The pace of innovation here is absolutely ludicrous. They designed and built a custom welding machine _and_ a custom x-ray machine for building tank domes in four weeks? They've gone from a production rate of one prototype in 8 months to one prototype every 2 weeks in less than a year. They doubled the size of their workforce in less than 48 hours. I'm gonna have to agree with the article author here: this is absolutely mad.
It's really helping them that they have some of the most motivated employees on Earth. Their people absolutely believe in this vision of colonizing Mars just as much as Elon Musk does. (Hell, I do too, I just don't work there.)
Or Facebook. Or heck, even Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe if you're in the "wrong" department. I bet even some Apple employees might occasionally feel they work at an advertising company.
>They designed and built a custom welding machine _and_ a custom x-ray machine for building tank domes in four weeks?
That's feasible due to the requirements being narrow and specific, and also well understood by a team close to the team building those machines.
Contrast that with expensive & slow-to-build machines available on the general market, where the requirements are broad, under-specified, and always shifting.
Yeah, we seem to have strayed a bit too much towards the turn-key end of the spectrum.
IMO both have their rightful place on an open market. The problem with managing building from blocks is that it requires innovation for end results, and, as the saying goes, "Innovation is hard to schedule" (with apologies to Dan Fylstra).
>They designed and built a custom welding machine _and_ a custom X-Ray machine for building tank domes in four weeks?
Can any engineer speak to whether this is actually progress, or even necessary? It seems like every time something goes wrong, Elon "invents" a way to do it better.
I'm old enough to remember rescue subs, battery swaps, brain implants that will cure autism, factories spitting out factories, solar shingles, truck carriers, one-hour body shop service, tunnels at a fraction of the cost, the ability to identify squeaks in your car with your phone, robots assembling cars so fast they need a strobe light to be seen...
I can't speak to how common that sort of custom tooling is in the industry, but as to whether it was necessary the article already explains that pretty clearly:
> 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.
I'm not in that area, but I struggle to find an analogue of a large pressurized tank on Earth where mass is the dominant cost factor.
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.
The compounding importance of mass is one factor here, but only half the story. The other half is how SpaceX' quick iterations and ability to retire vehicles early allows ample room to experiment and also to shave off safety factors.
In the more mundane aerospace engineering mass is quite important, but the manufacturing, servicing, longevity etc. are pretty important considerations too. A typical airplane is designed for manufacture of some 200 ... 2000 units and to remain in use for 1 ... 3 decades. This, together with the usual requirement for human flight ratings, ends up dictating rather high safety margins for designs.
Contrast that with SpaceX' vehicles which are supposed to perform a dozen unmanned flights each at most, and where one-way mission of a vehicle is a perfectly feasible strategy for testing while still making decent revenue.
Quick iterations get shit done in aerospace. Among historical examples, that's how MacCready's Gossamer Albatross[1] record-breaker came to be, where other teams failed.
It's a good reference point, even if there are some key differences worth mentioning.
First up, an airliner fuselage is specced for tens of thousands of pressure cycles; needs to sustain the wear & tear, accumulated stress, and distortion. The rocket needs to handle maybe a dozen pressure cycles at most, and it is feasible to only handle one cycle for first few experimental vehicles.
Secondly, the airliner fuselage has much more complex shape, due to conflicting needs for aerodynamics, attachment of wings & control surfaces, etc.. This, together with varying materials and large openings concentrates stresses in key points. The rocket tank is as close to a big dumb uniform pipe as you can get. Even better, a rocket may rely on internal pressure for structural rigidity, while airliner needs to handle depressurization.
Lastly, the Starship is designed to survive re-entry, thus heat resistance is a major concern there; not anymore for an airliner ever since the Concorde SSTO got retired.
>So yes it seems reasonable to me that these are groundbreaking challenges.
Isn't weld strength something engineers would know/understand in advance, though? How would it come as a surprise that the welds would fail under pressure?
It seems strange to me that Musk could be spending so much time working on Starship, and somehow a "badly designed, badly built, and badly checked" rocket makes it to the platform and explodes.
Welding by hand is both an art and a science. There is going to be variability in the quality of the weld, which will introduce variability into the strength. Machines can be far more precise and consistent compared to humans.
They probably designed their tolerances assuming perfect welds and then didn't have them.
It's perfectly normal engineering practice. Camshaft, gearbox profiles, and bearing surfaces in your car have very tight tolerances. A one slightly unbalanced turbine blade in your airliner engine would assure catastrophic failure. etc etc
Do you not see a difference between the intricate components of an engine and the welds on a tank as far as complexity?
Is it even possible to discuss anything Elon Musk anymore without 100% praise of his engineering prowess? Every single comment gets down-voted into oblivion, with very few replies. And, due to the "cool off", this prevents any balanced discourse.
Camshafts were turned then ground manually on line lathes and surface grinders for many decades before advent of CNC, with about the same degree of dimensional precision as today.
It is more an issue of quality control and inspection routines.
There are additional constraints not found in most welding projects. They can’t just make the material and weld thicker/heavier as that would impact the rocket performance.
So it has to be as thin and fragile as possible but no thinner. That makes it very hard to get right, and the welds have to be done to very fine tolerances on thin material, you could say it is rocket science.
>They can’t just make the material and weld thicker/heavier as that would impact the rocket performance.
I understand. But the stresses that materials and welds can withstand are not unknown variables. We're talking about a pressurized tank here. You aren't going to build a rocket (designed to carry people) that has tolerances so tight that it's touch and go whether it explodes as soon as it's pressurized.
> Can any engineer speak to whether this is actually progress, or even necessary?
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.
Given that the USA is apparently forming a Spaceforce and the long history of astronomical products becoming military products I'm surprised that more companies aren't trying to "go to Mars". Elon can probably tell that a race to be the first to expand heavily into space is coming and that even if he can't sell people on Mars he can sell tourists and the military on the moon.
Maybe the garbage fire that the Internet has become today was a necessary step for informatics to develop enough to tackle ambitious projects like this. Maybe all the talent that focused on computer entertainment, trading, advertising and surveillance was worth it and we'll see a second renaissance.
"I’ve spoken with plenty of the earliest engineers who worked at SpaceX, and almost all of them have noted that Musk tackles the hardest engineering problems first. For Mars, there will be so many logistical things to make it all work, from power on the surface to scratching out a living to adapting to its extreme climate. But Musk believes that the initial, hardest step is building a reusable, orbital Starship to get people and tons of stuff to Mars. So he is focused on that.
He knows he won’t get Starship right at first. He employs some of the smartest engineers on this planet, and they’re still, in many ways, fumbling toward solutions for the extremely hard problem of getting a super-large vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well into orbit—then to land it and fly it again. Musk has come to believe the only way to realistically achieve this is through trial and error, by iterating closer and closer to the right design."
I always found the dichotomy of Soviet culture interesting - that engineers were the most pragmatic I've ever seen, and the politicians were just...fucking idiots.
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.
>> I always found the dichotomy of Soviet culture interesting - that engineers were the most pragmatic I've ever seen, and the politicians were just...fucking idiots.
I'm not familiar with that history, but I'm quite familiar with Corporate America. One thing I've seen is that when Engineering is great, it gives the company great momentum and allows the Management/"Business"/Strategy/etc functions to lag and get lazy. Good Engineering momentum essentially produces enough residual value for others to leech off from.
Which may be an insight on how SpaceX/Tesla avoid some of those traditional business issues- the business is this case is a means to an engineering end, not a means to perpetuate the power/wealth/comfort of management.
> that engineers were the most pragmatic I've ever seen, and the politicians were just...fucking idiots.
The engineers would have big problems if they spaceship doesn't work. The politicians are not idiots, its simply that they don't have the same goals as the engineers so the politicians seem like idiots to engineers.
> Had he not died in 1966, I suspect the Soviets would have beat the US to putting a man on the moon.
This is an false take. Many people have looked at this and it simply doesn't hold up. The resources they were investing was not big enough and having korolev couldn't have solved all the many problems they would have still faced.
