Space X - Mars Travel

Yea, I'm guilty of that, frankly I thought there would be thread for it already and this is just my imperfect try to communicate basics. I suspected I heard him say 2018 as well, but it seems so fast and ubelivable that I checked pic-related and only glanced at "mars flights" and assumed I heard wrong without looking closely at "red dragon mission".

He says it's a non problem unless there is high solar activity.

Is Mars going to be a dusty waterless shitstorm?

By timeline that I posted in a previous post we could expect manned mission as soon as 23.

Well, I am only relaying what he said. I as well as you was anticipating this subject and belive that he has much more knowledge than I have, could you provide something to point on the contrary?

>What would happen there, is entirely different question.
I understand that he basically just wants to be the taxi system, but he should seriously think about about the logistics of mars as well.
It's not unimportant.

>Flacon heavy
>2016-2017
He better hurries or he'll be behind schedule already.

I can see humans on mars by 2029. If Nasa doesn't beat him to it.

>we could expect manned mission as soon as 23.
Probably not. That's when he wants to send his first MCT, not likely that it'll be manned.

>that indian chick asking if he wanted a good luck kiss
master ruse or spaghetti as fuck?

>WhatAreYouDoingThereOrbitinAllByYourself.png

I suspects that he belives they already take a lot upon themselves and someone else could do heavy lifting in the habitat department, after all they are "commercial firm"

>If Nasa doesn't beat him to it.
Well, NASA is big part of HIS funding. So it's like he is their "strongman". I belive NASA won't go anywhere, anytine soon.

Fuck I'm retarded, forgot pic.

>come outside and see my bus

You think he skipped the last one on purpose? 90% of the people in the q&a were cringy as fuck. Absolute despicable. Did they think this was some kind of weird celeb convention?

They are millennials, the only kinds of conventions they attend are Comic-Cons.

just an enormous waste of sorceresses

>launch window to Mars

I hate that. It is "optimal" launch window to Mars. You can get to Mars at any time, if you have enough fuel and thrust to do it.

>"W-would astronauts by allowed to hold hands during launch?"

Jesus Christ, really?

he said they could artificial magnetic fields on mars

didn't you read The Martian? On Mars, shit is a vital resource for making soil!

>every turd is sacred
>every turd is great
>if a turd is wasted
>Musk gets quite irate

Lawl. But actually at the point of "The Martian" author was wrong in assuming that martian soil has little water to it. Thanks to curiosity we know that there is much more water than the author predicted.

He doesn't have to.
Logistics will eventually figure out to so-and-so kg per passenger per year, a figure which will start high but get ever-lower as Mars starts producing its own materials.
Since Spacex plans to launch swarms of ships anyway, even large changes in the colony's planned logistical footprint would be a matter of launching a bit more ships or a bit less people, unlike a single-ship mission where you might end up with a ship that can't carry a crew and everything it needs.
When they start showing results on the way to a manned Mars mission, people and respectable organizations will be beating a path to the door asking to book flights or participate in the payload design.

kek

These questions were fucking atrocious

What about asking if this will be used to launch satellites, payloads to orbit, space stations, etc?

>Waste of resources
>If successful mission unlocks more resources than any previous venture in human history.

That won't get me real life upboats, let me ask about my cat or my beaner company instead

...

So, would that just be a "test of systems"-trip? Just to Mars and back/land and test shit?

Hence why Indians would be the perfect choice for first settlers.
>Poo In space-loo

No 2023 would be the first payload sent on an unmanned vehicle
Probably the machinery needed for producing methane & liquid oxygen there.

Makes sense, really. Use the first trip to test shit out without risking lives, dump a load of supplies and set of camp.

i feel bad for all these young engineers that were memed into SpaceX™

I have the 200k$ ready. I'm fit, trilingual, 30 years old.

I would definitely want to travel with 2nd or 3rd ship. Maybe even with the first.

Question is - how do I reserve my spot? Surely there will be more people able to pay the ticket price and wanting to go than those that can be taken on the ship? How does one reserve his place? Why can't some billionaire just buy all his children a ticket and then establish new dynasty on Mars?

Literally why

The workload is supposed to be brutal, but they're building something genuinely fucking cool

This

No whites allowed.

That's so ridiculous question, I don't even. First people on Mars will be colonizators. They would need to have specific qualifications ranging from enginering, biology, chemistry, geology, robotics to build, manitain manned mission. Many of them will die, maybe even all first batch will just die. Also we don't even know how pregnacy would develop in lessen gravity and lessen electromagnetic shield of Mars, so there is a possibility that before we figure it out there will be no Martian children so no dynasties.

If you would like to go, maybe reach out to spacex, show them your resume and wait for them to respond.

>Be Pajeet in 2044
>Develop pressurized closed chamber space suit technology to be able to defecate in the open martian soil
>Give it to the other hundreds of Indians already on mars
>Terraform mars in decades.

