super heavy rocket that'll allow him to do mars launches with the profits.
I think his batteries and solar panel companies are doing well too

All profits from these businesses will be going to the mars colony.

Actually it is already illegal to do something like that. Most countries signed a treaty that prevents such changes to off world bodies.

Besides, even crashing both moons into Mars won't help terraform it very much. You'd need to start a bombarding program that would last 1000s of years and throw so many moons and asteroids at Mars that it would increase the mass, create an atmospehre, restart the core, but at the cost of needing to wait at least 100,000 years for all the debris around it to enter the atmosphere to the point where we could get craft to it.

Oh, and another few 100k years to terraform it to our needs. Only by that time, humans won't exist. What ever we evolve into would have to do it, if humanity lasted that long enough to even evolve that far.

None of that makes a Mars colony any more profitable.

He's doing it becausw he wants to forcefully shove the human race into space and he chose a mars colony as his flagship because that inspires the most emotion on people and subsequent support, not because it's the best idea.

It isn't. You want a colony on Mars. You want them to breed and expand. They can't unless they literally build massive spinning rings on Mars to combat the lack of Earth-like gravity. You also have to combat the environment trying to wear at the things you've built.

That takes even more resources and time.

If we last that long we're almost cetainly going to be a digital hivemind species on our way to constructing a dyson-sphere type structure because efficiency.

Terraforming is a meme

Mars is going to be a self-contained colony
If all it takes is 10 billion dollars a year worth of imports, plus people donating assets to make one way trips there, it can very well be a profitable organization.

Most of mars development will be done by people on mars, getting paid in martian currency, engaging in the martian economy.
In the early days, likely they will be professional astronauts from various countries who will go back after 5-10 years.

Agreed. There's no need for it. It is more efficient to contain your environment as small as possible.

Humans can't live out their lives on Mars. There's not enough gravity.

>You want a colony on Mars
No I don't. It's a token gesture at best.
A shout of "look we did it!" Like the moon landing.

But an automated factory on Mars is a better option than shipping the resources from Earth and if you're doing that just put the same thing on Phobos or Deimos instead for smaller gravity well.

You seem to be under the delusion that a function society is by default profitable.
Da hell are they exporting that can't be better achieved by sending drones to phobos?
Everythibg is done by machines anyway and the gravity problem has to be tackled eother way.

>Humans can't live out their lives on Mars. There's not enough gravity
Cite your source showing that living at 40% of a G will result in fatal complications.
Cite your source that it would be impossible to build some sort of slanted circular track which would provide 1 g, IF it were needed.

You seem to be under the delusion that a mars colony wouldn't be essentially self-sufficient within 20-30 years

Any advances in automation on earth can also be applied to a mars colony.

If mining is all you want to do, mine the moon first then some of the near Earth asteroids.

Also, a token gesture being a colony on Mars is a bit like shooting yourself in the foot to get a medal.

It is called bone density loss. It is 38%, not 40%. It is a hell of a lot better than 0g/microgravity, but anything less than 1.0g will bring bone density down correlatively. Macrogravity will be the number one health concern for longevity on Mars.

>let's build an O'Neill Cylinder on Mars to combat gravity.

That's essentially what you want to do. Only you have to keep it spinning, at cost. In space at least you don't have to lose reaction mass to keep it spinning.

At the very best, it will be a "base" with rotating staff, just like the ISS, not a "colony".

>a functional society is profitable

You must lack reading comprehension. It's the only explanation.

If there are two options that produce the same goods and require the same effort to set up but one is easier to get the goods from which braindead single-minded fool is going to keep banging his head on the harder one before someone else decides to set up their own operation on the spacerock that has a lower gravity and undercut him?
It's not even unfeasible to build a spaceelevator on Deimos woth today's technology, unlike Mars.

>mine the moon first
Probable location for first off-world factory imo
>near Earth asteroids
Would it be easier to just throw them into the Moon first?
Or attach giant parachutes and send them down to Earth?

>Cite your source

science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast02aug_1/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_human_body#Bone_and_muscle_deterioration
mars-one.com/faq/health-and-ethics/how-will-the-mars-mission-physically-affect-the-astronauts

Now, imagine it being 38% healthier for you than living on the ISS. Still pretty shitty.