They had some great engine technology but its a long way from there to the moon.
Stalin spent the latter half of his career killing all the talented politicians, whereas the engineers got left alone. Then the not-so-talented politicians that got left over (some of whom were not so bad) had to fight against a culture of fear, compulsive ass-covering, and magical thinking.
The only fucking idiot among top Soviet politicians was Gorbachev who sold one of the world's biggest economic, scientific and military powers just for 30 pieces of silver. His predecessors were no idiots at all. They are depicted as complete morons by the western propaganda - it's true. But propaganda and reality are two completely different things. I would advise you to learn history instead of blindly believing the yellow press and political articles on Wikipedia.
> On 23 March 1938, Valentin Glushko was arrested. To reduce his charges he denounced Korolev, which resulted in his arrest on 7 June and a sentence of ten years forced labour. From that day on, the two men were bitterly opposed to each other.
So as you can see he was not sent to gulag out of spite by Stalin but out of envy and professional competition by his fellow rocket engineer.
While in gulag he was not tortured or sent to gold mines. He and other scientists continued their work in relatively comfortable conditions in so called "sharashka": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka
I'm not saying that Stalin was a saint or a winged seraph. But definitely he was anyone but an idiot.
Also Korolev did not died because he was sent to the Gulags. He died from a chronic disease from which he started suffering long before he was imprisoned.
An engineer was imprisoned because another engineer was spiteful. You don't consider this a dumb political decision? I consider the default judgment of "everyone goes to the gulags" to be shitty governance, and also quite stupid.
My understanding is Korolev's health greatly declined because of his time while imprisoned, and had he never had to endure it he likely would have lived much longer.
I must point out that username ilyich is a transliterated name likely referring to Lenin – real name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. So ilyich seems to be a fan of USSR.
I read Stephen Kotkin's excellent three part series on Stalin this summer and Kotkin (who is by no means a Soviet apologist; he's a conservative) thinks Stalin was a political genius, a modern Machiavelli. For example, in this interview [1] he explains how Stalin's administration was what he considers a "transcendental work of art" while also explaining how it was psychotic and evil.
I highly recommend Kotkin's books. You can jump into the second, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 if you want to learn more about him as a leader.
Gorbachev saw an totally undemocratic nation that had long flattened out in terms growth and innovation and wanted to make it democratic, he didn't realize that all these rich people in the society had more interest in keeping the system in their control and they had no interest in his vision.
> They are depicted as complete morons by the western propaganda - it's true. But propaganda and reality are two completely different things.
They were not idiots, but their intensives didn't align with the goals of the engineers.
It's well known that the Soviets advanced in the Space race because they neglected people's lives. Cosmonauts were launched in half-baked, hastily assembled spacecraft. It's a gruesome example of iteration.
The quote that explains why it's important to build one Starship a week:
> “A high production rate solves many ills,” he said. “If you have a high production rate, you have a high iteration rate. For pretty much any technology whatsoever, the progress is a function of how many iterations do you have, and how much progress do you make between each iteration. If you have a high production rate then you have many iterations. You can make progress from one to the next.”
It turns out orbital launchers scale rather well with size.
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.
Efficiencies of scale. Too small and you can't pack enough food for the trip or proper redundancies, still too small and you can't build the base fast enough, don't bring enough stuff on the trip and you need to make more trips..which are time limited due to the rendezvous. You end up inclined to 'as big as possible'
Basically to drive down the cost of payload mass as much as possible. First you have to build a lot of rocket to get anything up into space. If it only launches 1kg of payload, that's going to be a very expensive kilogram. As you continue to scale the rocket up, assuming you can design for a decent payload ratio, the amount of cargo capacity increases and the cost per kilogram drops.
People need to live in it. A 1 Kg probe can take some pictures, the tiny Apollo Lunar Module was 16,400Kg and only designed to support 2 people for 75 hours. Meanwhile Mars (3.72 m/s²) has significantly more gravity than the Moon (1.62 m/s²), making a trip back from the surface even more difficult.
Launch vehicles tend to scale payload capacity at a greater rate than dry mass. So a small launch vehicle like RocketLab's Electron might have a wet mass of 12,000kg at launch and an LEO payload capacity of 225kg (225/12000 ~ 1.8% payload), the SpaceX Falcon9 has a wet mass of 550,000kg and an LEO payload capacity of 22,800kg (22800/550000 ~ 4.1% payload).
This just tends to mean that, very generally and with exceptions, larger vehicles can get mass into space with less fuel.
A Falcon 9 has a LEO payload capacity of 22,800kg in expendable mode, something SpaceX does not like to do. The largest payload mass they've carried to LEO was Starlink-2 at approximately 15,600kg (60 satellites at 227 kg each).
The rocket equation [0] disagrees: "In what has been called 'the tyranny of the rocket equation', there is a limit to the amount of payload that the rocket can carry, as higher amounts of propellant increment the overall weight, and thus also increase the fuel consumption"
The pure, theoretical rocket equation still scales linearly, the tyranny lies in the hard limit of how much mass you can theoretically accelerate out of a gravity well per unit off fuel.
But bigger rockets can get closer to that theoretical optimum because some dead weight components remain fixed-size and because some masses scale with surface instead of volume. Rockets can scale better than linearly with size, but they will never exceed the rocket equation.
I'm having a mental blockage on this, as you can always launch 10 rockets at the same time and get 10 times the payload. Having those 10 rockets strapped together should not change the payload of them flying independently.
What am I missing here -- I'm sure I'm overlooking something.
If you strap 10 rockets together, you don't need to keep all 10 copies of some components. You don't need 10 computers, or ten emergency abort systems, or ten communications systems, etc. One large tank will have less mass/volume than 10 small ones, etc.
Interestingly there are couple rockets that are close to "strapping couple rockets together" for various reasons:
The R7 rocket
- mostly to avoid engine ignition in flight & due to having a lot of nozzles you need to fit on a rocket
- this was then kept for Soyuz even after an additional stage has been added that is started in flight
- Soyuz 2V uses a more efficient engine & uses only the central stage
The proton Rocket
- the central tank has the maximum diameter you can ship via rail from the factory to Baykonur
- by mounting smaller tanks around it that are shipped separately you can avoid building an overly long rocket, that could be fragile and unstable
Saturn 1/1B
- basically a stop gap using existing Jupiter and Redstone rocket tankage tooling
- strap 8 Redstone tanks around 1 Jupiter tank and you get the S-I first stage
Delta IV Heavy/Falcon Heavy
- you have a rocket that can launch by itself with smaller payload or by strapping 3 first stages together can launch a bigger payload
- better economies of scale as you can doe more with a single rocket design instead of maintaining 2 separate one (big and small)
- in Falcon Heavy case you can also save all the first stages from more demanding trajectories where you would otherwise have to expend the regular F9 first stage
OTRAG
- make dirt cheap and as simple as possible standardized "rocket tubes"
- strap a lot of them together
- fire and jettison in the right order to achieve orbit (check your staging! ;-) )
While this does work, the Falcon Heavy has convinced Elon not to go into that direction again. Its actually not that simple to strap these together and just making a bigger tank is actually easier.
Poorly for the current market using a FH makes sense, but to break to another level, building one big rocket is better. Both the US Saturn 5 and the Soviet N1 were big single tube vehicles.
Correct. You can (super¹)linearly increase launch mass by adding fuel. The rocket equation hits when you're trying to go farther, rather than more massive.
¹ Superlinear because tank mass scales with a lower exponent than tank volume.
You aren't missing anything, the comment you are responding to is confusing the per unit of fuel payload limit to be the total limit of the rocket. You can add more engines/ use bigger ones which would allow for more fuel and thus more payload( in theory at least).
That's correct so far. Now think further: a single, larger rocket has the advantage of leaving away the tank walls that would be in the inside now. Less mass needed for the tank walls (the outer walls need to become stronger though), more available for payload, extra fuel and oxidizer or extra stuff like things needed for reusability.
