This is not going to be your usual Samizdata article, if there is indeed any thing usual about articles on Samizdata. However, I strongly suspect his will be the first mission study ever published here, and I should know since I am responsible for most of the space blather around these parts.
I recently got my hands on an interesting NASA study for a deep space manned spaceship called the Nautilus. The more I have thought about the concepts behind the power points, the more excited I have become as to the possibilities… for a private Mars mission.
The NASA design study is interesting because if I were a many times over billionaire or consortium of billionaires, I could buy the majority of the vehicle today using hardware that is flight tested or is an incremental advance on such commercial goods. Nearly everything else one would need will be in that category by the end of the decade, with the exception of two important components. More on that later.
The Nautilus Deep space ship concept.
Image: NASA
To build this for a reasonable price we must avoid R&D where ever possible; we must avoid shaving pounds or adding efficiency or elegance for the sake of doing so. Given that criteria, I want to buy:
- A keel made out of one or more ISS truss segments. The only changes are the number and location of various attachment points.
- A set of Bigelow Aerospace Habs used for cargo holds lining the keel.
- A rotating joint good for many years of operation in vacuum.
- A rather largish ion engine with its fuel tanks and plumbing.
- A toroidal habitation module made out of specially designed Bigelow Habs.
- A Masten Aerospace or Armadillo Aerospace lander for Mars orbit operations.
In addition I will need:
- A consortium of one or more super rich space addicts who want to go to Mars and between them can come up with $5-10 Billion. I know of several whom I believe are already thinking ahead like this. Between them, there may already be enough money to do this in 2020-2025, given the expected commercial developments in this decade.
- Cargo capacity to LEO. This can be supplied by a lot of SpaceX Falcon 9’s launches or a much smaller number of Falcon 10’s
- Personnel capacity to LEO. Either the Boeing CST-100 or the SpaceX Dragon will suffice and there is a wide selection of existing boosters to put them on. There will probably be Virgin Galactic and XCOR space planes available by then, but I am being more conservative than that.
- Assembly shack. I need a place for the people to work while they put the spaceship together from the parts launched to orbit. We can either use the Bigelow Aerospace commercial facility which will be there already, or if we like to keep to ourselves, we can buy a single hab of our own.
- An orbital fuel depot. This is nonessential but nice. If we can simply store fuel near our construction hab, then ops become much more flexible. We can also make a buck or yen by selling fuel to NASA, DOD or to anyone else, private or government, who wants to drop in for a fill up and clean windshield. Even if it only defrays part of its costs, that is a net good.
- A space taxi. It can be a Dragon or a CST-100. It’s primary mission usage will be to deliver the crew to and from the vehicle when it is outside of the Van Allen Belts. It will need a throttle-able booster attached to it. I know lots of folk with very reliable throttle-able engines using propellants with reasonable shelf lives. That means we fore go the ‘joys’ of LH2 storage and handling.
There are a bunch of questions which need answers and most of them already have reasonable ones.
QUESTION: There is no large ion or similar High ISP/Low thrust engine on the drawing boards. No one in the private sector will have a reason to build one for at least a decade.
ANSWER: We need NASA to development and prove out the engine.
QUESTION: No one has ever built a large, low friction, long life rotating joint for use in a vacuum and micro-gravity or low G acceleration environment.
ANSWER: It would be helpful if NASA tested a rotating inflatable Hab attached to the ISS. There is even a docking port free upon which to install it. Now it is true, that if NASA does the project the internecine warfare between centers and their Senatorial and Congressional Patrons against NASA HQ will turn a good idea into an internal development product that will not be built. But they may try and the fall out might be those few bits we actually need from them. There are actually good people there who are trying to pass the baton to the private sector and are engaged in trench warfare against the Jobz’n’Pork crowd who do not give a damn about the country so long as they are re-elected.
QUESTION: Low thrust engines mean spending a long time in the high radiation environments of the Van Allen Belts.
ANSWER: We let the vehicle spiral out from the construction orbit under low acceleration without the crew on board. When it is clear of the danger zone, we ship the crew out in the space taxi to rendezvous with the mother ship. We can either take the taxi along with us or let it do a burn to let it return to LEO. That depends on variables well beyond what I am willing to look at right now.
QUESTION: Deep space travel raises the probability of getting hit by the full force of a solar storm during the trip.
ANSWER: We let the large Bigelow habitats we are using for storage double as storm cellars. If one or two of them have 6 feet or so of water with a small camping space in the center, the crew can go there to tough it out for 24 hours if necessary.
QUESTION: Crew will not be able to stand up after years in zero gravity!
ANSWER: The crew will be under artificial gravity for nearly the entire trip. That is why we have the rotating hab. So, there is no bone and muscle mass loss problem. Neither of these is as bad as some try to convince you anyway. These days, after many months in orbit, Russian astronauts have been known to get out of their capsule and hike to the nearest farm house…
QUESTION: We do not have much in the way of CELSS technology (Closed Ecological Life Support Systems) and what we have is not very reliable yet.
ANSWER: We make the ship bigger and add more Bigelow Habs for stores and simply don’t worry ourselves about it. It is not as if we were using a high thrust/low ISP engine that burns Olympic swimming pools of LH2 and LOX per second. We aren’t. There is a cost but we are building a pure ship of space. Size is not a big issue. Also, some areas of CELSS probably will be sufficiently advanced by then. Water recycling is coming along nicely. O2 use is reasonably efficient even on ISS which does scrubbing to remove CO2 but not actual recycling of the CO2 to O2. We can live without that. As to food, its a small crew and the Bigelow Habs are, well, BIG. So what if our storm shelter on the way back depends on the worlds biggest bag of… well you know what I mean.
QUESTION: We do not have the technology to land crew and take off again from Mars.
ANSWERS: We are not going to land on Mars. Only a national government is going to have the R&D funds to build the needed vehicle by then because there is no commercial need for a vehicle of those specs. A future very large version of a Masten or Armadillo lander might serve; our winged designs from XCOR and Scaled Composites won’t do it because no one has ever built an aircraft that can land and takeoff with pressures equivalent to perhaps 100,000 feet [off the top of my head and very possible wrong]. So we stay with landers “like God and Robert Heinlein intended” that land and take off on a pillar of fire. If Jeff thinks otherwise, I would not be bent out of shape to be proven wrong if he has a Mars Lynx concept in his future plans.
So if we are not landing, then why bother? Simple. We have to start some where and that somewhere is most likely Phobos. It may even have the ices from which we can replace some of our O2 for breathing and fuel for a lander. And with the very low G environment there, I suspect the *existing* Masten or Armadillo landers could do it. Since they will both be flying people by mid decade, their vehicles will be well tested in a more difficult environment by then. I will let Dave or John drop by and comment if they wish. Maybe they think they could get down to the surface and back already. I doubt it, but they are the experts on their future plans.
