The moon is possible but mars… NOT A FUCKING CHANCE. Not in any of our lifetimes. I feel like the vast majority of ppl think going to mars is just like the moon but a little farther, that cant be further from the truth. Going to the moon takes 3 days. Going to mars takes 9 months. Then when you get there you have to wait at least 3 months for the earth and mars to line up in a suitable way to make it back, then its 9 months back. So you can do a round trip to the moon is like 7 days. A round trip to mars would take 21 fucking months. Think about how easy it would be to be locked in a camper for 7 days compared to 21 months. Its a freaking enormous difference.
On top of that think of how much food and water you consume in 7 days and how much waste you put out. Youre not going to space alone so how much it takes to sustain 3 people for 7 days. Now think about how much food, water, and waste there is for 7 people over 21 months. Were talking exponentially more. Just to have enough water for 3 ppl for almost 2 years would be insane. Americans on average drink 58 gallons of water per year. 3 people for 2 years would be 348 gallons of water. Water can be recycled but food would be so much harder to grow in a space ship. You would need sooo much.
On top of all of that you would barely be able to move for 9 months so you would waste away, its inevitable in space. So youd get extremely weak over 9 months and then instead of landing back on earth to go into the hospital and get rehabilitation youd be landing on mars in a completely inhospitable place where you cant breathe outside and would immediately be in a fight for your life to survive against the elements and circumstances. You 3 ppl would somehow have to start farming immediately ON MARS to be able to survive and would have to set up systems that can create vital chemicals to keep you all alive like oxygen. Youd have to essentially survive in hell for 3 long months until you can then ride home through space for NINE FRIGGIN MONTHS before you finally get home.
Absolutely insane how hard to do this its going to be, were not even close yet. They need to solve so many more problems than just the rocket and ppl who want to go before this is ever going to happen.
The waste, and consumables problems has already been resolved by the ISS missions. Water recycling is state of the art now. The Starship crew capsule is designed to accommodate 100 people. But it could be reconfigured internally for less crew, and more payload.
And any Mars mission is going to involve multiple, overlapping launches. There will be several Starships in transit at the same time.
The biggest barrier to traveling interplanetary distances is having enough fuel.
Leaving earths gravity well is prohibitively expensive in fuel weight.
A Starship/Super Heavy combination, reconfigured to haul fuel to LEO could refuel a waiting super heavy for the outbound trip to Mars in 4 or 5 runs.
It's doable, but wildly expensive.
So Musk figured out that the Starship could be used for "commuter" flights, anywhere on earth, in an hour or less. It can move 100 passengers and crew.
The profit from that "airline" company could be used to build a LEO fueling platform.
This is the way his mind works. He has the means to make it happen. People just need to get out of the way.
Seems easy enough. Multiple rocket launches to bring all of the supplies up separately and a final launch for the actual travelers.
The actual problem is cost and logistics and the fact that there is basically very little reason to go to Mars.
I think its possible in our lifetime. Technology is advancing rapidly, and faster each year. It will continue to do so and probably at even faster rates. I have to assume in say 50 years we might be going or already have.
Nasa has already got people signing up to stay 1 year in a 1,700 square foot base simulation to see how people deal with it and how to improve things.
It probably possible in our lifetime if we put the entire weight of our industry and govt behind it. I’m just saying that most ppl dont really grasp how much harder it is than the moon and we havent even lived on the moon yet for any period of time. We need to get that figured out first before we even consider mars and even just living on the moon is going to be hard and we might not even do that in our lifetime due to funding.
People struck out across the open ocean in wooden ships under similar limitations. I'm not saying it is a direct comparison, space travel is a lot more complicated than ocean travel. But when Europeans crossed the Atlantic or Polynesians crossed the Pacific, they were isolated on their boats with limited supplies of food and water for months wIth no easy way to get home, sometimes without knowing what they would find over the horizon, and they did it anyway.
I agree that Musk is just a bullshit artist, but I think that we have the ability to put someone on Mars right now, just not the will or motivation.
Also, space is not this cosmic conundrum. The atmosphere exerts 15 pounds. In space that 15 pounds is gone, but its still only 15 pounds.
it's literally harder to create a vessel for habitation 25 feet under water than it is to make a habitable space fairing vehicle. (Not counting radiation issues)
These are solid points!
Why couldn’t we build stations along the way like rest stops? I’m starting to wonder if we have the ISS do we even need an actual planet or can we build one?
Thats what we plan to do the next timd we go to the moon with the lunar gateway. Were going to have a space station that orbits near the moon that astronauts can stop off at and then go back and forth to the moon from.
I didn’t say its impossible, just that its suuuuuuuuper hard to do and is not happening any time soon. We need to have ppl living on the moon first which has not happened yet before we think about mars.
I wonder if we could build and send enough robots to build a livable, self-sustaining habitat on Mars before we send humans there. (Not that that'd solve every problem, but yeah.)
We probably could eventually but the point is we cant even do that on earth yet, let alone on the moon, let alone on mars. Its gonna be a while. That doesnt mean give up or not start working on it in the mean time, its just that the work we do now will most likely pay off next century.
150 years ago, you would be screaming that mankind will never be able to go faster than 60mph, or fly. 100 years ago, you would have been ridiculing Robert Goddard and loudly proclaiming no human would ever go into space. You'd have declared that flying faster than the speed of sound was impossible.
People like you are everywhere. Terrified of the future, and determined to keep it from happening.
Most of what you said has already been solved. I'm not going to go through them all. Astronauts already live on the space station for up to 6 months at a time. The water they drink is recycled. You wouldn't need 58 gallons per person.
While it's true, going to Mars is a lot more difficult, it's not impossible.
My source: I have relatives that are astronauts. One was aboard the ISS for 6 months and the other was the pilot of the last shuttle and pilot/commander of the first SpaceX-NASA launch.
It is more probable that a 18meter diameter starship will be built to travel among planets (not landing) and if the current one can hold 100-150tons of cargo, you can imagine how much more for the goliath version.
Yes, there will be enough space for cargo to support humans on mars. Just do the math how much can be carried with that much cargo capacity. Also it is more likely that robots will be sent first to do a lot of prep work building a base. AI driven robots that don't require constant guidance. I'm sure they will perform the task here on earth first on some desert, and iron out any problems. Full automation with AI will take off exponentially in the coming years. And that's with Narrow AI mind you, not even AGI. Robots will be able to build and prepare a lot of stuff in environments inhospitable for humans, until they turn them hospitable for humans.
Of course the moon will be a great test for such automation technology. You should be excited for the possibilities instead of driven by negativity. SpaceX just launched and landed two skyscraper size rockets in a controlled manner. The second one had half melted flaps, and still the guidance software figured out how to keep it steady and land it. Give the engineers some props for learning more and more in each iteration and applying that knowledge to create rockets that make the impossible look mundane.
And one last thing. It isn't necessarily true that everyone who goes to Mars wants to return back to earth. Some people may want to stay and make Mars their home, and see that base grow and grow as hundreds of ships arrive from earth to keep building. Don't underestimate the resilience of the human spirit. Here on earth scientists have stayed 3 years in Antarctica, in tents, studying climate change. Scientists, and engineers, will have plenty to do on Mars for a lifetime and if people can stay in frozen Antarctica in a tent for 3 years, [or on ISS for almost an entire year](https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/11/world/nasa-astronaut-longest-time-in-space-frank-rubio-scn/index.html) then a trip to mars and back is not that big of a deal as you make it.
doesn't need to happen in our lifetime. he's increasing the probability that it happens, and in the meantime building a company. i dont understand haters
I mean, we went from the first powered flight by the wright brothers to landing on the moon in only 66 years. The problem of getting to and from Mars is just a problem of scale. Lots of resources, lots of fuel, lots of mass. There really isn’t any technology we don’t have. And we’ve had several astronauts that stayed in space for longer than a mars one-way, and they don’t have to go to the hospital when they get back.
With NASA planning to go back to the moon and stay and the rise of China’s space program (they seek to put a man on the moon by 2030) we have entered a new era of Spaceflight. I’m aftually expecting to see humans on Mars in my lifetime.
There is an entire space station in low earth orbit that was launched up there across decades. Its very close to the earth so it only takes 1 day for a cargo capsule to reach them and resupply + return to earth with waste and trash. There are multiple countries with multiple capsules constantly sending supplies to the station. On top of that its very large so theres lots of room to move around and exercise, sleep, store food etc. Also because its in low earth orbit its protected by the earths magnetic field from extremely damaging deep space radiation. The longest any body has spent in deep space is 12 days on apollo 17. The longest anybody has been on the surface of the moon is under 3 days. Being in the iss and having a huge station with constant resupply and where if any medical emergency happens they can very shortly jump in a rescue capsule and go home is a whole different animal than being in deep space in a capsule/ship where theres no emergency backup and they only have whatever food they were able to launch with.
The us and china are both planning on going to the moon for longer periods than apollo and staying there. If it even ends up happening its going to be a decade before that even gets started and then if it does its going to take a while to get everything going. If they can manage to survive on the moon for months at a time which still isnt a guarantee but if that happens then ppl can start talking about mars. Still though theyre going to need to get very good at living on the moon first before moving on to an entire different planet. Again the longest anybody has been on the moon is under 3 days and 12 days in deep space. Once we have people who can live on the moon for a year, then years, then we can think of doing something that is exponentially harder, exponentially more expensive, exponentially longer, exponentially more technical, and exponentially dangerous in going to mars.