This makes total sense to me. If you can solve the hardest problems, it is reasonable to expect that you can solve the rest as well. If you fail at solving the hardest problems, the system will not work anyway.
The science, then, lies in identifying the hardest problems. The art lies in identifying people who can solve these problems.
No, not in aerospace. The common approach is to spend years designing, simulating, and then actual tests come at the very end, and sometimes you don't even test because you can't or it would be too expensive. That's what Boeing are doing with their own rockets; Mars missions until now didn't really go through an iterative process; satellites are usually manufactured only by one and they better work once in orbit.
SpaceX built an incredible custom simulator in order to design the methane engines used in Starship[1]. Right now they are experimenting with manufacturing techniques, which is much less amenable to simulation
Elon has stressed this. Design is easy, building is hard, building at scale is harder. Thus the reason he iterates on the design is to make each design iteration also an iteration in the manufacturability, not just the functional design.
You're telling me we went to the moon on the first try? We went into space on the first try? The Wright brothers were successful on their first flight?
Simulation is not the same as trial and error. There's no such thing as a perfect simulation, and imperfect simulations without real world testing and iteration result in disasters. There are many examples, but the Mars probe that crashed because of a unit conversion error comes to mind.
You're not differentiating between an iterative design process, during which failures are expected, and a monolithic one where the end product is final. When Starships blow up, Musk can build new ones and try again. When the probe crashed, that was the end of the mission and there was no more Mars Climate Orbiter. It was a one-off. This is a common problem in spaceflight.
The Webb Space Telescope is another example. If it eventually does launch and something goes wrong, we'll have paid >$10 billion for absolutely nothing. These aren't trial and error because the designs are never improved based on the errors. They're just scrapped. SpaceX works in a fundamentally different way.
They are not that different from other space startups.
> "We succeeded in launching the rocket," Zhang told the media. "The experience we gained from evaluating the rocket's flight conditions will help us remodel the rocket as well as advance new rocket research and development."
When's the last time that someone tested a series of satellites (or launch vehicles), with a number of up-front failures? Prior to SpaceX, of course. To me it looks like that sort of iterative trial-and-error design process died with the end of the space race.
For instance, looking at LandSpace - that quote relates to the launch of Zhuque-1, of which there has never been a repeat despite a maiden flight in 2018, and Wikipedia says that a second flight ever happening is doubtful. The company's second launch (and probably any after that, too) will likely be with a completely different, liquid-fuelled design.
THAT's what failure normally looks like in aerospace. Whoops, we fucked up, and so now that design never flies again, or the company goes bankrupt, or everyone panics and goes through a massive design review because everything was supposed to be perfect and now obviously it wasn't.
You make it sound that everything that may involve an "error", however small (that is, absolutely everything) is "trial and error". This is not what most people mean - I argue that interpretation would make the whole concept meaningless.
In this context, "trial and error" means SpaceX builds things out and tests them in real-life not virtually (as opposed to others that tend to validate things virtually for much longer before actually building stuff).
You jest, but he actually does it. Executing the right idea is the value, not the idea.
Everyone else is cush and doesn't want to rock the boat (SLS, legacy automaker leadership, etc). For those, innovation has no incentive. "Innovator's dilemma" [1] and all that jazz.
Disclaimer: Not a huge Musk fan anymore, "world's least worst billionaire", but credit where credit due. I don't endorse sweat shops, but he has teached a cohort to yearn for the vast and endless sea. He is a salesperson first, and he is selling the dream.
Let's be objective: SpaceX has radically lowered the cost to get to Earth orbit, and commands a majority of the worldwide launch market. They are simply more efficient than other launch providers, so much so that they are branching out into global communications (StarLink) to capture more revenue (global comms is 10x the market size of the launch market). They don't need to go to the Moon to succeed. There is no market to get to the Moon unless nation states make one. Musk is building his own market for Mars logistics demand.
> SpaceX's market share increased rapidly. In 2016, SpaceX had 30% global market share for newly awarded commercial launch contracts, in 2017 the market share reached 45%, and 65% in 2018.
Tesla, according to the opinion of a single auto industry expert, has a 7 year head start against legacy automakers [1]. They sell every vehicle they build, and combined, legacy automakers have shed almost 40k jobs in the last year as they attempt to transition to building EVs to compete against Tesla.
A reasonable person might conclude these metrics indicate an achievement of some level of success.
I don't disagree that SpaceX has been successful. I just disagree that this trial and error methodology is some radical new thinking from Musk—it's not.
Nobody says he has invented trial end error, but every single person that worked in aerospace would tell you that they simply don't work like the other companies in many ways.
And with the Starship, they have gone to an extreme that even for SpaceX seems crazy.
There are tons and tons of interviews and podcasts with experienced people who worked there. Listing to those that came over from NASA is specially interesting.
Slightly off-topic but apart from Mars-related things, I don't think are appreciating how big of a deal Starship/Super Heavy will be.
Because space is hard and expensive, when designing payloads, they also have to be over-engineered to make sure you're getting the most out of your ride, which then makes the rockets over-engineered and expensive to make sure they don't blow up carrying the precious cargo. It's a positive feedback loop. So we end up with incredible telescopes like Hubble or James Webb, but it's literally a once-in-a-generation event. There's no tolerance for failure, so budgets and timelines ballon.
What if you knew you could get a cheap ride anywhere anytime? Why not mass-produce slightly lower quality telescopes instead of these masterpieces. The JWST's successor is LUVOIR, slated for sometime in the 2040s (!!), why not build a dozens JWST-like telescopes and use interferometry to build giant telescopes larger than the earth with higher light-gathering ability than even ground-based telescopes? This is the technique used by Event Horizon Telescope to capture the first picture of a black hole last year.
> What if you knew you could get a cheap ride anywhere anytime?
That's exactly the premise of Starlink. SpaceX know they can launch those things 100x cheaper (1000x ?) than ever before in history, so they're churning them out and throwing them up. Even though the ones going up right now aren't "finished" it doesn't matter, because replacing them with new and better ones is so cheap.
400 Starlink satellites per Starship launch costing $2M is $5,000 per satellite per launch. Basically nothing compared to the eventual mass-produced cost to make each satellite which might be $100,000.
Musk recently said that they need to get Starship working because the launch cost on Falcon 9 is already exceeding the cost of the launched Starlink satellites. With a launch cost of approximately $30M and 60 satellites, they are already at $500k per satellite at most.
> Purpose is so hard to come by now because we all don't know what we want. When we do know, we're constantly unsure about it.
This statement resonates deeply with me.
Whenever I meet someone new or that I might be interested in dating I ask "What are you doing with your life?" or "What are you striving for?" and I find the extreme majority of people don't have an answer beyond "I just go to a job I don't really like"
It seems very few people are seriously driven and motivated and living a life where they're pushing hard to achieve something great.
Why do they have to? I have that drive, but my wife is perfectly happy with a calm, comfortable, stress-free life. And in fact it helps to bring me back down to Earth sometimes also.
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?
Wow, I think you really misunderstood me. I'm not saying anyone has to do anything, I just said it's really inspiring to see people that are passionate, and are driven and motivated about something. And I want people like that in my life.
I'm not saying I want an Elon Musk for a partner, I'm saying it's inspiring, and I'm drawn to people that actually have a purpose and a reason to get out of bed, and they're striving for something. Maybe it's take a month off to ski tour around Mt. Logan this spring. Maybe it's sail around the Northwest passage, or maybe it's learning a new language. Maybe it's getting up early every day to do Yoga.
Anything, really.
I'm just saying I feel like a lot of people these days have nothing that they're striving for. They just go to work, and go home, and aren't even particularly happy about it. If you asked them what the point is they don't even have an answer. If you ask them what they will have achieved in 5 or 10 years, they have nothing. They're not even trying to do anything.
> Especially at times when I'm wound so tight I feel like I could pop.
It's a mistake to think that to be driven and passionate and motivated about something also means you have to be wound tightly. I've never spent time with anyone that is wound tightly, and I can't imagine how difficult that would be.
