Jeff Foust reports on the NRC report, and reactions to it.
As I tweeted last week, as both a space enthusiast and a taxpayer, I don’t want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to send a few civil servants to Mars decades from now. Call me completely uninspired.
“No single rationale alone seems to justify the value of pursuing human spaceflight”
Only one [non magical rationale] is required provided they do not force others to pay for it, people want to go (200k+ that we know of.) The real benefit is to all of humanity as we expand the economic sphere (the lack of vision here is astounding.)
international cooperation
Reveals that this Is being seen through a government filter. Those 200k+ are plenty international without any need for artificial requirements.
The fourth pathway is this poor slob is going to get about $25k together to create a database and website supporting a trust document. Then I will provide free rides to as many of those 200k+ as the trust can pay for (structured so that all and more can go over time.) Each will arrive with about a ton of property worth millions due just to the transportation surcharge allocated by mass. This also completely eliminated the need for supply missions. The lawyers will be glad to take my money. People will buy land if they see it as legitimate (which is the major reason for paying the lawyers… otherwise I’d do it without them.) I will have the money sooner or later (through inheritance if not before.)
The members that get this free trip will have to sign a contract that required them to understand property right better than our founders did (or our founders wouldn’t have included language that allowed today’s weasel to pervert those principles as they have.)
price tag
The arrogance of thinking they (the committee) could come up with a price tag when economics determines this also shows their mind set. I estimate about $3b will be required for the first mission of a dozen will come down rapidly for future missions (not just because infrastructure on mars will reduce the costs to those that follow, but because competition will be rapid as the light bulbs go off in understanding that profit is inherent in selling tickets.)
Let’s make government a minor customer and hold them to the OST which prevents them from owning mars.
If the MCT cost $500m to launch (does anyone have a better estimate please?) that brings the price at full loading to $5m per colonist (although mass allotment per colonist is also an unknown which must be nailed down.) However, what is certain is the cost will be lower over time from my $150m to $250m estimate for earlier missions.
We can do this and government is not required. The profit motive and normal economic laws will do it just fine. This is no magic rationales. $25k is a major hurdle for this poor slob but I will do it. Alone if I have to.
i don’t even want a statue. Anybody that wants can take the credit. The first new world is enough. Given them liberty is the bonus. The martians will show humans how to think because their living experiences will force it upon us all. As Pournelle said in the seventies… surviving in style. It’s all in the mind set.
To clarify…
my $150m to $250m estimate is per person.
“No single rationale alone seems to justify the value of pursuing human spaceflight”
Isn’t that a good thing? There are many reasons people support human spaceflight and that means that people in space will be pursuing diverse interests just like we do on Earth. The notion that people are free to choose what they do with their time and money has worked very well for our society. There isn’t any reason why it wouldn’t work off-world.
Ken wants settlement and Elon wants a retirement community or a bungalow. Other people want to mine or study rocks. They are all great reasons for human spaceflight.
Having more than one thing to justify our presence in space is a strength not a weakness.
The problem is you can’t just add reasons that, independently, aren’t justifiable up to get to “justifiable”, the costs of each of the inputs also have to be added up.
Well, for government, justification of what the government should spend money on is ideological. The government isn’t making or trying to make a profit. Costs matter only in terms of being bearable or unbearable and while there are returns, many are intangible. The government can have one reason or many to justify NASA’s existence and from an ideological perspective, the more reasons the better. It is certainly possible that no one reason is enough to justify human spaceflight and that a group of reasons are.
The argument (not saying it is yours), that NASA isn’t providing a return on our investment is ideological just as the argument that NASA’s funding would be better spent on food stamps is ideological. No one can say that NASA’s existence isn’t justified without making an ideological argument because the valuation of the intangible benefits is so subjective.
On the business end, businesses have to stay in business. Thankfully, it is becoming easier to close the business case. Ideas that were once too far out due to cost or technology limitations are inching closer to reality.
The problem with govt. justification is regardless of what they say it is, they never say what it actually is… control over others (since they’ve given up on ever having control of themselves.)