Sending humans is such a mistake, it is too early. They could accomplish so much more with robots.

...

>but they're building something genuinely fucking cool

Rockets that don't work?

rofl Musk intended the technical stuff to come out in the Q/A

Boy was he disappointed

he brings it up how they're concerned with transporting weight, and that a human is much more capable than any 80kg robot

So, we already know it will explode on the launch pad. Will this thing destroy Florida?

...

What do you all think some science payloads would look like for IPT?

Imagine fuck huge landers on Galilean or Jovian satellites.

Or imagine having a normal sized pay load be able to do something like orbit Eris in a REALLY short amount of time.

Or a very small interstellar payload that gets accelerated as much as possible on launch then deploys solar sails or something of the like

No point to do anything interstellar any time soon.

Without better Isp engines & space nuclear reactors, I don't think going to outer solar system is worthwhile either.

Well i guess wasting 200% or even 300% more food and water in the travel isnt irrelevant.

just launch it on new glenn

easier, cheaper and sooner

it could send a Cassini sized orbiter to Pluto

>Delusion: The thread.

Musk is a clebrity not a scientist. He's a fucking joke and so this idea. Just look at the Hyperloop. He's a reddit icon who's "company" pisses away a shit ton of public money.

>550 ton leo payload
holy shit

It just gets more ridiculous. It's sad that bright folk such as yourself are sucked into this bullshit.

Daily reminder that humans sent outside of the magnetosphere will have too much brain damage to be useful by the time they get anywhere, including Mars.

We're not going anywhere for a long time. Sorry. At best we can send machines to build a colony, then get some brain damaged humans down there, and hope in their demented state they reproduce and don't make too many errors.

the thing is, even if they can send 550 tons to leo, its literally impossible to reuse a rocket that large and heavy (the first stage I mean), those grid fins would have to be impossibly strong

As determined by computations you've literally pulled out of your ass I presume.

>what is carbon fiber

The tank that's going to hold the fuel has to be more robust than the fins and they have successfully built the goddamn tank already. Why do you think he's showing the fueltank off? Do you think millenials are interested in a black sphere?

Wow they built a fucking fuel tank, I'm convinced now.

what about the hinges

Pretty much.

This presentation was nothing more than hot air. Musk is a conman, end of story.

?
why? The empty vessel will weigh like 200 tons or something, nothing insane.

He has a physics degree and is a grad student.

>so he said he was going to mars, and he built a fucking tank the absolute madman

Having "a physics degree" really doesn't make you a scientist, not by a long shot.

there may be a truss system going on, unsure what their plan is for the rest.

Uh huh and where is he going to get the fuel to decelerate this?

Think about this for a second. What will the face friction of air for this vehicle?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo

uh he said in the presentation, 7% of the fuel load is used to return to launch site.
Which is a big improvement over like 20% that the falcon 9 needs.

I am Elon-neutral, belonging neither to the fanboy or the "Musk BTFO" clans, and frankly that presentation was pretty underwhelming. What he released : a mission architecture, some nice CGI, and very minimal hardware. So he is really at the same point as NASA and their "Journey to Mars" meme graphic. He refused to give a definitive timeline which is imho a very bad sign, since he is notorious for being very late on even much closer-to-reality projects (see the falcon heavy, which is little more than three existing rockets strapped together, and this is already years behind schedule), he admitted that a very small budget is allocated to Mars colonization and that very little people work on it, and that will be so until all the other issues (CCdev, etc) are dealt with, which is itself close to forever. And do not get me started on the real issue, economics, how he (or taxpayers) will pay for it.

Not excited, sorry

He showed you that the engine is mostly ready
He showed you that the building big all composite tanks is mostly ready

I think he expected some technical questions rather than shitty meme stuff, so he could elaborate on the specifics, but he only had a limited time & he's shit at speaking anyways.

Yes that was part of the useful things we learnt but when you think about it it doesn't mean much either. Unless I'm wrong, building composite tanks is not something industry ever had trouble with in the past decades, so even if I'm sure that his tank is designed to endure the specific conditions he wants him to endure, I really can't see this as any kind of big obstacle that was just solved. As for the engine, it is a pretty low-power one by rocket standards (solid boosters can go well beyond 10MN), and so he needs 42 of them (iirc) at lift-off, so then again I can't really think that as another great step forward. One engine like that isn't the problem. Making 42 of them work is, and given the really high pressure chamber, the slightest abnormality can quickly have catastrophic consequences. And frankly, despite all they achieved, they still havn't completley mastered the "basics" of rocketry (see their recent failiures). Going the N1 route didn't really work well the last time we tried.

Being the devil's advocate here I know

(cont.)
Imagine if soviet russia in the 60's just announced that they will go to the moon and all they have to show for it is a NK-33 engine and a tank. Would you take them seriously?