EDIT: Replying to your comment lower down - I absolutely DO NOT ever ask anyone what their plan to change the world is, and I never said anything like that above. I ask them what they're passionate about, and what they're striving towards. That doesn't have to be change the world.
The question posed was why do they Have to? Not why Should they.
Of course we need people driven to move society forward. But there is a stigma in modern society it seems around people who are perfectly happy being who they are and not "striving to be great". And that's ridiculous.
The previous poster asks all his potential dates, with what seems to be a fairly heavy helping of disdain for the "wrong answer", what their plan to change the world is.
Why does it matter? You go change the world. Let your spouse or your friends or your colleagues be content with not changing the world and just be happy living in it.
I'm not saying this is wrong or right, but perhaps some people feel everyone has a duty to do something meaningful to push society forward, otherwise they are essentially free-riding on everyone else's sacrifices.
And that something may very well be as broad a goal as "do your very best, everyday".
Sure, you can't force people to see the world through that same lens, but you can certainly pick partners based on traits which you admire, ambition / grit presumably being one of such traits.
I'm not. I'm just judging him for doing so. Which is wrong. I shouldn't have phrased it like that. I guess that stigma in society around people who are perfectly happy being happy and don't feel the need to "be great" is sensitive to me because my wife constantly receives a lot of crap for it.
So you be you, previous poster. Just don't look down on others who don't want to change the world.
I think this is what inspires me about spacex/musk, too. I'm not convinced there's a rational, utilitarian justification for settling Mars. But is there anything wrong with doing it solely for the purpose of having a grand purpose in the face of infinite uncertainty and doubt?
It's definitely very difficult. I'm striving to learn a new language,improve at chess and olympic weightlifting but that's a much lower level of purpose than building spaceships to reach Mars. I hope that I can find something in my career that fuels a burning desire like some of the SpaceX employees
> I'm striving to learn a new language, improve at chess and olympic weightlifting
Not that my opinion matters, but I think those are fantastic goals to strive for. If it's making you happy to challenge yourself, go for it!
THAT is exactly the purpose I'm talking about vs. someone that doesn't try at anything and doesn't have any idea what they'd like to do, or achieve, or improve in the next 10 years.
> I hope that I can find something in my career that fuels a burning desire like some of the SpaceX employees
I've accepted I won't find that kind of career, so I to do it in my outside life (like you are!)
> It's quite inspiring to see a real goal and drive towards it.
I'm throughly uninspired... As a friend of mine once said: "progress when you're going the wrong direction, is turning around".
The idea that we'll settle Mars while the Earth burns in borderline sinister. It reminds me of the elite outpost from Kingsman (the movie).
We have a planet that is in dire need of this kind of motivated action, and yet Elon would rather be distracted by this dream.
Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the "cool" factor of expanding to other planets. I too enjoy a good science fiction story. Who wouldn't want to escape the problems we've inherited, and proliferated.
But escapism solves nothing for "us", and it's foolish to think Mars is anything else. If we as humans can't live on Earth responsibly, we frankly don't deserve to exist at all.
(Perhaps we should pull a Titan A.E., and preserve some DNA in the vast wasteland of space. Just in case an alien species decides to give us another go)
> We have a planet that is in dire need of this kind of motivated action, and yet Elon would rather be distracted by this dream.
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.
The person who is doing this is also very concerned with the state of affairs on Earth.
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's a fair point, and I'm not trying to say everything Elon is doing is bad or wrong. I wish his other projects got even a fraction of the attention his space project gets.
Why are you reacting strongly to the topic of Mars or maybe Musk in general? Fixing Earth and going to Mars are not mutually exclusive and beside that there are a lot of billionaires doing far less useful things for humanity. Complaining that they could do something more useful would be more understandable, imo.
That line of thinking is next to insane. You should be happy he is not somewhere on the yaht drinking $20K whine every night.
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...
The technology developed for Mars will improve life on Earth, in ways we can't even imagine.
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.
It's sad that you think your priorities should be everyones' priorities. Find like-minded people and get to work. But what people get inspired of is none of your business to judge.
>If we as humans can't live on Earth responsibly, we frankly don't deserve to exist at all.
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.
Instead of being fatalistic and bemoaning the problem, you'll find yourself in a better mental space if you just apply yourself to solving it. Yes, you will only start with small steps, and yes, that will be a great risk, but in the end it the only chance we have of making things work.
Fixing climate change is a political problem first of all. A very different set of talents is needed here.
You'll have to convince or force people to change their priorities. First is probably not possible, due to the slow moving nature of the threat, second has its own drawbacks as well.
> As a friend of mine once said: "progress when you're going the wrong direction, is turning around".
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.
The discussion started out as "is it better to do something, or do nothing at all", which is outside of morals, but more about motivation and actually doing something.
Obviously if it's a horrible moral choice (i.e. Hitler) then sure, it's best if nothing is done.
In the very vast majority of cases ( build a better car, spaceship, software, grow better food, get fitter, learn a new language, help our community, be a better friend, etc. etc.), then doing something is much, much preferable to not even trying.
The topic of better vs worse, or good vs evil is the very basis of morality.
"Morality (noun): principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior."
I encourage you to think more deeply about your argument. I struggle to agree that the "very vast majority of cases" are positive.
It sounds to me like you are sensitive to apathy and/or nihilism. I can understand that, especially these days, but just because it feels like nothing is being done doesn't mean things can't get worse.
I suspect any reasons you'll come up with are all still less urgent than the needs of our Earth.
I've heard the argument about learning to control the climate through taraforming (or whatever you want to call it), but I'm completely unconvinced that is an efficient method.
I'd be willing to be convinced otherwise, but I'm very skeptical.
This is a spectacular gamble, however Musk has a track record and I think Superheavy/Starship will pay off with unpredictable dividends.
But the elephant in the room that Musk appears to be ignoring is the life sciences side of things. Only 12 humans have sortied outside the Van Allen belts (which protect us from the deep space radiation environment). Nobody has spent more than 18 consecutive months in space or reduced gravity, and we know there are biological changes that affect astronauts. The same goes triple for the plants and bacteria and fungi (never mind animals) we depend on for agriculture, and a closed-loop agricultural system and air plant is implicit in Musk's goal of a self-sufficient colony on Mars. We haven't even repeated the (failed) Biosphere 2 experiment.
We need the giant payload capacity before we can test the life sciences problems in a realistic manner (small and ferociously expensive lab experiments on the ISS are useful but fail Musk's iteration test because the lead time for running one is measured in years if not decades).
So we won't know if a Mars colony is even possible until some time after Musk builds the ships to put one there.
Then we'll merely go to the Moon. :-) (And LEO and the Lagrange points.)
You raise a good point IMO in re: viability of space. In the limit it may turn out that humans can't live anywhere but on or near the surface of Earth. What is certain is that living in space will suck for many years, or likely decades. It will be like living in a mine, but there are more things that can kill you and you're much much further from fresh air and safe ground. And I suspect living on Mars would suck anyway just due to the ~0.4G surface gravity. At least on the Moon you can go home (in a few days rather than lots of months) or fly like a bird under your own power if your cave is big enough. ("The Menace from Earth", Heinlein; "Welcome to Moonbase", Bova)
But even if we can't live there it's still really useful and important to go: micro-gravity manufacturing; robotic asteroid mining; science...
I hope we can live in space, I want to colonize the galaxy. (The green galaxy on the cover of "The Millennial Project" book is one of the more compelling images I've personally ever seen. A photosynthesizing galaxy...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Coloni... )
But even if we can't go at all these rockets are really important!
This is why I like to draw a distinction between space exploration and space colonization. The former is definitely within the realm of possibility, using existing technology (never mind the Superheavy/Starship system).
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.
It's one of those things, robots are much less romantic than astronauts, but they make so much more sense it's not even a contest.
I wonder how starry-eyed Elon Musk really is in re: Mars colonization? I know for myself that it was hard to admit robots make more sense (at least at first).
