So exciting watching SpaceX work. I wish other companies would take a cue from them and be as transparent about their goals and progress. Makes SpaceX 100x more fascinating than ULA and other competitors. Who needs a marketing team when you can casually throw out your plans to go to another planet within a few years and have people know you mean it? Moreover, who would go to work for a competitor when one company is heading to Mars and the competition is . . . not doing anything, really. How can ULA hire anyone beyond third-pick candidates?
>How can ULA hire anyone beyond third-pick candidates?
I have some good friends that work for $unamed_spacex_competitor and their claim is essentially that spacex is considered a "bad" job in the industry. They talk about it like it's a sweatshop.
Honestly, I think it's just jealousy. If you meet somebody and tell them you work for spacex, they think you're a rockstar. If you meet somebody and tell them you work for Boeing, they say "oh, I didn't know Boeing made rockets, you should go work for spacex!".
It does sound like SpaceX is long hours and hard work...but a lot of people really enjoy that sort of thing.
Sadly, whenever these discussions about employees leaving SpaceX come up, some commenters invariably come to the false conclusion that anyone who leaves SpaceX is a loser or somehow couldn’t hack it here. This is obviously not true.
Priorities change and work being the number one or singular focus during one period of life doesn’t make it so perpetually. People get older/more mature and some decide they want to start a family, travel more, want to own a home (not an easy task even as a well paid engineer here in LA), or any number of other good reasons that may lead to leaving SpaceX. None of these reasons should reflect poorly on those who leave.
With that being said, I find it incredibly annoying when new employees come in, some with very impressive backgrounds, and within a few weeks start complaining about the work environment despite it being made abundantly clear to them at every point in the hiring process. I was first hired for a job consisting of extremely low skill manual labor and even for someone in my position it was made very clear what was expected of me from the very first phone screening.
I went through the interview process, and it went really well. I got the tour, met some interesting people, had a solid interview, but I didn't get an offer. I like to think I didn't get an offer because I asked about work-life balance with wife & kids one too many times. :) It might have been a good thing to not get that job.
Sounds like you were not going to be a good fit for them. I expect this will be why they are keen on recent grads with little in the way of a personal life and still plenty of energy for all nighters.
SpaceX is an excellent example of how culture comes from the top.
I used to have a boss who complained that his employees turned up late or not at all for meetings. He would often turn up late or not at all for meetings.
I had another boss who used email excessively. His team used email excessively.
Elon Musk is mission-driven, work-oriented and puts in very long hours. Thus SpaceX is mission-driven, work-oriented, and people put in long hours.
It's all a matter of choice, I admire Musk and SpaceX whilst also appreciating many people want to spend more time with their family.
Just an observation to think on next time your employees don't exhibit the culture you'd like - the answer can often be found in a mirror.
Very true. I love watching the live stream videos which show teams celebrating after successful launches/landings, because it's easy to see just how rewarding the job is for them.
SpaceX is the only aerospace job I've held so I can't speak from personal experience working at any competing companies but from what I hear you are right in that SpaceX tends to have a pretty negative reputation within the industry as far as work/pay are concerned. Interestingly, this tends to work in favor of SpaceX employees who leave the company. I've heard that while engineers from competitors often times see working here as undesirable, hiring managers are quite fond of ex-SpaceX employees, at least partially due to it being a difficult work environment. I've heard that at the very least, competency notwithstanding, having SpaceX on your resume shows you can handle long hours and stress.
I would also add that in general I think many people tend to think the grass is always greener on the other side. I’ve known both engineers and technicians who have moved on to “greener” pastures at more established aerospace/defense companies only to later tell me that they weren’t all that green afterall. I have a good friend who joined a large aero/defense conglomerate out of state to be closer to family and while the the pay pump was a nice feature at first, its luster wore off after a few weeks when he ran into some bureaucratic issues that he probably wouldn’t have had to worry about here. I also work closely with a fairly senior engineer who has a decade plus experience at JPL and Rocketdyne and flatly states that working here has rekindled his passion largely due to the relatively flat structure. He was absolutely worn out by all the middle managers he had to deal with previously. I think, and this is especially true at the more senior engineering levels, not necessarily for us lowly techs, having the ability to walk over to Elon or Tom Mueller and voice your concerns directly is pretty empowering for most and makes working here very unique in an industry that tends to put massive layers between engineers and management.
I’ll add a counter point so that I don’t come off sounding like a complete SpaceX shill and say that I also know people who have left and are very happy with their decision and their new workplaces, although many, in my experience most, still look back at their time here fondly.
I would also note that the space launch business inherently requires long hours due to its complexity and unpredictability. If you work in space launch, and are responsible for any flight critical operations, you will work the occasional 60, 70, or even 80 hour week, there is simply no way around it and it even happens at places like ULA and Rocketdyne.
This isn’t to excuse SpaceX’s sometimes poor planning and management which end up requiring more of these long weeks than should arguably be necessary, but sometimes it’s just a fact of life in this industry. Hopefully as the company matures hours and schedules continue to stabilize, it’s always frustrating to lose good people because they have to make the choice between spending time with family or work.
I'm working in Antarctica right now, and some of the things you said reflect some similarities to working here. For some people, it's a lifestyle. Most of those people are single, divorced, never married, etc. For others, it's one or two "tours" (also called deployments) then back to "real life" in a more normal 9-5 type job. Tradeoffs either way, people just have to choose what's best for them.
I imagine that part of the sweatshop mentality comes from those who burn out. Not being negative about them at all. When you are in it and excited then long days and nights aren't a hardship but it can get that way. I doubt there are many who will stay the course with spacex if that is the mentality there but they get to cut their teeth there and branch out to the rest of the industry.
Normally I would be critical of that type of workplace, which is how I feel about Amazon when the stories of that workplace are aired. But I give spacex a pass because they are aiming for something no one has done before. Busting some amazon coders balls to raise the profits of the company is a piss poor reason for stressing people out, going to the red planet however.
Yup. The annoying thing is that there are always people on the other side of the fence yelling at you that you're doing it wrong, no matter what you're doing, and for reasons that can be entirely unrelated to you and your context.
The fantasy is that work should be engaging, fulfilling, fun, and yet only moderately challenging, doesn't take too many hours, has you surrounded by ideal colleagues, with policies that fit you perfectly... you get the idea.
Reality doesn't work like that and it's so silly that people keep pretending otherwise.
Yeah, so there are always trade-offs that an individual would have to make. Freelancers get freedom and flexibility, but they take a bit of a pay cut for it (as in the form of 401(k), like you mentioned). This might be a more optimal outcome for a particular individual with a particular set of circumstances.
And it IS possible for a freelancer to charge way more and get way better clients than an average salaryman, but that requires being able to deliver superior results. That's a responsibility that few people seem to be willing to take.
The central thing about either side of the fence is– nobody owes us anything, and it's up to us as individuals to negotiate for the conditions that we want.
I've heard as well that it's an unhealthy work environment. (For people who have shared priorities like family or outside interests. To each their own.)
I agree - SpaceX is incredible! They capture the imagination and hopes of our time. They stand for making our dreams come true.
