A long story about Elon Musk.
[Update a couple minutes later]
And here’s a video interview with him.
77 thoughts on “Retiring On Mars”
Comments are closed.
A long story about Elon Musk.
[Update a couple minutes later]
And here’s a video interview with him.
Comments are closed.
Some of those commenters give merit to the supposition the best and brightest of British genetics gave their all on the fields of western Europe.
The land of Churchill is becoming a spent and petty ghost of it’s former self.
I read the article before…
[SpaceX] is doing things in space that some countries with their own national space programmes have not yet achieved.
I lost many arguments before it happened saying it would happen. If nothing else, SpaceX has provided a ton of ammunition for argument. We are now loaded for bear.
…and we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
The land of Churchill is becoming a spent and petty ghost of it’s former self.
Yes, I was overwhelmed by the comments there. All they have to say about Musk’s endeavor is that it either can’t be done, or shouldn’t be done. “Reach for the stars” is a phrase that means nothing to them.
If these commenters are at all representative of British intellectualism, then they have become a nation of James Taggarts trying to belittle a real life John Galt.
Very sad.
I found it intriguing on the vidcast that Elon gave some thought to how you pronounce Falcon X, before saying it was just some engineers off the farm. The truth seems to be these back of the envelope concepts could become reality when the market demand arrives (whenever.)
From the article the money quote “…if somebody wanted to sell all their belongings and move to a new planet and forge a new civilization they could do so” Suggesting he understands that a mars economy will include local which may be more important than import/export as far as growth.
This is also central to understanding why colonizing mars is so important. With a determined effort, mars could be self sustaining in a way no other destination can be for a very long time to come. A colony with thrive or die… every place else can easily stagnate.
All, they’re just reminding us why 1776 was important and not just for the stated reasons.
Definitely love the sheer balls of it. Just wish Musk had put as much thought into choosing a destination as he has into reducing lift costs.
With one or two exceptions, what a sad bunch the commenters are.
Elon might want to take note of the guy who warned about D.D. Harriman’s fate, though.
Oh well, the meek shall inherit the Earth, the rest of us are going to the stars.
Not without a plan. Not even the Roanoke colonists boarded a ship without some idea of how they were going to strike out in the New World. Retiring on Mars isn’t a plan. It’s barely even an aspiration. It’s a pithy throw-away of the same breed as “we’re going to the Moon because it’s there.” Even if Musk gets a man on Mars, how much you want to bet he’s not going to die right here with the rest of us.
The negative comments this SpaceX article is attracting makes clear that the best and brightest left the U.K a long time ago. If these commenters are representative of the U.K. population as a whole, then the U.K. is full of loosers. Loosers always complain about the more successful.
The commenters are totallly divorced from reality, they all seem to accept the Earth has been turned into a “cesspool”, they can’t even walk outside and take a breath to realize their obvious delusion.
They need to get out of their little rat-infested cities and see the world around them.
I’ve seen similar comments from American losers, right on this very blog. It’s not an Old Blighty thing.
Not exclusively Rand but it sees significantly more pervasive over there.
How do those misanthropes keep from outright killing themselves?
I especially liked the commenter that implies Musk is exploiting tyrant by selling them a product they don’t “need”, then goes on to say the government needs to force contraceptive use to prevent further growth of the human cancer.
Even if Musk gets a man on Mars, how much you want to bet he’s not going to die right here with the rest of us.
If only I could get the people betting against Musk to put up some real money. If only one man, you’d be right. He needs to put several hundred men and woman. He’s a young man. He has the time to do it.
To do what? Put up his retirement home on Mars? Fat chance.
No. Several hundred to form the core of a colony that will eventually be millions. Building a retirement home on mars will be trivial once the colony is in place.
What colony? To do what? What’s the plan?
Remember that this is the frickin’ Guardian you’re looking at. Judging England from it is like judging America from the comments on Daily Kos.
What colony? To do what? What’s the plan?
You and I may not be privy to the plan (and nobody owes us that knowledge.) However, we can figure out some of it by working backwards from ‘retire on mars.’
He’s not going there just to die (he may not go at all but let’s suppose he does.) He intends to enjoy his retirement years.
That means he needs an infrastructure around him to supply his needs, but not just his own.
To do what?
To live. …and do anything else they want within the limitations we all have in our own lives.
What colony?
Enough people with enough knowledge to exploit the local resources to provide life for the people that live there. How many? The more the better.
Every element on the periodic table is available to them for the digging and refining. They just need energy, initial tools and knowledge.
What about the economy? You didn’t ask, but I know you want to. It’s a local economy. It will develop naturally and doesn’t require everybody to be a zillionaire. That’s not how local economies work.
External economy is a different matter and what everybody gets so hyped about. If they are self sufficient it doesn’t really matter, but the fact is, some of them will be zillionaires and will be able to import whatever they really need and can’t make for themselves until they can make it for themselves or the marginal cost of transport becomes low enough anybody can buy stuff.
Some of those commenters give merit to the supposition the best and brightest of British genetics gave their all on the fields of western Europe.