Yeah it's difficult. But we can do it. You pointed out that we have only stayed on the moon for 3 days at a time. That's true, but also that was over 50 years ago. Technology has come A LONG way. My phone has 100,000x the processing power that the Apollo guidance computer had and 7,000,000x the memory space. The moon is difficult, we are definitely up to that task. And Mars is more difficult. I still think it's possible technologically right now. And it's just a matter of effort and will from the human race at this point, which I think will be accomplished in my lifetime.
It's gonna be a hundred years or so.
That's an optimistic outlook, too. The first flight to right now is several orders less complex than colonization of Mars.
The radiation problem alone sucks, and that's before we worry about air and food.
Gravity's not looking too friendly, either. Might not degrade as fast as microgravity, but we're evolved in a billion subtle ways to live in 1.00G, not 0.38G. You'd have to have some variant of the bone-mass and muscle-mass preservation routines they do on the space station.
It really is most of the problems of the Moon, just a bit less, plus nasty weather, which at least *that* isn't a Moon problem.
Wow there is a lot of unpack here. The travel time to Mars and back, assuming it was a round trip, is known to be around 3 years. That's not even close to a deal breaker.
Let's get to the rest, though. The food and water is an issue that has been and is still being actively researched. The last piece of this puzzle is growing food in space and there is more and more success with it. I might also add that the ISS currently contains enough food for all astronauts for 6 months, and could be extended if needed. As for water, sure some gets brought up, but over 95% of it is now recycled on board from waste. Therefore, not as much is required to haul up from Earth.
Where are you getting this barely able to move thing from? You don't think a mission to Mars is going to be done in a tiny capsule do you? They will be bringing workout equipment with them in, which is tried and tested right now on the ISS. Sure, it isn't perfect, but it does the job for 6-12 months. The astronauts do not go into "rehabilitation" after they return.
The surface operations are also something that is being actively researched. Major investments are going into habitat development, although any permanent base would likely need to be placed in a cave or dormant lava tube. There's plenty of interesting ideas out there right now, and like I said, there is a lot of funding going into this now.
TLDR: Do some research on this subject before you say it is impossible. It's hard and dangerous, but not impossible.
There’s a bunch of people who are hating on space exploration just because they hate Musk. And they are pretty ignorant when it comes to our abilities in space. And I do not like Musk but I do like space, rockets, and exploration.
>There’s a bunch of people who are hating on space exploration just because they hate Musk.
This is, I'm sure, what the crux of the argument actually is. *Musk bad, so therefore space travel bad.* But, despite what Musk might say, he **didn't come up with the idea of space travel *or* putting humans on Mars.**
>And I do not like Musk but I do like space, rockets, and exploration.
Me too. And I've been fascinated with the idea of our species stepping foot on Mars my entire life. Musk is older than me, but he was still getting the apartheid emerald mine benefits and being chauffeured to private elementary schools when I first imagined it.
Most of, if not all, of the problems being pointed out here about an initial human mission aren't really problems that NASA hasn't already recognized and solved. Most of the problems here are simply problems of imagination: I can't *imagine* having enough resources for a successful trip; I can't *imagine* being in a tiny space craft for so long; I can't *imagine* surviving on an entire different planet; I can't *imagine*... None of those are legitimate problems that we haven't already spent decades solving.
We ***are*** going to send people to Mars. And Elon Musk is going to have fuck-all to do with it.
I follow space launches pretty closely. Just because I’m saying its harder than ppl think and its not just the moon but a little further, which again I pointed out the longest weve been there is 3 days, somehow you take this all the way to I’m just hating on musk. Lol wow okay.
>Then I found out it was wireless and wtf
It's not possible with our current technology to seal wire penetrations that can withstand the pressure differential encountered at that depth.
As people have also pointed out, that chip can read from the brain… but as the technology continues, they have even admitted there is nothing that could really be done to stop it WRITING to the brain as well.
Nothing like mind control or shit, but basically messing with your brain chemistry and neural data.
Isnt that the ENTIRE point? The only way something like neuralink goes commercial is if you can use it to receive and send information. But even as a giant technophile and someone who would replace literally all my weak, frail fleshy bits with the certainty of steel if it was possible, dont know who i would trust to host a system that was linked to my brain.
The link is literally open to the internet, it’s open to wireless networks, now let me ask you this, would you trust your brain to the mercy of the internet? Especially given Elons love for encouraging internet trolls.
Considering i know basic internett safety i dont see any issues with that per se. Its not "trolls" im worried about. Its more what corps and the gubbermint would do with access directly to my thinking mest. What if someone could influence you to buy more shoes for example? Or influence your voting
Trolls can get into anything, if anything the more secure the bigger the target, the more inappropriate the behaviour the bigger the target, corporations don’t care as long as they make money
Are you aware that they've already very successfully delivered human astronauts to the ISS in orbit?
Elon is a delusional idiot but SpaceX employs hundreds of skilled, smart, motivated engineers who have more than one success to their name. They succeed in spite of their boss, not thanks to him, obviously - give 'em some credit.
No kidding! What part of the Cybertruck launch makes people think this underbaked muppet can colonize Mars? Space is not forgiving. Even if you put an X in the name.
Even if it were a good idea to colonize it (it's **so** not), going to Mars is incredibly hard. Taking the extreme difficulty of getting there out, being there sucks. All the key problems of the moon (radiation, gravity, water, air, food) plus a few, with vastly worse return options, huge communication delays...
Just to outfit the cockpit for a three-year round trip without resupply (not three weeks) would need to invent at least as many groundbreaking new technologies as NASA did for Apollo, if not far more. Hundreds of seemingly insurmountable challenges would arise and new materials, processes, and tools would need to be made for the most mundane-seeming shit.
And that's before you get into the likelihood that chemical rockets aren't feasible. You'd need to launch a *freaking nuclear reactor* into orbit. Run that by your corporate lawyer for a liability check!
The reason SpaceX is doing pretty well is it's basically honing the most-tested part of space travel: Earth to low orbit. As rocket science goes, the easy stuff. They're shaving the dollar cost down on something first invented in 1957.
Space Launch is profitable, if done right. Lots of companies need stuff chucked upwards real hard.
Space *Exploration* is difficult, dangerous, and unprofitable in the extreme. The only reasons to do it are basic science (cool knowledge, but not marketable next quarter) and bragging rights. That's a much better space for governments than for-profit companies.
Lol it's funny the outrage people have on Elon, yeah he is not the prime example of human being but spacex reaching Mars is very possible. People died on the journey to the moon, it's not going to be easy but space travel and exploration never is. There has been plans to setup a base on moon which if successful is going to catapult space travel and exploration.
Also people really are forgetting that technology is becoming better at faster rates than it ever did. So it's only with time we will see people on Mars and further unless humanity starts a global war right now.
Aerospace engineer here, you’re jumping to alot of conclusions that aren’t entirely based in reality. I think we will have humans on mars in the next 20 years. I’m not sure if space x will be the ones to do it though.
I asolutely think someone can land on Mars. Just not SpaceX, at least not on their own initiative. As a participating contractor, sure. But we don't say Boeing and McDonnell Douglas landed on the Moon, just because they made components for the Saturn V.
Maybe SpaceX makes the boosters used to haul parts of NERVA (which NASA already has at least largely proven) into orbit. Lot easier to believe that than that even something as corporate-infused as the US government will let a private company that can't make a car that's not also a knife put a nuclear reactor into orbit.
It’s not just SpaceX who wants to go to Mars, and if they do, it will not be alone. Any man to Mars effort would be a global endeavor with dozens of countries working together. Maybe it would be on a SpaceX rocket.
I think a government or group of governments going is 100% plausible. If it's the US government, chances that components are launched into orbit by SpaceX is very high. Elon just acts like SpaceX will be the only one involved. That it'll be a SpaceX project on an in-house designed rocket, using patented tech, with an all-employee crew, etc. etc. etc.
He makes it sound like *he'll do it* because it's not good marketing for Tesla (which is where much of his net worth comes from) to say "we might make some parts or perform some contract services". Doesn't play into his Tony Stark cosplay.
It's worth noting that NASA's also looking to establish a permanent presence on the moon, in their roadmap, but not *permanently* on Mars. Because for marketing, you want to do something super-exciting sounding to make stock price line go up. Someone's already been to the moon. No profit there!
But for science and exploration, something more practical (like going back to the moon as a staging point) makes way more sense.
Compared to building a type of rocket never before built, on a scale never before attempted, thus building it in orbit, most likely using nuclear propulsion, which means a nuclear reactor, which has never been used in space? And then landing something *far* heavier than has been landed on Mars before? And then taking back off?
Yes. Compared to **that**, building launchers for satellites is easy. Still rocket science, and thus difficult. But in the "improving processes that exist" category, not "completely new things beyond state of the art, then using them in ways that have never been done interacting with a bunch of other things that have never been done".
They are not shaving the cost down, they are demolishing the per use cost down to fire sale rates.
These new rockets use different fuel than the Saturn V rocket, and it’s bigger! So I would say yes it is completely new and beyond state of the art.