I used to watch the live-blogs and then livestreams of Steve Jobs when he delivered his keynotes. It felt like seeing and hearing the future. Every new announcement was thrilling and exciting.
These days it's SpaceX's launches that gives me a similar feeling. A feeling of seeing and being part of something truly important.
If another company communicated in the exact same way it wouldn't be the same, because the story and the sense of importance just isn't there. I could imagine something similar being done in AI, robotics, prolongation of life, clean energy. But to be as great as SpaceX is, I think the mission needs to be something that resonates with us as being profoundly important.
Maybe someone wants to call me out and say that Apples products under Steve Jobs were not that important. But I'd say they were. iPhone, iPad - they changed our world. It's just now we've gotten used to it. I hope we'll one day get as used to people living on Mars! :)
In what sense is SpaceX profoundly important to you? It's profoundly exciting for sure... Mars will be the best reality tv show ever.
It's hard for me to see it as important though, except as marketing for science education. Is that what you're thinking of?
I guess I'm asking because sometimes people seem to act like SpaceX is of humanitarian importance and I just can't see that. Not compared to like 10 other immediate existential threats to humanity anyway.
If you can establish self-sustaining societies on multiple planets you eliminate humanity's greatest threat - the fact that Earth is a single point of failure.
If you can establish self-sustaining societies on the bottom of the ocean, you can be resilient to almost all of humanities great threats. It's technology that could also be used elsewhere in the solar system once it works well, opens up much more space for human habitation, and is also a much easier problem to solve.
Compared to deep ocean, space is easy. The rocketry is tricky, but you don't need to build foot-thick steel walls and, if something goes wrong, you can go outside.
Unless you are talking about bottom as in 10 metres down. That won't protect you in case something goes seriously wrong.
Never really bought that argument. So Hypothetically even if earth did get hit by another dinosaur killer or worse, wouldn't it still be easier to live here than on mars? at least the temperatures would be survivable and there is air and water here, much more so than Mars
Saying that the thread is about SpaceX and Mars and all I can say is "GO SPACEX!"
I think the idea is that Mars is just a stepping stone, and soon we'll be setting out for Alpha Centauri, Procyon, Tau Ceti, Vulcan, Betazed, Tattooine, and so on.
Hell, Zuckerburg, Yuri Milner, and Steven Hawking are already planning it:
More like a stepping stone to Saturn's moons and the asteroids. Once we get used - and capable - of living without a planet, there is little reason to bother with deep gravity wells.
> wouldn't it still be easier to live here than on mars?
Maybe. What if it's an artificial plague? What if any other number of catastrophic events cause the collapse of the civilization here?
Having multiple settlements elsewhere is insurance.
And, while Mars is one interesting place, there are other rocks we could easily settle and mine for resources. I don't think Mars should be the first we tackle (I'd go for the Moon first) but I'm perfectly fine with humans spreading all over the solar system.
The current big threats to humanity are climate change and nuclear war. They are threats we create for ourselves, by relentlessly expanding the economy and inventions of new technologies. Ironically our solution to it is to further expand our technology and economy into other planets.
Your question may be impossible to answer since I suspect that what is "profoundly important" varies enormously between individuals but I will try anyway.
Speaking for myself I believe there is something incredibly unique in the way humans devote incredible amounts of energy to aspects of life that aren't inherently necessary to survival but nonetheless add to the richness of our lives. Art and music are examples of things that while not required for life, certainly make life more interesting.
The human drive to explore the places beyond the horizon and to expand our knowledge are things I would certainly describe as of profound importance, even if they don't have immediate direct benefits, although often times they do.
In the end I think JFK put it best in his 1962 speech at Rice:
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win…
> I wish other companies would take a cue from them and be as transparent about their goals and progress. (...) Who needs a marketing team when you can casually throw out your plans to go to another planet within a few years and have people know you mean it?
I wish. Most other companies can't do that simply because they have no grand goal worth talking about. It's understandable. I don't want my local bakery to talk about feeding the world, because I know their sole purpose is to provide for people working there in exchange for bread customers need. Most companies are like that, and it's OK.
Personally, I value honesty. I despise of companies that try to pretend they're doing something grand, or working towards some idea, when in fact they're just in it for the cash. Not trying to fix the world is totally fine. Pretending to do it for a marketing boost is not.
Sure, but most bakeries don't even have that goal. I purposefully said about providing for workers - especially owners - by means of getting money in exchange of bread. When we're talking about networks of baker shops, the owners usually couldn't care less about what they're selling, as long as people are willing to buy that.
And as I said, it's fine. But the most important way in which SpaceX is different than most is that for Elon and his company, Mars and space are terminal goals, while profit is only means to get there. It's exactly the opposite to how most companies operate.
Agreed. I guess what I'm really saying is I wish there were more companies taking on huge problems in exciting and innovative ways the way SpaceX does, which is a prerequisite to them being transparent about it.
SpaceX also has a reputation for severely overworking its employees in addition to the below-market pay. If working in aerospace that actually gets humans off the earth is your goal, then SpaceX is hands down the best private employer. However, if you just want to use your education and skills to work on aerospace while working reasonable hours for good pay, one of the ULA companies would be a much better bet.
SpaceX’s reputation for not being an easy place to work is certainly deserved but from what I’ve seen management has been making a serious effort in trying to address issues of work/life balance. The situation today is much different than it was a few years ago in regards to hours worked and scheduling.
In my experience, it wasn’t so much the long hours that wore thin on employees but instead it was the unreliable scheduling that prevented many people from making plans to enjoy their limited time off. There has been progress made in this regard as we have grown and gotten a better handle on some of our critical processes.
I should add that much like with anything else it’s difficult to please everyone all the time and not all of these changes have been well received by everyone. Overtime work for hourly employees is much more regulated and carefully watched now than it was a few years ago and I fall into a camp that isn’t exactly pleased with this. While I think the new changes are better for the overall well being of most employees there are many of us who specifically prefer an environment that skews more heavily towards work in terms of work/life balance.
Pay also tends to be lower than the industry average, especially considering living expenses in LA/Socal, but from what I’ve seen while introductory pay is low it tends to ramp up rather quickly once you hit the 3-4 year mark and is much more aligned with competitors at that point. This probably is at least partially related to the relatively high turnover here which means promotions and advancement can come quickly if you can stick it out.
I should make clear that my experience is coming from the perspective of an hourly technician that is compensated for overtime, unlike the salaried engineers, although in talking with many during the course of my day they seem to have a similar experience.
>"SpaceX also has a reputation for severely overworking its employees in addition to the below-market pay."
This seems to be a trend with Musk-run companies. Do they really attract people that are that dedicated to the mission? Or do they get a lot of people padding their resume, then jumping ship to somewhere that compensates more fairly with work/life balance?
Yes. Working for and with people who want to change the world is, in many ways, its own reward. It's definitely possible to get burned out, and you do work hard, but there has never been a week that went by where I thought to myself, "I'm not doing anything worthwhile here", or even, "I'm not contributing positively".
I used to work for a financial services company. I made 150% of what I make at SpaceX for at least as many hours a week. The difference was, at the end of those weeks, I would look back and realize that if I did my job right, I was doing nothing other than making rich people richer.