The MCT is fully reusable, so $500M would be astoundingly high. Given reusability, and considering that the use of LOX/Methane should lead to very high stage lifetime it will really only take an initial input to put Mars colonization on a treadmill which will require little additional major capital investment in terms of launch. If it costs, say, $1 billion to build a fleet of 2 to 3 MCTs which then continue operations for 2 decades (a total of 9 launches for each vehicle plus 9 returns for each upper stage) that translates to a capital cost of only $56 million per launch. Even if operational overhead brings that up a lot that’s still dirt cheap. That leaves a lot of money for the stuff that’s actually staying on Mars as well as operations for manned flights.
And at 100 tonnes per flight that’s 1800 tonnes (4x ISSes) within 20 years. If they keep adding to the fleet over time that number gets higher pretty quick. Also, I’d expect actual prices to be lower.
Also also, I wonder if SpaceX would use most of the MCT in the “off season” for commercial business. That would certainly be the smart thing to do, provided that there was a demand for such a thing.
If it costs, say, $1 billion… for 2 decades… that translates to a capital cost of only $56 million per launch.
You forgot about the cost of money.
$500M would be astoundingly high.
Astoundingly high is the safest place to start with estimates. It’s also astoundingly low from the next best estimate which also uses SpaceX equipment (Mars One landers at $150m. ea.)
If $3b for a dozen colonists is made profitable; $500m for 100 should be ridiculously so.
Let the land rush begin!
““Asking future presidents to preserve rather than tinker with previously chosen pathways, or asking congresses present and future to aggressively fund human spaceflight with budgets that increase by more than the rate of inflation every year for decades, may seem fanciful,””
Why so? None of them really care about space. If Obama wasn’t so concerned with stamping out every trace of Bush, like a Pharaoh chiseling away any record of his predecessor, we would likely still have Constellation minus the Ares I.
The danger isn’t that a strategy will be changed, changes in tactics are to be expected because things never work out the way we want, but rather the people setting us on our initial path will choose the wrong one, setting us decades behind were we could have been. We are not just competing against our friends in space but against our ideal selves.
Mitigate those changes by making them irreverent. Do shoppers check with the govt. to decide what’s for dinner?
Earth-Mars Transportation would become a lot cheaper if they took advantage of high-Isp, low-thrust engines like nuclear thermal engines, solar thermal engines, or ion engines for doing the in space transportation part that is most of the trip. You would use chemical engines only for going up or down the gravity wells.
It would also be a lot more economically viable if they took advantage of celestial mechanics and did something akin to Buzz Aldrin’s Mars Cycler proposal.
This is another reason why super heavy lift is not a necessity for doing Mars exploration.
I still think we should establish Moon, Phobos/Deimos colonies first. Mars may be bigger but not necessarily better. The air is still unbreathable, space suits more cumbersome because it is high gravity, and transportation is a lot more expensive.
“The air is still unbreathable, space suits more cumbersome because it is high gravity, and transportation is a lot more expensive.”
And the dirt can kill you when it isn’t causing problems for machinery and other equipment.
The more I hear about the NRC report the less I like it, in general. But it has put the meme out there that not even the U.S. government can “do Mars” absent a farcically improbable long-term increase in NASA’s budget. That, in my view, pretty much leaves it to Elon to make Mars happen. I rather think he will. When it comes to the economic feasibility of doing so, Elon can ignore the rigidities and stupidities that make government programs so insanely expensive and simply rely upon his own quickly growing resources. To quote Peter Lorre’s character from Casablanca discussing the price of exit visas, “I found myself much more reasonable.”
Nobody wants to be first to market. Nobody wants to be second to market. Everyone wants to be third to market. When SpaceX has two competitors also trying to get to Mars, then it’s the real deal. Until then, we are one car accident away from that all fizzling out.
Yeah, the guy could get cancer too. I didn’t claim the Elon-will-do-Mars thing is bulletproof, but I still like the odds. Within 10 years, though, it probably will be bulletproof in that it will probably be far enough along in its gestation that it would likely survive loss of SpaceX’s founder. There’s no substitute for authentic genius, to be sure, but another decade in, Elon’s plan will probably have absorbed all the necessary geniusing and simply need competent execution to complete, even if it takes an additional decade or so to do.