Recently read this book and i gotta say this guy is a geniuss. Somebody think he will succeed in his quest to Mars?

Why go to the moon when you could go to mars?

It's like if you're a conqueror, would you rather take the whole earth or take one continent?

Yes the latter is easier but if you think you can achieve the former then why not?

>Tesla
>SpaceX

>profitable

Tesla is bleeding close to a billion every year in the past and has never turned a profit, SpaceX claims it turning a profit but doesn't release it.

It's possible with current technology to launch a manned mission to Mars, why humanity hasn't is because no one wants to foot the massive bill to after the Space Race ended and space exploration wasn't a political dick waving contest.

Permanent colonies on Mars is pure fiction and will never be achieved because of two reasons.

1) Mars lacks the environment for a self sufficient colony, i.e. water, arable land, self replenishing oxygen and the correct balance of nitrogen and oxygen gases. Any colony there would be artificially sustained by imports from Earth like the ISS.

2) Mars cannot pay for these imports. Any mineral mined on Mars would cost thousands of dollars per pound to ship back to earth. It takes ~9000 dollars to sent one pound of stuff into Low Earth Orbit and SpaceX promises to get that figure down to 4000. Sending something back from Mars would be exponentially more expensive. For comparison gold is 1,3000 dollars per pound.

>It's possible with current technology to launch a manned mission to Mars

I don't think they solved the radiation part yet though. It's really one of the biggest obstacles of outer earth manned space exploration

>brainlet logic & goals

You need a solid base of operations that does not cost billions per year to keep in orbit. You need a base like that which you can build, launch, and recover things launched from Mars (resources for instance.) It is the place you build when you want to build stuff to go to Mars in part of large missions and mass transit. It can be the shipyard for the Mars shipyard construction as well Mars base construction materials manufacture. You'd be able to assemble large shuttles and cargo craft to shield humans from the radiation or the trip. You'd be able to make large parts for a Phobos base so-to ferry humans/parts to and from Mars

A mass driver system can be made between Phobos and the Moon, further lowering travel costs going both ways

For something like asteroid mining, it will more than likely be done entirely by robotics and then only for highly precious metals. The entire mass of the asteroid belt is something like 4% the mass of the Moon. If you were to mine it, you'd probably have a mass driver system in place on one of the large asteroids like Ceres (which should have lots of ice deep in it). Of course that depends on the Delta-v involved in relation to asteroids with potential mining applications. Ceres, btw, is like 1/3 of the mass of the asteroid belt

Before we ever get that far we need to develop the corresponding asteroid mining tech using the low Delta-v near-Earth asteroids that are worth trillions

Radiation problems just need more shielding. Which adds weight. Which is best added off-Earth. Like on a lunar base that manufactures shielding (moon bricks!) for instance. Basically, any long term shuttle that ships humans out of Earth's magnetosphere can have a double hull with hollow spaces between the walls. Moon soil (deeply excavated soil) can be put between the walls of the ships to act as shielding. Since you are already at the moon, you can make those walls pretty thick with moon soil

>Radiation problems just need more shielding. Which adds weight. Which is best added off-Earth. Like on a lunar base that manufactures shielding (moon bricks!) for instance. Basically, any long term shuttle that ships humans out of Earth's magnetosphere can have a double hull with hollow spaces between the walls. Moon soil (deeply excavated soil) can be put between the walls of the ships to act as shielding. Since you are already at the moon, you can make those walls pretty thick with moon soil

Why not just put people into deep sleep in water tanks at night or for long periods of time to reduce radiation exposure? Water is a great radiation shield, plus is vital anyways for manned space exploration.

>1) Mars lacks the environment for a self sufficient colony

? Mars has all those things, just you need pressurized habitats, which is something easily made out of materials on mars.

>2) Mars cannot pay for these imports.

Insanity, with full reuse of rockets the cost of shit becomes largely negligible. Every MCT sending men to mars has a certain payload it can take back to earth for essentially free(need to produce the fuel ofc)

So to say some sort of mars co-op isn't totally doable is nonsense.

wat a geniice his and him brother sit in de bath tub and come op with memz kek fucking lel somulationnn theryy i am a complete retard he iz genuz

I think a moon base is a long way from ever happening unless the US or EU or Chi-com government decides they want one.
Doubtful it'll make economic sense in the near term..