QUESTION: We don’t have the aerobraking technology to slow down the returning spaceship!
ANSWER: We do not need aerobraking on return. We will just spiral in on a low continuous thrust and the crew will either get picked up by a taxi outside the Van Allen Belts or will use the one they took along with them, assuming they did not leave it on Phobos for future local Mars orbital and inter-moon exploration ops.
QUESTION: SpaceX does not have the funds to develop the Falcon 10 and its F-1 class engine right now.
ANSWER: It would be helpful if SpaceX was told to put its money where its mouth is and build the Falcon 10 for “less than $2.5B, in 5 years, on a firm fixed price contract basis.” That way NASA gets an HLV that will cost a fraction of what the Communist Design Bureaus want to charge on their Cost Plus contracts and it will actually be designed to be commercially viable, ie be manufacturable without a standing army and launchable by a dozen rocket geeks with laptop computers. Elon will eventually find a way to fund his big engine, we will get this someday anyway.
There are design issues, and some high risk items which need to be retired before such a plan could move forward:
(1) It would take a number of iterations to work out the mass budget, fuel budgets, consumables budget and such and then feed them back in to redesign the ship, which changes the structures budget, which changes the fuel budget and the engine sizing. I believe this is an engineering exercise. It is a matter of sizing things and selecting components from the existing set of Space Operations Lego Blocks. However, until the study is done and the various budgets reach closure I can only say that I think it will work, but only if done with a commercial mindset. A good engineer “can build for a dollar what any damn fool can build for ten” as Robert Anson Heinlein succinctly put it. Unfortunately we seem to often be lacking in Heinlein trained engineers in the aerospace field. This is why many New Space companies hire folk from outside that field.
(2) I have some concerns about the rotating Hab. Any frictional forces are going to start spinning up the keel, which will put a twisting moment on it for which it was not really designed, at least not to my knowledge. Also, since I am assuming a constant low acceleration, say .1 or .01 G or even less, there is a small but finite force vector against the ‘bottom side’ collar of the joint. This is bound to cause wear over 2-4 years of continuous operations.
The moments can be canceled out to some extent if we had two counter rotating Habs. That also eliminates the gyroscopic effect, which may be a good or a bad thing depending… the cancellation could mean that a mid-course flip would not require a spin down; but it also means that you lose the high directional stability of one spinning mass plus the ability to do some torquing of direction by applying tipping forces to get whole ship orientation changes. It’s a trade space that someone will have to look at.
Now, the mission itself!
The off the shelf components are purchased and stock piled at the launch facility, most likely Spaceport Florida at the old Cape Canaveral military pads. Or they may buy up some of the no longer needed facilities at KSC, perhaps even the VAB (Vertical Assembly Building) and the Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF).
Optionally a small Bigelow Hab is launched and inflated in the construction orbit. Otherwise we rent space from Bigelow on his commercial space station for about $10M/Year/Astronaut.
We send the initial complement of riggers and construction workers to the construction site using the most economical means available, whether CST-100, Dragon, SpaceShip3 or Lynx 3. For now we will assume the Dragon/Falcon 9 since it is already flight tested and cost effectiveness is known to be good.
We carry out a a series of cargo launches using the most economical cargo rockets available, whether HLV or MLV, to deliver the parts to orbit. We will assume a Falcon 10 is available by then, but we could just as well launch a larger number of Falcon 9 heavies and gain much of the cost back in the economy of scale.
The spaceship is assembled and fully tested in orbit, then it is taken on a short shakedown cruise, perhaps to ISS and back. Once commissioned, it is sent on its way in an unmanned configuration, doing a slow low thrust spiral out of the Earth’s gravity well and through the Van Allen Belts.
When it is out of the belts, if full system checks show all is well, the ship is certified for interplanetary flight. If there are minor electronics faults due to radiation, the necessary spares are prepared; if the damage is major, the ship can be ordered to spiral back to the construction shack where it can be fixed and a solution worked out.
When the ship gets an AOK, the Mars crew boards a Dragon capsule with a restartable booster and takes a fast flight through the radiation belts to join their space ship in high orbit. The taxi may either return to LEO or be kept on the spaceship if the mass budget allows. It may be a useful thing to have in Mars orbit so we will assume it stays. The crew takes its own good time checking out systems. If there are serious problems found, they can abort by using the taxi to return to LEO and then the spaceship can be commanded to spiral back as well. If the crew finds the ship is go, they light the engines again and start the long climb towards Mars.
If a system breaks down while underway, they use stored spares to fix it or else they make do if it is not a critical system.
The ship accelerates for as long as necessary to place it on the planned orbit to Mars. This may or may not require acceleration all the way to the turn over point.
At some point in the flight deceleration must begin so that the ship can spiral into Mars orbit near Phobos. The engine is shut down; the ship does a back flip; then the engine is fired up again. Depending on the architecture, the rotating Hab may or may not need to be de-spun for the flip. I am assuming we are good enough at physics to not need to de-spin.
The ship goes into orbit around Phobos. This does not take a great deal of effort as the gravitational field of Phobos is rather small.
The Bigelow Habs used for consumables storage on the way out which are now empty are taken to the surface of Phobos to be used as the start of a permanent base. This may be tricky, but the gravity is so low that it may not be all that difficult. Someone will have to look at it. In fact, the people who build the landers might even be reading this, or will as soon as I tell them I have posted it! As for exploration, we can use the Masten/Armadillo landers for crew.
We can either use the entire mother-ship to explore Deimos or we can send a volunteer or two in the Dragon taxi.
When we are done with planting our instruments on the moons and staking our property rights claims to reasonable areas around the nascent base, we fire up the engine again and spiral out of the Martian gravity well. We then replay the mission in reverse… When we get close to Earth, a Dragon taxi is sent out to pick up the crew and give them a quick trip through the Van Allen Belts.
The crew come back to the construction shack/Bigelow commercial station and are there interviewed by the lucky journalists from Samizdata and other major publications of the 2020’s before taking the scheduled Virgin Galactic or XCOR Space Lines trip back to the surface for their reunions with family and friends, their ticker tape parade through Time Square and their huge bonus checks from the private Mars exploration consortium.
Since we have built infrastructure, this need not be a one off. More of these craft can be built and each additional one becomes cheaper, better and more reliable because it is incrementally improved by commercially minded engineers. Each trip leaves more and more infrastructure in Mars orbit.
Over the period of a decade the cost-effective commercial Martian manned surface ops hardware is developed. Surface ops slowly build up as well until a tipping point is reached.
The club of Billionaires who did it go down in the history books and their names will be remembered for thousands of years. They can’t take the Billions with them, but they can guarantee they will be remembered for as long as any human being has ever been remembered. What better reason for spending your fortune could there possibly be?
You should be sending these articles to Branson and associates. He, and they, might be rich enough to sponsor such a thing.
It is true that I hope for big things from my own invention, the self-hooking button, but that will still take a while to build up!
