Elon Musk wants to go to mars. This implies that he will need to process and eat his own shit...

Those self-landing rockets were a complete and utter waste of time.

SpaceX BTFO! HOW will they ever recover???

It saves money.. a lot of money. So no, not really.

Doesn't save fuel. It's virtually negligible.

Fuel is cheap you idiot.
Building another rocket isn't.
You're literally saving billions by keeping the rocket on earth.
It's not complicated man.

lol why do they waste money landing and refueling this piece of shit when everybody can just jump out with a parachute over the destination city and then autopilot it into the ocean

This being poor bait anyways, why dont we just turn the tread into one about ISRU? Any new exiting tech coming out in that regard? Should be something pushed by anyone wanting to go beyond LEO anyways

I'm already doing that, but I'm a farmer so it goes with the territory.

Quality thread. Though, I was hoping for something like biogas methane digestor discussion more than anything.

If you are among the 30 million lucky in London and neighbourhood you drink water that has been through 7 stomachs earlier. Or bladders to be more to the point.

This is why English beer is supposed to be served luke warm.

You should watch Lo and Behold.

>london
>30m people

Youre a dumb faggot

I think the "and neighborhood" part has the other 22 or so million.

The city of London has a population of around 10,000

Greater London has a population of 8.5 million.

The whole of England has a population of 53 million.

You're a dumb faggot.

london has like 20 mil

same as ny, same as la

paris has 10 mil

same as chicago, same as moscow

i know this because i find it interesting

city of london PROPER

we're talkin bout agglomerations, n8

"city of london proper" otherwise known as, greater london in britspeak.

[citation needed]

i think i shan't be provdin' a citation just coz sum git wants it on the innernet

>I'm a dumb faggot

Thought so.

What the fuck is ''''''london proper''''''?

I just made it up. I figuh yore from luhndin i reckuhn

Why is there city size discussion in the Musk thread?

>city of London
>Greater London

kek okay, kid

Fucking mongoloid

spacex is supposed to be launching soon

See: "London and neighbourhood" kid.

So THATS why the governments keep pushing for the immigration of violent foreigners into white nations. Its like Britian and America, only with the world as Britian and mars/moon/space/etc as America. /s

It's not necessary to recycle feces, though.

For the outbound voyage, with no recycling of water whatsoever, people would require perhaps a ton of water each. That would allow over a gallon per day for drinking and washing. Once on Mars, industrial-scale water collection and purification is one of their first priorities, which they intend to set up before sending humans. Mars also contains an abundance of everything else needed to grow food, so regardless of what you saw on The Martian, "nightsoil" fertilizer isn't necessary.

With ITS planned to have a capacity of 450 tons and a maximum passenger load of 100 (with early missions taking perhaps a dozen), simply taking a ton of water for each person would be perfectly reasonable.

However, some recycling of water is almost a given. The average person produces under 1.5 liters of urine and 0.25 liters of feces per day. They also lose water from perspiration and respiration, which will have to be trapped by condensers or dessicants. Note as well that the human body will produce roughly half a liter of water per day. Purification of washwater and condensed atmospheric moisture would account for nearly three quarters of the gallon-per-day water requirement, and urine is not hard to extract pure water from, especially if you're willing to leave a quarter of it unreclaimed.

Therefore, essentially only a reserve supply of water would be needed, no fresh water would be consumed even if the food is fully dehydrated, and that's without touching the shit or distilling more than about two-thirds of the water out of the urine.

In the outbound trip to Mars, each would only produce about 60 kg in actual shit, and perhaps twice that in concentrated urine, so it's no trouble to simply store it until arrival. On Mars, the temperatures are permanently freezing, so disposal is very simple.

Put simply, the handling of solid human waste will likely be simpler and less of a "closed cycle" than it is here on Earth.

>I cannot read.

Did I just overestimate the reading comprehension of Veeky Forums?

The greater metropolitan area of London has a population under 9m.

To make up 30 million you'd have to include at least the top 50 most populated towns and cities in the uk.