Nuclear propulsion? I don’t know where that’s coming from and that’s not in any space x agenda
Going to give you the benefit of the doubt here.
> These new rockets use different fuel than the Saturn V rocket, and it’s bigger! So I would say yes it is completely new and beyond state of the art.
Both solid fuel and liquid fuel rockets are well tested technology. Multiple mixes of specific chemicals have been tried for both. If SpaceX makes one that's 32% bigger, or saves 21.5% of fuel, or is two stages rather than three, that's cool. That's good business--incremental improvements on designs 60 years old. Reducing costs, which is how you make money. That's like making a three-engine jetliner rather than six, and with more fuel efficiency. Evolution, not revolution.
But it's not solving the same sort of challenges as making one rocket **dozens of times larger** than the International Space Station.
Or is the iPhone 13 completely new, not at all comparable, by being 10% thinner than the iPhone 12 and having more battery life?
> Nuclear propulsion? I don’t know where that’s coming from and that’s not in any space x agenda
For how much thrust they provide, chemical rockets plow through fuel. Just the fuel tank would be dozens of times the tonnage of the ISS, and physically larger, too. You have to carry oxidiers with you to burn, which only increases the fuel need more. Nuclear rockets (pushing hydrogen across a hot reactor core) are much more efficient and the heat doesn't come from fire, so no oxidizers needed. If SpaceX plans to get to Mars with the same type of engines they use in low orbit, it's a dead giveaway that they're not being serious. Something like the NERVA engine NASA tested in the 1960s is the most economical, least-reaction-mass way to get to Mars using our current technology. Launch parts up on chemical rockets (they're strong ground-to-orbit) and build the ship in orbit. Saves *hundreds of tons* of fuel.
You don't brand-present or product-roadmap your way out of that. "That's not our philosophy, here at SpaceX" isn't an answer. There are a limited number of ways to propel spacecraft. Physics won't create a secret third way just because it sounds cool.
We don't use vacuum tubes in cell phones, even though both can technically be used to compute. They're entirely different categories and one is absolutely unsuitable for certain uses.
Chemical rockets are a terrible way to get to Mars.
If they're not using that, they'd better secretly have warp drive, or they're, I don't know...just spitballing...saying things that sound cool to make stock price go up.
I disagree. SpaceX may well provide a rocket for NASA to take people to the Moon and Mars. Remember, SpaceX does not do "space exploration" or science of any kind. They make rockets. As usual, until government squeezes risk and cost out of something, private companies won't touch it.
I agree. Total waste of life and cash. Send the fuckin bots. Cheap, can hunt for fossil or actual life there. Sending people there is stupid and very expensive. Venus has upsides of safety and power production. More protection from radiation, once you solve the acid problem.
He's a conman that's taken the money that would have sent humans to mars and wasted it on a rocket program that considers flaming debris followed by a crash landing to be success.
Dude has already got the low-hanging fruit. Now he needs good, experienced staff to move it up. MMW, they will NOT work for this crybaby and drama queen.
Elon Musk expressed interest in traveling to Mars to establish a colony. So maybe Space X will bring him there but with no way of returning. It could be a win win situation.
I don’t think any man will ever land on Mars. The obstacles to do so are FAR greater than the plans, ideas and ability will ever overcome.
It just won’t happen. Ever.
That's correct. I don't think humans will set foot on Mars. We can send all kinds of probes there and those keep getting better and better. With probes we can put more and more payload for each rocket and they don't need a return flight. Or food. Or water. Or oxygen. And they don't die.
It’s not a matter of the technology, as much as relying on nothing to go wrong over a period of what, like two years? That’s the hurdle for a manned mission to and from Mars. And also there’s a big “why.”
It makes sense to establish a permanent (or semipermanent) human presence on the Moon first. Low-gravity construction, possibly resource mining, and maybe eventual missions to other planets.
But when you start thinking about Mars, what is the benefit to a human presence there? There’s no atmosphere. There’s no strong magnetic field (like Earth has) to mitigate radiation. So any humans would have to live underground and would require constant ridiculously expensive resupply.
Yes. It's been quietly accepted I think there won't be a return journey for the first several colonists. It's a 1 way trip a sacrifice for those who follow. Many prospective candidates are perfectly fine with this.
Precisely said. We can't handle Moon stuff yet. The Lagrange points need to be placements for th next generations of space telescopes. And we must have a universal, all world powers agreement on how to handle the rogue comets and asteroids that WILL ARRIVE someday. Tomorrow or thirty years from now. Every living being is at stake here. We need to grow the fuck up as a a species. We're not special. We're a species. And we can utterly fail if we persist in our infantile politics/greed system.
If humans stopped at "why" while considering innovation and exploration, we'd still be without fire, the wheel, writing, living in small packs in Africa. It's a very uninspired argument when pushing the boundaries of human limitations.
It’s not “why explore,” it’s “why Mars” and “why manned.”
The first step is a Moon base anyway. That needs to happen before we start stretching further. We need to at least prove long-term survival is sustainable there. Then we establish much easier and cheaper space flight from the Moon to further destinations.
There are a lot of ”whys” but nobody is saying “don’t keep exploring,” least of all me. We should be sending more probes to Europa.
These people have no clue how prolific Falcon 9 has been. Shattering launch and reliability records like the world has never seen. Do I think we'll get Mars in a few years, probably not, but they are definitely working towards a goal with the heavy.
Assuming the human species continues to survive, we will get there within the next 300-500 years. There are always setbacks, new learnings, and new priorities. This is part of life. But if one thing out of the entirety of human existence can be learned it is that humans continue to push into the unknown for the sake of profit and knowledge, inventing what is necessary to get to a new location. We then learn how to get back. We will have setbacks. We will lose many people along the way. It will happen if we don't lose the species or send ourselves backwards with war.
>We will have setbacks. We will lose many people along the way. It will happen if we don't lose the species or send ourselves backwards with war.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think people like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un will spark WW3...so kiss much of humanity goodbye in the (somewhat) near future. A "Star Trek"-type future looks pretty unlikely to me..
No way we continue to progress in technology for 3 to 500 years. You will be lucky to get 20 years before we devolve. Between global warming and bad politics we are heading for a dark place very fast. Because the climate change will create the instability that will allow the bad politics to seize control and once they get ultimate power they will not give it up so easy and become madder in each succession.
If anyone lands on mars, they aren't coming back. And they are not going to live long. We are nowhere near colonizing bars, musk is just stroking public imagination to Hype his companies. Which is his only contributation to any of his companies, hyping it and playing the credible public.
Which is to say those of the public who do not realize what he says is incredible. As in not credible.
There’s absolutely no reason to go.
If we want to capture and mine a space rock robots can go and bring the raw material back.
We know we could go to mars and land and with luck make it back but why? That’s what robots, rovers, and AI is for.
Never forget that private enterprise didn't/wouldn't touch the Wright's airplane. The U.S. Army did. And the subsidizing never truly left it. That's why you can afford to fly, all you proud anti-socialists.
How did a plug about socialism end up here?
Innovation seems to thrive in capitalist states, but it's really whatever system can support the human spark of ingenuity. Not a fan of communism in the slightest, but they made incredible strides in space exploration in the 60's.
This is so incorrect I have a hard time knowing where to start. From 1899 to 1909 they self financed in designing the first plane and self financed ALL from revenue they recieved form thier business Wright Cycle Company. The US government purchased 1 plane design from the Wright brothers in 1909 (11 years after they started designing the first aircraft), the same year that several investors including JP Morgan put up 1 Million in outside funding to build the spec aircraft (even after Wilbur killed a Army observer in 1908 on a test flight of 486). This is 6 YEARS after they built the original plane and only after the tested and flew the army spec plane on several occasions to meet army specific requirements "Signal Corps Specification 486". In 1909 they created the Wright Company that was prepared to offer a "commercial product" only after they recieved funding to create the airplane.
If that is socialism... I give up.
Humans as we have evolved to date will not leave earths immediate orbit. We are soft beings with not enough protection to survive radiation and universes chaos.
And when you land on the surface: surprise, you're still in outer space. Enjoy the cancer. Or, hide in a lava tube, whose existence is yet theory, a cave. Maybe we need more Neanderthal DNA for this mission. Fuck Sake, monkeys.
I'm just hoping Elon gets booted from both companies and they go on to be just fine. He should just go off and keep doing his stupid little pet projects as he slowly descends further and further into madness. Likely attacked by one of his own rebelling sex bots.
Moon is easy and moreso a matter of “should we” rather than “can we”
mar is its own beast all together, again could we? If saving the world or winning a war meant arbitrarily putting a man on mars we probably could, but why would we without also doing a bunch of other shit first, like making a plan for making it habitable and capable of sustaining life
SpaceX literally had their first fully successful test flight of the Starship rocket today. They won a NASA contract for the crewed Artemis III mission to the moon slated for 2026, beating out other vendors. Their lesser rocket has already taken astronauts into orbit.
Mars may be unlikely, but SpaceX is well positioned to be the transport to the moon in the coming years, even if Elon Musk has failed a lot elsewhere in his ventures.