It wold be easier to use soil than to extract water for the same use.

Nothing in space makes economic sense except satcoms and technologies that can be used on Earth as well.

If however you have an uneconomic mars colony
Does it make economic sense to ship stuff from mars? or from the moon?

Likely it'll never make economic sense to ship from the moon without some massive investment in colonizing there too

>Mars lacks the environment for a self sufficient colony, i.e. water, arable land, self replenishing oxygen and the correct balance of nitrogen and oxygen gases. Any colony there would be artificially sustained by imports from Earth like the ISS.
Wrong. Mars has the majority of raw materials needed, provided the right equipment. If initial missions are heavy on equipment and light on crew, placing manufactory capability as the second priority after a safe habitat, a colony could become mostly self-sustained in a relatively short amount of time. In fact, it'd have to be, given the unavoidable 2 year gap between missions.

There would be a few things that would be difficult to produce on Mars to begin with (mostly rubber and microelectronics) but both are addressable given enough time. If done right, a Mars colony could achieve far better independence from Earth than a moon colony ever could.

It will make sense in the beginning. Shipping things from place to place because they lack those materials and need to develop the technology. Needs for goals don't have to be economic.

Shipping and manufacturing won't be done via colonies. It will be robotic with the barest of a human ghost crew who will be on rotation.

Mars lacks the gravity for a colony. That is all. 0.38g is a real bitch on the human body. The entire colony would need some sort of massive centrifuge to get as close to 1g as they can for most of their daily lives or at the very least their sleep time. "Colony" means human reproduction too. Children born on Mars will be required to live in centrifuge environments most of their childhood so to develop correctly.

Humans don't mutate quick enough for their to be a proper non-centrifuge colony on Mars. We'd need to be developing genetics as well to compensate so humans could live in 0.38 without health problems. VIIP may be a big problem in microgravity like aboard ISS after just 6 months to a year. On Mars, as a life time colonist, you may last 10 years before VIIP becomes a problem. Children born into 0.38g may develop VIIP very soon. But, that is only 1 health concern of many due to lower gravity.

Mars is easier to create self-sustenance on than the Moon.

Why doesn't he focus on actually important things like improving humanoid robotics?

Self driving cars are a luxury.
Space travel isn't practical.

Also once there is a good humanoid robot out there he could drive the car for you and he could also fly to space instead of humans.

>Mars lacks the gravity for a colony. That is all. 0.38g is a real bitch on the human body.
We don't know that, because no human has ever lived in a 0.38g environment for and extended period.

Microgravity as experienced on the ISS causes serious problems after long periods (1 year+) but the effects are reasonably mitigable. 0.38g is a hell of a lot more than what the astronauts in the ISS have to deal with, so I have serious doubts that it'll be anywhere near the problem you think it will be.

Either way, we need to find out, and I don't see NASA or anybody else sending a centrifugal force gravity sim lab into orbit any time soon. If Musk wants to try to put willing people on the surface of Mars, why stop him?

>Space travel isn't practical.
Only because nobody does it. It's a catch-22. Make it cheap and people will do it, making it progressively cheaper.

Sitting back and saying, "welp can't do that" is a great way to guarantee that we'll never be able to do it.

With how distant and hostile planets are what is the point?

You'd die if you were left for a week in a park, whats your point?

His point is pretty clear to me. Your point on the other hand..

To learn what's out there and experience it first hand. To push our limits. To open up a frontier for the disgruntled and restless. To bring a greater understanding of where we are in the universe to the entire human race. To push us a little further towards being masters of our solar system and reaping the benefits that status brings. To be possibly the first species in the history of the universe to not be permanently bound to the rock it appeared on.

I could go on for ages. Space travel on a mass scale will change civilization in massive ways, much of which is unforeseeable, and I believe that we'd be committing a grave error to not follow that road and see where it leads.

Besides, it's not as if the development of spacefaring detracts from the development of robotics in any way. If anything, one will drive the other.

The only good thing to come from space travel is the innovations made in technology. Nothing more. Even then imagine if we stopped all space travel, save for satcoms, and used all that brainpower and human resources to work on problems we have right now that are terrestrial based.