>Note as well that the human body will produce roughly half a liter of water per day.
I should clarify that this is from metabolism of food.

If you eat a mole of C6H12O6, you eventually breathe in six moles of O2 and excrete six moles each of H2O and CO2.

There's normally an excess of water during long space stays, which is why it's electrolyzed on the ISS to reduce the need for oxygen (the excess hydrogen is vented to space).

A likely feature of ITS is an electrolysis device, Sabatier reactor, and cryocooler so waste CO2 and water from the passenger compartment can be converted to oxygen and methane stored in the propellant tanks. CO2 in particular must be disposed of, and the simplest way to do it, using consumable chemical scrubbers, takes a considerable (though not prohibitive) mass of supplies per person. This capability is needed for propellant production on Mars, in proportion to the number of landed vehicles, so it makes sense to incorporate it into each of them.

This would also be a less objectionable use of the water and carbon in sewage than feeding them back into life support somehow.

>This would also be a less objectionable use of the water and carbon in sewage than feeding them back into life support somehow.
Damn it, I meant "into the food and water supply".

do they have hair transplants on mars?

Excellent sci-fi short story right here

>That is how the story ends.
Wrong.

>The greater metropolitan area of London
From the context a real scientist would immediately deduce we are talking about everyone who may drink "water" supplied from the Thames. That includes emergency supply lines that are tested every now and then, typically when you want to brew that extra splendid cuppa SFTGFOP.

With your logic, we should make airplanes disposable. After every flight lands, we should scrap the plane and build a new one because it "doesn't save fuel."

So considerably less than 30 million. Right ok cool.

Retard.

why are all Veeky Forumsentist cynical and sarcastic?

Is a shit vacuum even possible

They are gonna do a launch on the 9th, maybe

What?

What does that have to do with anything?

Whats with you guys always talking about niggers and refugees and the ''fall of white civ'', what the fuck

Nobody's going to mars because interplanetary contamination UN thing and the green shitstorm that will follow.
Probes are an hero'd in jupiter just so they don't accidentally crash in a moon, and you believe we'd send people and accompanying infrastructure anywhere? Hah.

can't wait

>interplanetary contamination UN thing and the green shitstorm that will follow
Yeah man, the stars of globalism and watermelon socialism are totally rising.

What are you talking about?
The US can't go against the UN's imposed limitations on space exploration. Trying to circumvent that with >it's private organization bro! won't work.
4years (assuming he's not impeached) of drumpf in power will do nothing about that.
Colonizing is out of the question. You can't claim for yourself resources that belong to everyone.

>The US can't go against the UN's imposed limitations on space exploration.
What are you even talking about? The UN isn't some "boss of the world" organization. They basically provide a place for countries to go and talk to each other about what treaties they might make and what to do when they break them.

The US can and does do things "the UN" doesn't like.

>4years (assuming he's not impeached) of drumpf in power will do nothing about that.
8 years. With Republican control of Congress. And the opportunity to install a clear conservative majority in the Supreme Court. And rapidly approaching the number of Republican legislatures needed to make constitutional amendments.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Democrats is not for nothing. They are truly being cast into the outer darkness.

Anyway, yes the President and Congress together have the power to make and withdraw from treaties. Unlike Obama's "executive agreements" which are completely non-binding the day he leaves office, and his "regulations" which can be erased by Trump with no support from Congress at all.

The Outer Space Treaty in particular was understood to be temporary from the beginning. It was a set of rules for the early exploratory/science phase, so people wouldn't do stupid, war-starting shit like barely be able to plant a flag on the moon and then claim they owned the whole thing forever. It was always understood that an exploitation/colonization phase would follow, and new treaties would be written.

I don't think so

Actually the only thing that matters is how much moneyand effort people will put into things. Werent for the cold war dick contest we wouldn't ever have got humans into space.
Musk is putting these two things into space exploration by himself, a lot

reaaalllyy really like this gif

mind if i save it?

>Werent for the cold war dick contest we wouldn't ever have got humans into space.
No, if it weren't for the cold war dick contest, we would have got humans into space slightly later and at much lower cost, probably with some amount of reusability from the beginning.