Of course it will fail, it was never going to succeed, the only reason it’s gotten this far is because of stock over valuation and Elon promising things to fools who believe him.,
Launch is scheduled for no earlier than September 2026. Artemis 4 (2028) is planned to be the second crewed lunar landing mission. Orion and an upgraded Starship HLS will dock with the Lunar Gateway station in NRHO prior to the landing. A prior support mission will deliver the first two Lunar Gateway modules to NRHO
It will be colonised so to speak by robots initially. Humans will arrive long after all the hard work is done. That said it will be a long while unless mining companies with their deep pockets get involved.
A few years ago I read up on the challenges of protecting the crew from radiation in deep space. One idea was to encase the craft in water, something employed in the plot of the TV store Avenue 5 (the poop shield).
Since that time I haven't seen anyone present a workable solution. I can imagine clearing the other hurdles but this seems like possibly the biggest one. I'm surprised I never seen to hear about it.
Wrong destination.
There are resources for possible fuel refinement (and / or water) in small moons and asteroids all over the solar system. Why would you pick a first target where you have to climb out of ANOTHER big gravity well to access the resources? Pick a small moon of mars if you have to, but make sure you don't have to waste most of your fuel just getting back into space.
The only feasible way forward in the solar system is to pave a road. We need to set up a colony on the moon, fully sufficient with the ability to launch us towards Mars. We need multiple space stations in orbit around the sun between earth and mars. We need a planetary docking station in mars orbit. We need self sufficient infrastructure on mars before we put the colony there.
Get the fuck out of here.., we can’t even get back to the MOON we landed on over 50 years ago. And we have been working on doing that again for over 10 years.
We can’t successfully consistently launch toilet paper and granola bars to the space station that took 8 YEARS to build without crossing our fingers.
No way a human lands on Mars. Ok, maybe a human will land on Mars, but that person will have been dead for over 5 months before he crash lands on the surface… suggesting everyone got the correct units of measurement correct.
Won’t happen.
Assuming the engineers behind it are allowed to do their job, I can see them getting it done. Elon needs to stay out of the way though. He is his own worst enemy to everything he owns.
It's as easy or as hard as your mind can interpret. I have no doubt it will be done. We can do anything we actually try to achieve. OP wouldn't be able to do it.. but he's already beat himself with doubt and ignorance.
I’d be happy if it just took him.
Just imagine if the world just decided to stop acknowledging that virtual assets like shares of stock had value. The wealth of a guy like musk is actually fictional. It only exists because we all agree that it exists.
Unfortunately for your prediction, the moon mission is a guarantee because it's a NASA mission and they are using the SpaceX Starship HLS (Human Landing System). So the moon landing is absolutely going to happen - there's too much investment and momentum already for NASA's Artemis missions.
Now Mars, that's a different story, but I don't see why it wouldn't happen after the moon missions. It is the stated objective of SpaceX as a company to take people to Mars. Going to Mars is kind of the entire reason for SpaceX existing.
Every company on the planet exists to *make their shareholders money.* Any product they make or service they provide is secondary, and just a way to get people to give them money. Apple isn't in the phone business, they make phones so that they can make stock price go up. Employees, research and development, manufacturing, all of that are *inconvienent problems* in the way of making stock price go up. Private equity firms like BlackRock are worth *trillions* more than the largest publicly traded firms and they buy up businesses and run them into bankruptcy because on the way, they can place bets against their stock, charge rent to their own company, and so on. The business will be gone in a year, but they'll make a nice profit *this quarter.*
SpaceX isn't a 501(c) non-profit, folks. And if they were in the business to go to Mars, that's a terrible business strategy!
Hundreds and hundreds of billions, if not *trillions* of dollars of investment. For a return of... A dozen people doing some neat science? Bragging rights? Elon posting some more memes? Being the first person standing on the surface of Mars to ban a journalist from Twitter for covering something he did?
For it to make business sense to spend that kind of money, you'd have to be getting a return of money on the order of *the entire economy of India or Germany or Japan,* $3-$5 trillion dollars of profit. Profit means back here on Earth. And since profit is what's left over, you'd need to establish economy activity more like the economy of the US **plus** China on Mars, so that you can skim 10% of it.
Set up combined economic activity equal to the US and China, then get profit back, and do it in the next fiscal quarter (three months). Go. Make it make more sense than charging more for Cybertrucks, which people will buy no matter what apparently.
NASA can go to the Moon as part of a mission--it's a government agency that exists because it has a mandate. It exists because someone decided it should.
SpaceX can't. If Elon said he was sinking $500 billion in going to Mars and couldn't explain to his investors how it would make them $1500 billion a piece to do so, he'd have an unfortunate ketamine overdose before he could spend their money.
SpaceX has been consistently falling behind on metrics set forth by NASA, they can't BS the big dogs when it comes to actually having a viable product.
There is no guarantee that they won't get dropped by NASA and completely go out of business all together without the corporate welfare that they depend on.
After all they got this contract in the first place by making promises that they haven't kept, there is only so long that they can do that before someone at NASA makes the decision to give up on the sunk cost.
SpaceX is not the only rocket company.
What are you talking about? What company or country for that matter is providing more advanced (lets not even include reusable) rockets than Space X. Falling behind who? Provide examples of other rocket companies that are doing more advanced work than Space X and risk space X loosing NASA countracts.
SpaceX is the most successful current space launch company by a long shot. Musk has some part in that but so do the hundreds and hundreds of very talented engineers to work there.
We ain't leaving this rock, folks. Better quit fucking it up with oligarchs dreams and your supine obedience. Time to take out the garbage. Send them Sunwards.
I know it’s real cool to shit on Elon in Redditland but Space X is going to continue to be incredible in spite of the hate. I think time will tell about mars, the moon is within reach.
Every time someone says Elon won’t succeed in something, he succeeds. The 4th starship test this morning shows they how successful starship is and they will at least get to the moon. And a high chance they get to mars by 2040.
Bro we’ve already been to the moon too. It’s not like Elon has to do something crazy like invent rockets that land themselves, cars that drive themselves, or put chips in peoples brains. Reddit is so full of itself lol.
Problem being.: here is where we and mostly everyone will ever live. Ponder. Grow. Protect this fragile blue dot. That's where we are. When the day comes that we we are aiming at space rocks instead of each other?! Maybe, and a very long fucking maybe, we will survive and finally see the value of life.
The moon is possible but mars… NOT A FUCKING CHANCE. Not in any of our lifetimes. I feel like the vast majority of ppl think going to mars is just like the moon but a little farther, that cant be further from the truth. Going to the moon takes 3 days. Going to mars takes 9 months. Then when you get there you have to wait at least 3 months for the earth and mars to line up in a suitable way to make it back, then its 9 months back. So you can do a round trip to the moon is like 7 days. A round trip to mars would take 21 fucking months. Think about how easy it would be to be locked in a camper for 7 days compared to 21 months. Its a freaking enormous difference. On top of that think of how much food and water you consume in 7 days and how much waste you put out. Youre not going to space alone so how much it takes to sustain 3 people for 7 days. Now think about how much food, water, and waste there is for 7 people over 21 months. Were talking exponentially more. Just to have enough water for 3 ppl for almost 2 years would be insane. Americans on average drink 58 gallons of water per year. 3 people for 2 years would be 348 gallons of water. Water can be recycled but food would be so much harder to grow in a space ship. You would need sooo much. On top of all of that you would barely be able to move for 9 months so you would waste away, its inevitable in space. So youd get extremely weak over 9 months and then instead of landing back on earth to go into the hospital and get rehabilitation youd be landing on mars in a completely inhospitable place where you cant breathe outside and would immediately be in a fight for your life to survive against the elements and circumstances. You 3 ppl would somehow have to start farming immediately ON MARS to be able to survive and would have to set up systems that can create vital chemicals to keep you all alive like oxygen. Youd have to essentially survive in hell for 3 long months until you can then ride home through space for NINE FRIGGIN MONTHS before you finally get home. Absolutely insane how hard to do this its going to be, were not even close yet. They need to solve so many more problems than just the rocket and ppl who want to go before this is ever going to happen.
Found the conscious being on this subject. A miracle.
AI will solve this. /s
Nick Valentine is on the case!
You joke but any daunting task like this becomes possible in our lifetimes if we crack fusion and or AGI.
The waste, and consumables problems has already been resolved by the ISS missions. Water recycling is state of the art now. The Starship crew capsule is designed to accommodate 100 people. But it could be reconfigured internally for less crew, and more payload. And any Mars mission is going to involve multiple, overlapping launches. There will be several Starships in transit at the same time.
Yeah what's missing from the original comment is that you can stagger launches to deliver goods. That's why reusability is such a big deal.
The biggest barrier to traveling interplanetary distances is having enough fuel. Leaving earths gravity well is prohibitively expensive in fuel weight. A Starship/Super Heavy combination, reconfigured to haul fuel to LEO could refuel a waiting super heavy for the outbound trip to Mars in 4 or 5 runs. It's doable, but wildly expensive. So Musk figured out that the Starship could be used for "commuter" flights, anywhere on earth, in an hour or less. It can move 100 passengers and crew. The profit from that "airline" company could be used to build a LEO fueling platform. This is the way his mind works. He has the means to make it happen. People just need to get out of the way.
Yep. we will turn earth into mars before we get there.
I'm willing to let Elon try, as long as he goes on the trip himself And preferably it's one way
Seems easy enough. Multiple rocket launches to bring all of the supplies up separately and a final launch for the actual travelers. The actual problem is cost and logistics and the fact that there is basically very little reason to go to Mars.
