Yeah, “top heavy” is actually more aerodynamically stable.
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I wanted someone who moved too.
Frankly, we’ve been throwing money at the planet we live at for fifty years now but they don’t seem to be solving the issues. We might as well do both and have multiple streams of problem solving. It’s not like social ills got solved after we cancelled everything after Apollo 17.
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Ah selective editing, I love thee. I said “top heavy and uneven blob” - not “top heavy”
Upon further inspection - the mars lander has a more symmetric shape that is not visible in the short video clip of the launch. I see no problem as it’s not uneven but more like a square or squat shuttle design.
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Sadly, I think it’s gonna take way more than just money and a mere ‘drop in the bucket’ of 50 years to fix everything our species has fucked up since the industrial revolution.
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He’s not proposing a one-way trip, have you watched the video? You should check out the full presentation.
The plan here is to bring the cost-per-person down to a manageable amount, ~$200k per person to begin with. A good chunk of the savings are made by reusing the ships (not just the boosters, which they’re already re-using). So once they get to Mars and deliver their payload they refuel and come back home, and get re-used to bring more people over during the next window (they’re going to be empty on the way back so anyone could hitch a ride home if they wanted).
He also accepts that the early trips will almost certainly lead to death, for some, the plans are to send around 100 people per ship at the beginning (and up to 200 people once various improvements have been made).
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Musk seems to agree, for the most part. But he seems to think that post WW2 industrial-corporate culture is reaching a plateau at a dangerous time, and sees a significant risk that progress will stagnate and leave a post-industrial humanity ill-equipped to deal with the devastation instigated by the past 150 years (I am reading between the lines here). We might be able to do it later, it might be now or never, and that’s too great a gamble.
That doesn’t make much sense to me. Living on Earth now ends in certain death. And why do pastimes such as capitalism and war not go out of fashion, when their casualties are so many in comparison with space travel? If 300 people per year die in car crashes, airplane disasters, etc, does the plug get pulled on those forms of transit? Humans do a lot of things now which have a cost in human life with a minimum of complaint or efforts to the contrary, and many of them arguably don’t even have an “up” side.
Musk said that the odds of fatalities in the first few missions are significant, and that their plan is to work past that until they can achieve something sustainable. Unlike NASA, Spacex does not rely in the long term upon space travel being popular or marketable.
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We are all on a one-way trip to death, a trip with more or less fun and things we and others find worthwile during the trip. Traveling to mars and contributing to a settlement is a quite meaningful way to risk ones life or even spend it.
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Yeah, but we don’t need to convince people that it’s worth the effort to colonize the Earth. What do you think will happen to funding for future Mars missions if the first person we send dies horribly because we didn’t take the time or effort to learn all the challenges first?
For example, we won’t be sure we’ve figured out how to build a self-fueling launch vehicle to take off from the surface of Mars until we’ve actually done it. I say that we send a robotic mission to retrieve a bunch of Mars rocks as a proof-of-concept mission for the technology before entrusting human lives to it.
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But the would-be colonists won’t be the ones financing most of the trip. Whether it’s governments, corporations or philanthropists who end up covering that multi-billion-dollar price tag then they’ll want some assurances that they aren’t just funding a novel new way to kill people. They can do that here for next to nothing.
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Again, this sounds an awful lot like you haven’t watched the presentation.
The timeline of his plan includes several unmanned return trips to Mars:
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That’s good to hear. Earlier Musk presentations I’ve seen didn’t include that bit.
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It’s definitely worth watching this one, it’s quite long, and goes into significant detail. The q&a section at the end was mostly pretty good too (some incredibly douchey questions, including a plug for a funnyordie show involving Michael Cera, aside). The only thing they didn’t spend enough time on was what everyone’s going to do when they get there, this was mostly focused on the rocket system. Presumably there’ll be more info on the other stuff further down the road.
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Me either.
In fact, I have a list.
I do hope that terraforming includes recreating the plot of The Core, to generate a magnetic field on Mars.
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I have no issues with homing pigeons finally needing GPS like the rest of us. Smug bastards!
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I don’t, yet, but I will on November 9th.
I… don’t think physics works like that.
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I always kind of wondered how many people who fantasize about going to mars have gotten around to seeing any of THIS planet.
“Sure, I’m an average schlub here who hasn’t bothered to out to a national park in the last decade, but man, make everything 1000x times more dangerous and expensive, and I’ll be all over it!”
After a week on dusty, dry, lifeless, flat shithole (hint, if your giant volcano curvature is barely distinguishable from planetary curvature, it doesn’t matter how tall it is): “Man, just think how amazing it would be to be someplace exotic like BARSTOW”.
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And I have a feeling you don’t understand how documentary films work.
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It would be stupid if mars travellers and the colonists kept dying from the same problem, knowledge needs to accumulate and be used making it reasonably safe, perhaps even as safe as base jumping.
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I’m a bit dubious whether techniques for growing crops on Mars will turn out to be both applicable here and not more easily discoverable here. Paraphrasing the Simpsons, the moon landing taught us about the effects of weightlessness on tiny screws, which has implications for everything from watchmaking to watch repair. I hope we can do better with Mars.
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I like the idea of giving the homeless “homes” - because that will of course solve it. Just like giving all of the poor money - then we can forget about it and move on to our golf game. SOLVED.
#We need more baskets!
We also have to take care of our only existing basket, and all of the eggs within it.
and i need better metaphors but on the plus i do have heuvos
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