One interesting idea I heard: Send starships in pairs. When in interplanetary coast attach each at the nose with a long (300+m) tether. Use RCS to start a spin. You can then simulate 1G the entire way.
Starships sitting on Earth are under compression. Starships hanging from one another's nose via a tether are presumably under tension, unless the tether is somehow anchored to the engine support structure at the base of each vehicle. So some non-trivial structural modifications would be required.
I'm not sure how big of a gamble that is. If he gets Starship into orbit he can start getting serious revenue from Starlink. Then he needs to transfer fuel in orbit to send cargo to the moon and mars. At that point he can send people and the return trip after two years will basically be free because some Starships will be returning to Earth anyway. I'm pretty sure he can get enough guinea pigs to commit to a 2-year trip. Then you iterate on the next batch of guinea pigs. Maybe he sends retirees who don't have that much life expectancy anyways.
What about the sci-fi ships that rotate very quickly and use the momentum as a form of false gravity - iirc, the basic physics seems legit (I recall an Einstein thought experiment along those lines). Or: use the acceleration/deceleration to create gravity. Are they impractical to build or power?
> 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.
O'Neill's colony design is flawed (and needs updating): in particular they had huge glassed-in window areas to admit sunlight (focussed via reflectors) for agriculture: he didn't account for differential heating-induced expansion/shrinkage.
On the other hand, he didn't have modern CAD back in the early 1970s. So in principle we can come up with something better.
The biggest problem is exposure to cosmic radiation -- L5 is way outside the Van Allen belts and high energy cosmic rays take roughly a metre of water to attenuate, or magnetic fields of 10-20 Tesla strength around the spacecraft. Which is a lot of mass (or a ridiculously strong magnetic field).
It's could be simple, flexible, easy to construct or modify, and resilient
to impacts. I'm not an engineer or scientist though.
- - - -
A tangent, if I may...
I think we need more near-term hard sci-fi set in the future that e.g.
Musk's space trucks are about to enable, to get more people excited and
involved.
I've been trawling through Netflix and cable recently looking for
inspiring, even-slightly-realistic sci-fi and it's a barren desert out
there. There are a handful of shows that aren't bad, and I've heard good
things about "Black Mirror". One the other hand, I watched a clip of
"Star Trek: Discovery" the other day and had a minor apoplexy. It's more
like a cartoon than the actual cartoon.
In contrast, I have a "100 Sci-Fi Movies" DVD set that my sister got me
for Christmas one year, and a lot of the older black & white sci-fi
movies are practically documentaries for space exploration and
colonization. Sure there are silly aliens and such, but the technology
and settings are realistic (at least compared to e.g. Star Trek or Star
Wars.)
I think some concrete visions of what it might actually be like to
attempt to build and live on a moonbase or Mars colony would inspire
people to want to really do it.
Well, for context, it seems, that he know, that the whole thing is not so easy ...
"“I’ll probably be long dead before Mars becomes self-sustaining, but I’d like to at least be around to see a bunch of ships land on Mars,” Musk said."
I assume that an "all-hands" meeting at 1AM means an all-hands for everybody working the night shift, not the entire staff. Yes, shift work sucks, but that doesn't necessarily mean overwork.
I don't think it's abusing workers if it's perfectly clear to everyone before they get on board what they're signing up for. I think most people applying for those jobs are dying (figuratively) to get in on it because it's such a unique opportunity to work on something big, hightech and exciting.
This part of the article is about shifts for assembly workers:
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.
Or he doesn't care about burnout. Because of the branding of how cool space is, and robotic missions that actually advance the science not being as sexy, he has a fresh supply of excited people (rant about the science vs the sensation). Knowing former SpaceX employees informs that.
I think that schedule actually sounds pretty great. I mean, it wouldn't work in my life now because I have kids and a dog and whatnot, but in my 20s? I'd have done 36-72-72-36 in a heartbeat. Imagine always looking forward to a three or four day weekend!
I'm happy with my 9-to-5 schedule now -- I can stop work at a specific time, and mostly stop worrying. Mostly. But it's not the same kind of freedom as knowing that the weekend has started, and that there is a multi-day period where you can start forgetting about that whole world (barring emergencies, of course).
Rotating between three and FOUR-day weekends? Wow.
If you want to change history, you'll put up with a brutal working schedule.
If you want a cushy 9-5 job, just apply to the nice big corporation down the street. At the end of the day, you just go home and enjoy your comfy bunny slippers.
This sounds suspiciously identical to a tweet Elon posted last year that went 'viral', including the bit about how people working 9-5 (like that even exists at most corps today) as somehow being 'weak'.
If you want to change history for the better you will do the better for the people now. Putting up with brutal working schedule reminds me of the coal mines of England on industrial revolution, no coal mine owner or worker from that time comes to my mind now.
I've noticed in my life, over the last 20 years, a strong correlation between companies being successful, which means, making money so they can keep paying their employees, and concerns with those companies making their employees work too hard or for too little.
Maybe this problem can be solved, by changing the system, but unless you are in a situation where you can avoid competition, until the system is changed companies may have to do some degree of hard work to survive.
You require a significant amount of equity and board seats assigned to employees or their representatives, so they share in the gains and have control over the direction of the org.
That just means that the employees are more likely to be well taken care of. This intuitively would suggest the company is more likely to be successful, but i think GP's observation is that the opposite might be what we actually see in practice. At least right now.
The model I suggest is used in Germany, and works well for both the business and the workers. On a smaller scale, Costco implements something similar in the US with positive results (Customers and employees before shareholders, but shareholders still profit).
I'd rather have something like a engineering corps that could keep engineers employees during recessions when the private sector can't afford it. Almost like and engineering reserve. I'd rather have the stability than more profit.
I agree! The US did this as part of the New Deal [1], it was called the Works Progress Administration (WPA) [2], making the federal government the largest employer at the time. You'd want to integrate that with employee unions; during good times, businesses work with unions to source labor. During hard times, the government steps in as the employer of last resort, using cheap nation state debt issuance to fund infrastructure projects to fill in private investment gaps. You of course then have to pay back that debt with taxes when the economy is booming again.
The overarching goal is to have a "backup" of humanity so to speak. Having some of society living on Mars so that if something were to happen to Earth, humanity wouldn't cease to exist. Settling Antarctica doesn't solve that problem.
I'm a huge Musk fan and would love to see us settle mars.
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?
Antarctic city is good. I like underwater cities personally.
A decent depth of water is very good protection against an awful lot of stuff, including almost anything Mars would be good for, and if you still love space, any technology we build to live deep in the ocean can probably be reused on Europa.
It's also, to bring it back to the 'iteration' discussion way way easier to iterate building underwater cities than building habitats on Mars.
Yeah, exactly. Problem is 'underwater base' is probably too easy to build. Within a few years you'd be asking people to actually live there and then ... well good luck motivating employees with that vision!
About the only thing that'd make it harder to survive on Earth than on Mars is a planetoid-sized impactor. For anything else a few hardened, isolated bunkers would be a hell of a lot cheaper than colonizing Mars, at least as effective at improving human survivability, and we could start building them today.
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.
Now, now, the fact that the sky is full of great big fucking rocks that occasionally fall out of it and hit the Earth has only been known for about two hundred years
> 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.
If you want weekly updates about SpaceX's progress, and about space science and the space industry in general, I write a newsletter for just that purpose: https://orbitalindex.com
I wonder how they handle differences in plans/knowledge/outlook between the 4 shifts. I can totally see the AM team working towards different quality standards or designs than the Evening team because they never talk to one another.
That was my first thought as well - how does the spiritus movens behind both Tesla and SpaceX have the bandwidth to pull off that level of (micro)management?
Once working on an important project (and the work went round the clock), Sergei Korolev ordered people to literally wake him up at night if some serious questions or problems surfaced up. His team took that literally, and Korolev was woken up a few times at night. Later he said "you seem to conspired to not let me get some sleep", but nobody was fired[1], and the team still adjusted to a balance between importance of problem visibility and importance of getting rest.
Sorry for no references, writing from memory :) .