Have you thought about going in one of those big lotteries that they hold in various countries? That might be big enough!
You may want to spend a few pounds/dollars in buying a copy of “The case for Mars” by Robert Zubrin. It explains why all this assembling-big-spaceship-in-orbit is a bad idea.
I can see this as entirely possible. There are plenty of billionaires, and lots of them have pet interests they like to fund. Bill Gates has his malthusianism, for example.
All it needs is for k few who had dreams of being astronauts as children before settling for making lots of money instead.
QUESTION: why?
Seriously. Obviously I want to live like George Jetson but… This will not work. It won’t work because it is essentially pointless. Dale you’re saying “It’s private so it’s good”. Except it might be private but it is the same fundamental model as state space travel. It will never work. Europeans didn’t get to the Americas by emulating the Chinese fleet. (They didn’t either but they could have done). They did it by extreme rational self-interest. They did it to make a few quid. Your plan is essentially, “Let’s go because it’s there!” which is the NASA playbook.
Well America was there too but no bugger went there until it was cheap enough to turn a dime on the trip. Then it happened and happened big-time. You talk about flight tested tech and off the shelf and stuff. My point is that this is a cockamamie scheme exactly a la NASA – just funded differently. A Mars shot – and I contend there is no point in a “shot” – we need the whole bottle has to be the full nine yards. It has to be Christopher Columbus or John Cabot or such. Doing another Apollo is a waste of time. Ah, but you might think it breaks the trail. No. If that was the case then why was Apollo not followed up? And it isn’t the source of funding. You talk of billionaires spending on a vanity project. And that is what it is. When Christopher Columbus took a voyage it was the Enterprise of the Americas. It cost the equivalent of six Spanish State Banquets. It was essentially a for profit operation.
We need tech way beyond what we have to make space doable in the free-booting way you envisage. I share your vision Dale. I really do. But it can’t be done off the shelf. Oh, it can be but it would be a billionaire’s party which is much the same as a statists one. Where in your plan are the huddled masses? That’s the key question. Without them we haven’t got Mars have we? Not really. Not like we got America.
Nick:
What’s wrong with that? it may be a NASA playbook as far as incentives are concerned. But the problem with state-funded operations is not always their incentives, it is often “merely” the way they are funded. Look at The Welfare State. The problem is not that some people want to help the poor, it is the way the whole thing is funded. Speaking of which, voluntary charity doesn’t have profit as an incentive either – does that mean that it can’t work?
No, it wouldn’t be the same at all. And who said that the huddled masses (whatever that means) should come along for the party? They may come, if there is something in it for them (material or otherwise), or they may not – it’s for them and for the partying billionaires to decide between them.
Why do you need the joint? Why can’t the whole thing rotate? Just asking.
My point was that I think going there for the pure buggeration of it is a non-starter. It’ll make could TV and that is all. You really want to get off this rock it has to be profitable. Hernan made a mint. That is why it happened. This will just be a party at 1/3g and then home again. It will not be the colonisation of space. It won’t be America 2.0. Don’t get me wrong. If Dale’s plan gets off the drawing board I’ll be popping corks with the best of ’em but it is quite simply not the real deal is it? The real deal is the huddled masses. The real deal is building Titan City and not an away day for Larry Ellison.
The real deal is people going to Mars for the same reason they went to America. The ultra rich didn’t did they? It was the poor wanting a better life. Apart from the slaves obviously.
None of this is going to happen for a hundred years anyway.
“The Man Who Sold The Moon” by Robert Heinlien – it is one of my favourate short stories also Dale.
However, even when Heinlein wrote that story the United States was no longer really that sort of country. And today it is much FURTHER away from being that sort of country – the government, and the institutionally corrupt government backed credit bubble financial system, is much more “developed” than it was when that story was written.
I agree with you that their is no technological bar manned missions to Mars (an atomic powered ship could be built on Earth or in Earth orbit) or conventional rockets could be used (if people want a round trip that would take more than a year).
However, the United States is no longer that sort of country – it is a civilization in decline (not a civilization ready to expand into space). For example, as recently as the 1950s someone like Barack Obama would be giving impassioned speeches (to no one in particular) on the wonders of collectivism, at a local park – these days he is President.
“What about Britain” – Richard Branson or no Richard Branson, Britain is in a WORSE state than America is.
Paul,
Far be it for me to say… But the whole point of talking about “Britain” or “America” (meaning the USA) misses the point. True space colonization is not building New Kettering or New Springfield on Mars it is like America building anew. This is not about countries grabbing real estate in space. It is about flight from countries. I once dated an American Jew. She was of Russian extraction. Her family fled pogroms. They sold all they could to pitch up at Ellis Island and the rest they burnt. That was 1900.
Countries might have an “interest” in space. People have a refuge there. We have got to think outside the box here. NASA were on not long since bout building an igloo on the moon. A scientific research base with like three PhDs. Magic. They don’t get it do they? If space means anything and I’m an astrophysicist by training so it does it means the telephone sanitisers too.
It has to mean people as potless as those Russian Jews who pitched up in NYC 111 years ago. A billionaire’s club is a billionaire’s club whether they made it honestly or stole it from the masses. OK honest billionaires can do what they want and fair play to them on that but it is not the main deal is it? The main deal is for the grandchildren I won’t have to think of flying to Titan the same way I think of flying to Sydney. A not insignificant expense but doable if I really want to.
And Paul, if you think they’d ever allow nuclear rockets (such as project Orion – which in the ’70s could have put something the size of a Los Angeles-class sub in space) then you’re wrong. It’s biofuels or bust! Mainly bust. You can imagine the greenery – “We’re killing this planet to explore others” said the lentil knitter with a smug grin. I’m not even allowed a backyard fire so a rocket! Yeah right.
But they are not lentil-knitters any more! The biggest change I have seen in my lifetime (I’m 37) is the mainstreaming of Green. It is profound. 15 years ago they were nucking futters with bad breath and ethnic skirts (and that was just the blokes). Now they are establishment. We used to take the piss out of this fringe element and now we are the fringe element.
It took the huddled masses a couple of hundred years to get to America too, Nick. One has to start somewhere, and seeing as there aren’t many other options right now, I wouldn’t be too picky, especially when it’s not my tax money – although if I were a billionaire, I’d finance it just for the heck of it. It’s time for some cool TV anyway, if you ask me. Oh, and BTW: “It’s private so it’s good”. Yes, it is. It is worth it just to show that it can be done.
Every human endeavor is profitable by definition – whether money is involved or not. If a billionaire X is set on having his name enshrined in the collective memory as someone who did it and succeeds, he made profit. That profit may not be material to you or me, but it is very material to him. Medium of exchange (AKA ‘money’) is a distraction from the key point, which is different people do different things for different reasons. Now, whether or not this is going to be a one-off thing or the beginning of a new era – we just don’t know, do we. Did Columbus know beforehand that he is about to discover The New World? He didn’t, and if IIRC, he maintained that he reached Asia to the day of his death. Just let people do what they would, and let the chips fall where they may.
