His larger point about bacon is correct though. There are many desirable attributes to living on Earth that will not be present on Mars for a long time. But it is fun to imagine how animal husbandry will start and how it will scale on Mars.
The other stuff off his list could happen pretty quick depending on how settlement takes place but it looks like we are still decades away from even the possibility.
Sharing a spaceship with a pair of pigs on the way to Mars should be fun. Will add a whole new meaning to the term “pigsty”.
To be fair, the pigs must have run of the ship. We wouldn’t want to discriminate against our porcine shipmates.
We will surely take our animals with us. I don’t know about pigs right away but chickens and dogs will be there for sure.
Dunno about dogs; they don’t grow fast enough or produce enough milk to be a food source. Pygmy goats, on the other hand…
Pygmy goats would be climbing all over everything. Maybe they would do really well in Mars gravity though?
Dogs were important because of utility and now just because they are magic but I wouldn’t be surprised if they found work on Mars.
If the colonists ticket includes a personal mass allotment (which it must) then everything martians crave from earth will get there eventually because that craving is classic demand. Assuming we can’t produce an artificial womb they will need one female animal, which does not have to be mature at the time of transport, to get things started. Frozen semen is easy to transport and addresses genetic diversity as well.
That is another fun imagination exercise. Some people would take things that are important to them while others will take things that they can sell.
The decision of what to take will greatly affect personal wealth. It is one of those things ‘planners’ should not be deciding. Individuals will not make perfect choices, but the element of randomness will make a more robust system.
Large animals may be bred using smaller animals as surrogates although that’s a bit more complicated than just frozen semen which most teenagers brought up on a ranch are capable of handling. It does mean however, that they don’t actually need a female of every animal to get them to mars.
Plants of every imaginable kind will arrive first, so whatever the animals preferred feed should be, it will be waiting for them. I wonder what carnivores (which probably come last) might arrive first?
“We need” is a common euphemism space advocates use for “I want”.
If we want to open space to humanity, we need nuclear reactors.
It is not obvious to me that this is true.
What are the existing alternatives you are thinking of?
Solar combined with power beaming.
There is plenty of prime real estate in Solar system where neither solar power nor power beaming simply aren’t feasible.
Even Mars is pushing it really. We’d need way more power there than we have today, do do anything substantial.
Thanks.
There’s a danger that such a system might be vulnerable to power grabs.
I’m very happy to see Bezo’s progress towards a reusable booster. Hope he starts getting stuff to orbit soon so Musk won’t be the only new kid on the block.
As much as I admire Musk, his MCTs and other visions seem wildly implausible.
Yeah but leaping from a barely suborbital to a huge behemoth of a orbital rocket is also wildly implausible.
Part of me believes it’s actually just an ego fight, as Bezos simply needs to have the bigger rocket.
More realistically though, both of them realize they are not going to be around forever. So after a decade of puttering around they have finally grasped how slowly progress in aerospace actually is being made, and now push their implausible impatient ideas as hard as they can.
If they succeed, great. Meanwhile, i’ll keep lighting a candle for all their burned out employees every month.
Bezos has demonstrated a long term view of things and the persistence needed to see his vision realized. From the interview, it doesn’t sound like he thinks he will ever go to Mars but is quite content to help build the capability for the next generation to get there.
Musk wants to do something but Bezos seems to want to enable other people to do things. Musk does too but there is an element of the unknown though because both of them are pretty vague about what people will do. This strikes me as very realistic and more than a little risky.
Nuclear thermal or nuclear ion propulsion (VASIMR) makes the solar system accessible. If we had somebody doing the kind of groundwork for that, the way SpaceX is laying the path for affordable launch, that would be game-changing for humanity. A little competition is good, but the worst-case scenario is Blue Origin and SpaceX driving each other bankrupt and SLS being the only heavy lift capability.
Since SpaceX and Bezos are going after different markets, bankrupting each other shouldn’t be a problem. The worst problem remains giving in to the determined regulators from the State Department. I would not be surprised if we don’t get fission powerplants for VASIMR until the prototyping and testing can be done at EML-1, out of reach of the NRC, for a LFTR using a supercritical CO2 turbine to run a superconducting generator.
I think nuclear thermal is way more viable. Having read about it over and over the heat dissipation issues for a nuclear reactor in space are non-trivial. If you look at a nuclear-electric like JIMO a large fraction of the vehicle mass was used on the heat sinks. I think it makes more sense to circulate something around the reactor and vent it over. That way the excess reactor heat is used for propulsion.
I think solar electric is going to be a lot more viable though. Fact is intense exploration of the outer solar system is kind of useless at this point. It’s just exploration for exploration’s sake and I don’t think it justifies any major investments. It’s still too early to consider settling anything other than the inner solar system and even that will require major efforts and new technology.
For the outer solar system missions that will be done I think it would be a lot more sensible to spend money to restart RTG production. It does not have the same power density as a fission reactor but do you really need that much power for the kinds of missions we want to do there at this point anyway?
So if I was doing the investments for robotic exploration area I would pick solar-electric and RTGs followed by nuclear thermal.
Heat dissipation is a central problem (perhaps THE central problem) in any high performance space propulsion system. This is one of the reasons I like beamed power concepts: the heat dissipation is mostly at the beam source, not at the vehicle. Additionally, laser light can be used to actively refrigerate the vehicle, using anti-Stokes scattering and similar effects.
I think it’s pretty obvious that Bezos thinks Musk will get people to Mars. What Bezos is aiming at is making a fortune when those Mars colonists order from Amazon.
We absolutely do need more powerful zero g nuclear designs. The great thing is it will be done in a higher radiation environment which should kill most of the anti-nuke arguments.
Mars gravity will simplify designs relative to microgravity.