[1] Firing in Korolev's team was a whole 'nother story entirely. For example, Korolev used to fire people in the morning only to require them to work extra hard in the same afternoon. The team got used to this feature. In reality, nobody wanted to be fired - people saw the importance of their work.
Two things. Yes he does, but despite his management style, not because of it. And no, he doesn't have the bandwidth people think he has. That is part of his narrative, and that narrative, more than anything else, keeps his companies afloat.
Not to forget that he misses a ton of deadlines and constantly moves the goal posts. Helps in beating expectations.
So we've accepted that we're never going to find life on Mars, and that there's no concern of "contamination"? Or is this just a big plan to build a city in the first bit of "unspoilt" wilderness we can find off planet?
I hope he gets to solve the terraforming part of going to Mars, as well.
Also, maybe he sets his eyes on colonizing the ocean space on Earth - lots of empty space in the water.
Bezos and Musk are both waxing romantic about saving the human species with space colonization, it does sort of encompass a large number of our problems!
His media narrative is about being the visionary genius who will propel humanity to the next era--working on the big problems in a flashy way has the side effect of being pretty great for your public regard, and therefore most likely your ego. Being a Reddit manbaby and working on big, next-era goals are not mutually exclusive.
And where did I say he was working on all problems?
I was talking about the general psyche of tolerating abusive assholes ( ie. Steve Jobs ) and eccentric renaissance man who we "know" will crash and burn but we rationalize it like "we'll get some indirect benefits, just like the whole NASA thing" or "at least the trains run on time".
There are justified reasons behind this, but also a lot of excuses. The whole Elon fever is something between Steve Jobs and the usual Hollywood actor talking politics on stage.
The only reason why we have the prosperity that we have today is because inventive people built things that people like you said were not worth the time.
>The only reason why we have the prosperity that we have today is because inventive people built things that people like you said were not worth the time.
Does it? Do you have some examples? As far as I can tell, societal progress moves slowly and incrementally, with many people contributing by building on the works of others.
Automobiles were developed over hundreds of years. What was the skepticism there?
>Lightbulb
Edison "invented" the first commercial bulb in 1879. The first electric lights were created in the early 1800s.
>Printing press
People were trying to find ways to print books for centuries. Copying them was laborious. Some random monk claiming hand-writing to be morally superior doesn't change that.
"first lightbulb", "first automobile", "first airplane flight", "first color photograph" etc. are always arbitrary thresholds; much ink has been spilled over who, when, and where; over what exactly makes a lightbulb or whatever else. "First rocket" was probably constructed & launched around the time of gunpowder invention, i.e., in the 9th century China. That's not quite the same as reliably getting cargo & crew to the ISS.
In contrast, "first commercially successful" is about as clear-cut case of inventiveness and crossing a threshold as there can be: the product was made worth more than its costs, and thus became viable for large scale deployment. Whether by one big change or accretion of several smaller ones. Some key inventions regarded manufacturing process rather than the end product itself, and thus are easily lost on a casual observer.
Commercially viable means a fleeting dream got turned into an ever growing reality for us all. To wit, we already have had some /nuclear fusion reactors/ up and running. But we will only perceive it as a real thing when it becomes commercially viable.
I agree with you, but this isn't really a counter-argument; it bolsters my point.
The examples the OP gives of things that were coinsidered "not worth the time" were, in fact, so desired that the time between "first" and "first commercial" was sometimes spread over tens or even hundreds of years.
These were not things that skeptics wanted thrown in the dustbin, but instead a Great Man worked on to bring them to fruition. They were fine tuned over long periods by many people.
We have this weird thing where you can find a quote by some monk, or Steve Ballmer and the iPhone and we think, "No one believed!" But there is plenty of evidence (judging by time from "first" to "first commercial" ) that people saw value from day one. The iPhone was a big step, but itself was still just an iteration. That's how progress works.
The total mass launched to orbit is currently in the order of 500 tons per year. To start a colony on Mars, millions of tons of material would need to be shipped there from Earth. This massive launch capacity is why they want to build so many ships and creating an assembly line is how they want to do it.
Cool story bro but let's just think for a minute, why do you need an assembly line of spaceships now/near future when you don't even have one? when you ARE far away from sending an human to orbit Mars, let alone land one there? I'm talking about the actual realist act of doing that, not a pseudo Hollywood story of sending a "suicide mission", for what? Seriously, for what? When the day comes ( it never will, in those terms ) I want to see who actually steps up.
All of this assembly line talk is "idea guy" talk trying to keep all the plates spinning. Mars is just a pretext for other more mundane/ego/profit driven things.
And what I criticize is this mass stupidity driven romanticism where nobody calls him out on his Starship sized bullshit.
Humans are not adapted to live in space either. But because of a couple brave people, we now know a little about how to counteract zero gravity's degradation on the body (Bone and muscle loss -> stricter workout regiment). Bound to fail in the long term is quite the statement to make given our ability to build tools based on data that could increase our chance of survival.
Low gravity is one thing. But the radiation outside the Earth's magnetic field is quite another. People colonizing Mars will need to shield themselves from several types of harmful radiation. Wich means in practice: living underground.
Agreed. You could cover your above-ground pressurized habitat with blocks of ice. Or with a thick layer of dirt. But the subjective experience remains about the same as living underground.
There are a lot of people who live indoors almost 100% of the time in the winter in northern climates. A lot of the larger northern cities have underground walkways between buildings with subway access etc. No one wants to even walk across the street when it's 40 below. :)
I expect that designs for 'permanently underground/inside' cities would need to include some high-ceiling park-like areas with some bright UV lights, and other considerations, but that sort of thing seems pretty doable. Whether it would be enough to maintain a population's mental heath I guess would need to be seen, but generally speaking I think humans are a pretty adaptable bunch...
> I expect that designs for 'permanently underground/inside' cities would need to include some high-ceiling park-like areas with some bright UV lights, and other considerations, but that sort of thing seems pretty doable.
Definitely doable. But then there's no longer any special appeal to living on Mars, as opposed to: living in rotating space habitats among the asteroids.
If we reformulate Musk's goal as being: "Create off-site backups of human civilization", then I think asteroid mining & space habitats have a better shot at bootstrapping this process than colonizing Mars.
Once we are leveled up this way in resources and technology, building settlements on Mars can be a side-effect of this outcome. Just like the burgeoning scientific outposts on Antarctica are a side-effect of our current civilization.
I like the idea - why waste all that energy going up and down, and missing out on swimming in zero g? :)
But rotating space habitats might not be as good at replacing gravity as some think. Even with the really-huge 'O'Niell cylinder' scale (8 kilometers diameter), coriolis effects would be noticeable. I suspect a number of industrial processes would be affected by it.
I expect some of the major industrial processes will still need/want to be done on a big pile of rock or sand, rather than in a more fragile object that inherently wants to explode and fling apart all the time :).
The magnetic field is, by far, the easiest problem. There are many other unsolved problems, but that isn’t one of them.
Now I’m working if making a very large current loop on the ground would double up as a launch/landing system where the planet itself is the reaction mass…
(Probably not; the chances are the requirements for safety and reaction are orders of magnitude different from each other).
We're not biologically adapted for surviving in Siberia, but we manage it. Hell, you'll get hypothermia on the French Riviera in winter without clothes.
Technology has always been our way of expanding into spaces we're not otherwise evolved to cope with.
> Almost no one wants to live permanently in Antarctica.
I mean, that's at least in part because you can't on a legal level. There's no private property rights and any of the Antarctic Treaty participants has the right to enter and inspect any installation on the continent. It's a set of research stations, not a colony.
Siberia has other problems similar to Mars. Water is frozen, so you have to melt it (as on Mars). Growing seasons are short (similar to the sunlight issue, which we've solved on Earth with grow lights...).
Focusing on the "Mars has more things to solve" thing continues to ignore the point.
But you don't need to go to Siberia for Earth to be extremely difficult to survive in.