Hm, NickM. You’ve got to start somewhere. Dale has a permanent base on Phobos. Future trips will be cheaper — perhaps mere millionaires can go next time.
Why can’t it be the new America? Getting to America was just a matter of getting the costs down low enough that the masses could afford the trip.
If I had a few billion I’d want to go. Maybe Branson will go himself. He used to like going round the world in balloons, this is much better.
Anyway, what about some sort of magnetic bearing?
Maybe you could spin the whole ship, as long as anything mounted off-centre was strong enough.
I’d like to think this could be done without NASA, too.
Nick – I agree with you.
The whole point of my comment is that such things as the United States government (and dependent banking insitutitons and so on) make such things impractical at the moment.
Let us say that (for example) the K. brothers got together with some of their friends…..
They still would be blocked by some regulation or other (just as you say).
And if they did get to Mars they would not be allowed (by international treaty) to set up a private tax haven their.
There is no route of escape “out there” – period.
Things are too far gone (already) right here on Earth, for that to be a starter.
Perhaps statism will be pushed back.
2012 and what comes after, will tell us.
By the way the alternative to national independence is not individual freedom and civil society – the alternative to national independence is globel “governance” (international treaties and so on) total collectivsm with no escape.
No escape this side of total economic and soial breakdown and a new Dark Age.
That is the alternative to rolling back the state – not freedom.
But, tyranny (a tyranny that might last quite some time as basic capital was used up), then total breakdown (mass starvation), then a new Dark Age – where the primary goal of groups of human beings would be brute survival.
And where Mars would be just a strange light in the sky – of which they knew nothing.
That is the road that Barack Obama and the vast majority of academics and other elite members are UNINTENTIONALLY driving the world down (even in India and China – where the principles of the Welfare State have aleady been accepted, and where the financial system is also a credit bubble).
I say “unintenetionally” as this is not their intention.
They want a fluffy world collectivism about like Francis Bacon’s planned “New Atlantis” or “Star Trek: New Generation”.
But their scheme (their religion – for that is what it is) just will not work.
You don’t get me. What I’m saying is this is no more a new era than Neil and Buzz going for an away day. It is not trail-blazing. It is keeping space-flight high-end. It is the Concorde and we want an A300. Think of it. Moon shot in ’69, a few more missions and then nothing. Nothing. It has to be financially viable. I’m no money-grubber but this has to be to be real. That is why I reffed Columbus as “The Enterprise of the Americas”. It wasn’t funded because it was just there. It was funded because it paid. And his crew… Estremaduran. The merest scum of Europe.
So a bunch of billionaires go to Mars! great! Whatever! Quite frankly it is not opening a new frontier. It’s saying this is effing expensive but we can afford it. We don’t need a Richard Branson, we need a Freddie Laker. The frontier opens when we get variable cycle engines to escape. Not before. And a load of minted tits using old tech to do it by brute force of their money will not help that. Oh, they can knock themselves out (it’s their cash) but… Mr Rolls and Mr Royce didn’t change the world. Henry Ford did by making a car cheap enough that the workers could buy it.
I don’t honestly care who is funding it though. It is still a Brabazon committee. It’s still gonna build a DH Comet to get folk round the Empire in style. And not a 707. You know how technologically different those two were? You know why they don’t bury engines in wing roots any more?
Essentially we are looking at a failure of imagination made up for by money.
Nick, without Daimler there may have not been a Ford (the fact that at the outset cars were not produced by the state is irrelevant to my point or yours – although if they were, I’d admire Daimler even more).
I do.
Nick, why do you care? Seriously, what business is it of yours how people choose to spend their money? You’re treading awfully close to saying billionaires must spend their wealth for the common good. Do you really want to go there?
Dale, I have a question that maybe you are somebody in the thread can answer. Is it theoretically feasible to shield from solar and background radiation with a magnetic field? Are there a lot of free neutrons to contend with? Could a space ship be made into a sort of inside out containment vessel?
Unless and until there is a political/economic rationale for such a one-time expedition, it seems a mere PR exercise. Recall that Jamestown in Virginia perished (1610), and that from 1620 emigre populations flirted with extinction for decades pending the New England fur trade plus tobacco exports from Virginia.
Moreover, though rocket technology has become an engineering rather than a scientific exercise, we suspect that gas-jet reaction engines are obsolete in principle already. By c. 2030 – 2050 “sky hooks” in form of vertical Erie Canals will likely be boosting super-tanker sized bulk cargoes into low Earth orbit, preparatory to slinging materials beyond cislunar space to miles-wide intrasolar enclaves disposed about the plane of Sol’s ecliptic.
By the time Millennials born c. AD 2000 turn fifty, macro-scale teleportation exploiting quantum-physical effects will sustain an en masse off-Earth exodus necessitated by the not-so-gentle fade of Earth’s “long summer,” the overdue end of our current 12,250-year Holocene Interglacial Epoch. Planetary exploration accompanied by a leap-frog pattern of expansion into interstellar venues will follow in due course.
No-one in 1900 could possibly have predicted 21st Century aerospace industries, nuclear energy, radio and television, genomics, infotech, etc. & etc. While we cannot conceptually foretell AD 2100, as in 1600 certain themes emerge: Humanity is fast outgrowing its dangerously vulnerable home planet; our Western scientific-technological dynamic has outmoded “cycles of Cathay”; not only political economics but peoples’ socio-cultural survival hinges on radically diversifying polities on the autonomous model of medieval Italian city-states.
Billionaires need not shoot untold wealth to Phobos, for that matter to any blighted cosmic sandspit. Better far to set new trains of R&D in motion, with a goal of exporting freedom and liberty outward to the stars.
A few comments:
1. Pretty much no one could afford this even if they spent all their money and the costs didn’t overrun. They won’t spend it all, and the costs will overrun.
2. There are other, cheaper ways to be remembered better. At a crazy extreme of personal vanity, there is the Burj Dubai, a nearly one km tall skyscraper, at a mere $1.5bn. A large charitable foundation like the Rockefeller or Gates foundation is a little more expensive, but remembered better than whoever funded some space project.
3. Why, oh why? Even if you can encourage people to pay for this (and I don’t think you can), should you? Space is cool and all, but the reason the market doesn’t fund it is that the return on investment is extremely low. There are, at least in most peoples’ view, much better ways to use the money to benefit humanity.
But mdc, with all due respect to skyscrapers, some people want to be remembered as space explorers – they are just crazy that way.
But these ‘most people’ are not necessarily the ones with the cash, are they.
No Mid I am absolutely not. They have the absolute right to their space program as I have the absolute right to say it’s a crock. Because I think it is.