He’s right about nukes, wrong about bacon.
His larger point about bacon is correct though. There are many desirable attributes to living on Earth that will not be present on Mars for a long time. But it is fun to imagine how animal husbandry will start and how it will scale on Mars.
The other stuff off his list could happen pretty quick depending on how settlement takes place but it looks like we are still decades away from even the possibility.
Sharing a spaceship with a pair of pigs on the way to Mars should be fun. Will add a whole new meaning to the term “pigsty”.
To be fair, the pigs must have run of the ship. We wouldn’t want to discriminate against our porcine shipmates.
We will surely take our animals with us. I don’t know about pigs right away but chickens and dogs will be there for sure.
Dunno about dogs; they don’t grow fast enough or produce enough milk to be a food source. Pygmy goats, on the other hand…
Pygmy goats would be climbing all over everything. Maybe they would do really well in Mars gravity though?
Dogs were important because of utility and now just because they are magic but I wouldn’t be surprised if they found work on Mars.
If the colonists ticket includes a personal mass allotment (which it must) then everything martians crave from earth will get there eventually because that craving is classic demand. Assuming we can’t produce an artificial womb they will need one female animal, which does not have to be mature at the time of transport, to get things started. Frozen semen is easy to transport and addresses genetic diversity as well.
That is another fun imagination exercise. Some people would take things that are important to them while others will take things that they can sell.
The decision of what to take will greatly affect personal wealth. It is one of those things ‘planners’ should not be deciding. Individuals will not make perfect choices, but the element of randomness will make a more robust system.
Large animals may be bred using smaller animals as surrogates although that’s a bit more complicated than just frozen semen which most teenagers brought up on a ranch are capable of handling. It does mean however, that they don’t actually need a female of every animal to get them to mars.
Plants of every imaginable kind will arrive first, so whatever the animals preferred feed should be, it will be waiting for them. I wonder what carnivores (which probably come last) might arrive first?
“We need” is a common euphemism space advocates use for “I want”.
If we want to open space to humanity, we need nuclear reactors.
It is not obvious to me that this is true.
What are the existing alternatives you are thinking of?
Solar combined with power beaming.
There is plenty of prime real estate in Solar system where neither solar power nor power beaming simply aren’t feasible.
Even Mars is pushing it really. We’d need way more power there than we have today, do do anything substantial.
Thanks.
There’s a danger that such a system might be vulnerable to power grabs.
I’m very happy to see Bezo’s progress towards a reusable booster. Hope he starts getting stuff to orbit soon so Musk won’t be the only new kid on the block.
As much as I admire Musk, his MCTs and other visions seem wildly implausible.
Yeah but leaping from a barely suborbital to a huge behemoth of a orbital rocket is also wildly implausible.
Part of me believes it’s actually just an ego fight, as Bezos simply needs to have the bigger rocket.
More realistically though, both of them realize they are not going to be around forever. So after a decade of puttering around they have finally grasped how slowly progress in aerospace actually is being made, and now push their implausible impatient ideas as hard as they can.
If they succeed, great. Meanwhile, i’ll keep lighting a candle for all their burned out employees every month.
Bezos has demonstrated a long term view of things and the persistence needed to see his vision realized. From the interview, it doesn’t sound like he thinks he will ever go to Mars but is quite content to help build the capability for the next generation to get there.
Musk wants to do something but Bezos seems to want to enable other people to do things. Musk does too but there is an element of the unknown though because both of them are pretty vague about what people will do. This strikes me as very realistic and more than a little risky.
Nuclear thermal or nuclear ion propulsion (VASIMR) makes the solar system accessible. If we had somebody doing the kind of groundwork for that, the way SpaceX is laying the path for affordable launch, that would be game-changing for humanity. A little competition is good, but the worst-case scenario is Blue Origin and SpaceX driving each other bankrupt and SLS being the only heavy lift capability.
Since SpaceX and Bezos are going after different markets, bankrupting each other shouldn’t be a problem. The worst problem remains giving in to the determined regulators from the State Department. I would not be surprised if we don’t get fission powerplants for VASIMR until the prototyping and testing can be done at EML-1, out of reach of the NRC, for a LFTR using a supercritical CO2 turbine to run a superconducting generator.
I think nuclear thermal is way more viable. Having read about it over and over the heat dissipation issues for a nuclear reactor in space are non-trivial. If you look at a nuclear-electric like JIMO a large fraction of the vehicle mass was used on the heat sinks. I think it makes more sense to circulate something around the reactor and vent it over. That way the excess reactor heat is used for propulsion.
I think solar electric is going to be a lot more viable though. Fact is intense exploration of the outer solar system is kind of useless at this point. It’s just exploration for exploration’s sake and I don’t think it justifies any major investments. It’s still too early to consider settling anything other than the inner solar system and even that will require major efforts and new technology.
For the outer solar system missions that will be done I think it would be a lot more sensible to spend money to restart RTG production. It does not have the same power density as a fission reactor but do you really need that much power for the kinds of missions we want to do there at this point anyway?
So if I was doing the investments for robotic exploration area I would pick solar-electric and RTGs followed by nuclear thermal.
Heat dissipation is a central problem (perhaps THE central problem) in any high performance space propulsion system. This is one of the reasons I like beamed power concepts: the heat dissipation is mostly at the beam source, not at the vehicle. Additionally, laser light can be used to actively refrigerate the vehicle, using anti-Stokes scattering and similar effects.
I think it’s pretty obvious that Bezos thinks Musk will get people to Mars. What Bezos is aiming at is making a fortune when those Mars colonists order from Amazon.
We absolutely do need more powerful zero g nuclear designs. The great thing is it will be done in a higher radiation environment which should kill most of the anti-nuke arguments.
Mars gravity will simplify designs relative to microgravity.