I expect first it would be private competition in setting altitude and speed records, subsidized if not paid for by photograph sales. The first picture taken from space might have made a very popular poster. Then there would be the communication satellite goldrush. Then some millionaire adventurer would have himself launched to become the first man to orbit the Earth. Then a space hotel / research facility.

The trouble with throwing government money at a problem is that people get more in the business of catching the money than producing the intended results.

going to mars
no magnetic field that led to:
no colony on the surface(only on lava vacuum)and no terraforming

musk and nasa are just niggers

The presence or absence of a magnetic field is essentially irrelevant to terraforming. It only makes a difference on the order of millions of years.

The solar system and all of its planets are billions of years old. You can't assume their current condition is something that will be returned to quickly after a change.

The US government ratified the legally binding Outer Space Treaty.

The Outer Space Treaty says space exploration and colonisation would be used for the benefit of all mankind. That could legally be interpreted as no private enterprises.

Yes, they could, then they'd be kicked out of the UN.

>That could legally be interpreted as no private enterprises.
Yeah, no.

>they'd be kicked out of the UN.
This is an insane claim. The UN would crumble to irrelevance if it kicked the USA out. There are reasons it has its headquarters in New York. Anyway, it's not a treaty with the UN, it's a treaty with the other signatories.

>That could legally be interpreted as no private enterprises.
Man, who do you think would be in charge of interpreting it domestically? I've already pointed out that Trump and the GOP are getting the chance to install a conservative majority of SCOTUS justices over the next few years. They're not going to take the kind of extreme biased anti-business position you're suggesting.

As for internationally, nobody is going to try and impose sanctions on the USA over some hair-splitting interpretation of the OST. What they're going to do is start talking about what is a reasonable and fair framework for the early stages of colonization, like non-interference, extending features of maritime law into space, and agreeing on how to identify and fairly share highly-advantageous unique resources (like the few decent places to get water on the moon or the best few asteroids to mine).

Anyway, as I've already pointed out, the OST was *always* provisional, meant for the period before colonization or mining became practical, to be replaced by a more complete treaty at that time.

>That could legally be interpreted as
You know, when a law, treaty or agreement is open to interpretations it is also full of loop holes.

A similar treaty also protects the South Pole yet that does NOT stop the US from having a base on the South Pole. Possession and presence is in practice occupation.

>going to mars
Finding vast deposits of, say, rare earth metals, helium traps and other elements we are running out of.
Make rails to launch out or the low gravity low pressure Mars environment, send goods to Earth.
All necessary treaties will be scrapped same day.

It has been said (mening: I cannot find the source now) that even if you found gold bullion neatly stacked on the Moon it would be more expensive bringing them to Earth than you would get from them. That however neatly sidesteps the little matter called technological development. Whenever there is a need there will be a solution.

>It has been said (mening: I cannot find the source now) that even if you found gold bullion neatly stacked on the Moon it would be more expensive bringing them to Earth than you would get from them. That however neatly sidesteps the little matter called technological development.
Whoever said that was a moron, whose only argument was probably the cost of getting rock samples with Apollo, which was by no stretch of the imagination a cost-optimized mission to get rock samples.

Throwing material to Earth from the moon takes under 3 km/s of speed, easily achievable by catapult and requiring only modest energy resources (the kinetic energy of 1 kg accelerated to 3 km/s is 9 MJ, catapults and cannons commonly exceed 10% efficiency, and a solar panel on the moon will produce roughly 1 MJ per hour per square meter, and space solar arrays are typically 1 kg per square meter), and a solid lump of gold doesn't need any heat shield or parachute.

The Moon is possibly rich in He3 which on Earth is only obtained from reactors. The value of 1 tonne in electricity produced in a fusion reactor would be 3 billion dollars. China is wanting to go. The US is hesitating.

Give Trump a shot. He's the god emperor after all.

