> If NASA is Amtrak in space, then SpaceX is the Fyre Festival with rockets
> the hypertunnel that is just a regular tunnel, the door panels that fall off the self-driving car, the robot that’s only a guy in a suit
This was an otherwise well-articulated post, but wow, Musk Derangement Syndrome is real.
I’m not saying SpaceX and Musk have a complete viable plan for getting to Mars, but it was striking how the quality of his arguments when it came to Musk just dropped off a cliff.
SpaceX is making more rapid progress towards Mars than anyone. Even if Mars is not viable in the timeframe Musk has said, or you don’t think we should send humans to Mars at all, it would still be highly beneficial for Starship to succeed.
The underlying serious point of these light-hearted jokes is that Musk's demonstrated approach to technological questions will not solve the challenges of keeping people alive without access to the resources of our biosphere for years at a time. This challenge is arguably more difficult even than building rockets.
You inadvertently proved a point of the article: now we are arguing about Musk and not about the technological challenges of getting to Mars.
It’s certainly not an easy problem but neither are many of the other problems SpaceX has thrived solving. “Arguably harder” sounds like pretty good odds to me.
The author essentially dismissed SpaceX with ad hominem attacks on Musk, who in his critics minds is simultaneously incompetent and the embodiment of his demonstrably successful companies.
Again, we're arguing about Musk more than about the technological challenges. The article makes that very point - that Musk's approach to technological questions is to distract and make people argue about his character. Which we are doing.
> The author essentially dismissed SpaceX...
The article also makes the point that keeping people alive in space for years is a very different and unsolved and underestimated challenge than is building rockets. SpaceX builds rockets. It does not do the other thing.
I’m arguing we shouldn’t be arguing about Musk. I don’t know how much he is personally involved in the engineering decisions, but it doesn’t really matter because SpaceX has proved it can solve the vast array of problems that need to be solved to:
- Launch a rocket into to orbit
- Land and recover the first stage of that rocket (which had never been done before)
- Build a spacecraft that can be launched into orbit, dock with the ISS, deorbit, and be recovered
- Make that spacecraft support human life, and launch humans on it to the ISS, and bring them back alive (which also had never been done by a commercial entity)
I wouldn’t bet against SpaceX being able to do the engineering required to keep humans alive on spacecraft for years once it becomes a priority for them. At this point it’s premature.
I am a pretty big SpaceX fan, but so far, they've been tackling challenges that lend themselves to a rapid iteration if given sufficient capital.
Rapidly iterating on the incredible engineering difficulties inherent in building a reusable rocket does not mean you can do the same thing with an interplanetary mission that involves at least ~5 months of travel one way.
They need a whole other class of scientists and engineers to solve the "keeping a human alive for years in spacecraft/colony" problem. It just seems like a fundamentally different class of problem to me, and that SpaceX's strength of rapid iteration may be hardly applicable to this problem.
I still thing a lot of it transfers over, especially if Starship works as intended - send Starships to Mars often with proof of concept tech and any customer payloads & have part of it pressurized with prototype life support system. If it works fine after the trips on multiple occasions, you can be reasonably sure it will work with a crew as well.
Possibly more sure than the "classic" testing (and paperwork) heavy model that usually does very few actuall test flights due to costs.
Ok, fair point. I do agree with the article that the challenges involved are probably greatly underestimated. Although we imagine that they are familiar, akin to known problems like deep-sea diving or mountain climbing or airplane travel or arctic exploration or even space station inhabitation, the challenges are actually wildly outside of current human knowledge. Worse, it's a boring problem. Not nearly as dramatic and exciting as making a rocket ship.
nonono, it's the TFA that lays down the weird unnecessary jokes like the "useless billion dollar shit dehydrator", and then brings up the name and launches into full blown ad hominem.
There are people out there doing real things, perhaps blundering along the way. If the articles author disagrees with their approach, they can just say "some well-publicized people think that cheap reusable rockets are a step 1 to any successful space endeavor, but I personally emphatically disagree with that, because a better way than cheap rockets is..." - instead that author launches a mud fight at that point.
Only national space agencies have had a reason to invest in keeping humans alive for long periods of time so they are the only organizations that have demonstrated that capability. It doesn't follow that SpaceX couldn't do it - they just didn't have a reason for it so far.