The rotating joint shouldn’t be too difficult by 2020. The whole P3/P4/P5/P6 and S3/S4/S5/S6 truss segments of the International Space Station rotate about their alpha joints. These joints are designed to rotate once per orbit for fifteen years in microgravity. That’s not too different than what you’d need.
As you mentioned, the low-thrust engines would put more stress on the bearing, but the basics of the joint have already been demonstrated.
NASA owns the IP, but Boeing designed and built the thing. If you buy a CST-100, perhaps they’ll throw in a modified alpha joint for an additional fee.
Mike
The way I see it, trying to get to Mars is a little bit like asking the Wright brothers to make Concorde their next project.
Space goals should come naturally:
Branson will make space tourism affordable to the millionaire with competition doing it’s next bit. Some new venture will come getting paying guests to go into orbit – then they will be superceded (or expand) to cover flights around the moon. And pretty soon, if space travel progresses as quickly as flight did, we’ll have people staying on a lunar base.
Then the next step will be growing food on the moon (will that project be funded by the guy who buys 10000sq miles of the Sahara for dirt cheap and makes millions through turning it into agriculturally valuable land?) with a longer term colony founded there.
Heading to Mars might be interesting, but it’s unlikely to lead to have the significance of Virgin Galactic.
Midwesterner: Yes, there are people talking about using magnetic fields for shielding but there are difficulties and it has never been demonstrated. I intentionally built my base line around components which I expect will or could exist by 2020 and which are all built around technology that has extensive time in space already. I’m trying to think like an engineer here, how to take what I have or can reasonably expect to have, and carry out a Mars mission.
Now what are the fallouts from this program? We have kick started the orbital fuel depot, or at least given it a good customer. We’ve trained a bunch of workers in zero G construction. We’ve built a frigging re-usable interplanetary spaceship that can go *anywhere* in the solar system. We’ve captured the imagination of the planet on the activities of free people (not States) carrying out one of the most exciting adventures of the century with their own money. We’ve laid down the foundation for a Mars orbital infrastructure. A second ship can now be built at much lower cost. A second trip can be done for the cost of check, refurbish and updating of the ship, then refueling and reloading consumables. Each time it flies it gets cheaper because this is private money and they care how it is spent. As new technology becomes available, it is added. The basic ship will last and be flyable for decades if not centuries, although its use will change and value decline as new ships are designed from the ground up using nanotech, magnetic shields, CELSS, better engines and whatever the future brings.
This is a start. It puts free men and women in the fore front of human destiny… where they belong.
Thanks Michael. I’d forgotten about those ISS joints. Of course the wear on a .75 rev/hour vs perhaps 60 per hour or so (Since I have not picked a diameter nor a g, I can not definite any closer than that) is rather more, as is the stress and twist on the attached structure. I’m not saying it is a big issue, just one that has to be reduced to practice and flight proven for a number of years before we put it in our deep space tool kit.
Frederick: Actually my copy of Case for Mars was signed by Bob while we were sitting in a bar talking. I’ve known him for better than 2 decades.
I also think Mars Direct was a brilliant idea for the time, if you wanted the government to get locked into something real. However, it does not make sense to me for a quick and dirty private trip. There are too many large ticket items which are not flight tested and will not be tested by then. I think many of the technologies he speaks of will be used for the push to Mars surface after we establish the beach head at Phobos. The private sector has to go incremental and off the shelf, not all up and revolutionary, at least not at these price tags.
I think you are mixing some of your rockets
You mention a smaller rocket, the Falcon 10, which is infact the Falcon 1-e
And then you mention a larger rocket (which you also call the Falcon 10) which is in fact the Falcon X (where X isn’t a number)
The reason for not rotating the whole thing is worth studying, but I stayed clear because there are more issues involved with it than I have time to think through. Extra stress on all of the structural elements for one… all of those cargo modules filled with food, water, spares, etc… are now a structural radial loading on a very light truss that was not really designed for carrying loads for long periods of time. They are attach points on ISS, true; they get some stress when reboots are carried out, true; but that is not a continuous radial load. Then there is the issue of attitude control, fuel, instrumentation. I suspect the logic will fall out that it is best to only spin up what needs to be spun up, probably just to keep the structures cheap and cheerful.
I may well have mis typed some mentions of the SpaceX product line. The smaller cargo rocket is the Falcon 9 Heavy for cargo; a Falcon 9 for crew; the Falcon 10 (or X) for HLV. It depends on whether you interpret the X as experimental or as the Roman numeral number following 9.
The Apollo Project demonstrated that it was possible to make short visits to the moon with 1960s technology if you had military rocket programs to start with, if you had a gargantuan budget, military procurement programs. and quite a lot of will to do it. However, it created very bureaucratic organisations that had monopolies on space travel and crowded everything else out, and created the belief that this was how space travel had to be done and that it was necessarily this expensive. Somehow with that mentality and those institutions and with congressmen wanted as much money spent on their districts as possible, and…., we have a situation where we can spend in the hundreds of billions on a relatively useless space station and our capabilities are less but more expensive than they were in the 1960s.
This goes totally against the reality that our overall levels of technology are just astoundingly better and cheaper than they were in the 1960s. (I am typing this on a laptop that cost $250 and which has orders of magnitude more computing power than all of NASA did in 1969). If going into space becomes something done by billionaires who understand engineering in the private sector and who can hire the very best people who understand that sort of engineering discipline, space can be done for orders of magnitude less money than it has traditionally cost. (I will also recommend “The Case For Mars”, at least partly because Bob Zubrin gets this and the book expains this clearly). Getting to Mars really is in the realms of ordinary billionaires at this point. As it happens, many of America’s more recently minted billionaires are of this ilk, get this, can afford to fund such a thing, and are willing to do it for glory. I there are people of that ilk working on this now. (Yes, I can guess one or two now – not so much flamboyent people like Branson but the kind who keep their heads down and get on with it.).
As for will it be a one shot thing, I don’t think so. Do it right and the cost (at least at the beginning) will be single figure billions. That’s a small enough sum of money that economic justifications and profit sources can be found along the way. I think it is going to happen, and I think it is going to happen in the next decade. And it may well be done by somebody who doesn’t declare his goal until he is almost ready to do it.
Dale, I don’t understand why, if you are searching for billionaires who wish to live as large a space dream as possible, why then not aim as high as possible. Start with a plan that incorporates all the dreams of the most complete mars mission you can envisage. Make it a game where the billionaires get to imagine what they can or cannot do with regard to getting there.
It just seems really silly to me to say: “I want to entice billionaires to fulfill a wonderful dream” and then immediately to slap it down with: – “But I’m going to limit the dream to what I think they can do”.
Actually I am not trying to entice any billionaires to do this. They are already laying the ground work. I know at least 2 for sure who have Mars in their long range goals. I suspect at least one other does as well. If they get to the ‘take off point’ where the pieces are all on the board, I can think of at least one other who will opt in; maybe 2. And that is just amongst current players who I am familiar with.