He3 for fusion is irrelevant. Any fusion involving He3 is more difficult to implement than D-D fusion, which could produce He3 in abundance. Even D-T fusion would produce large amounts of He3 byproduct, due to decay of the tritium reserve. If you have any use for He3 fusion reactors, deuterium reactors would be the natural places to get the fuel for them.

Anyway, the only advantage of He3 over boron is the same kind of advantage D-D has over He3, so if you're assuming some magic technology to make that advantage irrelevant, you ought to be assuming that we can skip straight to cheap, abundant boron.

For other purposes, He3 might be a valuable byproduct of lunar mining, and cheaper (or at least less controlled) than reactor production. He3 has some specialized uses and a very high price tag.

>China is struggling to copy Apollo tech half a century later. The US is developing a fully-reusable megarocket.

Considering he's bent on shutting down most if not all of all Earth satellite work to suit his political agenda, your delusional mamayemm leader can't even register that thought.

>he's bent on shutting down most if not all of all Earth satellite work to suit his political agenda
You mean he's bent on shutting down the Earth satellite work that was only serving the progressive agenda, so he can refocus NASA on apolitical stuff it should be doing: exploring, demonstrating, supporting industrialization of space.

Any kind of fusion is difficult, decades of research has made that clear. The question is, which line of research will succeed? National security dictates that nobody sane will take the risk of handing He3 over to the Chinese, along with the rare earth elements they already control

Early laser research focused on ruby (no pun, honestly) as that is what they got going first. Ruby is not used much these days, other technologies are far, far easier. The same could happen also in fusion research.

>Any kind of fusion is difficult, decades of research has made that clear. The question is, which line of research will succeed?
No, it's perfectly clear that some are harder than others, and D-T and D-D fusion will work at least as soon as He3 fusion does.

Also, the "aneutronic" character of He3 fusion is exaggerated. D-He3 would make a bit less than one tenth the neutrons that D-T fusion would, but that's still in the neighborhood of the neutron output of a fission reactor.

Proton-boron fusion is about fifty times better, but still not "aneutronic". You wouldn't want an "aneutronic" fusion reactor in your car or in a plane. It still would need pretty much all the shielding/distance a fission reactor would need to not pose an unacceptable threat to human life.

>national security dictates

No. That era is past and gone. If the chinese could do it then they will and the west will have to accept it or do something ugly reminiscent of imperialist times which is obviously impossible due to internal politics.
Centralized even if incompetent power would still triumph over anarchy/disrupted system. Russia has proven you don't even need to be particularly powerful to stir shit up, even moreso if you actively use disinfo - you'll have plenty of support from your "enemies".
Therefor, China could hoard all the goodies and we'll have to deal with it because ultimately it's our countries' fault we didn't get it. They just can't, yet.

>easily achievable by catapult

Of couse its never been done before
but "easily achievable"
Kappa

>jealous

SHARP did 3 km/s in the early 90s with a light-gas gun, and it's harder on Earth because of the atmosphere.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_High_Altitude_Research_Project

Railguns did it in the 80s.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun

At 3 km/s, sea-level air is like hitting a wall, but in a vacuum, use any kind of frictionless magnetic bearing, and you're golden, it's just a linear motor with no special considerations. There are also advantages like the insulating properties of vacuum, if you want to use superconductors.

He will need to science the shit out of it.

kys my friend. That kind of attitude will get us nowhere.

After all, if you think it will never happen, that just means you won't be one of those will make it happen.

>will have to accept it or do something ugly reminiscent of imperialist times which is obviously impossible due to internal politics
That is more or less what people said ... in 1913. Didn't work out then, probably won't work out now.

>Russia has proven you don't even need to be particularly powerful to stir shit up
True, also see South China Sea

That, however, does not make things any better.

>They just can't, yet.
And they are more willing to sacrifise human lives than the West, to achieve their goals. China has understood the importance to control raw material sources On Earth. Likely also on the Moon.

A hydraulic empire is the dream of many.

You can also use coilguns.
illustrations of future lunar bases often has such a launch track visible.

Dont that is internet piracy

really makes you think