The land of Churchill is becoming a spent and petty ghost of it’s former self.
Well, you know the saying, “England is 20 years behind America and working hard 3 days a week to catch up.”
“Not without a plan. Not even the Roanoke colonists boarded a ship without some idea of how they were going to strike out in the New World. Retiring on Mars isn’t a plan.”
Roanoke failed. The Pilgrims and Puritans came with their plan to find a place where they could worship freely. About the same level as “retiring on Mars,” I’d say. So let’s not get too tied up in the central planning stages.
I had read this interview a few days ago, but if it IS written by Paul Harris (the guy whose picture is at the top), why is it “signed” at the bottom by “Camilla Turner”?
The comments are as bad as some I’ve read from Florida, Utah or Georgia area newsblogs. But as noted above, we really shouldn’t judge the UK by readers of the Guardian. The comments on the BBC Spaceman Blog are usually top notch.
That was kind of the point.
You’d say? The Pilgrims displaced themselves through England before heading to Amsterdam and eventually the New World. And they certainly didn’t head out without good idea of what they were getting into, a plan to succeed–risky as it was, or at the expense of better, more profitable options.
Central planning? I’d settle for any planning. What we have here doesn’t even pass muster as a mission statement. Elon Musk is almost certainly not going to retire on Mars. He while he may pull of a Mars equivalent to a Moonshot, he’s certainly not going to open up Mars for settlement. And that Moonshot mindset is the only reason anyone even contemplates such a boneheaded path towards settling space.
he’s certainly not going to open up Mars for settlement.
What you’re really saying is nobody will. The fact is, you’d certainly have to include Elon among the front runners.
You have no idea what plans he has, other than what he’s willing to reveal. He says he’d like to retire on mars. Who are you to call him a liar? How would you know how serious he is? (and you must admit, he’s done some serious stuff so far.)
Because settling Mars makes about as much sense as settling the Arctic.
If it weren’t for those pesky UN treaties, Antarctica would have mining colonies on it today.
Because settling Mars makes about as much sense as settling the Arctic.
Or anyplace else in space. Ok. The question is settled. Humans stay home. Or…
…perhaps those that want to can continue outward without your approval?
Because settling Mars makes about as much sense as settling the Arctic.
No, you’re wrong. Settling on Mars makes sense because it’s the only way to put a viable sample of the only intelligent and proactively creative animal that we know of, in a place where it can’t be destroyed by a natural, accidental, or intentional disaster to our only biosphere, the Earth.
That’s the crux of it all.
In the video (I watched the EPIC version so I don’t know if it’s on youtube) Musk talks about colonizing Mars and specifically says he isn’t aiming to do that himself. He says that he estimates that the price of access to space has to be lowered by about 200 times to make colonizing Mars practical and that he is trying to *contribute* to that by significantly lowering cost and getting the big aerospace companies to compete.
So no, he doesn’t think he can do it all by himself, he’s taking an economic strategy to achieving the goal.
Given what they’ve done in less than 10 years… why shouldn’t it be possible for him to be able to choose whether to “retire” (it’d actually be a lot of work for the rest of his life) to Mars?
LEO is halfway to anywhere. If you can master refueling and construction (especially doable if the engineering is done so that there is little more involved than docking), you can send a mission to Mars with today’s rockets. A compact space-capable nuclear reactor would be another hurdle (mostly political), because you’re not going to make much of a colony with solar panels. Advanced engines like VASIMR would tie in quite well, too.
That doesn’t mean it’d be an option for most of us–but, if they keep hitting their marks, I could see people with sufficient supplies being placed on the ground in a couple of decades for a total program cost in the billions each, dropping over time.
I no longer have any such confidence in any government-directed program.
Reading the comments on the article I am reminded of England at its best 🙂
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
This is the Guardian. It is oriented towards Labour party members, much like the Daily Telegraph is oriented towards Conservative party members. So you will see comments appropriate to that here.
The UK was the only nation in the world which decided to lose access to space, after launching their own satellite (Prospero), using their own rocket (Black Arrow), from their own pad. Many proposals for manned space were made since, but there has been no government funding, nor does the stock market there fund any business which does not provide quarter by quarter gains. Neither do private investors, to any reasonable degree. It is hardly surprising to see those kinds of comments.
That’s not even remotely true. You have an entire volume of space within 3 km/s delta-v of LEO and a Moon that tacks on only another 2 each way and is only 300 thousands klicks away. You have near Earth asteroids and comets. All of this in our backyard. But seriously, the goal is to fight yet another planet‘s gravity and atmosphere? Why don’t we just come out and say it? Nobody is serious about settling space.
If by economic strategy, he’s pursuing a course of action that only sinks cash into a venture with negligible prospect for return, then yeah. The moment a competitor figures out he can get whatever Musk thinks he’ll find on Mars right in our backyard, SpaceX’s Bogus Martian Journey is finished.
What a sourpuss you are Presley,
The moment a competitor figures out he can get whatever Musk thinks he’ll find on Mars right in our backyard…
This makes a totally unwarranted assumption. If whatever he finds on mars is needed on mars then having it also in our own backyard doesn’t do that much good does it? You’re peddling the bogus idea that the only reason for going into space is gold in them there hills and the only incentive is some import business. It just ain’t so.
