Unless I've missed something, the SpaceX estimates this seems to be based on miss the rather basic fact that the energy/time (and presumably economic) cost of Mars trips varies depending on the synodic cycle.
It's never just point and shoot.
So the current SpaceX estimates are going to be for the most efficient and cheapest trajectories.
If you want to ignore the synodic cycle and run missions every day for years, the costs are going to be much higher.
Almost everything about SpaceX's Martian colonization announcements is very, very far from what could be practically realized with anything we can build today.
For example, Musk repeatedly mentions a six-month trip. No, it is 9 months, at best.
He talks about transporting 100 colonists for those 9 months, 6500 hours, in a ship with the room that an airliner uses taking that many with their baggage across the Atlantic Ocean, up to 9 hours.
Might they not need food, water and, maybe, air for 9 months? The airliner pumps air through on the way. It collects its sewage, to deliver there. Maybe a pressure suit for when they get there? Change of underwear?
By NASA standards, Starship has room for at most 17 crew for such a trip. That is if you know they all get along, or don't care how many kill one another on the way. More practically, 8 is probably the limit.
Probably you need to send ships in pairs, so they can be swung on a cable between ships' noses for centrifugal gravity. That way their bones don't dissolve on the way. Will 1/3g be enough? Nobody knows. But it had better be.
It is a good plan to send uncrewed cargo ships ahead of time with what they will need there. You probably need at least five of those per colonist ship. With on-orbit fueling, that amounts to ~80 Superheavy launches, 10 for each colonist.
Will Starship be rated for launching crew? Maybe you need a couple of Falcon/Dragon launches, besides, for each Starship-load of 8 colonists.
So for a million colonists, you need ten million Superheavy launches. At 10 launches/day, every day, that is 3000 years. Maybe breeding colonists in situ would be faster? Because over 3000 years, some will die. (Hopefully not all at once.) How many do you need to launch just to keep numbers from falling? Maybe later ones can move into dead colonists' pressure cans, so need less cargo?
But a million colonists is very far from enough to be self-sufficient. No microchip manufacturing, no biochemicals, no Cybertruck. So you still need all the cargo launches, 10 every day, century in and century out. Hopefully the colony produces enough (movies?) to pay for that, because you can't bring them back.
So, no, there will be no SpaceX Mars colony. But promoting it keeps Tesla stock price inflated.
If something sounds as implausible as you just made it sound, the explanation might be rather that they know more about the topic than you and that it is your numbers that are off.
Sounds like you have an axe to grind. Think about solutions instead of problems, nobody is asking you for anything. If the physics permits something to happen, if there’s a will there’s a way. If you don’t have the will there is never a way.
Yes, let's make it personal. That always turns out well.
If you can figure a way to get a million-person Mars colony together in under, say, a thousand years, with SpaceX hardware, go wild.
Freeze and stack colonists like cordwood? Nobody said they have to be alive, right? They'd keep. Maybe somebody will figure out how to revive them, someday.
> Probably you need to send ships in pairs, so they can be swung on a cable between ships' noses for centrifugal gravity. That way their bones don't dissolve on the way. Will 1/3g be enough? Nobody knows. But it had better be.
I have some questions about this bit!
1.) Why would their bones dissolve? If bones aren’t used do they really just collapse? My hands don’t really experience gravity (I think!) and they are fine.
2.) Couldn’t you make some sort of exercise thingy that could simulate gravity?
"One of the major obstacles to long-term space missions in the threat of severe bone loss in astronauts. In the microgravity environment of space, astronauts lose on average 1% to 2% of their bone mineral density every month. For a short-duration flight, bone loss is a fairly minor consequence.
On a long-duration space flight, such as those planned for missions to Mars and beyond, bone loss can be a serious impediment. This loss may not hinder astronauts while they are in orbit, but upon return to Earth, their weakened bones will be fragile and at an increased risk of fractures. At this time, it is unknown whether this bone loss will eventually reach a plateau, or whether it will continue indefinitely." [1]
2) ISS astronauts spend a couple of hours every day exercising to keep the worst of the space-related medical issues at bay... but it's simply no substitute for real gravity.
Space has all sorts of weird effects on the human body: [2]
I don't know, I think appreciating the difficulty of getting to Mars is important, and puts things in a perspective that Elon Musk doesn't seem to respect when making these claims - which to be fair no successful hype man ever espoused a realistic perspective.