Other than satcoms, only O'Neil Cylinders and Generation Ships should ever be considered for space. For those ends, we need to develop off world technologies like mining other worlds, moons, and asteroids. All of which can be done via robotics.

That's a terrible ass pull of logic. You should consider using to vent instead of Veeky Forums.

>Even then imagine if we stopped all space travel, save for satcoms, and used all that brainpower and human resources to work on problems we have right now that are terrestrial based.
But it doesn't work like that. A smaller space market doesn't mean more people working on robotics, it just means less people in the space industry. The spread of people who would've been in the space industry will be so thin that the terrestrial problems you speak of would be no closer to getting solved.

?
there is no garden of eden, all environments are hostile

That paragraphs was a different line of though in respect to the second paragraph. The 1st is humanity without space travel of any kind. The 2nd is the proper way to do things.

There's no reason humans will ever need to leave Earth.

>There's no reason humans will ever need to leave Earth.
If humans only did the bare minimum of what's needed we wouldn't be here today. Everything we have can be attributed to someone somewhere taking a big risk on something that most of society saw as unnecessary at the time.

...

>confusing "need" with "want"

he's not a genius. the people working for him are. do you seriously think he projects everything on his own in his reclusive superlab just like tony stark?

dude jumped in on a nice online payment system, got some bank out of it and decided to create his own r&d company (he has a physics background after all)

>>dude jumped in on a nice online payment system, got some bank out of it and decided to create his own r&d company (he has a physics background after all)
This is the "genius" that people talk about. Most people who have a shitload of cash suddenly dropped in their laps either blow it all and destroy themselves or hoard it until the end of time.

>Somebody think he will succeed in his quest to Mars?
Musk's total fortune : 12 billions dollars
Nasa's yearly budget : 19 billions dollars
Nasa gets more PER YEAR than what Musk have managed to collect in his lifetime. Consider as well that the fact that none of Musk's major businesses (Tesla, SpaceX, Solarcity) are profitable and that here's even a part of Nasa's budget that goes straight to SpaceX.

If Nasa hasn't the money to put a man to Mars, you can be certain as hell that Musk wont. Humanity will only put a man on Mars through a large scale international mission. No country on its own can do it, and fuck, certainly no single company.

Muskfags believing otherwise are nothing short of schizophrenic.

But then again, NASA can't really do much with that budget thanks to the government issuing orders and slapping ridiculous restrictions on everything, and it's not in the best interest of the contractors manufacturing hardware for NASA to do anything in a cost effective manner.

Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin don't have to worry about those bureaucratic shackles and are by definition *required* to be efficient. Furthermore, having a single man as their leaders, they have a sort of focused vision of the likes that NASA hasn't had since Kennedy. They have a lot going for them.

networth based on arbitrary valuation of his companies is not really his "total fortune"

>you can be certain as hell that Musk wont.
Nothing has a fixed cost. Certainly the energy cost of sending men to mars is not much more than heating buildings or going on trans-continental plane flights.

Yep, and if the success of SpaceX depends so much on its cherished leader Musk Jong Il, then it will go down the shitter just like Apple is going down the shitter since Kim Il Jobs died.

It is also very naive to believe that a comparatively small actor on the world scale such as SpaceX can succeed putting a man on mars simply because of they don't have to deal with "bureaucracy" as much. If space agencies, larger and richer space actors, with much more experience and demonstrated capability, are saying we don't have the money to land someone on Mars, I'll rather believe them rather than some silicon valley entrepreneur who, in space matter, simply managed to build a medium-sized, moderately-successful rocket. But what do they know, the newcomer Elon is so cool, he can do anything, right?

Musk is only mid 40's and isn't doing any quack all fruit diet.
He should last fine.

Do you believe there is some physical impossibility in producing a fully reusable rocket ? Or in any of Musk's plans for mars? These private space companies have regularly demonstrated they can do shit for 1/10th the cost of NASA/defense contractors.

>Do you believe there is some physical impossibility in producing a fully reusable rocket ?
Basic principles of lightweight structure engineering, the rocket equation, and to a lesser extent, the energies involved will make it very, very difficult. Rockets are glorified ICBMs, there's only so much you can extract from such an old idea. Re-usability itself is a very old idea, that has been tried and again, with very little success. If spaceflight is one day to change dramatically, it will be with a dramatically different concept that the rocket, not a half-assed solution that consist of using decade-old rocket engine designs (yes, today's engines are basically just more efficient versions of the V2, no real difference besides specifics) and landing them back on earth with some fancy acrobatics.