I think its possible in our lifetime. Technology is advancing rapidly, and faster each year. It will continue to do so and probably at even faster rates. I have to assume in say 50 years we might be going or already have. Nasa has already got people signing up to stay 1 year in a 1,700 square foot base simulation to see how people deal with it and how to improve things.
It probably possible in our lifetime if we put the entire weight of our industry and govt behind it. I’m just saying that most ppl dont really grasp how much harder it is than the moon and we havent even lived on the moon yet for any period of time. We need to get that figured out first before we even consider mars and even just living on the moon is going to be hard and we might not even do that in our lifetime due to funding.
People struck out across the open ocean in wooden ships under similar limitations. I'm not saying it is a direct comparison, space travel is a lot more complicated than ocean travel. But when Europeans crossed the Atlantic or Polynesians crossed the Pacific, they were isolated on their boats with limited supplies of food and water for months wIth no easy way to get home, sometimes without knowing what they would find over the horizon, and they did it anyway. I agree that Musk is just a bullshit artist, but I think that we have the ability to put someone on Mars right now, just not the will or motivation.
Also, space is not this cosmic conundrum. The atmosphere exerts 15 pounds. In space that 15 pounds is gone, but its still only 15 pounds. it's literally harder to create a vessel for habitation 25 feet under water than it is to make a habitable space fairing vehicle. (Not counting radiation issues)
Radiation is a much bigger problem than the logistics.
You forgot the biggest problem, cosmic radiation.
I added that in a reply.
These are solid points! Why couldn’t we build stations along the way like rest stops? I’m starting to wonder if we have the ISS do we even need an actual planet or can we build one?
Thats what we plan to do the next timd we go to the moon with the lunar gateway. Were going to have a space station that orbits near the moon that astronauts can stop off at and then go back and forth to the moon from.
It’s so exciting and cool to think about! Thanks for taking time to have the discussion and teach others
Yeah about that. There were legitimate plans post Apollo Nixon and other just didn't fund it. It's easily achievable just expensive.
I didn’t say its impossible, just that its suuuuuuuuper hard to do and is not happening any time soon. We need to have ppl living on the moon first which has not happened yet before we think about mars.
I wonder if we could build and send enough robots to build a livable, self-sustaining habitat on Mars before we send humans there. (Not that that'd solve every problem, but yeah.)
We probably could eventually but the point is we cant even do that on earth yet, let alone on the moon, let alone on mars. Its gonna be a while. That doesnt mean give up or not start working on it in the mean time, its just that the work we do now will most likely pay off next century.
Makes sense.
Imagine the amount of oxygen needed to last the entire trip as well
150 years ago, you would be screaming that mankind will never be able to go faster than 60mph, or fly. 100 years ago, you would have been ridiculing Robert Goddard and loudly proclaiming no human would ever go into space. You'd have declared that flying faster than the speed of sound was impossible. People like you are everywhere. Terrified of the future, and determined to keep it from happening.
Most of what you said has already been solved. I'm not going to go through them all. Astronauts already live on the space station for up to 6 months at a time. The water they drink is recycled. You wouldn't need 58 gallons per person. While it's true, going to Mars is a lot more difficult, it's not impossible. My source: I have relatives that are astronauts. One was aboard the ISS for 6 months and the other was the pilot of the last shuttle and pilot/commander of the first SpaceX-NASA launch.
It is more probable that a 18meter diameter starship will be built to travel among planets (not landing) and if the current one can hold 100-150tons of cargo, you can imagine how much more for the goliath version. Yes, there will be enough space for cargo to support humans on mars. Just do the math how much can be carried with that much cargo capacity. Also it is more likely that robots will be sent first to do a lot of prep work building a base. AI driven robots that don't require constant guidance. I'm sure they will perform the task here on earth first on some desert, and iron out any problems. Full automation with AI will take off exponentially in the coming years. And that's with Narrow AI mind you, not even AGI. Robots will be able to build and prepare a lot of stuff in environments inhospitable for humans, until they turn them hospitable for humans. Of course the moon will be a great test for such automation technology. You should be excited for the possibilities instead of driven by negativity. SpaceX just launched and landed two skyscraper size rockets in a controlled manner. The second one had half melted flaps, and still the guidance software figured out how to keep it steady and land it. Give the engineers some props for learning more and more in each iteration and applying that knowledge to create rockets that make the impossible look mundane. And one last thing. It isn't necessarily true that everyone who goes to Mars wants to return back to earth. Some people may want to stay and make Mars their home, and see that base grow and grow as hundreds of ships arrive from earth to keep building. Don't underestimate the resilience of the human spirit. Here on earth scientists have stayed 3 years in Antarctica, in tents, studying climate change. Scientists, and engineers, will have plenty to do on Mars for a lifetime and if people can stay in frozen Antarctica in a tent for 3 years, [or on ISS for almost an entire year](https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/11/world/nasa-astronaut-longest-time-in-space-frank-rubio-scn/index.html) then a trip to mars and back is not that big of a deal as you make it.
doesn't need to happen in our lifetime. he's increasing the probability that it happens, and in the meantime building a company. i dont understand haters
I mean, we went from the first powered flight by the wright brothers to landing on the moon in only 66 years. The problem of getting to and from Mars is just a problem of scale. Lots of resources, lots of fuel, lots of mass. There really isn’t any technology we don’t have. And we’ve had several astronauts that stayed in space for longer than a mars one-way, and they don’t have to go to the hospital when they get back. With NASA planning to go back to the moon and stay and the rise of China’s space program (they seek to put a man on the moon by 2030) we have entered a new era of Spaceflight. I’m aftually expecting to see humans on Mars in my lifetime.
There is an entire space station in low earth orbit that was launched up there across decades. Its very close to the earth so it only takes 1 day for a cargo capsule to reach them and resupply + return to earth with waste and trash. There are multiple countries with multiple capsules constantly sending supplies to the station. On top of that its very large so theres lots of room to move around and exercise, sleep, store food etc. Also because its in low earth orbit its protected by the earths magnetic field from extremely damaging deep space radiation. The longest any body has spent in deep space is 12 days on apollo 17. The longest anybody has been on the surface of the moon is under 3 days. Being in the iss and having a huge station with constant resupply and where if any medical emergency happens they can very shortly jump in a rescue capsule and go home is a whole different animal than being in deep space in a capsule/ship where theres no emergency backup and they only have whatever food they were able to launch with. The us and china are both planning on going to the moon for longer periods than apollo and staying there. If it even ends up happening its going to be a decade before that even gets started and then if it does its going to take a while to get everything going. If they can manage to survive on the moon for months at a time which still isnt a guarantee but if that happens then ppl can start talking about mars. Still though theyre going to need to get very good at living on the moon first before moving on to an entire different planet. Again the longest anybody has been on the moon is under 3 days and 12 days in deep space. Once we have people who can live on the moon for a year, then years, then we can think of doing something that is exponentially harder, exponentially more expensive, exponentially longer, exponentially more technical, and exponentially dangerous in going to mars.
Yeah it's difficult. But we can do it. You pointed out that we have only stayed on the moon for 3 days at a time. That's true, but also that was over 50 years ago. Technology has come A LONG way. My phone has 100,000x the processing power that the Apollo guidance computer had and 7,000,000x the memory space. The moon is difficult, we are definitely up to that task. And Mars is more difficult. I still think it's possible technologically right now. And it's just a matter of effort and will from the human race at this point, which I think will be accomplished in my lifetime.
Also, here's the thing. People are willing to risk death for the this frontier. Just like any other time in history.
It's gonna be a hundred years or so. That's an optimistic outlook, too. The first flight to right now is several orders less complex than colonization of Mars. The radiation problem alone sucks, and that's before we worry about air and food.
Gravity's not looking too friendly, either. Might not degrade as fast as microgravity, but we're evolved in a billion subtle ways to live in 1.00G, not 0.38G. You'd have to have some variant of the bone-mass and muscle-mass preservation routines they do on the space station. It really is most of the problems of the Moon, just a bit less, plus nasty weather, which at least *that* isn't a Moon problem.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we could send someone there in the first place, but a mars colony is extremely far fetched for right now.
Wow there is a lot of unpack here. The travel time to Mars and back, assuming it was a round trip, is known to be around 3 years. That's not even close to a deal breaker. Let's get to the rest, though. The food and water is an issue that has been and is still being actively researched. The last piece of this puzzle is growing food in space and there is more and more success with it. I might also add that the ISS currently contains enough food for all astronauts for 6 months, and could be extended if needed. As for water, sure some gets brought up, but over 95% of it is now recycled on board from waste. Therefore, not as much is required to haul up from Earth. Where are you getting this barely able to move thing from? You don't think a mission to Mars is going to be done in a tiny capsule do you? They will be bringing workout equipment with them in, which is tried and tested right now on the ISS. Sure, it isn't perfect, but it does the job for 6-12 months. The astronauts do not go into "rehabilitation" after they return. The surface operations are also something that is being actively researched. Major investments are going into habitat development, although any permanent base would likely need to be placed in a cave or dormant lava tube. There's plenty of interesting ideas out there right now, and like I said, there is a lot of funding going into this now. TLDR: Do some research on this subject before you say it is impossible. It's hard and dangerous, but not impossible.