I think that what will end up happening is that Starship will be used to construct larger spinning 'cruise ships' that will be placed into Cycler orbits[0] that ships like Starship will ferry cargo and passengers to from the surface of both planets.
The potential upsides of this approach would be better living conditions while in journey, with potentially larger accommodations and artificial gravity from spinning the craft. If these cruise-ships are designed in a modular fashion they can be added to every time they make a return orbit around Earth and will end up having a sizable population of people permanently living on them making their money providing services to the guests travelling between worlds.
While what you say is partially true and some of these problems might be difficult to solve or even impossible to solve during Musk's lifetime, for the most important of them the reasons that might prevent their solving are not technical.
There is no need for a million colonists to achieve self-sufficiency. Even one hundred thousand is much more than enough. The only reason for which a large number of colonists could matter would be to ensure enough genetic diversity for a colony that would lose contact with Earth.
For manufacturing all that is needed, the number of colonists is much less important and the main obstacle is not technical. The most important obstacle is that you cannot go e.g. to a library and learn how to make everything that must be made in a self-sufficient colony, because there is a huge amount of know-how details that is hidden in the trade secrets of thousands of companies scattered around the globe.
None of this secret know-how is something that could not be rediscovered by a good engineer, but rediscovering how to make everything that is made on Earth now is indeed a job for at least one million of engineers.
So for a self-sufficient Mars colony it matters very little how many colonists would be sent there, but it matters if it would be possible for the colonists to license all the technologies that are required for making everything. Most companies existing today might not want to license their technologies at all, or they would request a very large amount of money for that and a Mars colony could not produce anything valuable enough to pay such licenses.
So besides financing the transportation by SpaceX, the creation of a Mars colony would need a many times larger financing for licensing manufacturing technologies, supposing that there would be any willing providers.
Many of the existing manufacturing technologies would need a lot of research to be adapted to Mars conditions, mainly to make them less wasteful and to improve recycling, but in general the Mars ambient conditions, i.e. the lack of an oxidizing and humid atmosphere, can make most manufacturing processes simpler, not more difficult, except for the fact that it may make cooling more difficult, as the Martian atmosphere is useless for that, so the use of other cooling fluids is mandatory.
You seriously underrate the broad expertise by millions of professionals needed to sustain just global electronics manufacturing.
A clear majority of colonists would necessarily be wholly occupied with just keeping the colony alive, breathing, and eating. So an extra population to do electronics, another for chemical engineering, another for mining, another for medicines, more for plumbing and electrical wiring, construction, pilots, drivers, agronomists, programmers, economic planners, dieticians, physical therapists, optometrists, lens grinders, glassmakers ...
There are reasons why exactly zero societies under a million sustain any of these industries domestically.
As a professional electronics engineer with direct experience in semiconductor devices and integrated circuit manufacturing, I can be completely certain that there is absolutely no need for the expertise of "millions" of engineers to do that, but at most for the expertise of a few thousands.
The expertise of "millions" would be needed only when none of them has the practical experience about all the details of how something is made and they have to design all the technological processes from scratch, instead of just improving and adapting a set of known technological processes.
While indeed I am not aware of any society with under 1 million people that was able to sustain all these industries domestically, some decades ago there were a few countries in Western Europe and many of the countries from the Eastern Europe enslaved by the Russian Communists, which could have been entirely self sustained for all the industries, while having a population of only a few millions.
Moreover, the population actually involved in the industries was no more than a few hundred thousands in each country.
Already after 1980, and especially after 1990, the globalization has destroyed the local industries and none of those countries could be self sufficient now.
However the reasons why that has happened have nothing to do with technology or with the human potential of those populations.
Had those countries been kept insulated from external influences, they would have remained self sufficient until now. There is no doubt that technological evolution would have been slower inside a smaller society, but nonetheless they would not look too different from what we have today, e.g. many such countries could manufacture a personal computer with domestic components at that old times, so they certainly would have been able to make better computers 30 years later, even if not so fast and small as we have today in a globalized world.
A smaller society has increased risks of failure, but those risks have nothing to do with technology or with the human potential of its engineers and technicians, but to factors like a parasitic political class which grabs all the power and which also prevents the other people to do properly their jobs, like it happened in the Communist countries.
It is always inspiring to hear scientists disparaging engineers, and engineers downplaying the importance of technicians and of all the support apparatus, materials, and consumables that enable them to do their own work, and all the skilled people needed to develop and produce those reliably on demand.
I thought maybe the experience of supply chain disruptions in the past couple of years would remind people of their dependence, but apparently memories are short.