> I used to work for a financial services company. I made 150% of what I make at SpaceX for at least as many hours a week. The difference was, at the end of those weeks, I would look back and realize that if I did my job right, I was doing nothing other than making rich people richer.
I'm working in Antarctica right now and my story echoes yours almost exactly. Worked for a large finserv company in a very comfortable position (telecommuting allowed, great benefits, etc) and took a 30% pay cut to come down here. But here I feel my work matters, supporting research that matters, where at the other job it was just a paycheck at the end of the day.
Money is not the only thing that matters in work. Often, depending on the field/mission/etc, the work is its own reward. I'm currently in Antarctica and took about a 30% pay cut to come here, leaving a very stable job with a large financial services company. But the chance to live, work and play here is by far more important to me than some extra money.
Or do they get a lot of people padding their resume, then jumping ship to somewhere that compensates more fairly with work/life balance?
It's probably like any other successful company of its size... a few really hardcore people pull a lot of weight, in terms of both getting things done and defining the company's reputation, while some others just hang on for the ride.
Good management consists largely of identifying those few supercontributors and making very certain that they remain very happy.
They probably get both. The former are ones who stay, the latter are those who leave and complain, because SpaceX is not geared towards people who just want to pad their resume.
I think that may have been the case earlier on but the company has certainly matured and I don't see this anymore. Maybe I'm missing it but I think a lot of that reputation is unwarranted. No one is going to stop you from over-working yourself but no one is going to force you to over-work yourself either.
FWIW I work at spacex and have gotten offers from competitors. I don't regret staying at SpaceX and I enjoy my job -- I also work very reasonable hours on meaningful work. There are times where I'll work 80+ hour weeks close to a launch but most of the time I sit very happily at 40 hours a week. If you're interested in joining a literal rocket ship of a company you're welcome to reach out to me: randall dot hunt at spacex dot com -- we do really exciting and meaningful work that you'll be proud to talk to your friends and family about.
I think it also depends a lot on where in the company you are. If you are directly responsible for something needed to launch, there's naturally going to be a lot of pressure. If you are more removed from the direct launch operations, it's not as hectic. Being somewhat removed from the "money making business" is of course a disadvantage if you're trying to hustle and advance, but it's a tradeoff.
I really really want to see us go to Mars. I want to see humanity become a multi-planet species and eventually have a colony on Mars.
Still, I have to point out and ask, what the hell is the financial incentive for SpaceX to go to Mars? This is still a private business, with investors! What money will be made from this?
Musk has suggested that a Mars colony is most viable if you can sell tickets at a market price of about $500,000. Or rather, that a mid-to-upper class family in California might decide to move to Mars instead of buying a house on Earth. I've seen estimates that would place the number of early potential customers at 80,000[1]. So one very large revenue stream will be direct ticket sales to people like me.
Another early revenue stream will be science done and paid for by governments, universities, etc. There will eventually be a Martian economy, and SpaceX will be well-suited to earning money from the colonies [2]. There will be lots of ways to make lots of money if you have a thriving Mars colony with millions of people moving there and a constant supply of materials going both directions.
[1]: So that's people that will be able to afford to go in 20 years and who also want to move to Mars.
[2]: How much value has America created since it was a colony? Sure, Britain didn't actually earn that money itself since there was a war over it - but establishing colonies in "new worlds" does seem like it could be a very profitable venture.
> How much value has America created since it was a colony?
The comparison to America is terrible, if you ask me. If the american continent was looking anything like Mars, people would have never settled there and the value you're talking about would be very close to zero.
If seems dishonest to me to compare mars with the American continent, especially considering that if we want to compare mars with the discovery of a whole continent, there is one that looks much more like mars : Antarctica. There is no record whatsoever of any long-term human occupation there. That has to prove that humans tend to dislike living in cold deserts.
By comparison, the american continent has been inhabited for thousands of years, and its discovery by Europeans has brought many extremely appreciated plants and animals.
What is there to bring from mars that there is not on Earth already? Apart from vast areas of rusted rocks and dust, not much, except perhaps for the possibility of fulfilling the fantasy of people who have read or watched too much science-fiction.
I mean, a settlement on mars can have value, but it will only be the value that you'll bring there. For instance if you build an hotel or casino there (as I personally believe tourism is one of the very few business models that make sense for mars), then the fact that it is on mars will not bring much more value than the intrinsic value of your hotel or casino itself.
> "I mean, a settlement on mars can have value, but it will only be the value that you'll bring there."
This is actually true for most countries. America's economic strength lies in the fact that it creates software, micro-chips, manufactured goods, entertainment, etc.
Tell me, where in the ground do you dig up a micro-processor? Or a hollywood blockbuster? Or a Tesla Model S? Or the source code for google's search engine?
Economic value is primarily created by human activity. Once there is human activity on Mars there is the potential for economic value there. And once human activity on Mars is relatively self-sustaining, which we can achieve through building up the local industry combined with certain technological innovations, then that human activity will indeed provide things of net positive value to the rest of human civilization.
It seems so hard now, but in fifty or a hundred years we'll look back and it'll just seem normal and possibly even natural.
We tend to discount the truly incredible and jaw dropping amount of labor and ingenuity that has gone into building the prosaic world we see out the window every day. Even something like providing water to New York City is itself a herculean effort beyond the capability of even the entire human race only a few centuries ago. What we've done to network the world together digitally, to build engines of mass trade of manufactured goods across and between continents, to travel across land/sea/air from point to point with minimal overhead beyond the raw requirements imposed by the laws of physics, all of these things are awe inspiring creations when you give yourself the opportunity to look at them in whole. And many of them are vastly more difficult and in some cases more questionably of long term value than colonizing Mars.
America's economic strength lies in that fact NOW. What convinced Europeans to move to America was that there were people who found it within their means to move to America take unclaimed land (or, at least, unclaimed within their legal system), and build farms on it. Or hunt fur animals, or build mines. And the existence of those people created a market for those who wanted to say sell those people goods. And so forth.
There's nothing to start the process off on Mars. Mars is intractably expensive to get to in a way that America was not. It is expensive to live on in a way that America was not. It has no basic draw that can bring thousands of people there despite the cost.
Which is why the "activation energy" for colonizing Mars is different than it was for the Americas (either time). Yet still, that doesn't push colonizing Mars outside the realm of reasonable activities, it just means it requires more of a push.
People want to live on Mars, for lots of reasons. Mostly Mars colonization is about getting the activation energy lower than the latent resources available for doing it (which are substantial, make no mistake).
I sort of agree. If we imagined a world thousands of times more wealthy than the present one, I think you'd probably see a Martian colony kick off more or less "just because it's there."
But absent any return on investment, the available resources today are orders of magnitude too small to make a go of it.
In any foreseeable world, any kind of substantial off-Earth human presence (more than say 200 people) is going to require a substantial practical value to justify it. Pure science or "just because it's there" or fulfilling the childhood sci-fi dreams of various people are not going to cut it. Which bums me out too! I have childhood sci-fi dreams.
If there's a path to large-scale (or even medium-scale) human presence off Earth, it's something like solar power generation or asteroid mining.
I was objecting to the comparison between mars and the american continent. The value of the American for the Europeans was certainly higher than if it were completely desert. Europeans brought countless species[1], and discovered large areas of fertile lands.