Wherever you are, if you lack technology your chance of surviving is very low. Without clothing, housing, fire, tools it's very, very hard to survive anywhere on Earth.
The only reason life is so safe and pleasant right now on this planet is because we changed our environment to make it so.
If we were to survive on Mars, we would have to do the same. The advantage with Mars is that we wouldn't have to start from scratch.
The alternative is we either go extinct on earth or find another earth-like planet to go to, which won't have humans on in and may not be able to support us any better than mars
Unfortunately, due to Mars' lower gravity and lack of a magnetically active core, not only can it not hold a substantial atmosphere to begin with, any such atmosphere would inevitably be blown away by solar winds.
So there's that. Maybe we can put a big dome around the whole thing like Planet Druidia.
The timeline for that process is millennia, so if we come up with a continual process for replenishment that works on shorter timeframes, it's maintainable.
> MAVEN measurements indicate that the solar wind strips away gas at a rate of about 100 grams (equivalent to roughly 1/4 pound) every second. "Like the theft of a few coins from a cash register every day, the loss becomes significant over time," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "We've seen that the atmospheric erosion increases significantly during solar storms, so we think the loss rate was much higher billions of years ago when the sun was young and more active.”
The entire solar system is an inherently unstable construct. Luckily for us the instability is on a scale of billions of years. Terraforming mars would be similar. It would be a herculean effort that would take several lifetimes to complete, but the result could be stable on the scale of millions of years without further input. With a bit of maintenance it could well be stable for the life of the solar system.
Genuinely curious, is it possible to make atmosphere in Mars just like in Earth? Isn't this because of Earth's unique gravity that we have an atmosphere? I'm not a physicist so please excuse my ignorance.
Also, the thing we do not have an earth like planet in a reasonable distance to settle. We have a few candidates that might be earth-like from the few scraps of date we have been able to gleam about them, but all are many light years away, which is much MUCH more mindbogglingly farther than the ~9 months of flight time our probes can already do today to reach Mars.
Ability to survive nuclear war. He doesn't just want to settle, he wants to settle with a self-sustaining colony. It's a contingency plan.
We've almost plunged the world into nuclear holocaust a couple times before. India and Pakistan are at each other's throats, and rising ethnonationalist populism and climate change are threatening to strain these tensions further. This is a real risk.
I'd buy into Musk's Mars bullshit if he built a sealed self-contained colony in New Mexico. We have experience with two long term space habitats, Mir and the ISS. Despite all of the engineering know how that built both shit breaks on them all the time and needs to be repaired. They also need regular resupply because they're nowhere near self sufficient. They also need a Soyuz capsule docked at all times in case they need to evacuate.
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'm happy Musk _is_ obsessed. The world would be a worse off place without SpaceX and Tesla, who both are what they are to a large extent because of him.
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.
The momentum of civilisation is meandering and spread. The few humans burning their own path are straightforward and fateful, there seems to be more change happening once there's a single individual behind it, but perhaps only because more change in every direction seems less than the pure firethrodden path of the single individual.
Unfortunately, the science and technology involved is nowhere near ready for a Starship-style push to be feasible. That's not even mentioning the legal environment.
Let’s hypothesise sufficient brain scans. I think even that is a way off yet?
Is a backup of your mind protected by the right to avoid self-incrimination? What about the minds of your pets?
Does a backup need to be punished (e.g. prison) if the person it is made from is punished? What if the offence occurred after the backup was made?
If the mind state is running rather than offline cold-storage, how many votes do all the copies get? What if they’re allowed to diverge?
If you memorise something and then get backed up, is that copyright infringement?
If a mind can run on silicon for less than the cost of food to keep a human healthy, can anyone other than the foremost mind in their respective field ever be employed?
If someone is backed up then the original is killed by someone who knows they were backed up, is that murder or the equivalent of a serious assault that causes a small duration of amnesia?
I suspect we have a few groups. Those who drank the kool-aid and liked it. Those who used to believe in it but after abuse are now stuck in an endless cycle where they have no time for job searches. And those that never drank the kool-aid and will leave after getting time on their resume.
It takes a great mix of super smarts and super stupid to work there.
I think that's pretty much accurate, and what I saw when I was at the Job Faire in Browning last month, most were surprised by how extensive my experience was before I applied to get there: I worked for one of Kimbal's companies, I did a short stint at the Mars Desert Research Station, and got to know the Director and was asked to come back under her on a crewed mission etc...
Most were there to dip there toes and see what it was all like, but some of us were kool-aid drinkers for sure.
I met a SpaceX engineer in S. OC at an inn/out years ago and struck up a chat and the way he spoke about it was inspiring; despite the commute, long hours, fears of possibly going bankrupt before every launch (this was before Falcon 9 was recoverable) he seemed very fulfilled: like this is what he was here to do.
I got to stay after hours and hang out with some the crew in Browning as they were having dinner-lunch and it was the same vibe--smiles everywhere and just a really warm and inviting environment as you knew you among similar 'crazies.' I'm not sure if its cult-like or not but it was one of those rare moments I've had in Life where people genuinely wouldn't want to be anywhere else than where they are.
Money can't really buy that, and that is probably why I'm so drawn to it. If you're there trying to have a cushy work-life balance in any Musk corp you're deluding yourself.
> There is some segment of the population that would pity your perspective as the disillusionment of an abused spouse. I don't. I get it.
Thanks, I often wonder if this is healthy practice myself as it can be rather personally-abusive to be so mission-centric, but then I see the consequences of the alternative: consider how many people in the US alone consume psychotropic drugs just to cope with depression despite having access to so much of everything but being so inherently listless and distracted.
I won't bemoan about the pitfalls about the Human Condition, but I will say that despite the hardships and loss I still see this as a worthwhile endeavor and wish to be part of it all, especially when you understand the implications it may have for the Species if we get this right.
Which right now as we're seeing the blow-back of something significant (albeit minor in the grand scheme of outbreaks) like Coronavirus is really alarming.
No engineer that works at SpaceX and is actually good at what s/he does would have an issue finding a job somewhere else. Having SpaceX on your resume is a guaranteed door opener. Everyone that I knew did it because they believed in the company's mission. Eventually, many went on to other places, many others kept on.
My guess is that an engineer who can build space stations has every employment option in his field that he could wish for. Wave with SpaceX's employer's reference letter and get the job, basically.
Working at a Musk company usually is, from what I've heard, a rigorous, fast-moving and stressful experience. It's expected, from the top all the way down, that people move really fast and push really hard.
So, given that, here's my question: is it not well known, ahead of time, that's the environment? How many people are truly surprised once they hire on?
I've been a long-time fan of most of Musk's work, acknowledging that the man is deeply flawed.
Yet even though I personally believe in most of what Musk wants to accomplish, I will never work at any of his companies, even though I'm quite qualified for several roles in each.
I believe in the mission, but my personal and family time is even more important to me.
Note that all of the above is, roughly, talking about salaried/technical/management positions, and not, roughly, about hourly.
The word "Starship" means specifically that the ship is capable of traveling between stars. At a minimum, it should travel from it's home star to the nearest neighboring star.
What we're talking about here are "Spaceships".
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The only way I can lighten up and enjoy the name Starship in this context is to assume it's being used ironically... like someone who's named their cat "Dog".
There are other vehicles called "Starship" that aren't actual starships either - the Beechcraft Starship (a twin-engined turboprop pusher aircraft) or "The Starship" (a Boeing 720 used by Led Zeppelin and other bands). It's a proper noun chosen as a name or model designation for the vehicle, as opposed to a common noun describing the vehicle itself (a spacecraft).
It's going to be really interesting to see how vocabulary changes as frequent space travel becomes a reality. This may be one of the few times in history where a field has had so much imagination invested into defining it (sci-fi stories making up words for things) before it slowly becomes a reality.
Seen from the earth every light point in the sky is a star at first. Even planets. Or the starship itself. Or some satellites. So even if it only travels to Mars, which looks like a star to us it would be OK to call it that. Don't be so uptight!