But Dale, from your post, your dream is that they will do this, and a little more encouragement in the right direction, from their peers/other dreamers, etc may be something they need. 🙂
That’s why I was saying don’t limit your dream too much. Dream big, and then if you get to have their ear, or the ears of their workforce then jump right in and embolden them.
Im putting this badly. I completely despaired at the lack of imagination in the shuttle program. I would love to see some real goals in human spaceflight attempted. Technology has come on incredibly since the Apollo program, yet the only dreams we seem to be seeing realised are virtual reality ones.
I’ve come to realise that too often now we limit our dreams for no good reason. In limiting our own imaginations, without realising it we can all too easily be putting limits on other peoples dreams.
Like a mildly negative enthusiasm. Just bit by bit putting little after little limit on the achievable we end up with achieving much less than we are capable of.
What Hmm said.
I find this idea as exciting as anyone (although I share NickM’s doubts as to feasibility). However, I’d like to throw one other bucket of water onto the fire: the Outer Space Treaty (and its various ancillary treaties and accords). Almost all nations are signatories to this Treaty, and it essentially cedes all control of space-faring activities to those governments (surprise!). With respect to private actors, the Treaty provides that “the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty.” In other words, you’ll need to get the permission of your government to go. I have no doubt that some squeaky-wheel environmentalists (or some such) would raise all sorts of objections which the government would be only too happy to encourage and oblige (since this whole idea is a direct challenge to their monopoly on space activities). You’d be so bound up in red tape the first module would never get into orbit. (And don’t forget that “continuing supervision” part. That would be loads of fun!)
And of course, since celestial bodies are declared to be “the common heritage of mankind” you won’t be able to profit from the venture. No staking of claims on other worlds is allowed. If you found anything valuable out there (minerals or whatever) you probably wouldn’t be able to benefit from it.
The only remedy I can see to this would be to base your trip in some nation which isn’t a signatory to the Treaty. Unfortunately, most of those few are pretty dicey places. The only reasonable one I can think of is Belize*. I suspect (hope!) that any such consortium of billionaires is seriously negotiating with that government for launch rights and some sort of guarantee that it won’t ratify the Treaty before they launch.
* I don’t think the Cayman Islands would work since they are (I believe) technically still British overseas territories and so subject to Britain’s ratification of the Treaty.
In the US, that supervision mostly comes down to, “Have you got insurance?” And the basic requirement is, “If you kill yourself doing this, we want to make sure your flaming debris does not come down on a populated area.”
There will undoubtedly be a regulatory ‘tax’ paid, but in the US at least, it will be not that large, relatively speaking. There are lawyers who are expert in this area and who are on our side.
Laird: the real question to ask is not whether you legally need their permission, but do you need it practically. I suspect that the answer to that is not obvious.
“But these ‘most people’ are not necessarily the ones with the cash, are they.”
Wait, who with money has pledged billions for space vanity projects? You’re treating this blog post as though it’s actually happening – as opposed to just a rather pie in the sky idea.
People who think it isn’t worthwhile are both the ones with the case and the ones without.
Dale, that is the situation as things stand now. Once this becomes a success though, and you get enough people there, settled and running tings on their own, our masters here may just become so much more interested. Whether they’d be able to do anything about it at that point is the real question. Which, obviously, does not mean that you shouldn’t go just because they may come after you.
mdc, In order to get something working it has to move from theory to application, and if you don’t act as though its going to happen at some stage then it never will. You are doing exactly what I was talking about re. negative enthusiasm.
If people cant even believe to dream, never mind believe enough to contemplate the process for realising the dream, then they have become lesser people and in doing so infect the dreamers and the doers.
Even if there aren’t people actively developing a mars expedition craft. The fact that Dale can post a dream of a plan of doing so makes it that bit more likely someone might take it and run with it. The more people are willing to run with a dream the more we will achieve regardless of whether anyone else thinks its achievable. The better the dream is envisaged the better the chance of it achieving some sort of reality. Which is why I think Dale should not dampen his dream with shortcomings or possible unachievables, but rather let it extend to the range of what the active players might imagine.
I don’t think it would take until the point Alisa suggests for the government to wake up, Dale. There is very little private space activity right now, and what there is is closely tied to NASA. If someone got serious about mounting a private manned expedition to another world, and appeared to have the ability to actually do it, my bet is that the legal/regulatory environment would change radically. I would be looking around now for a more friendly legal environment.
Dale, rather than use Nasa at all, why not lobby for an X-prize type competition to produce a feasible propulsion unit.
It is certainly an idea. Ideas presented here are not intended to be THE way things are done, just an indication that such a path DOES exist.
I’m all for making use of what’s available.
Considering all the current financial world problems its good to see someone posting about a wildly expensive goal.
Governments are a good method to make war where there are clear large scale objectives. The moon landings were really a cold war goal. The objective was in showing a clear advantage over the enemy. A Mars expedition does not currently have a “war” objective, so government involvement would be subjective rather than objective and therefore frustrating to the goal itself. Now is a good time to push people to aim for high individual dreams with high ideals and big thoughts. People need to be lifted out of the stupor they have been eased into over the last 30/40 years. We all need something to aim for beyond the spastic dreams of the terminally nannied.
Dale, any way you can find to encourage people of all walks of life to buy into this dream – I applaud you for. I say, keep on at it and tell it,sell it, and go for it any way you can 🙂
Basically been at this my entire life. And there are lots of folk who are making dreams come alive from their lathes and composite layups.
Dale, Funny thing is – with money being so tight, I had put on hold some ideas for business touching on the aero industry – I had disregarded the space industry, (I dont have the time or money for any real development costs) but now that I think about it, I can see where they may have a useful application in your dream.
If what you say is true and certain people are still dreaming (and willing to spend money on that dreaming) then it might be worth my while taking these ideas on a stage or two to where I can make them saleable to the right dreamer. Hmm – so much to do – so little time.
We are of course missing the point. Why would anyone want to go to Mars anyway?
It’s ghastly.
Anyway, if we’re talking bloody chemical rockets… Yeah, and I’m going to Buenos Aires on a unicycle.
When Cabot et al officially went to the USA they found natives who could speak English. They had been trading with British fishermen (it’s called Cape Cod for a reason) for years. The British taste for Cod is legendary and drew us across the Atlantic. Of course we had tasty fish and the natives had water and veg and meat and stuff so deals were made. There is no similar draw to Mars. There is fucking nothing there. It’s cold as buggery and there is no atmosphere. NASA have landed billion dollar missions there to photograph rocks! The Europeans came back from the Americas (or stayed) with gold, silver, potatoes, tomatoes, baccy, sugar and stuff like worth having. Mars is fucking Utah without Mormons.