You are talking about current american economy that happened literally centuries later.
> Economic value is primarily created by human activity.
Precisely. If economic value depends on human activity and not on the location it takes place, then why spend hundreds of billions to do it somewhere else? What exactly can you do on mars that you coud not do on Earth for much less money?
That is seriously hampered by the cost of trade, though. I don't think anyone quite knows how this will play out with regard to exports/imports to Mars. It seems like those on Mars will be handicapped by lots of "survival" overhead in what they are able to produce per capita. Even their Internet access will be 5-20 minutes delayed to/from Earth.
Musk knows the score on exports perfectly well: " Honestly, if you had like crack-cocaine on Mars, in like prepackaged pallets, it still wouldn't make sense to transport it back here." [1] A couple of years ago there was loose talk of SpaceX financing the Mars colony by building a space-based ISP (in low Earth orbit, mind you), but as far as I can see that's no longer on the table [2][3].
To be fair, lets compare a colony on Mars with, say, a colony on top of Mt Everest. Little or no oxygen; massively inhospitable environment; staggeringly difficult to get there or get cargo there; radiation hazard due to thin atmosphere; negligible resources once you arrive.
Except, of course, that Mt Everest would be childs play compared to Mars.
But we don't have the technology for a self sufficient mars colony. We're not even close. Anything we put there is going to have to be expensively supported from Earth.
What will you do if you're on Mars and the company that supplies you food, spare parts, and medical supplies goes out of business?
The Americas worked as colonies because they could become self sufficient in a very short period of time and had enormous quantities of valuable resources. The trees alone were priceless to the parent countries where every tree was spoken for. Even then some of the colonies failed.
What does Mars have that you couldn't obtain more cheaply on Earth?
Yes, but who in their right mind would choose to leave beautiful California, to live in desolation on Mars? Sure it's important to explore new worlds, but expecting a family to pack up and leave this world for one with absolutely nothing sounds a bit far fetched.
Well, families with children make things a bit less likely, but I 100% would be on a list to go if I was childless. Even knowing it was a one way trip. Life is already short and if you cannot do something truly meaningful (subject to personal interpretation), then what are you doing with your life? Meaningful to me happens to include space exploration. Having had kids that list also includes raising my part of the next generation to be good members of the human race.
The thing is, when you get there you are essentially living in a small prison cell. At least until there is enough infrastructure to move around in. But your activities are still limited to about what you can do sitting in a little room in front of a computer.
Just thinking about some small things, such as going swimming, or riding a bicycle on a path through the woods. Or hiking / camping, or driving a sports car along a twisty mountain road.
>you are essentially living in a small prison cell. [...] But your activities are still limited to about what you can do sitting in a little room in front of a computer.
Honestly the VR scenario here isn't so bad and you get exercise from it too :)
What young rich kid wouldn't want to play video games and colonize a new planet?!
I think cruising around space on the Enterprise is pretty meaningful life. But how would a more realistic living 20 years on Mars in a 100x100 foot dome do the same? The exploration part would wear off after maybe 2 weeks.
That is why the number he gave is a paltry 80,000 instead of millions. The assumption is a really tiny portion can afford it, and a really tiny portion of those again will want to move there or visit. But there's a lot of people in the world, and people have willingly settled in a lot of desolate, horrible places.
There is nothing as comparably desolate, and horrible on Earth. There is nothing to sustain life, at all. Even in the most punishing Earth environments, people find ways to survive for the simple fact that basic necessities still exist. Mars has none of them, namely air.
Well, I for one am extremely excited to go! I live in beautiful California right now, and I'm soaking it all up while I'm here just in case I get the chance to move to Mars. And I'm sure that the percentage of the population who'd want to go is small - but it's big enough to start a colony, that's for sure.
I wonder how long it would take for you to realize you really miss Earth?
Knowing you'll be confined to a closed space for years (assuming no return capabilities on the initial mission), even the awesome research you'd be doing will probably start to look very bleak.
I'm sure I will miss Earth before we even leave Earth orbit! But that won't make me want to go to Mars any less.
> Just send robots and control them from Earth...
This idea makes me feel isolated and sad. What a dystopian future that would be, with everybody sitting on a single planet at risk of disease, nuclear war, asteroid impacts, global-scale climate change, all without a care, while you look into your VR headset and see the realistic landscapes of other planets. So sad :(
I'll take Mars any day over that. And I'm also confident that return trips will be frequent if anyone wants to leave - that's the whole point of reusable rockets, afterall.
I cannot tell if you are serious, or seriously trolling.
>What a dystopian future that would be, with everybody sitting on a single planet at risk of disease, nuclear war, asteroid impacts, global-scale climate change, all without a care, while you look into your VR headset and see the realistic landscapes of other planets.
Have you done any reading on the habitability of Mars? I will guarantee that once you truly comprehend what life on Mars will entail, you will be BEGGING for the luxuries of disease, nuclear war, climate change, and all the other great things that life on Earth bring.
Mars is a brutal, senseless struggle against a guaranteed DEATH.
I recommend going to live in Antartica first, and see how long you can last there. Followed by building a capsule on top of Everest. Then by living in the ISS. Then by living on the Moon. ONLY THEN, would you have any idea of what Mars living will be like.
But alas, even then it will be far, FAR more challenging than living on the Moon. The transit time between the Earth and the Moon is childish compared to Earth and Mars. Once you're on Mars, there will be no coming back for a LONG time.
How is living on Mars significantly harsher than the ISS?
You would get resupply missions once every 2 years [0] instead of 10 times a year, but in general they share most of the downsides but Mars has soil, gravity and an atmosphere.
When things go south on the ISS, you are a four hour flight away from Kazakhstan.
When things go south on Mars, you die.
Supporting the survival of six people on the ISS also costs billions of dollars a year. Even if you cut launch costs by a factor of 10, it's still going to be north of a billion dollars. Supporting the survival of a viable colony on Mars would bankrupt the world twice over.
The initial investment would be significant yes, but Mars isn't anywhere near as space constrained as much as the ISS.
Once you've got enough people and supplies, you can build farms, which means less food needs to be shipped out, freeing capacity for other goods. Presumably a lot of the infrastructure will be shipped out long before people are, so all they need to do is collect things from the supply drops, then assemble and expand.
Get the Mars colony to self sufficiency and the cost to Earth will trend to zero.
You're crazy man! Also, while that percentage is extremely small, the percentage that actually will qualify has to be insanely small. I'm sure everyone headed there is going to be subjected to rigorous testing, they aren't just going to ship off anyone.
>that a mid-to-upper class family in California might decide to move to Mars instead of buying a house on Earth
I don't know the details of what he suggested, but, when we talk about 'families' I think most parents would hesitate to subject their children to the rigors and risks of an early-stage Mars colony, even thought they might be keen themselves. Retirees, the childless, and people without plans to have kids soon would be a safer bet for early colonists
I'm not sure. If that was true, colonization of America by Europeans would not have succeeded. If they succeed to put up some bases and a workable, extensible agriculture (honestly I doubt I will see that within my life time), colonists will come - and bring in or have their children there.