This idea that "life support" is the most difficult aspect is unfounded. The most difficult problem is transportation and reducing the cost of transportation means that you can attempt to solve every other problem by simply throwing more mass at it.
NASA does much of its work through contractors anyway and there are several companies working on independent space stations. I'm confident that the "life support is too hard" argument will be proven false in a few years.
A similar argument is made that "cryogenic fuel transfer has never been demonstrated at scale therefore Starship can't work". But nobody has even seriously attempted this! And the reason is that without reusable rockets every refueling mission is unbelievably expensive and the business case never closed.
> This idea that "life support" is the most difficult aspect is unfounded.
It's an unknown. While we have manned rockets, we have never entirely isolated a group of humans from the biosphere for even a year, never mind indefinitely. The times it was tried, it failed. As the article points out, it is not an experiment that can be done piecemeal. All elements must be in place and interacting before the effects are known: lack of gravity, radiation shielding, recyclers, scrubbers, years of time, etc
A lot of stuff is known about it. Both the US and USSR first operated long-duration space stations nearly half a century ago.
Gravity and radiation are well understood and we can definitely build machinery that can tolerate them well for many years.
> we have never entirely isolated a group of humans from the biosphere for even a year, never mind indefinitely. The times it was tried, it failed.
Why doesn't the ISS count? It gets resupplied every few months but a Mars base would be resupplied every two years so systems only have to scale to last 10x as long.
So the door panels are questionable. But the other two are huge red flags, no? These are two supposedly moonshot-type projects that have turned out to be outright lies:
- Hyperloop was a sort of snake-oil to squash High-Speed Rail
- The robot as a guy in a suit dancing on a stage ... I've no idea where he was trying to with that. I see there's been some movement on their robot since it was "launched", but why on earth did they start off with the weird dancing suit guy?
Seriously? The robot dancing was an obvious joke. He was not trying to pass it off as a real robot and literally no one thought he was. Tesla is actually working on the real thing and they’ve demoed admirable progress 1 year after the initial announcement.
The hypertunnel reference seems to be conflating two (related) things: the Hyperloop concept and the Boring Company.
The Hyperloop thing is definitely questionable, but to steelman it: he truly believes the High Speed Rail is a waste of money and we should be more forward thinking with something like the Hyperloop, even if he didn’t personally intend to build it.
After all, if it was entirely fraud and then what did he have to gain from killing the High Speed Rail? I guess a small fraction of the taxes he pays not going to something he didn’t like?
Also, the origin story suggests it was not concocted as a means to kill the High Speed Rail:
“The recent plans for a version of vacuum train called Hyperloop emerged from a conversation between Elon Musk and Iranian-American Silicon Valley investor Shervin Pishevar when they were flying together to Cuba on a humanitarian mission in January 2012. Pishevar asked Musk to elaborate on his hyperloop idea, which the industrialist had been mulling over for some time. Pishevar suggested using it for cargo, an idea Musk hadn't considered, but he did say he was considering open-sourcing the concept because he was too busy running SpaceX and Tesla. Pishevar pushed Musk to publish his ideas about the hyperloop, so that Pishevar could study them.”
> After all, if it was entirely fraud and then what did he have to gain from killing the High Speed Rail? I guess a small fraction of the taxes he pays not going to something he didn’t like?
He’s a car salesman. He wants you to commute in a Tesla and opposes remote work.
I find it a bit hard to believe you’re really that naive, but I’ll go ahead and respond.
> One-off projects like the High Speed Rail won’t make a noticeable dent in global sales.
You’re comparing now with several years ago when California was by far Tesla’s biggest market.
> And he opposed remote work at his own companies because he believes (rightly or wrongly) it leads to decreased productivity.
It’s called a hidden agenda.
The man is a sociopath and chronic liar, one would be a fool to take anything he says at face value. Instead we must judge Musk by his actions and past behavior, not his words.
I agree entirely. Some of the stuff SpaceX has done is nothing short of incredible (regardless of the involvement of Musk). Imagine if just 20 years ago you said something like "You know, we should make a rocket reusable!" You would have been laughed out of the room, even at a place like NASA.