The Delta-V required to move something that massive just isn't in the books. It is easier to toss some mining robots at them and wait for the ore exact ores you want to return.

>bone density
>muscle deterioration
Wouldn't that only matter if you plan to come back to Earth.
Assuming you spend the rest of your life at .38g why would weaker bones / muscles matter except for impact injury?

Children being born on Mars in macrogravity won't develop properly. They won't even be normal looking. I'm talking having bones so brittle that hugging a child could break them.

Why would you need "reaction mass" to get something moving on mars

A colony needs to have resources it can extract & utilize.
Look at the sort of architecture Musk has chosen for his mars mission, direct to mars no fucking around in orbit beyond LEO, this is what makes economic & physical sense. Not large space stations.

>but anything less than 1.0g will bring bone density down correlatively
Has there been any science or study showing this? No
Obviously Musk does not think its an unsolvable problem, or he would be talking about a Venus colony.

>At the very best, it will be a "base" with rotating staff, just like the ISS, not a "colony".
No it will be a colony of 10's of thousands of people.

You talk about autonomous asteroid mining, but thats just hand waving assuming some sort of magic tech development that noone has done and noone is working on.
Musk talks about a man on mars for 2025

All of our experience is in microgravity
Where does 38% fall on the scale between microgravity and 1 g? Impossible to say until we do it. This is something that SHOULD have been tested by NASA a long time ago but whatever.

Some of these near earth asteroids can be moved to earth orbit with very little delta v, actually.
Throw a big ion engine grid out to one of em, and pilot them back to earth orbit.

>hugging a child will break them
If an Earth born person does it sure. If the muscle loss is relative it would make them able to hug each other fine, no?
I'd say something about evolution adapting to the circumstances but by the time that could happen we'd probably be good enough at genetic manipulation to do it ourselves.

There is another consideration about lowered gravity on Mars. Eyesight. On the ISS, astronauts eyes deform. The backs of them flatten and vision starts to get blurry. This happens in as little as 6 months for most astronauts. It doesn't correct itself when they return to Earth.

A mission to Mars is estimated to be 7 months one-way.

>implying Mars colonists will hug their children
They will be brainwashed and instructed to become maximally efficient Musk worshippers and equipment producers.

Transit will be 100-120 days

Spinning/rotating for artificial gravity is very possible/doable.

It doesn't work that way. Brittle bones means...brittle. If they fall they break. It doesn't work like how you think it works. It isn't like comparing human bones to say mouse bones. It is like comparing human bones to chalk.

What about on Mars though? Less gravity is going to have a profound effect.

>'A colony of 10s of thousands'
>sending that many people to Mars
>totally okay
>'Asteroid mining requires magical tech'
>completely rational statement

Are you sure you're not retarded?

Jesus, dude. gb2

Doing completely new things that noone else has done before costs money
How many billions will your autonomous mining tech cost? How much will it produce? What sort of return on investment will you get? How does it bring large tonnage back?

Of course you also ignore that its easier to get to mars than the moon or any other asteroid, by handwaving about some solar electric drives which also don't exist & have never been done.

VIIP is from pressure buildup. The lack of gravity does that. Some form of VIIP will most likely occur in 0.38g.

You know those old sci-fi movies about little green men from Mars? That will probably be us if we try to live there. lol

If getting useful product from the moon or Asteroids is hard then getting it back from Mars is inconceivable. Literally those are the scales you're on.

FYI stuff from asteroids can be send back by small drones and from the moon by railgun.

You do mining on mars for the needs of martians, not to ship it back to earth..
There is no scarcity in materials on earth

>FYI stuff from asteroids can be send back by small drones and from the moon by railgun.
More hand waving about stuff that doesn't exist & hasn't been done before

>for the need of martians
So where is the profitablility?

Railguns exist.
Proof of concept for asteroid mining drones also exist.

>So where is the profitablility?

Possibly in rare metals, possibly in diamonds or gems or something else worth bringing back.
Mars colony is not being done for business purposes, the only "profit" it needs to make is enough to pay for the imports it needs to survive.
We live in an era where youtubers make make millions annually, how much will the "Life on Mars" TV show make?