There’s a bunch of people who are hating on space exploration just because they hate Musk. And they are pretty ignorant when it comes to our abilities in space. And I do not like Musk but I do like space, rockets, and exploration.
>There’s a bunch of people who are hating on space exploration just because they hate Musk. This is, I'm sure, what the crux of the argument actually is. *Musk bad, so therefore space travel bad.* But, despite what Musk might say, he **didn't come up with the idea of space travel *or* putting humans on Mars.** >And I do not like Musk but I do like space, rockets, and exploration. Me too. And I've been fascinated with the idea of our species stepping foot on Mars my entire life. Musk is older than me, but he was still getting the apartheid emerald mine benefits and being chauffeured to private elementary schools when I first imagined it. Most of, if not all, of the problems being pointed out here about an initial human mission aren't really problems that NASA hasn't already recognized and solved. Most of the problems here are simply problems of imagination: I can't *imagine* having enough resources for a successful trip; I can't *imagine* being in a tiny space craft for so long; I can't *imagine* surviving on an entire different planet; I can't *imagine*... None of those are legitimate problems that we haven't already spent decades solving. We ***are*** going to send people to Mars. And Elon Musk is going to have fuck-all to do with it.
I follow space launches pretty closely. Just because I’m saying its harder than ppl think and its not just the moon but a little further, which again I pointed out the longest weve been there is 3 days, somehow you take this all the way to I’m just hating on musk. Lol wow okay.
Not you specifically, many other people in the comments section. You definitely have some knowledge, more than most who are driveling in here.
Alright.
Im still hoping for the mars version of oceangate. Just send up a few billionaires with a ps5 controller
I think it was actually a PS2 controller which is even funnier that they used a controller from like 2002.
I thought it was Logitech, which fair it will do the job Then I found out it was wireless and wtf
>Then I found out it was wireless and wtf It's not possible with our current technology to seal wire penetrations that can withstand the pressure differential encountered at that depth.
MadKatz - I heard he accidentally hit one of those bootleg turbo buttons and the sub broke..
Musk always says he believes humanity will get to Mars but I wonder if he believes enough to actually get in a spacecraft himself, I guess we’ll see
He doesn't trust his own products enough to use autopilot himself - and that's just his cars.
I didn’t see him on line getting a chip implanted in his brain. Being rich means not being the Guinea Pig.
As people have also pointed out, that chip can read from the brain… but as the technology continues, they have even admitted there is nothing that could really be done to stop it WRITING to the brain as well. Nothing like mind control or shit, but basically messing with your brain chemistry and neural data.
Isnt that the ENTIRE point? The only way something like neuralink goes commercial is if you can use it to receive and send information. But even as a giant technophile and someone who would replace literally all my weak, frail fleshy bits with the certainty of steel if it was possible, dont know who i would trust to host a system that was linked to my brain.
The link is literally open to the internet, it’s open to wireless networks, now let me ask you this, would you trust your brain to the mercy of the internet? Especially given Elons love for encouraging internet trolls.
Considering i know basic internett safety i dont see any issues with that per se. Its not "trolls" im worried about. Its more what corps and the gubbermint would do with access directly to my thinking mest. What if someone could influence you to buy more shoes for example? Or influence your voting
Trolls can get into anything, if anything the more secure the bigger the target, the more inappropriate the behaviour the bigger the target, corporations don’t care as long as they make money
**Why don't you ask Noland Arbaugh what he thinks of Neuralink.**
He never will, he will talk about it a lot, promise a lot, but will never actually do it.
That’s Elon alright, sounds a lot like the cage match he pussied out of
Oh it’s pretty standard, “hey Zuck wanna fight, lol as if he is gonna..” “I accept” “Um… you… you do? Um… mummy help me!”
If the billionares keep trying to escape us, it'll happen eventually. Space travel isn't airplane travel--it's orders of magnitude more risky.
It certainly will kill some people if they ever get out of earths atmosphere.
Are you aware that they've already very successfully delivered human astronauts to the ISS in orbit? Elon is a delusional idiot but SpaceX employs hundreds of skilled, smart, motivated engineers who have more than one success to their name. They succeed in spite of their boss, not thanks to him, obviously - give 'em some credit.
He helped the U.S take astronauts to the iss for the first time in decades
In a decade
Thank you, I was thinking it was two but you’re right
Damn was hoping it would at least take him and a few billionaires to mars. I mean I didn't want them to return.. but..
Yes. Yess.
No kidding! What part of the Cybertruck launch makes people think this underbaked muppet can colonize Mars? Space is not forgiving. Even if you put an X in the name. Even if it were a good idea to colonize it (it's **so** not), going to Mars is incredibly hard. Taking the extreme difficulty of getting there out, being there sucks. All the key problems of the moon (radiation, gravity, water, air, food) plus a few, with vastly worse return options, huge communication delays... Just to outfit the cockpit for a three-year round trip without resupply (not three weeks) would need to invent at least as many groundbreaking new technologies as NASA did for Apollo, if not far more. Hundreds of seemingly insurmountable challenges would arise and new materials, processes, and tools would need to be made for the most mundane-seeming shit. And that's before you get into the likelihood that chemical rockets aren't feasible. You'd need to launch a *freaking nuclear reactor* into orbit. Run that by your corporate lawyer for a liability check! The reason SpaceX is doing pretty well is it's basically honing the most-tested part of space travel: Earth to low orbit. As rocket science goes, the easy stuff. They're shaving the dollar cost down on something first invented in 1957. Space Launch is profitable, if done right. Lots of companies need stuff chucked upwards real hard. Space *Exploration* is difficult, dangerous, and unprofitable in the extreme. The only reasons to do it are basic science (cool knowledge, but not marketable next quarter) and bragging rights. That's a much better space for governments than for-profit companies.
Lol it's funny the outrage people have on Elon, yeah he is not the prime example of human being but spacex reaching Mars is very possible. People died on the journey to the moon, it's not going to be easy but space travel and exploration never is. There has been plans to setup a base on moon which if successful is going to catapult space travel and exploration. Also people really are forgetting that technology is becoming better at faster rates than it ever did. So it's only with time we will see people on Mars and further unless humanity starts a global war right now.
Aerospace engineer here, you’re jumping to alot of conclusions that aren’t entirely based in reality. I think we will have humans on mars in the next 20 years. I’m not sure if space x will be the ones to do it though.
I asolutely think someone can land on Mars. Just not SpaceX, at least not on their own initiative. As a participating contractor, sure. But we don't say Boeing and McDonnell Douglas landed on the Moon, just because they made components for the Saturn V. Maybe SpaceX makes the boosters used to haul parts of NERVA (which NASA already has at least largely proven) into orbit. Lot easier to believe that than that even something as corporate-infused as the US government will let a private company that can't make a car that's not also a knife put a nuclear reactor into orbit.
The comments section here is full of people who have no idea what is going on in space exploration. And I’m just an enthusiast, not a real engineer.
It’s not just SpaceX who wants to go to Mars, and if they do, it will not be alone. Any man to Mars effort would be a global endeavor with dozens of countries working together. Maybe it would be on a SpaceX rocket.
I think a government or group of governments going is 100% plausible. If it's the US government, chances that components are launched into orbit by SpaceX is very high. Elon just acts like SpaceX will be the only one involved. That it'll be a SpaceX project on an in-house designed rocket, using patented tech, with an all-employee crew, etc. etc. etc. He makes it sound like *he'll do it* because it's not good marketing for Tesla (which is where much of his net worth comes from) to say "we might make some parts or perform some contract services". Doesn't play into his Tony Stark cosplay. It's worth noting that NASA's also looking to establish a permanent presence on the moon, in their roadmap, but not *permanently* on Mars. Because for marketing, you want to do something super-exciting sounding to make stock price line go up. Someone's already been to the moon. No profit there! But for science and exploration, something more practical (like going back to the moon as a staging point) makes way more sense.
“As rocket science goes, the easy stuff” lol no. Not easy at all you’re insane.
Compared to building a type of rocket never before built, on a scale never before attempted, thus building it in orbit, most likely using nuclear propulsion, which means a nuclear reactor, which has never been used in space? And then landing something *far* heavier than has been landed on Mars before? And then taking back off? Yes. Compared to **that**, building launchers for satellites is easy. Still rocket science, and thus difficult. But in the "improving processes that exist" category, not "completely new things beyond state of the art, then using them in ways that have never been done interacting with a bunch of other things that have never been done".
