Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
4people
2019–2024years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- 1. If you’re going on a one-way ticket to another planet, you don’t need $1m in spare cash. You just need everything you own (house included) to sum to $1m, which is an easier hurdle for an early career engineer, and Mars will want young engineers. In actuality you probably just need a down payment and premiums for an insurance contract. Costs could be closer to $100k.
2. Trips will be two-way with an included but unscheduled return ticket. Orbital dynamics make this not expensive to do. People who take advantage of that and who got part of their trip out on credit would find themselves deeply burdened in debt, but survivable. The gamble being made (and hedged with insurance) is that most colonists would stay.
3. “and die on Mars” can be literally interpreted as old age, but given the aggressive responses in this thread the underlying assumption I believed was that they’d die from lack of food/water/air, too much radiation, life support failure, etc. in other words the “mars is harder than you think and the colonists will die” tired assumption. In reality ISS research has demonstrated what is required to keep humans alive and healthy, and literal decades of preparation has been done on designs for early bases that exploit local resources to reduce external dependency.
If you’re actually interested in this, Zubrin’s The Case for Space is a good introduction.
- Might be obvious but check out Delian Asparouhov, founder of Varda Space Industries. Chris Power, founder of Hadrian. If you look them up in spotify there are many interviews that touch on the space industry. Regarding books:
- I really enjoyed Lift-Off by Eric Berger on the early days of SpaceX.
- Shoot for the Moon is another good read on the Apollo program.
- The Case for Space by Robert Zubrin
- Ignition by John D. Clark for a history of liquid rocket propellants
Godspeed
(Edited formatting)
- The atmosphere is fairly transparent to microwaves, so the loss shouldn't be much worse. The book The Case for Space Solar Panel cited net efficiency of 40% with the tech at the time it was written, with a theoretical maximum of 60%. It's a pretty good deal given that a panel in geostationary collects five times as much energy in 24 hours as the same panel on the ground, and the power flows 24/7 for most of the year with no need for storage.
- The Case for Space by Robert Zubrin.
Puts recent developments by SpaceX in context, and shows how we really are about to settle the cosmos in an economically sustainable way. A call to action to anyone who wants to participate to start making space companies now.
Radical Abundance by K. Eric Drexler.
Re-introduces the concept of atomically precise manufacturing (aka molecular nanotechnology) and shows how it can solve basically all major global problems from climate change to energy crisis to wars over resources.
- Here's what Robert Zubrin has to say about this graph in his latest book "The case for space" (p174):
"The national fusion programs progressed well during the Cold War because of fierce international competition. They have stopped moving forward in the late 1980s because the decision to consolidate them all into a single global project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), removed all stimulus for action. Indeed, it too, nearly a quarter century for the bureaucrats in charge of ITER to manage to reach a consensus in 2010 on where tu put it, and it will be another quarter century before the machine even attempts to reach thermonuclear ignition in 2035"
- On the other hand many are of the mind that the progress in fusion was quite fast paced, due to competition, until many nations decided to join forces and invest in ITER. After which it pretty much stalled. ITER was supposed to be the Manhattan Project of fusion ( * ). So there's that.
Here's Robert Zubrin in "The Case for Space": "The national fusion programs progressed well during the Cold War because of fierce international competition. They have stopped moving forward since the late 1980s because the decision to consolidate them into a single global project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), removed all stimulus for action. Indeed, it took nearly a quarter century for the bureaucrats in charge of ITER to manage to reach consensus in 2010 on where to put it, and it will take another quarter century before the machine even attempts to reach thermonuclear ignition in 2035."
( * ) Cost comparison: Manhattan Project $23BN in 2018 dollars [1]. ITER cost, construction only: $22BN as per their own estimate, $65BN as per the US Department of Energy estimate [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
[2] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.2018041...