How did you jump from your stated number of 17 colonists per ship to 10 launches needed per colonist? If it’s 5 starships of cargo, then you need 10 Starship launches including the refueling. So in total that’s 12 launches to transport 17 people. That number 17 is what you randomly came up with. So really, it’s about 20 launches for a 100 colonists which is pretty reasonable really.
Why would the bones dissolve, astronauts spends many months at a time on the ISS with relatively minor consequences.
Is it possible for a mission starting at T1, to arrive later than a mission starting at T2, where T1 < T2 due to the sheer speed w/ which the planets are moving?
Would be far more interesting if he considered the local labor market and how that's going to interact with all of this. I'd also like to know why he thinks the GDP per capital will be 10x higher on Mars, or where the "virtually unlimited" amount of supplies will actually be stored. There's a massive difference between "just in time" production and "stockpile" production.
This seems to view the problem down one dimension, and I don't find the analysis particularly satisfying or complete.
As long as the contents don't mind being in vacuum, a mylar bag will last a long time just sitting in a field on Mars. No not much 02 to oxidize things, not even enough air for wind to cause dust abrasion. As much as I love "The Martian", once you get there and pay the prices of setting up shop it is likely to be very stable. Daily and seasonal thermal shock will be the primary force of erosion.
I started to write a "A cardboard box" but then thought of UV and switched to mylar. Doing some research I can't find much direct discussion of perchlorate and mylar, but they do ship it in mylar bags.
why he thinks the GDP per capital will be 10x higher
We'll, it's all somewhat pie in the sky predictions. But I don't think that's intended as an assumption, but rather an argued outcome predicted by the other assumptions and mechanics of his model (annual tonnes-per-capita of consumption of various classes of goods, $/T, etc).
What was the GDP/capita of the early colonies relative to their source populations? An order of magnitude wouldn’t surprise me given the initial and ongoing selection pressure.
Order of magnitude more? Or less? Back home, they had centuries worth of physical plant to rely on. Colonists have to make do with what can be cobbled up on the spot.
Small-parcel courier services (read: USPS, UPS, FedEx) are far, far more expensive than the freight shipping that moves most things around. It costs about $1/kg to ship things all the way from China to the US by ocean container (much more expensive than it used to be because supply chain issues).
I think a model of economics which doesn't ignore the huge value inherent in the fossil fuels we're burning, and can account for both energy and currency, would go a long way to better understanding the Earth economy, as well as giving better predictions of the Mars economy.
This is an absolutely fantastic article that gives me a much better sense of how and why an extraterrestial city would emerge, and what form it would eventually take.
You might be happy to hear that the author of the article founded a company (Terraform Industries) that is working on making carbon sequestration and synthetic fuels economically viable.
Money put into synthetic hydrocarbon production is extremely premature when we don't have enough renewable generating capacity yet to displace current CO2 emissions.
I'd word it as "Developing negative carbon emission industry and economy on Earth will almost certainly lead to better ways of doing things on the Mars" as in the two questions aren't different enough to phrase them as a "this one" or "that one". Solving one without solving at least a significant portion of the other doesn't seem possible and I don't see the desire for either shrinking as time goes on.
There is limited evidence large populations are willing to incur pain to solve the climate crisis. To the degree money is spent, it’s politicised and inefficient. The necessity of survival simply isn’t there here. It would be on Mars.
It would help, some, for it to be actually possible for a Mars colony to exist, and then maybe to survive at all. But there is thus far no reason to expect that. Certainly not by relying on Starship/Superheavy, which is so far from adequate it is comical.
Starship might be adequate to keep a small moon base operating. That would be an achievement.
The atmosphere there provides all the carbon, oxygen and nitrogen you need, hydrogen (from water) is the thing in short supply at present.
If you can synthesize methane there, you should be able to make longer chains and polymers with the right application of chemistry. One thing for sure, you'd never just burn fuel/oxygen together instead of using fuel cells, batteries and solar.
Nuclear would be a good power source if cooling isn't impractical.
There is very, very little accessible water, thus very little hydrogen. Any expedition planning in situ fuel synthesis had better bring its own hydrogen.
Personally I would rather see that we quit the rocket stuff and focus on real problems. Playing with rockets serves the entertainment needs of billionaires and maybe the tech bros on HN, but serves no other purpose.
Starlink does come to mind, but that need can be served cheaper and more effectively if we would not be so capitalistic and spend a bit less on military.
Speaking of purpose, at times it feels to me that the space thing is the only thing that gives the audience a higher meaning. But it seems so desperately hollow.
