Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars (opens in new tab)

That's a funny way to spell Google.

> The current process for building a pressure dome takes about a week; 1 or 2 days to tack up and fit steel sheets, 4 days to weld the sheets together, and 1 to 2 days for X-ray inspections and repairs.

> [...]

> The knuckle seamer looks something like a giant zipper that articulates over the front and back of a dome, like a taco shell around its filling. [...] Then, in about 10 minutes, an automated torch will trace down the length of the curve, providing a precise weld. Following this, the dome is rotated to bring the next seam into view.

> [...]

> With this new X-ray machine, SpaceX hopes to compress a process that can take a day down to a few hours.

So the new machines reduce the amount of time needed to weld and inspect a pressure dome from several days to several hours. I'm certainly no expert, but that seems like a pretty big deal to me.

You might have equally big tanks on Earth, under equal pressures, but it will be more cost-effective to just increase the material used on the shell of the tank to solve your problems. Whereas in space, every kg that can theoretically be removed from the launch vehicle is worth investing in, even if it raises the cost of engineering and materials.

So yes it seems reasonable to me that these are groundbreaking challenges.

No, they probably can't. It would be really weird for an outside engineer to have a better insight on this than the engineers from the actual rocket company.

The best example being Korolev, possibly the greatest rocket designer in history (certainly up there with Von Braun and Xuesen, and in my opinion more impressive), who died because he was sent to the Gulags by a bitter politician (this is an incredibly short edit of the full story, but that is a factual statement).

Korolev built working rockets the US said were theoretically impossible, and he did it because he couldn't afford to build the rockets the way the US were doing it. So he got resourceful.

Had he not died in 1966, I suspect the Soviets would have beat the US to putting a man on the moon.

The rocket is already 90+% propellant (fuel & oxydizer), with the few percent left being the engines, structure and payload. So if you want the rocket to have a meaningful payload, it needs to be big.

For example the Falcon 9 weights 350 tons and can place 22 tons to low earth orbit (LEO). So about 6% of initial launcher weight ends up in orbit.

If you want to place the 100+ tons estimated for a reasonable Mars trip, your launcher will be either huge or you will need to do a lot of launches and assemble your ship in orbit with all the overhed that requires.

Starship also aims to be fully reusable, which will eat to your payload yet again but provides a huge benefit of not throwing away any part of your rocket, just burning a lot of propellant, which is dirt cheap compared to rocket hardware (estimates say about 5% of conventional rocket launch is fuel, the less is hardware that you normally simply crash into the ocean after use).

So in short - big payload -> big rocket. Reusable rocket with big payload -> humungous rocket that is really really cheap to operate.

In space vehicles, that means everything gets really, really big.

Rocket efficiency scales infinitely with size.

https://youtu.be/Exd1IO52exs?t=361

There's nothing wrong with wanting a life that free. In fact it's oftentimes admirable. Especially at times when I'm wound so tight I feel like I could pop.

If you're choosing a partner based solely on whether they want to be the next Elon Musk or not, you're doing yourself a serious disservice.

And if you really ask those questions to every potential date, you should stop, because dude, wtf?

What? You see a motivated person with the resources and drive to pursue his dream and you're upset that he's not putting his vision aside to pursue what you think is important? Musk doesn't owe you anything.

He owns SolarCity, a solar panel company, Tesla, an electric car and battery company, and Boring Company, an attempt at creating a transportation system that mandates the use of EV.

The fact that all of this technology will benefit human existence on Mars should go ahead and show you how developing technology in order to survive a situation far more dire than Earth's, in a sustainable way, might also help us better survive our situation on Earth.

That can be said about anything - why do you buy board games or watch sport events every night or learn to play piano - you should be saving the planet ffs...

Human effort isn't completely fungible. There is no guarantee that all of the people working incredibly hard at SpaceX would switch to work on whatever problem you want them to.

We did for a long time though, except for relatively recently. And Mars won't be able to live without Earth for a long time so it isn't really escapism as you paint it.

I don't think we deserve to disappear completely, but if we don't reverse climate change, we'll have a ton of loss of life but not likely total extinction except for some astronauts. That's probably "enough" as far as galactic justice goes. I'm always a little disappointed in this argument though because it's climate change that we should be judged by, rather than massive deaths from human made conflicts throughout history. Surely there's lots of previous events that qualify for "we don't deserve to exist at all".