1) we are plain in the middle of a mass extinction event, expected to get much worst in a decade or two. Wouldn’t it be good to solve that first?
2) we need a 4th industrial revolution to survive global warming as a civilization. Wouldn’t be better to fix that first? (No, electric cars won’t suffice)
3) is it really necessary to spoil astronomy/night sky to finance one’s dream? (No, vantablack won’t solve the issue)
4) our technology presently rely on mining 100+ elements. Does anyone here believe one can mine all of those on an a planet that misses an atmosphere? Using Earth ressources for a “colony” seems a dubious idea.
5) has anyone an idea of the CO2 equivalent cost of bringing one person to mars?
6) there is growing evidence that there is life in the Martian underground. Should we take the risk of destroying another biosphere?
1) we are plain in the middle of a mass extinction event, expected to get much worst in a decade or two. Wouldn’t it be good to solve that first?
I don't see why we can't do both. Maybe if you come up with an actionable plan you can start your own company like Elon and tackle that problem.
2) we need a 4th industrial revolution to survive global warming as a civilization. Wouldn’t be better to fix that first? (No, electric cars won’t suffice)
No electric cars won't suffice, but they are a start. As is an increase in nuclear, and renewables in areas it makes sense. Again I don't see how this detracts, especially looking at Elon's other ventures. Maybe you can create a company that tackles the concrete problem, that's a big one.
3) is it really necessary to spoil astronomy/night sky to finance one’s dream? (No, vantablack won’t solve the issue)
That's subjective and you don't know if it can be solved or not, seems they are working on it. Why do you think a non-reflective coating won't work?
4) our technology presently rely on mining 100+ elements. Does anyone here believe one can mine all of those on an a planet that misses an atmosphere? Using Earth ressources for a “colony” seems a dubious idea.
We don't have to mine all of them at first. Look where we started here on Earth, from scratch.
5) has anyone an idea of the CO2 equivalent cost of bringing one person to mars?
I'm sure it's negligible relatively. Was that rhetorical or do you have a number?
6) there is growing evidence that there is life in the Martian underground. Should we take the risk of destroying another biosphere?
Are you talking about the ice found? The martian biosphere is already destroyed, terraforming it would bring life to the surface and if there is life it's underground and must be pretty hardy.
You can't start from "scratch" on Mars with respect to mining or industry. Cavemen wearing mammoth pelts won't work on Mars. In order to simply survive people would need high levels of technology. Even the most basic living on Mars would need steel and glass and equipment to machine both.
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.
Colonization efforts off Earth can't be gradual. There is a baseline infrastructure necessary for people to live. There are no readily available resources on Mars that exist like they do on Earth. There's no safe places for people on the planet.
Everything people need to survive needs to be brought from Earth. Every aspect of life on Mars needs to be bootstrapped from absolutely nothing. There's no working models for any of that on Earth. That means it all needs to be designed, built, tested, and iterated upon before a single person boards a SpaceX Starship.
Even with Elon Musk's billions that is a vast expense. Even if it was all built, it's billions spent to send people to Mars to simply not die in case a nuclear war wiped out Earth.
It's not pessimistic to point this out, it's realistic. Dreaming about colonizing Mars and hand waving away every practical consideration is just fruitless fantasizing. It's not a plan. It doesn't actually move towards a colony anywhere.
The opportunity cost is billions of dollars and a lot of engineering effort not spent on solutions to more immediate problems that might benefit more people.
Musk talking about colonizing Mars is 90% PR for SpaceX and 10% ego stroking. If SpaceX could build a Starship a week to send people to Mars it would be Musk's friends and billionaires and millionaires. I doubt there's more than a car load of people that work at SpaceX that would be able to afford a Mars ticket. I can't fawn breathlessly over a billionaire describing his fantasy of leaving all us poors to rot on a planet his fellow billionaires ruined.
I am not pessimistic, I am a scientist that just read the literature. We have now extinction levels 1000-10000 higher than background, this more than previous mass extinctions and expected to go 10 fold worst in the next decades. Moreover we are just a few years to enter a truly non linear regime in the Earth climate dynamics. These are our life support systems on earth and they are about to fall. Swift global action on these points is therefore required for our short term survival.
These people propose solutions for the wealthy. They are BTW ruining my dream of seeing more stars than satellites in the sky. (I’m a material scientist, coatings won’t work)
Therefore I heavily disagree with you: short term survival requires protecting our life support systems here on earth, namely climate and biodiversity (the Earth-System).
I am also very disappointed that people use the word “colonisation” so often, a brief look at history support my doubts.
I don’t mind exploring the solar system when the above issues are fixed, but this has to be done in a scientific way, I.e. exploration, not for a blind colonialist purpose.
I see. Alright, I'll let you continue whatever it is you think you're doing. A lot of what you said is opinion and a lot of scientists would disagree with your assertions (which are in my eyes pessimistic)
I do believe in this goal though as do others, you should respect other people's dreams, especially when it doesn't detract from yours.
I didn't say this was for short-term survival. This is for long-term survival, we still need to and we are tackling our own planet. Elon himself has disrupted many industries that were contributing to the destruction of this planet (auto, oil & gas)
If you want to help the planet, go help it, don't neg others.
> The Starlink constellation, so far, is not respectful to people who want a clear sky for instance.
How do the feelings of a few astronomers trump connecting the rest of the world to the internet?
You're blowing things way out of proportion as well. You fell for all the aggressive attack campaigns. I've seen all the articles you've read, it's not a real issue.
> I just think it has to be framed in a more global and long term context.
What message from SpaceX did you take issue with exactly? I don't think anyone is suggesting we'll all be living on Mars in a few years.
Re your 4th point, this is exactly why you want a working space presence -- if you move all your mining off the planet you just remove one future failure point.
Also, there are lots of people, humanity can walk and chew gum at the same time. On best of the days anyway.
I respect the clarity of the vision and the drivenness to make the vision a reality.
I disagree with the vision. The best analogy I can think of right now is high school kids renting a hotel for a party and trashing it and then doing the same thing next week. That’s humanity right now.
There is no Planet B until we build a mutualistic relationship with the one that created us.
And yes when I say “there is no Planet B” I’m being vaguely spiritual. I believe Earth is a creature and somehow won’t allow one of its creations to explore the stars until that creation learns mutualism. But I’m also being pragmatic: A) colonialism was a big motivation in our last 2 world wars and we still have intense colonizer memes circulating through our societies B) we now have the means to destroy ourselves thoroughly C) Mars is the crown jewel of potential colonies right now.
The pursuit of sustainable living and the pursuit of a multi-planetary existence are parallel endeavours, not serial ones. Perhaps the view from Mars will instil a renewed perspective on our dependence on Earth, and teach us lessons on ecological management via terraforming.
I would argue that achieving self-sustainability on Mars forces the issue, even. The problem we’ve had on Earth is that because the costs of being wasteful, polluting, etc are externalized, which makes such behavior “cheap” in the short term — on Earth, the environment is constantly handing out loans that we rarely if ever repay.
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.
> The pursuit of sustainable living and the pursuit of a multi-planetary existence are parallel endeavours, not serial ones.
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.
> Developing technology for surviving outside Earth's atmosphere contributes to advances in sustainability tech.
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?
It will be there for a beautiful cross-section of humanity for a while so long as Musk controls it (but even then he surely has some unconscious biases that will limit certain segments of the population from being there) and then nuclear war will break out on Earth and it will be there for whoever is well-connected to whatever government seizes control of it fastest.
Maybe it's just the thing that tries to fill the volume. Because otherwise it's displaced by a different one that does it faster. You argue about "how fast" should it be so life won't starve itself, but I think everybody is familiar with this danger. Then we can approach it more formally: what time/speed/volume/survival probability we want, try to calculate it for different options and go from there.
> Maybe it's just the thing that tries to fill the volume. Because otherwise it's displaced by a different one that does it faster.
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.
A related question: What’s your bet on how long until the US government starts taking SpaceX seriously and commandeers it under the pretext of national security? Or is Musk already cozied up with the MIC?
