Astronauts landing on the planet Mars

[PeroK]

You think going to the Moon wasn't been called fantasy in 1890? People called the idea of airplanes pure fantasy at that time. Do you want to repeat that mistake?

That doesn't make everything possible. You still have to judge each project on its merits. Going to the Moon was extraordinary, but we haven't been back since. You would have been dead wrong if you'd predicted in 1969 that we would be living on Mars by now. It works both ways. In terms of transportation, technology has not fundamentally changed in 50 years: cars, trains, aeroplanes and space travel are much as they were in 1970.

80 years is a very long timespan for technological progress. So long that our actual achievements usually surpass even optimistic expectations.

That's not true at all. Space travel, AI and robotics are three that have done nothing like what was expected of them 40-50 years ago. These have proved tough to develop. And supersonic commercial air travel has come and gone.

Some project in the UK being poorly done isn't changing that.

The project isn't poorly - not yet, anyway. That's the planned timescale, if all goes well. The new line across London (Crossrail) is struggling and has been going for 15-18 years now.

The point about Mars is not so much technology as logistics and economics. Those cannot be magicked away by some technological innovation. We could definitely go to Mars and back if we really wanted to, but building a civilisation there is not logistically or economically viable.

 

[Klystron]

We have sent automatic and semi-autonomous machines into space and nearby planets on a fairly regular schedule. Humans require habitat, conditions and resources that machines do not.

 

[mfb]

It's one thing to be pessimistic, it's another thing to just claim it's pure fantasy. Things claimed to be pure fantasy are routinely achieved. Not everything, but do you really want to have a 50% or even a 10% track record of "pure fantasies" becoming reality? Would you call this successful? I would not.

The point about Mars is not so much technology as logistics and economics. Those cannot be magicked away by some technological innovation. We could definitely go to Mars and back if we really wanted to, but building a civilisation there is not logistically or economically viable.

The technological innovation changes the logistics and the economics of it. You can't build a permanent South Pole station with husky sleds, but you can do that with trucks and airplanes. We are in the middle of a rapid price drop for spaceflight. Falcon Heavy is a factor ~10 cheaper today than previous US rockets (per mass to orbit), and Starship should beat that by another factor 10 even with pessimistic assumptions. And that's just the 2010s-2020s.

Imagine how air travel would look like if aircraft couldn't land. Every flight you jump out with a parachute and the airplane crashes into the ocean. Plane tickets would cost a million or so. You would dismiss a world where middle-class people fly for vacations as pure fantasy because the logistics and economics of it wouldn't work. You would miss the innovation that airplanes can be reused, which makes all that possible.
The Wright brothers didn't invent being in the air, hot air balloons beat them by over 100 years. So why do we remember them? They made being in the air far more useful. Rapidly reusable rockets are the equivalent in rocketry.

You can be pessimistic in terms of their viability. But I don't think it's wise to dismiss things as pure fantasy just because you don't see how they could happen. This has been shown to be wrong over and over again.

 

[PeroK]

You can be pessimistic in terms of their viability. But I don't think it's wise to dismiss things as pure fantasy just because you don't see how they could happen. This has been shown to be wrong over and over again.

Why not set up a colony at the centre of the Sun, then? Why not build a FTL spaceship?

Why not cure cancer? (That should be really easy - what is stopping a cure for cancer? Nothing except excessive pessisism?)

Why not achieve world peace? It's 2022 and we have war in Europe. Is that sheer pessimism?

Why do we not have a Moon colony 50 years after we first visited?

Why are commercial aircraft limited to subsonic speeds?

Why are we still burining coal, oil and gas? What happened to nuclear power? What happened to fusion? (That was just around the corner in 1980.)

Your everything-is-possible optimism has been shown to be wrong over and over again.

PS And, of course, we are unable even to prevent potentially catastrophic climate change on Earth. Why can't we stop that? Where's the technology to retain the necessary climate on Earth?

 

[PeroK]

Imagine how air travel would look like if aircraft couldn't land. Every flight you jump out with a parachute and the airplane crashes into the ocean. Plane tickets would cost a million or so. You would dismiss a world where middle-class people fly for vacations as pure fantasy because the logistics and economics of it wouldn't work.

The most I've ever paid for a return plane ticket was about £1000 (to fly to New Zealand and back in 2003).

Are you really saying that 80 years from now I'll be able to fly to Mars and back at an affordable price for the average person?

There's a middle ground. I can imagine asteroid mining. That's plausible. I don't simply dismiss everything.

You're confusing the plausibly futuristic with the implausible and impractical - asteroid mining compared to living permanently on an asteroid, for example. One is possible and one is nonsensical.