Do we need another eccentric billionaire but for climate change though? Sure, bring it on.

I disagree strongly.

Progress in the wrong direction still teaches you things, and it means you're moving and you've overcome the inertia of doing nothing, which is half the battle.

Failure isn't trying and not reaching your goal. Failure is never trying.

there are plenty of reasons humanity should be multi-planetary other than escaping climate change.

But Musk, with his talk of a self-sufficient city, is clearly targeting the latter, and there are a whole lot of details we haven't worked out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder

> The O'Neill cylinder (also called an O'Neill colony) is a space settlement concept proposed by American physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in his 1976 book "The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space". O'Neill proposed the colonization of space for the 21st century, using materials extracted from the Moon and later from asteroids.

> An O'Neill cylinder would consist of two counter-rotating cylinders. The cylinders would rotate in opposite directions in order to cancel out any gyroscopic effects that would otherwise make it difficult to keep them aimed toward the Sun. Each would be 5 miles (8.0 km) in diameter and 20 miles (32 km) long, connected at each end by a rod via a bearing system. They would rotate so as to provide artificial gravity via centrifugal force on their inner surfaces.

So Musk is making the machine to make the machine. Musk has brought lessons learned from Tesla’s assembly line so workers do not burn out. They will work three 12-hour days and then have a four-day weekend. Then they’ll work four 12-hour shifts with a three-day weekend. Thus, with four shifts, the Boca Chica site can operate at full capacity 24 hours a day, seven days a week. SpaceX is throwing in hot meals every three to four hours, for free.

But. Really. What's the threat model here?

Mars is meant to be a backup of humanity. OK. Against what threat? We can think of many, but a self-isolating base in the Antarctic would survive nearly all of them with better conditions than a Mars base.

Nuclear armageddon? Not much fallout over Antarctica and OK, you can't go outside of a while. Still better than Mars where you can't go outside ever.

Runaway global warming? The ice will melt but at a slow pace that leaves plenty of time for adaptation, the climate will become more hospitable at the poles rather than less, and at least you will have lots of fresh water. Unlike, say, on Mars.

Global pandemic? An Antarctic base can self isolate, no problem. Just lock the doors and let anyone who tries to reach you freeze to death. A serious Mars base would need some sort of border control policy too, if Musk had made it cheap to get there.

Massive asteroid strike? I guess it'd wreck the atmosphere but ... well, then you're no worse off than on Mars which doesn't have one to begin with. And you're much more likely to get nuked by a 'roid on Mars where there's no atmosphere to burn it up.

I dunno man. I'm trying to think of a problem that a serious Antarctic city couldn't solve and coming up blank. Short of Earth getting sucked into a black hole or something, what scenario is survivable on Mars that isn't at the poles?

Of course I'm rooting for the Martian stuff because it's cool and may be accidentally useful (SpaceX already has been, really) and beats the fuck out of finding new ways to sell crap to people and the other garbage lots of other prominent companies do, but the goal isn't valuable per se, in my opinion.

It takes time for these things to sink in (apparently, despite e.g. the Chelyabinsk meteor, and all the craters, and how all the dinosaurs have wings now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Eart... )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid#History

> Although meteors have been known since ancient times, they were not known to be an astronomical phenomenon until early in the nineteenth century. Prior to that, they were seen in the West as an atmospheric phenomenon, like lightning, and were not connected with strange stories of rocks falling from the sky. In 1807, Yale University chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman investigated a meteorite that fell in Weston, Connecticut.[30] Silliman believed the meteor had a cosmic origin, but meteors did not attract much attention from astronomers until the spectacular meteor storm of November 1833.

The Starship is an iterative design with seventy years of engineering knowledge behind it. Keeping humans alive outside the Van Allen belts for a long duration and then on a completely inhospitable planet has very little engineering knowledge behind it.

Also to suggest a Mars colony is a contingency plan is ludicrous. In order for a Mars colony to be a human civilization contingency plan it would not only need to be self sustaining but self perpetuating. Otherwise a life ending event on Earth would just give the Mars colonists a few months to come to terms with their mortality. Then no kore humans.