The Mars Colonial Transport will bring back some low amount of tonnage from mars every trip.

Companies like Amazon make no profit, but they continue to exist. Musk is not doing mars because he expects to become rich from it.

>mining on mars isn't to send resources back to earth
>earth doesn't have a resource shortage
>profit will come from sending resources to earth

Well done. You've come full circle.

A "Life on Mars" realoty show will lose viewers faster than the new Top Gear. No variation, see.

It's much cheaper to send back stuff from the moon than mars.
There's no chance of Mars->Earth shipping
Mars has nothing of such great value that can't be found elsewhere and much easier.

Musk wants space. People connect with the idea of Mars colony best. That's why Musk chose Mars. His colony idea will die with Mars One and everyone will move on.
He knows this and the hope is that Space will be seen as normal enough that other, less exciting, projects can be done without a societal "what a waste of money!" While investors realise the capabilities are there. All investors already know the potential exists in space.

>There's no chance of Mars->Earth shipping
Every MCT will be coming back from mars immediately, thats his architecture.
It will be designed to carry some amount of tonnage like 25 tons, single stage from mars to earth.

I don't think you quite understand that the mars colony will exist for its own sake.
The production of resources on mars does not need to compete with the production on earth.

Assuming Musk or governments don't directly fund the Mars colony(which you can bet they will), Mars will engage in trade with Earth to purchase the stuff they can't make themselves.

Kinda like how every country exists on earth.

Even if you're right.
Even if it works out that way.
Even if by some miracle the Mars colony becomes self-sustaining.

It's still going to take more time for it to have '10s of thousands' than it will to set up mining operation in the moon.
It'll take less time (and money) to make drones that mine asteroids and send back the same material as your Mars colony in larger quantities faster.

It'll possibly even take less time to start construction of an actually habitable spacestation (probably for touristic purposes) than create a real colony on Mars and not just a robot base with token humans.

In your best case scenario you almost certainly still end up losing the 'who made it first to full-scale' race.

>It's still going to take more time for it to have '10s of thousands' than it will to set up mining operation in the moon.
Considering it takes less delta v to get to Mars, than to get to the moon.
I don't see how this is accurate.
What lunar mining will be profitable in comparison to Earth mining?

The Mars colony will exist for its own sake, and the things it sends back will be for its own profit, which it will then use to buy goods for Earth.

Musk is building a reusable super heavy for mars colonization, not for mars or asteroid mining.
Who is going to pay him to do that?

>Less delta v to get to Mars tha. Moon
>asi.org/adb/j/02/less-fuel-to-mars.html
Aaand I'm done
Keep living the dream buddy

Because you can't mine vacuum.

The moon is the best first colony because its close (3 day Holman Transfer) and lunar regolith is 5% water ice by weight.

Mine the regolith for minerals and water. Suddenly you don't have to supply the colony with air or water.

With a space station you must always send supplies.

delta v -wise the asteroid belt is closer than Mars, because you have to enter/escape Mars's gravity well.

Your page ignores the fact that they will be generating the fuel on mars

>We can't assume aerobraking to the surface of Mars
Also ignores the fact that the whole fucking reason Mars is easier is because of aerobraking
Whcih then also ignores that you can do quite a faster trip if you just accept more aerobraking.

>We designed our Lunar Transfer Vehicle to fly from Earth orbit to lunar orbit and back again.
>We're not landing
And they also ignored the whole reason why the moon is harder, since you can't aerobrake to land on the moon.

These sorts of retarded mission architectures is why space exploration has gone nowhere for decades.

Except you can aerobrake at mars
You can't do that at an asteroid
This adds a LOT of needed delta v

You are refueling at mars, so the needed delta-v to return to earth is essentially free.
Can you refuel at asteroids? Not any time soon, maybe for some sort of electric drive, but then we are talking about really long mission durations.

Mars One isn't part of SpaceX or Musk's plan.