If you don't have children, then you don't have a colony. At best, you might have a pathfinding expedition intended to prepare for a future colony, but then there's a case to be made that the money and time might be better spent improving various supporting technologies.
You'd need to be able to raise that as cash; you're going to have trouble persuading a bank to give you a mortgage for a $500,000 stake in a mars expedition.
The Portland real estate market is extremely hot right now, and you can't get a decent house in a decent (or even not decent but "up and coming" neighborhoods) without an all cash offer, or way over asking price. Every friend that has been through the market in the last year has been beaten out of multiple bidding wars by all cash, no inspection offers 10+ % over asking price. Lots of bay area money moving up to PDX, tons of satellite offices opening up for tech companies, it's a big cultural shift that's happening pretty fast.
This is not a publicly traded company, Musk has no need to satisfy shareholders. If he wants to pour profits from other areas into going to Mars, he can.
With first stage reusability well on its way, and SpaceX being the only launch provider to have it, their margins for every launch are going to become huge.
There's no law that says everything a company does must be profit-motivated. Even if there are investors. Even if it's publicly traded (though SpaceX is not), although in that case you must often make your intentions clear in advance to shareholders.
It doesn't matter. The purpose of the company is Mars colonization, not profit generation. That's why it's still private rather than public.
Long term there will probably be a significant monetary RoI from various projects and technological advancements along the way, as well as being able to sell people (and governments) tickets to space and to Mars. But the company is set up so that even if that doesn't work out getting to Mars will still happen.
Musks whole goal with SpaceX has been to get to mars. He accidentally built the biggest private space company in the process. I would say there's value in shooting for the moon in order to achieve smaller but large things. But the moon isn't a big enough goal for that saying to work here.
Not everything in life is because of financial incentive. Some people are driven by ideology, desire to do good, desire to accomplish something for the first time, etc.
The Moon on the other hand: it's orders of magnitude closer, and there's actual profit potential for tourism and possibly other things (producing fuel to deliver to low Earth orbit, for example).
"SpaceX has entered into an agreement with NASA for a Dragon mission to Mars" -- NASA is footing the bill.
Government contracts are often quite profitable, not to mention the technology and reputation gains SpaceX would realize from such a mission. I would expect investors to be thrilled with this announcement.
“We’re particularly excited about an upcoming SpaceX project that would build upon a current ‘no-exchange-of-funds’ agreement we have with the company,” noted NASA deputy Administrator Dava Newman. “In exchange for Martian entry, descent, and landing data from SpaceX, NASA will offer technical support for the firm’s plan to attempt to land an uncrewed Dragon 2 spacecraft on Mars.”
Treaties are great fun for the specific brand of nerd that loves treaties.
In the real world, the only thing that matters is who has the bigger stick to backup whatever terms they dictate.
No NATO treaties or US treaties would have any weight without the backing of the largest military force on the planet. So in regard to space, it's all meaningless, because there's nothing of value on Mars or the Moon that is economically worth sending a military to enforce a treaty over.
Well, there's the rub. While I imagine there's a school of thought that says "fuck you, we're on Mars, we're declaring independence, whaddya gonna do about it?", there's also a school of thought that says "we have nuclear weapons, interplanetary missiles, media control, and the political will to do the obvious".
Economic worth is not what wars are fought over. They are fought over the prospect of losing face. It all boils down to dick-waving, even over the vast expanses of space.
I mean, who would object to a limited tactical strike with no boots on the ground on a radical (possibly insane) terrorist controlled (I hear they abuse children) space-pirate-fortress?
As a prospective space pirate, I believe that would be a good time to shelf the question of raw military might, and bring up the prospect of Kessler Syndrome and Earthbound dissenters/sympathizers.
The Martian independence play is to just put a bunch of fragmentation grenades into LEO, rather than mess around with nukes. Nobody who expects to keep living on Earth would ever do something so foolish, but if you wanted to cut ties with your homeworld in a hurry, without killing anyone directly, that would certainly do it.
Yeah, but also don't underestimate the power needed to get it there in the first place. Earth would have a fully fledged industrial complex, the ability to lob nukes across space. A burgeoning Mars colony would still be worrying about producing enough water to survive - launching boulders, or even carving chunks off phobos to fling back at earth - neither are easy prospects, and given that a nuke could make the journey in weeks (big rockets, don't care about slowing down), you wouldn't have much time to do anything other than hunker down and wait for fire.
I thought it was a bit unfair that your comment above was downvoted, so I upvoted it. Anyway, the canonical "reference" is Kim Stanley-Robinson's "Red Mars" :-) In that book independence happens after the Mars colony has reached a sufficient level of development.
When akk they have to do is fire a few rocks or boulders back at earth it doesn't seem like a good idea. Of course earth could do the same but hitting a smallish base on mars would be problematic, for Mars they could just redirect a few decent sized rocks toward earth and because it is so densely populated wherever they struck would cause global pandemonium at best.
Exactly. And there is basically no way Earth will be able to maintain military hegemony over Mars in the long term. It would be easy for Mars to obtain MAD capabilities.
Redirecting a rock in space or even firing some metal rods from space toward your target would be sufficient to fuck things up for the recipient of said projectile. No need to mess around developing a nuke when an asteroid will do a more complete job. Now that would be MAD.
You'll not that India is the only space faring nation that's actually signed the Moon Treaty. The relevant one is the Outer Space Treaty[1] which does prohibit owning celestial bodies but allows groups to establish installations and prohibits interfering with other nations operations so you can de-facto own what you build on. That's a lot better than allowing the USA to claim the whole moon because we got there first with a flag, though.
"finding" will need to be precisely defined: do you need a actual human to set foot on a celestial body before you can claim it, or is crashing a 'micro-probe' or even a ball-bearing be sufficient?
Anyhow, it's premature to even be worrying about ownership rights until some person actually lands there, and even then, there's ample historical precedent to guide us. If you're seriously interested in this topic, spend some time with exploration-age history, because space is likely to look a lot like that, only without the ethical issues associated with ignoring the natives, which at least our local space doesn't seem to have.
(And even if it does turn out Mars has some bacteria, well... Earth-bound conservationists are unlikely to hold back the progress for very long once it becomes a real possibility. It's really easy right now to posture about how we can't afford to colonize Mars if we would so much as tousle even one microorganism's precious little cilia, because the choice isn't real yet. When it is, someone's going to go.)
Conservationists (or anyone else who objects) will have it easy. Interplanetary missions are sensitive to timing. All you have to do is disrupt the launch schedule for a few weeks, then boom, it's another few years before they can even try again.
The United States and the West is not the world. Maybe you can file a couple of lawsuits and get an injunction against a US launch, but try that in China and the best case scenario for you is that nothing happens to you, and the scenarios get progressively more, ah, "interesting" for you from there.
Anybody who knows anything about human behaviour will know that it was a failure from the beginning. If there is strong demand for the resources in the moon, powerful people will move in and take them. Watch what will happen with the Arctic as its oil becomes more accessible.
A law or treaty is only as good as its enforcement mechanism.
They still have relevance. Lets take the Antartica treaty for example. Lets, for the sake of argument, say only one entity has the knowledge, resources, etc to reach Antartica and this entity is a subsidiary of BP. BP-Antartica lets say. BP-Antartica wants to drill for oil. This would still be a violation of international law under the treaty that governs Antartica. Same thing applies, or should apply to SpaceX or any other entity (public or private) with regard to any existing and future space treaties.