There is nowhere in the solar system that can support humans in the way Earth can. In fact everywhere else is so hostile we need to take significant amounts of Earth with us just to not die immediately.

If you want to live in underground colonies have the Boring company build you tunnels here on Earth. At least when you need parts for the GECK you can go above ground with just a gas mask and rugged clothes instead of a bulky space suit.

I can definitely empathize with that, I'm happy with what's being achieved as well. Seing how SpaceX and Tesla are routinely achieving their goals and arguably change the world, I often can't get over the fact that the output of our civilization seems to hinge on the iron will of a few billionaires.

Elon Musk (and SpaceX as his tool) is just an extremely illustrative example of this, because we can directly see what our space capabilities and ambitions would look like without him.

I wish there was a Musk-like figure focused on transhumanism, but sadly it may genuinely be too early for that in my lifetime. Or not. And that's the frustrating thing: we wouldn't know until one appears.

I know this sounds like I'm writing a love letter, but it's really not meant that way. I would rather live in a civilization that has its own momentum and a better-distributed capacity for achievement, as opposed to putting my hope for the future on a few tenuous human pivot points and their whims.

It takes a great mix of super smarts and super stupid to work there.

Making a steel or glass plate requires a lot of industrial capability and a capable supply chain to say nothing of raw materials. Both are cheap on Earth because we've built that infrastructure over the past two hundred years. That infrastructure was relatively easy to construct because the workers could wear overalls and hard hats rather than space suits. Taking a lunch break doesn't mean disrobing and piling into a pressure vessel.

Go camping for a weekend in the desert or in the snow sometime. Consider all the crap you need to take with you to not die of exposure or thirst. In those environments where you've got air for free and usually water if you know where to look, you've still got a fair bit of equipment. If you forget anything or lose it you could end up seriously injured or even dead. That's somewhere that's lousy with breathable atmosphere, protection from most ionizing solar radiation, and an average temperature high enough your lungs won't freeze.

Surviving inhospitable environments on Earth requires effort and technology. Surviving outside of Earth is several orders of magnitude more difficult. Thriving outside of Earth is more orders of magnitude beyond mere survival.

That’s not an option on settlements beyond Earth’s surface. There, you’re forced to live with every decision you make almost immediately, so if you’re wasteful or stupid it’s promptly going to bite you in the ass and potentially threaten the lives of everybody involved. You’re not given the option of fixing things later, you have to do the correct thing now, and I think that’s the type of environment it’s going to take for humanity to change its ways.

I agree that they’re parallel because the reality is that they’re both happening right now. I’m pointing out that there’s a huge risk in not figuring out A before B, which is that we’ll just be transporting our problems to a new planet (and if they succeed, then whoever controls Mars will be able to use their monopoly to exacerbate problems on Earth). Granted, the rocket sure is shiny, though... funny how that trick never fails ;)

> Perhaps the view from Mars will instil a renewed perspective on our dependence on Earth, and teach us lessons on ecological management via terraforming.

Or perhaps you’re in the equivalent of an “early internet” optimism phase around Mars exploration.

We have all the resources we need here. The research around mutualistic living (renewables, land use, food waste, etc) is making that clear. If we’re glorifying hard problems, then the real hard problem is figuring out how to get humanity to share our already abundant resources equitably and peacefully.

Once we solve that problem we will be ready for Mars.

And to be clear I share the dream of exploring the stars. But I can’t in good faith support that dream until we shift from a parasitic to a mutualistic relationship.

Good point, thanks.

> It also opens up huge amounts of clean energy resources.

Sustainability research is making it clear that we already have an abundance of clean energy resources here on Earth. If Mars does indeed flood the market with cheap clean energy and makes clean energy the overwhelmingly obvious choice, then I agree that will be a net win. But the problem doesn’t appear to be a resource scarcity issue here on Earth so I’m unconvinced that the solution is more resources.

Also, what clean energy resources are you referring to specifically? We essentially need something that can be substituted into our existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Mars provides something like that?

This sounds like parasite logic to me. We can do better. The fact that I can even conceive thoughts of doing better is all the proof I need to know that we can do better. That’s what vision is about.