And even if re-usability does work out, it really has nothing to do with going to mars. landing back the booster will really be the least of our worries when we'll attempt a manned mars mission.

Or in any of Musk's plans for mars?
A thousand, but most importantly cost. Work on your reading comprehension.

>These private space companies have regularly demonstrated they can do shit for 1/10th the cost of NASA/defense contractors.
>1/10th
Lol.
And if "doing shit" means putting payloads in earth orbit, well hello there, we can do that since the late 50's. I'll need a bit more to be impressed.

>humanity

You mean white/western civilization. And east asians. Shitskins aren't capable of technological thought and aren't worthy of mention.

>And even if re-usability does work out, it really has nothing to do with going to mars. landing back the booster will really be the least of our worries when we'll attempt a manned mars mission.
Being able to reliably and safely land rockets is a big deal for going to mars. Landing on Mars with any kind of payload at all is a huge pain; parachutes only work for the lightest of payloads and the atmosphere is too thin for a shuttle-style glide-in (and there's no runways for that there anyway). Retropropulsive landing, on the other hand, works just fine there and scales nicely up with huge payloads. It means we can send crazy amounts of cargo and/or large teams of people and changes the game quite a bit.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. India's first martian orbiter successfully reached Mars and established stable orbit not so long ago. They managed to succeed on their first try, something nobody else has achieved. Pic related was taken by said orbiter.

Reasons for the United States go establish a Lunar presence before going to Mars:

1. Lunar resources can be used to produce consumables for manned and unmanned space flight. This would significantly lower the cost of missions beyond Earth.
2. Most of the people who designed and directed the Apollo missions are either senile or dead. Establishing a base on Luna will give the next generation of space explorers a place to wet their feet in a noncontrolled environment.
3. Going back to the previous point, Luna is considerably closer to Earth than Mars. That means if anything goes wrong, there is a chance of rescue. Having all your inexperienced astronauts die on the way to Mars could destroy the space program.
4. Luna is actually quite conducive to long term habitation compared to LEO. It would be an ideal place to study how the human body reacts to low gravity (>0.1G) over long periods of time.
5. Going to moon first makes sense for long term, sustainable space exploration. The guys planning the Apollo missions thought so too and we would have a moon base already if the program hadn't been cancelled.
6. While very few countries are capable of going to Mars at the moment, many are eying Luna with interest. If the US doesn't established a presence on Luna, it risks being left behind as other countries establish their own space infrastructures.

IMHO we won't be ready for a manned Mars mission till the mid 21st century. We could have been ready by now if we hadn't built the ISS and Space Shuttles. Those projects were dead ends and we're almost back to square one when it comes to sending people past LEO.

"Because of the high cost of spacecraft, a
dramatic reduction in launch cost alone will
not substantially lower spacecraft program
costs. Although launching a pound of payload to
LEO currently costs about $3,000, procuring
that pound of payload typically costs much
more. For example, representative U.S. spacecraft
busses of types first launched between
1963 and 1978 cost between $130,000 and
$520,000 per pound dry,including amortized
program overhead costs. Procurement of the
mission payloads carried on those busses cost
about 50 percent more—about $200,000 to
$800,000 per pound. Reducing launch costs
from $3,000 to $300 per pound of payload, a
goal of the Advanced Launch System program,
would reduce the total cost of procuring and
launching a dry spacecraft (half bus, half
mission payload) by less than 2 percent."
-- U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Affordable Spacecraft: Design and Launch Alternative --Background Paper, OTA-BP-ISC-60 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 1990).

>taking your smart money and blowing it on Tesla and SpaceX is Musks genius
lol

Well, yes, this is pretty much the full extent of Musk's genius indeed.

>melanin content influences IQ.
Ok retard

you don't get economics. read for 10 years then come back

1) it's called terraforming, yes I am aware of how long it would take and how difficult it would be but it's still an option

2) it's down to $25 a pound on some space craft and will only get cheaper

>melanin content is the only genetic difference between races
Ok retard