"International law identifies Antarctica and outer space as two of four global commons (the others being the high seas and the atmosphere). Both have been defined within international regimes as spaces outside the territory of nation states and beyond the normative inhabitable zones of the human species. In both instances the current governance regime were outcomes of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) (1957-1958)."
"No acts or activities taking place while the present Treaty is in force shall constitute a basis for asserting, supporting or denying a claim to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica or create any rights of sovereignty in Antarctica. No new claim, or enlargement of an existing claim to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica shall be asserted while the present Treaty is in force."
If tomorrow the 5 permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China, France, Russia, UK, USA) and their atomic weapons decide to cancel the Antarctica treaty, then the treaty is void. They can invite to the ceremony the other members of the UNSC, but I guess it's better to invite the other countries with atomic weapons.
They didn't cancel it yet because for now there is currently no activity there with a profit, and they are not sure how to divide it. But once there is a way to gain money, don't expect that the treaty will last too much.
Realistically any 1 or 2 of those members could unilaterally 'cancel' the treaty. Treaties are only useful until someone violates them, then you have to figure out what comes next...
The UN isn't s game of Risk. Nobody's going to start nuking countries over the Antarctic Treaty. Trade sanctions, embargoes, blocking IMF funding, etc are the actual way things are done.
I know, and then humanity will have destroyed the last remaining wilderness on Earth and the ecosystem that goes along with it. Looking at our collective history we should know better. How tragic.
How do Antartica treaties affect entities based in countries that aren't party to the treaty? Say a Nigerian company set up a base there and started mining. What would happen?
Yes! Or it should as humanity has identified Antartica as a Common. Just because you are an international corporation doesn't mean you get to violate international law.
Unfortunately, the environmental protection protocol is open for review in 2048. This will probably roll back the protections in place for the environment of Antartica :(
It depends more than a little bit on how independent from Earth you are. If you are dependent on Earth, you are pretty meaningfully subject to the governments where you are operating.
"If you sanction us or cut access to our launch site in Nevada, we will redirect a 50m asteroid to impact Washington, DC."
It would be a classic Mexican standoff, but the group with access to orbital and inter-planetary platforms would win. You could try to starve them out, but you couldn't keep them from obliterating you while it was happening.
> "If you sanction us or cut access to our launch site in Nevada, we will redirect a 50m asteroid to impact Washington, DC."
At which point you have become the worlds most wanted terrorist, and will have to watch your back for the rest of your life while large portions of the worlds security apparatus tries to find ways of taking you out (not just the US - everyone else will worry they are next).
To the extent that the US government believes something like that will happen, I expect it will develop sufficient capability to eradicate the thruster (and the people controlling it). If it has to have a militarized orbital platform, it will. I guess in some ways that super-capable ballistic missiles would be more politically palatable than a militarized platform. Such a thing could just be launched at any object that showed a suspicious early trajectory.
Anyway, I meant economic dependence; if you have investors that are on Earth, they will expect you to do what it takes to get them their returns. That means complying with governments. So in that scenario, dependence is simply needing that investment.
Shoot out the trusters? there is no friction to stop the kinetic momentum in space.
Anyway you can rig the asteroid with explosives in the center of it, and just blow it to make a still dangerous giant meteor rain.
The rather hard sci-fi book series by Jack Campbell/(non alias name is: John G. Hemry) by the name lost fleet is full of scenarious where planet dwellers are rather fucked against space forces.
Spoiler: Giant block of metal is all you need to do planetary bombardments from space, just send it off and Newton will do the rest. Good luck stopping the many many tons of a single metal object "dropped" from space.
I'm assuming that the first notice of the asteroid changing trajectory will be well before the trajectory is Washington DC. So presumably there is something changing the trajectory. Vaporize that thing. Now the trajectory is not Washington DC and the threat is empty.
How about this scenario? There is an asteroid in the solar system we've already directed on such a trajectory. Using the thrust capability that we installed to accomplish that, we're happy to redirect the asteroid, if our demands are met.
Agree, I'm interested in the political aspect of this as well. For most of modern history (past WWII lets say) exploration of unknown frontiers (Antartica, space, the moon etc) has been done under nation states with various levels of funding from governments either at 100% public or a public/private mix. This exploration is done usually with the end goal of expanding human knowledge or sometimes for national defense as in the space race and the moon.
What makes me SUPER uneasy about what SpaceX is trying to do with Mars is the 100% private nature of this, at least from an ownership perspective. Is SpaceX trying to claim ownership to Mars, or a least a part of it? Who or what gives them the right to make this claim? Wouldn't humanity as a whole be better served to see Mars the same way we see Antartica?
Additionally, why does SpaceX get to say who goes to Mars and who doesn't? Shouldn't we choose who gets to go on missions to Mars based on expertise in technical and scientific fields vs how much one can pay for a ticket? Why should the ability to go to Mars be based capital? Does a little child who wants to be an astronaut also need to be a billionaire? Ultimately, what gives the super rich the right to leave this planet for a colony on Mars while the rest of us try to figure out how to survive on the planet that they had a large hand in destroying in the first place. Why should we, as a society, even support a colony on Mars that will take many years to be self sustaining in the above configuration.
Hopefully our international bodies wake up and start taking the privatization of space seriously and at least start enacting and enforcing some guidelines, regulations, and treaties around space and bodies in our solar system.
SpaceX isn't standing in anybody else's way. Any and all other interested parties are free to pursue their own plans. Adding guidelines and regulations won't suddenly make it so that other people go, all it'll do is make it harder for SpaceX to do so.
This post sounds to me like sour grapes. "I can't go, so I don't want anybody to go unless we all can." I hope I'm wrong, because that idea terrifies me a bit.
Good, it should be harder for SpaceX and other completely private entities to go since space is identified as a public Common (see my comment above).
Its not sour grapes. When Neil Armstrong went to the moon it was for all Americans and all of Humanity. During the space shuttle missions there was a public effort to try to select a broad representation of cultures, backgrounds, educations, nationalities etc to be astronauts.
However, if the only ultra rich get to go, which it sounds like the case since that would be the only way to fund a private mission, why should everyone left be ok with it? Why should the richest people in the world, most who have had a incredibly large role in environmentally destroying the ONLY planet all of humanity can live on, just leave everyone else to clean up the mess? It would be the ultimate FU to the rest of the 99.9% of humanity.
'''there was a public effort to try to select a broad representation of cultures, backgrounds, educations, nationalities etc to be astronauts.'''
Oy vey... that might be a sentiment which befits an established enterprise, but it is no way to reach for the stars.
Do you think Magellan or Columbus tried to be inclusive when they were looking to crew their expeditions? Of course not, they selected on whatever capabilities or vices they deemed necessary for their purpose. Did the Vikings go for a multicultural crew when they tried to reach Vinland? Nope. What about Genghis Khan, did he choose his troops by looking at the colour of their skin or their cultural heritage? He probably did, the criteria being 'just as long as they look and talk like me'.