I see a lot of people comparing the BFR to Saturn5 but for me, the BFR is a lot more similar to the N1 rocket. The Raptor engine is also a slightly more powerful and more efficient version of the NK-33 if you look at the stats (I'm also waiting to see if they will live up to the adverstised stats). Also, what utlimately killed the N1 was, in fine, poor quality control, which seems to be something SpaceX is also struggling with. Management of labor at SpaceX seems pretty goulag-y as well. But maybe i'm going too far. Still, the parallels are interesting

N1 wasn't able to test fire any of their engines, unable to do static fires, and was developing/testing the vehicle by trying to launch it.

Bit of a different story.

Building an all/mostly composite launch vehicle is very much a totally new advancing-state-of-the-art thing, same with cryogenic carbon composite tanks.

It is designed to be able to reach orbit despite engine failures, and I expect designed to be able to land with an engine failure as well.
So thats where the large number of engines comes from, he also tweeted that this engine size is where the thrust/weight ratio was optimized.

Both their falcon 9 failures involved the helium pressurization system(might have also been sabotage/deliberate destruction of the vehicle), and this new vehicle won't have that. So hopefully it'll all work out well.

>Being the devil's advocate here I know
You are at least presenting some decent questions/arguments about the project, which is more than most people on Veeky Forums does. Its become an echo-chamber where "lol meme" and "btfo" is thrown around at anything that resembles an argument.

I want to know what the living quarters are going to be like. How many people will the BFR hold? Will it have artificial gravity by spinning?

Does anyone know?

>Both their falcon 9 failures involved the helium pressurization system(might have also been sabotage/deliberate destruction of the vehicle), and this new vehicle won't have that. So hopefully it'll all work out well.
I've read that methane-tanks wont be needing pressurization, but does that also go for LOX?

They haven't even gotten anything into an actual orbit yet

While I'll admit that the dust is a big issue there is actually quite a bit of water ice trapped in the regolith. About 2% by weight up to 60%.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_soil

Big thing is the dust. Magnetic, abrasive, slightly toxic and occasionally blocking out the sun. Really hope their solar panels have a nuclear back up.

>Building an all/mostly composite launch vehicle is very much a totally new advancing-state-of-the-art thing
Vega is all-composite and has been flying since 2012

>It is designed to be able to reach orbit despite engine failures, and I expect designed to be able to land with an engine failure as well.
One engine shutting down, sure, but quitely shutting down sadly isn't the only failure mode of a rocket engine. As I said I'm more concerned about quality control. They are operating very close to what material can withstand (close to failure, as do all lightweight structures, but it's even more critical here) A tiny manufacturing defect and boom

>Both their falcon 9 failures involved the helium pressurization system(might have also been sabotage/deliberate destruction of the vehicle), and this new vehicle won't have that. So hopefully it'll all work out well.
Helium isn't an evil molecule per se. And they have experience with Helium, but next-to-none with methane. I try to look at the big picture rather than specifics. And for me (own opinion) this big picture is not inspiring confidence.

>(might have also been sabotage/deliberate destruction of the vehicle
Cmon now that's just ridiculous

L...Lewd

Ahem NASA has built and tested the SSME engines the SRBs, the fuel tanks and even the Orion capsule. What has Musk got to show? I giant beach ball.
Yeah and SpaceX has a bigger budget than the Soviet Union in it's heyday right?

Who would do something like that?

the presentation had a quick 3d flight through the inside, obviously its a little early to finalize that design, and he commented that they could be making it bigger for more people.

>Vega is all-composite and has been flying since 2012

Vega is solid, solid, and non-cryogenic liquid

>but quitely shutting down sadly isn't the only failure mode of a rocket engine.
Go look at the video of the one time they had an engine failure, it didn't quietly shutting down. They do some armoring around the engines.

Microgravity, no spin
100+ people is the target
Protection from geomagnetic storms happens by pointing the ship's ass toward the Sun
There's supposed to be a big observation deck with windows on the front where people can play zero-g sports and shit because the journey needs to be "fun" according to Musk

Then Musk showed up and said
"NIGGA WE GOIN TO MARS LMAO"

Questions were a fucking disgrace. More than half of the time used to answer them was wasted.

Mentioning Vega means you don't really understand the tech here.... This is tankage for cryogenic propellants, not solids or hypergols. Low temperatures and composites traditionally go together very very badly. Look at the issues experienced trying to develop the X-33 hydrogen tank

Would it be easier to send mechanical spiders piece-by-piece from Earth or just build them on site?

sounds like we just need to send Russians

>quitely shutting down sadly isn't the only failure mode of a rocket engine
Falcon 9 1.0 had an engine blow up and carried on to space without a problem.

How is this any different from NASA's interplanetary concepts from decades ago, except NASA have actually put people in space and on the moon and this guy is just going straight to mars?

probably because nasa aint tryna do shit and Musk man is enough of a madman to try. Sometimes you gotta just follow the madman.