Economic activity follows where ever humans go and you can not predict how it will occur. Just because you can’t find any reason to make a business venture doesn’t mean anything about what others do. Value is in the eye of the beholder.
If you can’t see the value of a whole new world of humanity that’s your lack of imagination.
I think Presley is missing the point that what he *wants* is important. Its the same reason people live in pretty houses with nice siding and have gardens. While it would make more sense economically to live in a concrete block house or bare apartment, people are willing to pay more to live in a place they enjoy.
Yes it may be easier to create a new home on the Moon or in a space station, but that’s not what he wants. He wants a new home on a new planet. And I guarantee there are thousands or millions more like him.
I agree it makes sense economically to shoot for stations or the moon in the near term, but I’m not sure I want to live in a station and the moon might get rather dreary after a while.
Bottom line is not always everything. If he wants to go to Mars and there are others willing to put up the cash and make the sacrifices to go with him, who are we to stop him?
Let him try. If he succeeds we are all better off with a second home, if he fails we still have 10-30 years of privately funded space technology development. I really don’t see a reason to not support him
What one man wants–or what a thousand or a million people might wistfully fantasize about–is hardly the issue, and a private lacks a goverment’s wherewithal to shovel capital down a sinkhole. Commercial space is already in dicey waters where it concerns expanding the near Earth market. SpaceX somehow manages to run this Mars-shot down the rabbit hole, she will certainly fail. If I were a shareholder, I’d be very worried right now.
SpaceX somehow manages to run this Mars-shot down the rabbit hole, she will certainly fail. If I were a shareholder, I’d be very worried right now.
SpaceX is privately held. They have no near-term plans for a Mars mission.
SpaceX certainly has shareholders other than Musk, and as its privately held we really don’t know much about what their plans beyond whatever goes into their publicly announced launch schedules or pops up interviews like this. And if I were one of those shareholders, I’d be thinking about how SpaceX’s strategic vision aligned with my expectations for the IPO–if and when that ever happens.
The IPO will be based on SpaceX’s success record and order books. Elon’s retirement plans will not be a factor. People are making way too much of this.
If it were that simple, there’d be no risk in floating stock in the first place–anyone in the black would do so with a reasonable expectation that the price would hold or improve. More importantly, companies in the red wouldn’t even bother.
I hope this is nothing more than a publicity stunt, but NASA isn’t the only entity out there having a hard time articulating a reasonable case for manned space. When you set aside all the talk about competing services already offered by government agencies to reduce costs, what are some concrete visions for industry exploitation of space? I’m still looking for ones that don’t flow out of the advocacy paper mill.
I hope this is nothing more than a publicity stunt
It’s not even that. It’s just Elon expressing his hopes for retirement.
I can live with that.
I am sure if Elon is browsing this post, that knowledge will greatly comfort and relieve him.
I heard you lack of approval was causing him considerable lack of sleep.
You can thank your unwavering, aimless cheer-leading for getting him through restless nights.
‘Mars Direct’ benefits from Mars having better in situ resources. The only real disadvantages to Mars are the time delay and a gravity well. (both significant, but with a nuclear pulse engine…)
I can’t say it’s a bad idea. But the benefit of near Earth colonies is that they benefit economies back on Earth – that they’ll be integrated into those economies. They also make far colonies a lot more reasonable – for a variety of destinations.
Still, are people still worried about a few comments by Bob Zubrin about big spinning mirrors? Haven’t recent discoveries about NEO’s, lunar hydrogen, developments in robotics, the success of SpaceX itself, and on and on been enough for the space community to rethink its big picture?
That’s the problem really, there’s no more big picture anymore. With Constellation dead, people are waiting for ‘someone’ to do ‘something’. Which is why I think it’s important for people like Musk to consider very carefully not just their activities, but their vision as well. Although I admit that many more people than the space community are watching.
Presley? You made a funny? I’m so proud of you.
For the record, I have often thought that I would like my last act to be riding around in a wheelchair as an old man inside of a brand new O’Neill cylinder – smelling funny, with baby treelings, and bad temperature control – but there, tangible, finished.
Goldin had his fuzzy picture of an extrasolar Earth, Musk I guess has ‘Red Sands Links’ in mind.
I like the idea of worlds created by man, superindustry, an overabundance of energy, and that sort of thing.
Things you don’t get while fighting gravity and atmosphere, whether on this world or Mars.
I could honestly care less where Elon wants to retire. All i care about is the fact that what he is doing helps my chances of retiring where I want.
Granted, even if he lands a bunch of merry colonists on mars with shovels and printed houses, my chances of retiring on Europa only go from one in a zillion hojillion to one in a gabillion, it still helps and i am all for it.
Especially as what he is doing does not hit my wallet in a measurable way.
Now, if i were a shareholder in SpaceX all i would care about is that they have a marketable product/service offering and strong financial plan to go with it. I wouldn’t care much how do they spend their research budget.