Billionaires might do it because they’re richer than creosote and they only build yachts so long. Some cockamamie UN type dealie might do it for all humanity (i’m thinking some Brian Aldiss wank here) or some such ballcocks or the Chinese might do it to erect a giant sign saying, “Fuck off America you’re our bitch now!”
This is the massive problem. Mars is close but it’s awful.
Anyway, I’ll be dead before for whatever reason – and it will be a shite one – anyone sets foot on Mars.
Take it in small stages! First, set up an orbital hotel (Bitel? Ortel?). Make money from such a service. Use the money to finance lunar resorts. Then go on to Mars!
“Once you’re in orbit you’re halfway to anywhere.” Iirc that’s a Heinleinism. And in that I think thinking Mars is thinking too small. Think asteroid belt. Accessible raw materials and microscopic gravity wells. Phobos might be useful as proof of concept but the asteroids are where it’s likely to be at.
You could probably build a big, slow, expensive contraption to take you from Boston to Los Angeles using a 2 horsepower electric motor.
But why bother?
We need power, speed, and efficiency. We need kick-ass propulsion systems to get us there fast. Screw long-duration flights.
Spend the billions on engine development. Once you’ve got speed, the rest is easy. And a lot cheaper.
“mdc, In order to get something working it has to move from theory to application, and if you don’t act as though its going to happen at some stage then it never will. You are doing exactly what I was talking about re. negative enthusiasm.
If people cant even believe to dream, never mind believe enough to contemplate the process for realising the dream, then they have become lesser people and in doing so infect the dreamers and the doers.
Even if there aren’t people actively developing a mars expedition craft. The fact that Dale can post a dream of a plan of doing so makes it that bit more likely someone might take it and run with it. The more people are willing to run with a dream the more we will achieve regardless of whether anyone else thinks its achievable. The better the dream is envisaged the better the chance of it achieving some sort of reality. Which is why I think Dale should not dampen his dream with shortcomings or possible unachievables, but rather let it extend to the range of what the active players might imagine.”
While I am not yet a doer, I do have some scientific training, and it’s not lack of ‘enthusiasm’, or ‘belief’ that leads to me to the conclusions I’ve reached, it’s rather possessing clear knowledge of the actual difficulty and utility. Here the difficulty is huge and the utility is quite low.
While I too enjoy sci-fi and would love to own some magic spaceship that can jet off to explore distant stars in the run time of an episode of a TV show, what you’re going to get instead is a few men in a tiny box taking six months to cross a small fraction of our own solar system, in exchange for the GDP of a small country.
Space opera outcomes are probably precluded by theoretical limitations, but in time, we will I am sure go into space on an industrial basis, then as tourists, and finally as colonisers. But before we reach that latter, we will first have colonised the deserts, then Antarctica, then the sea, and even the most basic of profitable uses of space will not happen without very substantial advances across all areas of science and engineering.
Since it’s often referenced in these debates, the aircraft was not invented by mindless hopechange ‘belief’. Even the ancient Greeks, and doubtless pre-historics of whom we have no record, dreamed of flying. It was actually done, and implemented on a large scale, only after the technology had matured to make it practical and affordable.
Why not colonize the Moon first-? It’s closer and we could learn a lot about long term life in a low-gravity environment. If located straddling the dark/light zone we could adjust for heat/cold to create a human habitable environment not entirely dependent on energy sources for comfort.
We could use the unlimited and unfiltered heat/light from the sun to power energy cells and build underground facilities. We could melt/form basic rocks into different zones. Unlimited, unfiltered, uninterrupted sunlight might be a source of beam power to Earth
We could even, uses several of these solar power units to build a lasers that would guarantee no high orbital missile launches against/by any nation, reducing the ballistic missile threat to low level flights that are easier to defend. A civilian owner would be far less corruptible than one controlled by the UN or any nation.. If one has unlimited power and the ability to create their own security and environment-what can be offered as an inducement-?
Our Chinese friends are supposedly planning a Moon Colony… why-? “Because it’s there”, might be good enough for Western civilization; I suspect to explore-exploit and develop and possibly change the Chess-Go dynamic with all other Earth based powers. The goal in winning is not the destruction of ones enemy but the removal of his ability to respond… Surrounding and removing any response capability is far better than a destructive war. Plus the markets remain active and profitable to some more than others.
JSAllison hit one of the many nails on the head. I did note that once built, this ship can go anywhere in the solar system. It just takes time to get there. Better ships will come, but someone, sometime, has to wrest Space from the province of the Design Bureaus and show that incredible things can be accomplished by a few individuals with big dreams. That someone can start from nothing, create a company, make billions and then do what nation states have claimed to be their own, and do it 10 or 100 times better.
If you want newer, better technology, you will just have to wait. I’m rather tired of waiting myself. We’re nearly at the threshold where dreamers who are smart enough to make their fortune can MAKE those dreams happen.
You wanna play in this field? Go forth and make your venture. I’m launching my venture and if it does end up making a billion, which is a very long shot indeed, I know what club I will be joining, and it isn’t the country club.
Good luck with it, Dale. I hope you make your billion.
Mr Amon,
Quick and dirty is the only way it is going to be done; most examples of historical voyages of discovery have been done with quick and dirty solutions that were neither ideal nor tailored for the type of voyage they planned for (Columbus complained about the unsuitability of ships; HMS Endeavour was a cargo vessel before Cook took it to the Pacific; Apollo was not the kind of mission von Braun wanted, only the kind he could do in a decade). Only in subsequent trips are more tailored solutions used (Cook always thought HMS Resolution was the better ship). In exploration, the best is usually the enemy of the good.
Are we talking about the same book!?
“someone, sometime, has to wrest Space from the province of the Design Bureaus and show that incredible things can be accomplished by a few individuals with big dreams. That someone can start from nothing, create a company, make billions and then do what nation states have claimed to be their own, and do it 10 or 100 times better.”
Which has only ever been true if the idea is a good use of resources, not a bad one. Invent facebook and you can make your billions. Squander billions on vanity projects of little practical value and the market will have you out on your arse (or stop you before you get started). That’s the whole point of it. Taking billionaires and asking them to ignore the market incentives is more moral than stealing money from unwitting bystanders, I agree, but BASA will not be any more efficient than NASA, nor will it change the underlying practical reality of space travel with 2010 technology.
Excluding the effects of regulation, private use of space will happen – when the costs have come down sufficiently to make it worthwhile.
And you are treating it as if someone is asking for yourmoney. WTF?
Yes, it is already happening. Whether my ideas have any connection to how things will roll out over the next 20 years Is anyone’s guess, although it is unlikely. When the people doing the things currently reach the point where the parts are all sitting around, they will decide how to put them together and where to go.
And as to those complaining about this, what is the point of spending your life becoming a billionaire if you haven’t got big dreams? You can only build so many incredible houses and yachts and fly around in your private airliner and throw parties for a few hundred friends for so long if you are the sort who was able to create a fortune from a technology idea in the first place. People in that category mostly don’t arrive at boredom. They are doers and the do. Many of them are spacers just like me. So what do you think they are going to do with that money? Are *already* doing with that money?