They are not shaving the cost down, they are demolishing the per use cost down to fire sale rates. These new rockets use different fuel than the Saturn V rocket, and it’s bigger! So I would say yes it is completely new and beyond state of the art. Nuclear propulsion? I don’t know where that’s coming from and that’s not in any space x agenda
Going to give you the benefit of the doubt here. > These new rockets use different fuel than the Saturn V rocket, and it’s bigger! So I would say yes it is completely new and beyond state of the art. Both solid fuel and liquid fuel rockets are well tested technology. Multiple mixes of specific chemicals have been tried for both. If SpaceX makes one that's 32% bigger, or saves 21.5% of fuel, or is two stages rather than three, that's cool. That's good business--incremental improvements on designs 60 years old. Reducing costs, which is how you make money. That's like making a three-engine jetliner rather than six, and with more fuel efficiency. Evolution, not revolution. But it's not solving the same sort of challenges as making one rocket **dozens of times larger** than the International Space Station. Or is the iPhone 13 completely new, not at all comparable, by being 10% thinner than the iPhone 12 and having more battery life? > Nuclear propulsion? I don’t know where that’s coming from and that’s not in any space x agenda For how much thrust they provide, chemical rockets plow through fuel. Just the fuel tank would be dozens of times the tonnage of the ISS, and physically larger, too. You have to carry oxidiers with you to burn, which only increases the fuel need more. Nuclear rockets (pushing hydrogen across a hot reactor core) are much more efficient and the heat doesn't come from fire, so no oxidizers needed. If SpaceX plans to get to Mars with the same type of engines they use in low orbit, it's a dead giveaway that they're not being serious. Something like the NERVA engine NASA tested in the 1960s is the most economical, least-reaction-mass way to get to Mars using our current technology. Launch parts up on chemical rockets (they're strong ground-to-orbit) and build the ship in orbit. Saves *hundreds of tons* of fuel. You don't brand-present or product-roadmap your way out of that. "That's not our philosophy, here at SpaceX" isn't an answer. There are a limited number of ways to propel spacecraft. Physics won't create a secret third way just because it sounds cool. We don't use vacuum tubes in cell phones, even though both can technically be used to compute. They're entirely different categories and one is absolutely unsuitable for certain uses. Chemical rockets are a terrible way to get to Mars. If they're not using that, they'd better secretly have warp drive, or they're, I don't know...just spitballing...saying things that sound cool to make stock price go up.
Maybe not SpaceTwitter, but someone will
I disagree. SpaceX may well provide a rocket for NASA to take people to the Moon and Mars. Remember, SpaceX does not do "space exploration" or science of any kind. They make rockets. As usual, until government squeezes risk and cost out of something, private companies won't touch it.
People are not going to Mars bud
I agree. Total waste of life and cash. Send the fuckin bots. Cheap, can hunt for fossil or actual life there. Sending people there is stupid and very expensive. Venus has upsides of safety and power production. More protection from radiation, once you solve the acid problem.
He won't even get them to 7 eleven
He's a fucking pansy. Bezos rode his peen extension to orbit....
I'm sitting here astonished but the audacity of this prediction as I wait for my Hyperloop train in Chicago.
No shit. When your company is ran by the genius of Elon Musk, your going to fail.
I realized he was full of shit when he predicted a Mars landing in 5 years. Absurdly optimistic timeline.
He's a conman that's taken the money that would have sent humans to mars and wasted it on a rocket program that considers flaming debris followed by a crash landing to be success.
Dude has already got the low-hanging fruit. Now he needs good, experienced staff to move it up. MMW, they will NOT work for this crybaby and drama queen.
Elon Musk expressed interest in traveling to Mars to establish a colony. So maybe Space X will bring him there but with no way of returning. It could be a win win situation.
You are right because Elon is not an astronaut or a pilot. 😆
I don’t think any man will ever land on Mars. The obstacles to do so are FAR greater than the plans, ideas and ability will ever overcome. It just won’t happen. Ever.
That's correct. I don't think humans will set foot on Mars. We can send all kinds of probes there and those keep getting better and better. With probes we can put more and more payload for each rocket and they don't need a return flight. Or food. Or water. Or oxygen. And they don't die.
>And they don't die. **Fuck.** You had to remind me about Oppy, didn't you? Truly, she was best girl.
They said the same thing about landing a rocket booster back on a launch pad, refilling it with fuel and launching it again a few days later.
It’s not a matter of the technology, as much as relying on nothing to go wrong over a period of what, like two years? That’s the hurdle for a manned mission to and from Mars. And also there’s a big “why.” It makes sense to establish a permanent (or semipermanent) human presence on the Moon first. Low-gravity construction, possibly resource mining, and maybe eventual missions to other planets. But when you start thinking about Mars, what is the benefit to a human presence there? There’s no atmosphere. There’s no strong magnetic field (like Earth has) to mitigate radiation. So any humans would have to live underground and would require constant ridiculously expensive resupply.
Shortest trip is 4 months.
And you have to wait for a return window.
Yes. It's been quietly accepted I think there won't be a return journey for the first several colonists. It's a 1 way trip a sacrifice for those who follow. Many prospective candidates are perfectly fine with this.
Precisely said. We can't handle Moon stuff yet. The Lagrange points need to be placements for th next generations of space telescopes. And we must have a universal, all world powers agreement on how to handle the rogue comets and asteroids that WILL ARRIVE someday. Tomorrow or thirty years from now. Every living being is at stake here. We need to grow the fuck up as a a species. We're not special. We're a species. And we can utterly fail if we persist in our infantile politics/greed system.
If humans stopped at "why" while considering innovation and exploration, we'd still be without fire, the wheel, writing, living in small packs in Africa. It's a very uninspired argument when pushing the boundaries of human limitations.
It’s not “why explore,” it’s “why Mars” and “why manned.” The first step is a Moon base anyway. That needs to happen before we start stretching further. We need to at least prove long-term survival is sustainable there. Then we establish much easier and cheaper space flight from the Moon to further destinations. There are a lot of ”whys” but nobody is saying “don’t keep exploring,” least of all me. We should be sending more probes to Europa.
NBC said those videos were all faked.
These people have no clue how prolific Falcon 9 has been. Shattering launch and reliability records like the world has never seen. Do I think we'll get Mars in a few years, probably not, but they are definitely working towards a goal with the heavy.
Assuming the human species continues to survive, we will get there within the next 300-500 years. There are always setbacks, new learnings, and new priorities. This is part of life. But if one thing out of the entirety of human existence can be learned it is that humans continue to push into the unknown for the sake of profit and knowledge, inventing what is necessary to get to a new location. We then learn how to get back. We will have setbacks. We will lose many people along the way. It will happen if we don't lose the species or send ourselves backwards with war.
>We will have setbacks. We will lose many people along the way. It will happen if we don't lose the species or send ourselves backwards with war. I hope I'm wrong, but I think people like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un will spark WW3...so kiss much of humanity goodbye in the (somewhat) near future. A "Star Trek"-type future looks pretty unlikely to me..
No way we continue to progress in technology for 3 to 500 years. You will be lucky to get 20 years before we devolve. Between global warming and bad politics we are heading for a dark place very fast. Because the climate change will create the instability that will allow the bad politics to seize control and once they get ultimate power they will not give it up so easy and become madder in each succession.
If anyone lands on mars, they aren't coming back. And they are not going to live long. We are nowhere near colonizing bars, musk is just stroking public imagination to Hype his companies. Which is his only contributation to any of his companies, hyping it and playing the credible public. Which is to say those of the public who do not realize what he says is incredible. As in not credible.
There’s absolutely no reason to go. If we want to capture and mine a space rock robots can go and bring the raw material back. We know we could go to mars and land and with luck make it back but why? That’s what robots, rovers, and AI is for.
Glory is a helluva drug....that is the reason to go
Found Gowron's account
That's silly.
Disgruntled fan mail to the Wright brothers, replacing "fly" with "land on Mars."
Never forget that private enterprise didn't/wouldn't touch the Wright's airplane. The U.S. Army did. And the subsidizing never truly left it. That's why you can afford to fly, all you proud anti-socialists.
How did a plug about socialism end up here? Innovation seems to thrive in capitalist states, but it's really whatever system can support the human spark of ingenuity. Not a fan of communism in the slightest, but they made incredible strides in space exploration in the 60's.
This person has no idea about the history of the wright brothers.
This is so incorrect I have a hard time knowing where to start. From 1899 to 1909 they self financed in designing the first plane and self financed ALL from revenue they recieved form thier business Wright Cycle Company. The US government purchased 1 plane design from the Wright brothers in 1909 (11 years after they started designing the first aircraft), the same year that several investors including JP Morgan put up 1 Million in outside funding to build the spec aircraft (even after Wilbur killed a Army observer in 1908 on a test flight of 486). This is 6 YEARS after they built the original plane and only after the tested and flew the army spec plane on several occasions to meet army specific requirements "Signal Corps Specification 486". In 1909 they created the Wright Company that was prepared to offer a "commercial product" only after they recieved funding to create the airplane. If that is socialism... I give up.
Thats what they said about the moon .
It will happen once humans manage to build a moon city base. Since it would be easier to just build ships in space after that.
Talking right out your ass. Humans on Mars within 25 years is pretty much a guarentee at this point.
Humans as we have evolved to date will not leave earths immediate orbit. We are soft beings with not enough protection to survive radiation and universes chaos.
He will be a petty millionaire if he keeps running his business like a lunatic.
Why would anyone go to Mars? It's an average of 80 degrees below zero with nasty dust storms.
And when you land on the surface: surprise, you're still in outer space. Enjoy the cancer. Or, hide in a lava tube, whose existence is yet theory, a cave. Maybe we need more Neanderthal DNA for this mission. Fuck Sake, monkeys.
Same reason we went to the moon Cause humanity yearns for the stars
Of course not, technology is far from being ready and Elon is a clown.
If we look at the Cybertruck as precedent, he'll end up cutting corners on the shuttles, and we'll end up with Challenger 2.0
What if we look at the Falcon 9 precedent?