Trying to be culturally sensitive and inclusive might work when trips to Mars are organised by the UN, based on technology and experience from pioneers like the current crop of 'commercial space access providers'. This is not where we are just now, however. Right now the selection criteria are altogether more practical: can you afford it, cope with the stress, have the right capabilities, can you function as a crew in a cramped environment for an extended period, can you handle the possibility of being left 'stranded' on a planet hostile to (our) life?
It's not being culturally sensitive for sensitivities sake. It's about an equal chance of survival. Most fairly intelligent people acknowledge having one planet for the human species is risky right? What if an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth? We better spread out to hedge our bets. Which leads me to...
> can you afford it
Now, if all was fine and dandy on Earth and some rich people want to take the risk of starting a Mars colony with the idea that most of us will be able to travel back and forth in a hundred years go for it.
The problem is, there is an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Oh, and the asteroid was created with help from some of the people trying to now escape. The asteroid is global warming. I can go into great detail on how global warming is going to make things incredibly challenging for the 9+ billion of us around on Earth in 2050. At least to Elon's credit he's doing some things that might make living in a warmer world a little more sustainable before he jets off to Mars. Most people that will be able to pay the price won't be doing so.
Wouldn't be more ethical to focus on saving the one planet most of us and our kids will live on? Lets say the Mars colony is successful. So successful that you and your families chances of surviving are actually better on Mars vs Earth. What gives you and your offspring the right for that greater chance of survival? Because you are rich? What about executive XYZ who lead company ABC for 20 years and used our air and water as a dumping ground for pollution. What gives them the right to leave? What gives them and their offspring the right to survive and thrive on another planet while us on earth deal with the cost of that pollution. As I said, it would be the ultimate FU to 99.9% of us.
I think a spaceship designed for and by those who have the means and will to design such will work just as well for those who lack either, or both [1].
[1] After all, the Golgafringians managed to put their entire middle-management layer, not to mention their telephone cleaners and hairdressers, on one...
I really don't see many multi millionaires sitting on Mars trying to do subsistence agriculture honestly and if some want to, they are welcome...
You are missing the point. Capital funded the moon missions as well - just in that case it was the capital of the community you belong to, let's say your nation, so you feel involved. Nowadays NASA can't even put a human being into orbit any more - and that's not the fault of SpaceX.
As a "public Common", everybody should be allowed to go there. That's not the same as to claim ownership, which indeed should be publicly and very well regulated.
What purpose will that serve? You make things harder for SpaceX, so... what? Everybody just stays home? Does that make you happier, because we're all equally stuck?
Did you miss the part where they are doing this for NASA? There's already a legal framework in place, in fact, legislation has to be passed just to enable private space flight.
Ah! There is a big difference, I believe between subcontracting LEO for NASA and a frikin Mars mission.
Since so far everything is done for NASA I don't have a problem with it. NASA, like any giant government agency subcontracts out a lot of work to various parties. The whole "Military-industrial complex" thing. In the case of LEO where it's NASA controlled but privately contracted SpaceX is awesome because they are bringing down the cost of launches to LEO. This saves us, the US taxpayer $$$.
The frikin Mars mission is different because from what I understand SpaceX is going with or without NASA. That's the difference between an Apollo mission, where the Saturn V was developed by Boeing and others, and Boeing just going alone.
Personally, I think this legislation is a bad idea and is a direct attack on a global common. It will be interesting to see how this holds up internationally. Its almost like the US saying to the world we open up waters in the middle of the Atlantic (international waters) for resource extraction by any of our corporations. Try and stop us.
>Its almost like the US saying to the world we open up waters in the middle of the Atlantic (international waters) for resource extraction by any of our corporations.
The US doesn't have to do anything for that to happen, since that's the current status quo. Fisheries in international waters are in crisis due to overfishing in part because they are global commons and access cannot be restricted.
For all the good SpaceX is doing (and it is great indeed), has Musk taken steps to prevent his company from turning into essentially the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in say 50 or 100 years from now? A question made partly in jest of course.
I guess a response would include Musk's well-known fears of AI, though I don't recall him stating he is afraid of out-of-control private interests with respect to interplanetary exploration and colonization.
because you want immense suffering to expand outward undefinitely, instead of being confined to one dot where there's a hopeful chance of it being put out?
Certainly one possible way human suffering might be "put out" on this pale blue dot is by the extinction of H. sapiens, either by our killing ourselves off, or by some kind of serious natural catastrophe (large meteorite strike, supervolcano, etc.). So I'd suggest that it would be better to colonize the solar system before we make whatever developmental leaps that could let us transcend suffering. Otherwise we may never get the chance.
Humans killing ourselves / extinction events are incredibly unlikely over the time frame that SpaceX will exist for. They're also easier to survive or avoid than it would be to colonize Mars. Except maybe surviving a gamma ray burst -- but who knows, since it looks pretty impossible for humans to colonize a planet.
On the other hand we have a chance to save the tens of billions of people who will live and die in the 21st century and experience genocide, starvation, disease, child abuse, imprisonment, other violence, etc. We're already doing it -- it's achievable. It can't wait for a Mars colony!
> On the other hand we have a chance to save the tens of billions of people who will live and die in the 21st century and experience genocide, starvation, disease, child abuse, imprisonment, other violence, etc. We're already doing it -- it's achievable. It can't wait for a Mars colony!
i don't follow. why do you think those horrible things wouldn't happen on an extraterrestrial colony?
I don't think we should put any resources into colonization activities right now. In case it's unclear, I'm agreeing with you and responding to blacksmith_tb's suggestion that "it would be better to colonize the solar system before we make whatever developmental leaps could let us transcend suffering".
It sounds like you have much more faith in the longevity of Earth as a viable life-supporting planet than I do. I'd love to see what data you're looking at that supports such optimism.
I'm just saying we shouldn't abandon or postpone progress on Earth to start an impossible colonization project on Mars.
Any opinion you or I have about how long Earth will remain viable is irrelevant. There's nothing else. Mars and every other body are not viable at all and we have no way to make them so.
"Weyland-Yutani is consistently portrayed as exhibiting the worst aspects of corporate profiteering, willing to sacrifice
decency and life in the endless pursuit of profits."
Musk's road map is for SpaceX to make a profit colonizing Mars. Starting within the next 10 years. (Musk himself wants to be a colonist there.)
The value proposition is that for a half-million you get to move to Mars, and you can return free if you decide you don't like it. (You still spent the half-million though.) So sell your house, move to Mars.
Laughable. What would they fight over? I love sci-fi too, but let's be realistic.
If Musk succeeds, and I believe he will, it will still be quite a long time, possibly hundreds of years, before there's any notable population on Mars beyond a single city.
They won't have any resources we don't have here, aside from Martian tourist trinkets, and the cost of getting resources from Mars to Earth would defeat any potential profit anyone could make. Musk has said this more than once. In scifi, this plot flaw is usually undone by having the alien planet possess a resource that can't be found or made anywhere else, like Avatar's unobtainium or Dune's Melange. But in the real world, that's not a thing.
If we're not fighting over resources, then what? So what if the Martian colonists declare independence? Independence from who, anyway? "Earth"? Because it won't be an extension of any existing country, it won't just be "US territory on Mars." It'll be its own entity, with inhabitants from a variety of the countries on Earth. And it's not like Earth is going to be demanding "tribute" from it, that makes no sense on any level.
In Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," the Earth demands grain shipments from the Moon to feed its overgrown population. But....is that likely, really? Are we really likely to be dependent on grain shipments from Mars? It's a fun scenario, but I doubt it. It seems more likely to me that they'll find ways to scale grain production with existing land, as they have done for decades and continue to do today.
The one thing that I can think of which Mars has in abundance and is limited on Earth is plain old real-estate.
In a century's time (give or take), being able to build sprawling, cheap (for certain values of cheap), polluting factories without having to worry about poisoning the local rivers or running afoul of environmental regulations might start to look like a decent deal.
If that happens we better hope it never escalates to physical conflict at any scale. Google "hypervelocity kinetic weapon" then factor in that adding a hydrogen bomb warhead wouldn't be much harder and would give it that much more punch. Have fun deflecting an inbound going 500k mph.
Interplanetary war between players that advanced would be a really fast path to extinction.
I guess this means they're taking a "better to ask forgiveness than permission" attitude towards planetary protection? Musk is on the record as not being worried about contaminating Mars with Earth life, and it seems like a 2 year time frame wouldn't give them time to put together a JPL-style clean room operation. Is there anything that NASA could/would do to stop them from landing a 'dirty' Dragon on Mars?
The article says they are doing this with NASA, carrying instrumentation of unspecified origin. My guess: SpaceX hands a Dragon to NASA which sterilizes and outfits it with instrumentation and then hands it, enclosed, back to SpaceX to launch.
Well, "SpaceX has entered into an agreement with NASA for a Dragon mission to Mars[...]" so it seems like if NASA had strong requirements for cleanliness they would request SpaceX follow them.
That site says it assumes circular and coplanar orbits for Earth and Mars. I'm guessing it also assumes a Hohmann transfer for the spacecraft. All three of those assumptions could affect the optimal departure date by weeks.
So who all needs to sign off on something like this? Whoever's air space you are in at launch seems like one, perhaps that means a few different countries. Anyone else?
All of SpaceX's launch sites are in the US (in fact, the two active sites are on ranges owned by the US Air Force). Their rockets (like all US based orbital rockets) are launched over the ocean, and are well into 'space' before they fly over any other countries.
I don't understand why Musk is so focused on a Mars Colony. Why go to all the effort of climbing out of one gravity well just to drop yourself down another?
It be a lot easier to mine asteroids and build colonies in Earth or solar orbit. And potentially hugely profitable if they choose a platinum-rich asteroid.
See further:
'The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space' by Gerard K. O'Neill
Well, if it happens before 2020, it'll be in 2018. That's just how the orbits line up (the next window is late spring 2018, with summer 2020 being the window after that).
Given SpaceX's inability to estimate time frames (the F9 Heavy is, what, four years late?), I would be shocked if this happened at all, let alone before 2030.
Falcon Heavy is late, but making Falcon Heavy economical means making all of the 3 F9 first stages it uses reusable. They haven't cracked that yet, they've got 2 good landings and a lot of data, but it's far from certain whether e.g. the landing attempt next week will be successful.
Most of their customers do not need the extra payload / push of Falcon Heavy and so they're concentrating on making F9 itself work first. This is reasonable I think.
I'm right there with you on SpaceX and timelines (my recent post history here includes trying to convince folks that just because they landed a stage doesn't mean cheap and easy rocket reuse is right around the corner). In this case however, my gut feeling is that they're a lot deeper into the development cycle of this project and they feel pretty confident about the 2018 timeframe.
OK, so SpaceX want to get NASA to pay for this. Is that in NASA's budget?
2018 with a Falcon Heavy is optimistic. The first flight of the Falcon Heavy isn't expected until 2017. Last year, the first flight was scheduled for spring 2016, but it's slipped to the "end of 2016", which means 2017 in SpaceX time.
Space-X needs to get those paid Falcon 9 launches going faster. That's the revenue generator. They're a year behind on launches, and they've been losing unhappy customers to Arianespace. The Brownsville launch site project is way behind schedule; they're building on sandy soil (what did they expect on the east coast of Texas?) and have delayed a year or two for soil compaction.
It's great to have an ambitious program, but the profitable products have to ship.
OK, so SpaceX want to get NASA to pay for this. Is that in NASA's budget?
as was noted in another comment[0]:
“We’re particularly excited about an upcoming SpaceX project that would build upon a current ‘no-exchange-of-funds’ agreement we have with the company,” noted NASA deputy Administrator Dava Newman. “In exchange for Martian entry, descent, and landing data from SpaceX, NASA will offer technical support for the firm’s plan to attempt to land an uncrewed Dragon 2 spacecraft on Mars.”
SpaceX gets expertise and technical support, and NASA gets data. This isn't a normal contract where NASA is paying with cash.
Exciting news! The Dragon capsule, using drag and retro-thrusters to decelerate, could even land at much higher elevations than previous Mars missions using parachutes for breaking.
I wonder if they'll send another to Europa in 2019(Feb 28). (http://clowder.net/hop/railroad/EJ.htm) that's the next closest launch window that FH can make it to after the April 30th 2018 Launch window to Mars
Interesting, tweet. I suppose if its an unmanned Dragon with just instruments or something, and they execute flawlessly on Falcon Heavy, and they catch a break in terms of getting the landing stuff qualified. That has to be an extremely aggressive schedule with no margin for error.
I hope they would fill it with resources future settlers could use. More realistic too. Although, I could understand keeping it empty in order to maximize the success rate.
Given Elon's sense of humor I'm guessing these 'red dragons' would have a bunch of instruments to insure the mission success and collect data on the environment around them, and to have something like several boxes of vegetable seeds or hard candy. Basically something that a future visitor would enjoy having and might not have thought to bring along. If he was a fan of the Martian if could be a flash drive with movies and music.
He's already in his forties, he would go straight to terraforming Mars if he could, but I suppose building a Mars colony in his working lifetime is difficult already.
p.s: I hope I could somehow become good enough to build on his legacy
There's been no detailed presentation of the whole Mars architecture; Musk has promised to present at least an overview this September at the International Astronautical Conference.
In the meantime, it's known that there's a high-performance methane-fueled engine in development as part of the project ("Raptor"), with some component tests already underway at test facilities, and several dropped hints about components (including rockets substantially more powerful than the Saturn V used for Apollo lunar missions), but not enough publicly released to determine much about how operations would work.
As rst has mentioned, details on how the Red Dragon would return from the Martian surface have so far been quite sketchy. However, the basic outline for a proposed sample return mission involves having a Mars Ascent Vehicle pop off the top of the Red Dragon capsule to get the payload into low Mars orbit. Once there it jettisons the ascent stage and ignites a second stage to place it into a trajectory for trans-Earth injection. Essentially, it's packing a small two-stage rocket for the trip home. [1]
It'll be interesting to find out if the payload capacity of the MAV is actually enough for a crewed capsule to be launched to rendezvous with an orbiting vessel (a la The Martian), or if that would require a much larger descent vehicle in the first place.
Browse their job listings and you will see this: "To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State." [1]