Humans have an extremely bad habit of discounting future tech.
I mean honestly, how can anyone still doubt SpaceX after seeing FH land two boosters at once, Starship doing retrofuturistic manoeuvres and Dragon being NASA's go to for all things ISS for years.
It is unfortunate that they're tied with Musk given his recent self implosion, but they will surely survive him.
Explain how being able to land boosters is relevant to setting up a manned self sufficient base on a planet so far away from Earth that any mishap spells the immediate end of the endeavor?
Well aside from the obvious cost savings when launching on Earth, you need to do the same on Mars to return. in fact Starship's landing and launch profile is conceptually the same on both planets, except that on Earth it needs the booster to reach orbit with any kind of practical payload and the ISRU refueler on Mars.
Making rockets reusable and the cost limited to refurbishment and propellant means you can spend the same amount of funding on greater redundancy. Need to build a landing pad on Mars with robots? How about 4 missions in parallel for the same price you'd be quoted by Boeing for just one? Even if three of them don't work out you're still set to continue.
A manned self sufficient base is probably far fetched, but a small short-term Earth-supplied research station is not something outside the realm of practicality. Remember that we haven't actually landed on the planet AT ALL yet. Baby steps.
And you won't be doing four missions in parallel before you've done one that succeeds and as far as I can see with the known technical limitations an economical improvement isn't going to result in a technical success, just in a cheaper failure.
The tech being there isn't helpful if it's too expensive to use at scale. And the computers then were... passable at best. It would be exceedingly hard to adequately control a rocket for an accurate powered landing at the time.
> you won't be doing four missions in parallel
Well you do have the problem of only having an ideal launch window every 2 years, so you do have to do them at the same time with minimal spacing or wait forever to try again. I think the plan was to only do two ships at a time initially though.
Some things you can compensate and plan for, some failures are just natural or random. Like a micrometeorite hitting two of the main computers or something.
If you don't want it to be expensive as hell - any part.
Also with space resources you can make the whole thing quite comfortable - big ship, lots of fuel->deltav->short travel time and lots of shielding for when the Sun decides to reach out and touch you.
Compared to the total cost of the mission I highly doubt that that is going to be the thing it hinges on, besides, all you need to be able to do is get back to orbit from Mars, you don't need to lift the fuel to get back to Earth from the Mars surface, you just leave that parked in orbit.
Anyway, I don't see it happening at all so debating the execution details of things that are in the realm of the solvable already or at best an optimization isn't going to move the needle, the things that need to be solved that we have no clue about are life support, mental health, exposure to radiation for a prolonged period, waste management. Keep in mind that there is no way to re-supply a mission like that en-route and a crew of say four (which would seem to be a minimum for such a mission, and probably is too low from a redundancy perspective) will eat and drink their way through a small mountain over the course of 4 years+ total mission duration.
Believe it or not it's around a 60% reduction in launch mass, so it should cut costs significantly. Tsiolkovsky equation do be like that. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20140009943
As for all the human related needs, the ISS has been a decades long study on practically all of those. That's kind of why we have it.
Supplying the mission isn't really a fundamental problem since you can send multiple times redundant amounts of all the supplies there on the previous cycle. But yes if something goes wrong they're on their own to solve it for (2 years - time spent there), much like any other mission not in close proximity to Earth. That's why you don't send idiots.
And you're right that there's no point in debating it further, because no amount of arguing will stop humans landing on Mars sooner or later.
Reusable rockets were seriously discussed many decades before SpaceX, they were just considered too expensive. NASA was among the organizations that evaluated them before it ultimately settled on the space shuttle which was quite a bit cheaper.
> the hypertunnel that is just a regular tunnel, the door panels that fall off the self-driving car, the robot that’s only a guy in a suit
This was an otherwise well-articulated post, but wow, Musk Derangement Syndrome is real.
I’m not saying SpaceX and Musk have a complete viable plan for getting to Mars, but it was striking how the quality of his arguments when it came to Musk just dropped off a cliff.
SpaceX is making more rapid progress towards Mars than anyone. Even if Mars is not viable in the timeframe Musk has said, or you don’t think we should send humans to Mars at all, it would still be highly beneficial for Starship to succeed.