There is a certain puritan thread in many replies. I am not a puritan. Many things exist because people want them. A large portion of what the West calls its ‘poor’ live in luxury and with good beyond the imagination of the Kings and Queens of England even a few hundred years ago. Hot water! Amazing entertainment on demand! The finest of musicians around the clock! Warm floors covered in carpets of wondrous colour, clothes of materials beyond imagining… they are not bare essentials of survival. People buy them because they want them.
Trips to Mars will exist because people want them. Same reason, higher price.
This is premature. We need to first build a culture/population of space mission capable, via direct involvement in unmanned flights to eg NEOs.
This by analogy to what happened with computers–The Altair and its kind stimulated the appearance of a new culture and simple cheap hardware which then evolved to all we have now.
Google “microlaunchers”
The Cold War large scale space initiative is over. NASA’s mission was done after Apollo and the decision for canceling the Apollo follow-on plans.
Dreaming now of large scale adventures in space without doing the development of the means to do it will mean the dreams will never happen. There is work to do first.
Charles: Who is we? if I had a few billion dollars, I’d simply do what I damn well wanted to do, and if that was a big dream, then I would do it. If I were a Bill Gates, I would have a ‘secret cabal’ working the design issues on this in advance, updating it every time a new piece falls into place, investing a few million here and there on the key things I need for my space ship. When I reached the point at which the pieces were available, I would go. Whoever wants to wait for ‘better’ may do so. I won’t.
“Amazing entertainment on demand! ”
Do you get ITV2 Dale? It’s amazing but is it entertainment? It seems more like unmiitigated shite to me.
“Dreaming now of large scale adventures in space without doing the development of the means to do it will mean the dreams will never happen. There is work to do first.”
What a silly statement, Charles. No one is going to do the work unless he is driven by the dream. The dream always comes first; it has to. I’m glad there are people like Dale around keeping it alive.
I’m with NickM on this.
We can do all sorts of things because they are there, but long term sustained development of permanent infrastructure to maintain a viable colony? Needs a sound commercial justification to survive.
Mars is a pointless destination. Space based manufacturing in orbit leading to permanent settlement in both LEO and GEO. Lunar settlement financed by supplying raw materials to Earth orbital factories. Later on big raw materials from big BIG rocks sent down from the asteroid belt, leading to permanent settlement out there.
Settlement needs to be commercially viable, long term, not dependent on subsidies based on the whim of politicians or rich toffs, and it will be in orbits, not on surface. It will go – Earth orbit, Lunar City, Asteroid Belt/Ceres, Jovian orbit. And it will have a commercial impetus.
Much as I would love to see an expedition, Mars is a sideshow not the main event.
Commercial interests are not part of the periodic table (and even that one saw men-made additions, IIRC). Rather, they are created by humans “out of thin air”, based on new opportunities. Those opportunities are usually combinations of natural resources being initially recognized as such by human imagination, Just recall how not very long ago it was widely accepted that there was no use to personal computers.
“Out of thin air”. Have you noticed how essential thin air is to ideas, and new inventions? And where is the air thinnest? In space! With all that really thin air, ideas would practically develop themselves! Therefore, the voyage would repay itself with all the new gadgets and inventions that would come your way!
Nuke: Not to mention which, if you put people who made their billions from being creative engineers into a new environment for several years with nothing to do but observe, brainstorm and think… they are going to come up with some really interesting ideas about products and services and ways to make commercial space ships better.
Dale, this is a little off-topic, but do you know anything (that you can discuss) about the Air Force’s X-37B “Space Plane”?
I only know the official info, which says it is basically recon and at the moment is experimental. But once you step into the world you can never really be sure what is cover, what is misdirection… I have not actually thought much about it since I read about the successful test.
Dale, how come there is no solar sail? NASA is already experimenting with light-sails on a small scale, or so I read recently. And i remember that you strongly backed light-sails a few years ago. would there be space for a sail on that space-ship?
Dale, there all still too many holes.
Most of the plan you came up with consists of
” we do (insert technical/operational challenge here) using the cheapest means available”
Do more materials research.
I am pretty sure there are materials able to withstand copious amounts of radiation.
rever, sort of like this?
my point exactly dale…;-),
but seriously though, I say we think even further outside the box: slipstream technology, bias drives etc.
Keep in mind that at these speeds, micro-meteorites become Armour-piercing bullets. Some kind of slipstream could have the added benefit of protection in the form of an energy wake.
Great post. My longish comment here.
Ken, I tried to post a longish reply to your comment on your website but the comment link there appears to be broken. So I’ll summarize here:
Your entire premise rests on the ability to create legally cognizable claims to land on Mars, but the Outer Space Treaty (see my comment at 3/1/11 at 8:28 PM for the link) probits any national signatory from claiming any “celestial body” and makes any “non-state actor” subject to the laws of its “host” state. Thus, unless your expedition departed from Belize or some other non-signatory state (there are very few) no nation would recognize your claim. Even if you departed from Belize I doubt that any other country would recognize the claim anyway, which would make selling lots an extremely difficult proposition.
Also, such a colony would either have to be entirely self-sustaining or capable of producing something of sufficient value to justify the expense of shipping it back to Earth. Our current level of technology doesn’t support either option. A Martian colony is simply not a viable prospect at this time, even with the support of a consortium of billionaires.
Common heritage of mankind is marxist crap, but I’ll post something about it on my blog once I’ve had some time to research and think about it.
No colony would not start out completely self sustaining. The reason for going is to learn what it takes to survive rather than debating it for the next few centuries.
Thinking balance of trade is a profound misunderstanding of economics. Mars is a world. Once we understand it, it will provide everything needed even if not everything wanted. Life will be hard at first, but some people like a challenge.
One reason for going is to be free of nations that decide what rights to allow their people to have.
I’ll have to talk to my host to see why the comment link isn’t working. Sorry about that. BTW, your comment thingy always wants me to put in a second security code.
Forgive the double negative. All colonies start out needing support.
Your comment covered two issues so I’ve written two posts in response. I hope you enjoy rippin em to shreds.
Liberty or death, baby!
Any criticism (pos or neg) is welcome.
Tech support of my service provider says they can’t repeat the broken link problem. They asked me to ask you to try again, but that’s no obligation to you. Sorry it happened. But thanks for making me write so many posts this month… I really slacked off last month.
Regards, ken.
PS: I consistantly have to post twice on your blog. It always rejects the turing code the first time.
Except it just made a liar out of me with that last comment and took the turing code the first time.
I hate computers (and I’m a programmer by trade!)
I think I said the same thing to a customer 30 years ago.
The only thing I did different was click yes on remember personal info. That could be it, but unless you ask I’m not going to make any further test posts here.