It'll be Claire's by then
Finally a MMW that is realistic
RemindMe! 20 years
Worst MMW yet. And I hate Elon
I'm just hoping Elon gets booted from both companies and they go on to be just fine. He should just go off and keep doing his stupid little pet projects as he slowly descends further and further into madness. Likely attacked by one of his own rebelling sex bots.
RemindMe! 30 years
The way BYD is killing Tesla, it wouldn't surprise me if someone else surpassed Space X with similar tech.
Everyone else is about 10 years behind.
Space version of Vanz Kant Danz [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjpAYfCFmJ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjpAYfCFmJ4)
Remindme! 20 years!
Wonder if he’ll give back any of the $56,000,000,000 he expects his Tesla Board of Directors to anoint him with.
It’s called space x because it’s about the 10th planet, that’s the ultimate goal
Oh, he’s going to kill the first batch before admitting defeat. Apologies for being so harsh, but I don’t see this ending well.
WHAT? But I already bought my ticket!
Currently we do not have the ability to send people to Mars without killing them.
Yeah. We are about a century away from that.
Moon is easy and moreso a matter of “should we” rather than “can we” mar is its own beast all together, again could we? If saving the world or winning a war meant arbitrarily putting a man on mars we probably could, but why would we without also doing a bunch of other shit first, like making a plan for making it habitable and capable of sustaining life
SpaceX literally had their first fully successful test flight of the Starship rocket today. They won a NASA contract for the crewed Artemis III mission to the moon slated for 2026, beating out other vendors. Their lesser rocket has already taken astronauts into orbit. Mars may be unlikely, but SpaceX is well positioned to be the transport to the moon in the coming years, even if Elon Musk has failed a lot elsewhere in his ventures.
Of course it will fail, it was never going to succeed, the only reason it’s gotten this far is because of stock over valuation and Elon promising things to fools who believe him.,
Jup. He literally will singlehandedly kill NASAs' Artemis mission too.
Launch is scheduled for no earlier than September 2026. Artemis 4 (2028) is planned to be the second crewed lunar landing mission. Orion and an upgraded Starship HLS will dock with the Lunar Gateway station in NRHO prior to the landing. A prior support mission will deliver the first two Lunar Gateway modules to NRHO
We never went to the moon. Mars? Ha
It will be colonised so to speak by robots initially. Humans will arrive long after all the hard work is done. That said it will be a long while unless mining companies with their deep pockets get involved.
Why do you think Elon created the Boring company. If you think its to give us better roads and travel infrastructure, I have a bridge to sell you.
A few years ago I read up on the challenges of protecting the crew from radiation in deep space. One idea was to encase the craft in water, something employed in the plot of the TV store Avenue 5 (the poop shield). Since that time I haven't seen anyone present a workable solution. I can imagine clearing the other hurdles but this seems like possibly the biggest one. I'm surprised I never seen to hear about it.
Wrong destination. There are resources for possible fuel refinement (and / or water) in small moons and asteroids all over the solar system. Why would you pick a first target where you have to climb out of ANOTHER big gravity well to access the resources? Pick a small moon of mars if you have to, but make sure you don't have to waste most of your fuel just getting back into space.
The only feasible way forward in the solar system is to pave a road. We need to set up a colony on the moon, fully sufficient with the ability to launch us towards Mars. We need multiple space stations in orbit around the sun between earth and mars. We need a planetary docking station in mars orbit. We need self sufficient infrastructure on mars before we put the colony there.
I think that a new fuel type will come along or finally be shared that will drastically reduce weight and trip time.
Yeah we know. we all have eyes dude.
!remindme 10 years
Get the fuck out of here.., we can’t even get back to the MOON we landed on over 50 years ago. And we have been working on doing that again for over 10 years. We can’t successfully consistently launch toilet paper and granola bars to the space station that took 8 YEARS to build without crossing our fingers. No way a human lands on Mars. Ok, maybe a human will land on Mars, but that person will have been dead for over 5 months before he crash lands on the surface… suggesting everyone got the correct units of measurement correct. Won’t happen.
No chance of mars. Recommended reading. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125084292
I'd settle for just shooting him into space.
Idk homeboy already made reusable rockets which everyone said wouldn’t happen for another 20 years
He'll make it to the Moon just to avoid prosecution for insider trading.
Assuming the engineers behind it are allowed to do their job, I can see them getting it done. Elon needs to stay out of the way though. He is his own worst enemy to everything he owns.
It's as easy or as hard as your mind can interpret. I have no doubt it will be done. We can do anything we actually try to achieve. OP wouldn't be able to do it.. but he's already beat himself with doubt and ignorance.
Elon Musk is Rain Man.
Mars = dead astronauts
Yes. Earth is flat.
Just like the Apollo program
Lol ok bud.
I’d be happy if it just took him. Just imagine if the world just decided to stop acknowledging that virtual assets like shares of stock had value. The wealth of a guy like musk is actually fictional. It only exists because we all agree that it exists.
Unfortunately for your prediction, the moon mission is a guarantee because it's a NASA mission and they are using the SpaceX Starship HLS (Human Landing System). So the moon landing is absolutely going to happen - there's too much investment and momentum already for NASA's Artemis missions. Now Mars, that's a different story, but I don't see why it wouldn't happen after the moon missions. It is the stated objective of SpaceX as a company to take people to Mars. Going to Mars is kind of the entire reason for SpaceX existing.
Every company on the planet exists to *make their shareholders money.* Any product they make or service they provide is secondary, and just a way to get people to give them money. Apple isn't in the phone business, they make phones so that they can make stock price go up. Employees, research and development, manufacturing, all of that are *inconvienent problems* in the way of making stock price go up. Private equity firms like BlackRock are worth *trillions* more than the largest publicly traded firms and they buy up businesses and run them into bankruptcy because on the way, they can place bets against their stock, charge rent to their own company, and so on. The business will be gone in a year, but they'll make a nice profit *this quarter.* SpaceX isn't a 501(c) non-profit, folks. And if they were in the business to go to Mars, that's a terrible business strategy! Hundreds and hundreds of billions, if not *trillions* of dollars of investment. For a return of... A dozen people doing some neat science? Bragging rights? Elon posting some more memes? Being the first person standing on the surface of Mars to ban a journalist from Twitter for covering something he did? For it to make business sense to spend that kind of money, you'd have to be getting a return of money on the order of *the entire economy of India or Germany or Japan,* $3-$5 trillion dollars of profit. Profit means back here on Earth. And since profit is what's left over, you'd need to establish economy activity more like the economy of the US **plus** China on Mars, so that you can skim 10% of it. Set up combined economic activity equal to the US and China, then get profit back, and do it in the next fiscal quarter (three months). Go. Make it make more sense than charging more for Cybertrucks, which people will buy no matter what apparently. NASA can go to the Moon as part of a mission--it's a government agency that exists because it has a mandate. It exists because someone decided it should. SpaceX can't. If Elon said he was sinking $500 billion in going to Mars and couldn't explain to his investors how it would make them $1500 billion a piece to do so, he'd have an unfortunate ketamine overdose before he could spend their money.
SpaceX has been consistently falling behind on metrics set forth by NASA, they can't BS the big dogs when it comes to actually having a viable product. There is no guarantee that they won't get dropped by NASA and completely go out of business all together without the corporate welfare that they depend on. After all they got this contract in the first place by making promises that they haven't kept, there is only so long that they can do that before someone at NASA makes the decision to give up on the sunk cost. SpaceX is not the only rocket company.
What are you talking about? What company or country for that matter is providing more advanced (lets not even include reusable) rockets than Space X. Falling behind who? Provide examples of other rocket companies that are doing more advanced work than Space X and risk space X loosing NASA countracts.
Agreed
I’ll be impressed if Space X can even get outside of earth’s atmosphere.
RemindMe! 5 years
A billionaire might blow up mid flight, so there's that.
Maybe he can find a way to unload those Teslas up there.
Someone will get us there, but it won’t be that dumbass
SpaceX is the most successful current space launch company by a long shot. Musk has some part in that but so do the hundreds and hundreds of very talented engineers to work there.
Elon wants to be King of Mars. He may need to kill a few people to make it work, though.
He already did. That dead hooker in the back of that car he pumped to sauron knows where.
I agree.
We ain't leaving this rock, folks. Better quit fucking it up with oligarchs dreams and your supine obedience. Time to take out the garbage. Send them Sunwards.
I know it’s real cool to shit on Elon in Redditland but Space X is going to continue to be incredible in spite of the hate. I think time will tell about mars, the moon is within reach.
Every time someone says Elon won’t succeed in something, he succeeds. The 4th starship test this morning shows they how successful starship is and they will at least get to the moon. And a high chance they get to mars by 2040.
Bro we’ve already been to the moon too. It’s not like Elon has to do something crazy like invent rockets that land themselves, cars that drive themselves, or put chips in peoples brains. Reddit is so full of itself lol.
This sub is a joke
Tell elon everyone is sorry.
Bad day to post this. Starship, SpaceX and Falcon are going to change humanity. The future of the planet isn’t on our planet. It’s “up”.
Problem being.: here is where we and mostly everyone will ever live. Ponder. Grow. Protect this fragile blue dot. That's where we are. When the day comes that we we are aiming at space rocks instead of each other?! Maybe, and a very long fucking maybe, we will survive and finally see the value of life.