>The Falcon Heavy from SpaceX was the notional launcher in the early Mars One conceptual plan,[74] which included the notional use of SpaceX hardware for the lander and crew habitat, but, as of May 2013, SpaceX had not yet been contracted to supply mission hardware, and SpaceX has stated that it did "not currently have a relationship with Mars One."[75] By March 2014, SpaceX indicated that they had been contacted by Mars One, and were in discussions, but that accommodating Mars One requirements would require some additional work and that such work was not a part of the current focus of SpaceX.[76]

>generating the fuel on mars
>aerobraking
>refueling at mars
>delta-v is free

...

>Can you refuel at asteroids? Not any time soon

CO2 atmosphere
Huge amounts of water
= easy creation of methane fuel & liquid oxygen on mars

Can you do that on the moon? At asteroids? Be quite a bit more difficult/tricky

Your link ignored the whole reason why Mars is preferable to make a claim that the moon is better.

>Your link

I didn't post a link, kid.

You're fantasy land magical fuel making is going to be worth shit in actual application. It will take years to manufacturer that much fuel.

>hurr you can't do it because I am ideologically committed to my special snowflake strategies

is where you belong.

>Why aren't people working on these instead of trying to get to and colonize shitty unlivable planets?

Because those planets are rich in resources and will teach us more about long term off world sustainability then some shitty O'neill Cylinder which requires a SHITTON of resources that on earth are stupidly expensive. Not to mention we have a hard enough time running one ISS, imagine a neill cylinder.

Shit should happen in this order
1. Colonies mars with small groups of scientists/miners
2. Understand limitations of living off world
3. Correct limitations or come up with solutions
4. Mine the fuck out of rare metals
5. Begin building long term and long distance space stations

With 40% of the gravity escaping mars is much easier than escaping earth. Not to mention mars can burn up micro meteors, where on an asteroid it's anyone's guess why you bang into something else.

>Most countries signed a treaty that prevents such changes to off world bodies.
>thinking the space or moon treaty will mean jack shit when countries actually start getting serious about colonization

It was a measure to prevent further escalation of the space race; nothing more, nothing less.
The USSR doesn't exist anymore.

>we have a hard enough time running one ISS

We aren't having a hard time doing that.

Mars is 38% 0.38g. You can't live on Mars forever because of that.

The treaty is still in effect regardless of the USSR being the Russian Federation now. I mean 104 countries signed it after all.

Profit will always be from Mars to Earth selling/buying. The biggest problem here is that there's nothing Mars can sell Earth that would actually be profitable. Mars is like that old house you sink money into to try to fix up. Only in this respect, you eventually die.

Is there any space company or government program that is even designing or studying O'Neill cylinders or like structures?

I just realized that O'Neill cylinders bypass most of the crap in the Outer Space Treaty, just so long as it doesn't have any WMDs or fiddles with other parties' space travel or equipment.

But they are governed by the state that oversees their approval.

Yes lets take some metal and then build it into giant cylinders, and aftewards work on ways to produce enough oxygen so everyone doesnt die thats brilliant OP.

...

>musk's scheme is a wacky sci-fi fantasy in the first place
>therefore we don't have to account for shipping costs
>therefore diamond mines on mars will be profitable

Profit from space shit has always been from inventions and sending up telecom shit.

You laugh now
Then in 10 years from now he brings back the first shipment of Mars Diamonds
Will almost cover the price of his divorce from amber heard.

So you're saying the diamond prices will drop to nothing when that happens.

oh no, muh economy, how can companies hording and slowly releasing diamonds keep control of the market if it's flooded

(faggots)

There's already more diamonds on Earth in possession than what people could ever want or use. The cartels just make sure they don't get released.

And it's for absolutely no reason other than greed, I can't wait till retribution arrives desu.

>I can't wait till retribution arrives

>europa/callisto/titan
What's wrong with Ganymede faggot

#AllMoonsMatter

>Venus
If you can withstand the heat, you mean

>Ganymede receives about 8 rem of radiation per day
Could be doable, but no point going there first

Look into some proposals for colonizing Venus, bud. The upper portions of the atmosphere are survivable to humans both in terms of temperature and pressure.

Though constructing enough aerial habitats to support "mass" colonization would be ridiculously labor-intensive.

>Though constructing enough aerial habitats to support "mass" colonization would be ridiculously labor-intensive.

I think that to begin with, you'd live in habitats sent over, but we're getting good at working with carbon so you can just keep expanding the habitat with carbon fibers/composites