It seems so gratuitous that billions are spent on nothing, whereas some very serious issues here down on earth are going out of control.
But let’s keep dreaming and fantasizing about Mars.
I keep my focus on the disintegration of society by the people who finance this rocket stuff.
Couple thoughts: First, I would gently suggest that, while it is easy to complain, it is hard to build - if you are into spending energy on humanity’s current plight, ‘focusing on disintegration of society’ is going to be a full and complete waste of your time, and of no benefit to the rest of us - I’d encourage you to do the much harder (and often riskier/scarier) thing of figuring out what you might do to improve things. Probably won’t look like what Elon does, but it’s a big world!
Second, counterpoint on Starlink. Starlink is actually pretty amazing - it, at scale, will provide global relatively low-ping pervasive broadband internet EVERYWHERE. Without any ground-based deployments. Logistics in much of the world are prohibitively difficult to even get strung-out microwave repeaters into places humans live, much less 30-100ms broadband. Seriously, Starlink is amazing. While I agree that military budgets could often be better repurposed for the good of humanity, I’m not sure that even the US military budget could blanket the earth with broadband in any other way than this — politics plus logistics make it seem impossible to me.
Anyway, I personally think the world could do with a lot more crazy dreamers building things right now!
It is very far from clear that Starlink is even sustainable. It needs many times more full-price subscribers than can afford it. Expect available data rates to plummet as more sign up.
And, anywhere with trees around (e.g., here), it doesn't work.
Sustainability is an interesting metric, probably two ways to look at it:
On the “financially sustainable” question: Current public reported runrate is $40+mm/month in revenue = $500mm/yr ARR business on roughly 400,000 customers. Customers are still limited by geo for the reasons you mention - they need more satellite density, so I presume more customers would sign up than have right now, e.g. there is a lot of growth ahead in raw revenues. That should give the current business, as is, at least a $5bn valuation, frankly quite a lot more given the ease with which they can sign up whole countries worth of people.
Can starlink add another 400,000 customers for less than $5bn? Absolutely. SpaceX has paid the capex for lift already, and right now it’s a matter of adding satellites and creating antennas and paying (at-cost) lift rates for the cheapest lift known to man. Starlink is going to be a $100bn+ business IMO very quickly, like next 5 years.
Per your point, e.g. ‘is it good enough near trees’, or what percent of the earth can Starlink serve? On the one hand, it doesn’t matter a lot because that number is clearly north of 10%, and that makes the starlink broadband market 3 times the size of the US as is — and that ignores the various super-high-value markets like shipping, jets, and elsewhere that will pay 50x a ‘typical’ customer - but, I think the tree/coverage problem in general is a problem of low satellite density right now.
My starlink is laid out as best I can near my house, and it’s at like “96% coverage” per the app; every ten minutes or so, it loses connectivity for a bit. That’s because all available satellites are occluded by my trees - with additional satellites, I wouldn’t have that problem. So, I would guess that problem gets less bad over time as they grow.
By my estimate they need a million subscribers just to pay for launching satellites at the prescribed replacement rate (per 5 years) presuming 19000 units. But I have seen numbers from 9800 to 42000, quoting various people at SpaceX at various times.
Why not? Be more specific. The tree issue I believe could easily be fixed by broadcasting over a lower frequency that can penetrate more materials easy. Wi-Fi for example works at lower frequencies (2.5Ghz/5Ghz opposed to 12Ghz). This is more of a regulatory constraint. The effect could also minimized with more satellites.
They would need new regulatory clearance, a new spectrum allocation, and probably all new satellites and terminals to operate in a different frequency band.
And by my estimate they need a million subscribers just to pay for replacement satellites as the old ones burn up.
I don't understand those dreams about Mars, Musk failed even with a simple thing like the boring company and settling Mars is so much more complicated than that. Musk succeeded in places where the technology was there and all was needed was to refine and market it, spaceX, Tesla and even paypal are all good examples. But digging tunnels, let alone building on Mars, are two problems that don't have any known solutions at the current moment and will not improve dramatically in the near future.
Tunneling is tech that goes back thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians cut many miles through bedrock with primitive tools. Musk failing at tunneling, thus, says a lot.
Success with rockets I have to attribute to lucky hires.
It's never just point and shoot.
So the current SpaceX estimates are going to be for the most efficient and cheapest trajectories.
If you want to ignore the synodic cycle and run missions every day for years, the costs are going to be much higher.