 

[mfb]

Your everything-is-possible optimism has been shown to be wrong over and over again.

Where? Supersonic commercial aircraft have flown, commercial nuclear power exists, nuclear fusion reactors exist (and ITER will very likely reach Q>1). Cancer mortality is far lower than it was 50 years ago, some types went from death sentences to almost 100% successful treatments. Deaths from wars keep decreasing, not in every country in every year, but as long-term trend.

Where's the technology to retain the necessary climate on Earth?

It's there, we are just lacking the political will to actually use it on a large scale. Same for the Moon base.

Even including the silly examples we get ~50%. Pretty good success rate for something you want to call impossible.
You seem to mistake "possible" with "guaranteed to happen", because you keep arguing against "guaranteed to happen".

The most I've ever paid for a return plane ticket was about £1000 (to fly to New Zealand and back in 2003).

Yes, because the aircraft landed safely and was making its next flight the following hour. That's something rockets don't do at the moment, and that's the reason they are far more expensive.

Are you really saying that 80 years from now I'll be able to fly to Mars and back at an affordable price for the average person?

At the cost of "I sell my house for that"? Maybe. I don't know. I think it's foolish to call it impossible.

 

[anorlunda]

I wish the English language had two distinct words.

The word Impossible (capital I) means that the laws of physics tell us it can't happen. Perpetual motion machines for example.

The word impossible (lower case i) means Possible but so difficult that we can't imagine success. We cheer speeches from visionaries about "making the impossible possible."

Do other languages have distinct words for those two meanings?

 

[PeroK]

The word impossible (lower case i) means Possible but so difficult that we can't imagine success. We cheer speeches from visionaries about "making the impossible possible."

I spent a lot of the latter part of my career on (usually large) government IT projects. I would ponder what percentage success you should be looking for?

Technically, we need to establish what we mean by success. An analysis that our company did showed that there was a clear split into projects that ran more or less to time and budget and then projects that bombed. These are the projects that either get abandoned, overrun by years and/or ultimately deliver much less than planned. There were projects in between, but there was a clear pattern of the two extremes.

The reality was that ideally no more than one project in ten would bomb. From a commercial point of view, if we make a margin of 20% on a successful project and a deficit of 100% on a failed project, then for ten projects at 10 units each with one failure we have:

Income is 10 x 10 = 100 units

Costs: (9 x 8) + (1 x 20) = 92 units

And that is sustainable. Although, if we didn't get paid anything for the failed project, then we would just about be breaking even.

The reality is that possible/impossible is not the issue for a large project. The reality is that it has to be almost certain of success (say 90%) to be viable.

This, IMO, was part of the problem with large government IT projects: the government departmemts would judge them as possible. And they themselves would use language like cutting-edge, world-leading, ambitious etc. Possible meant perhaps 20%-50% chance of success. Most, in my experience, fell into the "bombed" category.

In that sense, a commercial project to do something on Mars that had only a 10% chance of success would be technically possible, but commercially impossible to undertake.

Moreover, projects with only a 10% chance of success have a relatively high chance of complete failure. I.e. you deliver nothing and/or lose all your investment.

In that sense, these projects are almost impossible to finance because no one wants to go into a project where they expect to lose a lot of money. The 20% chance of success that looks like a golden opportunity to the research scientist looks like a commercial disaster to a corporation.

 

[anorlunda]

The reality was that ideally no more than one project in ten would bomb. From a commercial point of view, if we make a margin of 20% on a successful project and a deficit of 100% on a failed project, then for ten projects at 10 units each with one failure we have:

Income is 10 x 10 = 100 units

Costs: (9 x 8) + (1 x 20) = 92 units

And that is sustainable. Although, if we didn't get paid anything for the failed project, then we would just about be breaking even.

Very interesting. I spent most of my career with a consulting firm bidding on non-government projects. I did the identical analysis, assuming that one in five bids would turn sour. How much premium would we need to add to the other 4 projects to compensate? But I gave up the whole business after realizing that the real road to profit was to underbid, then charge exorbitant fees for contract changes. It was just too distasteful.

But regarding impossible, my favorite is from my own youth. I started reading SF in the 1950s, and much of the fantasy was space travel to places like the moon. Obviously, that was impossible. But 1960s proved that very wrong. I even got to work with GE's Saturn V / Apollo Project team (but on a different project).

 

[PeroK]

Very interesting. I spent most of my career with a consulting firm bidding on non-government projects. I did the identical analysis, assuming that one in five bids would turn sour. How much premium would we need to add to the other 4 projects to compensate? But I gave up the whole business after realizing that the real road to profit was to underbid, then charge exorbitant fees for contract changes. It was just too distasteful.

Your numbers are probably more realistic. It was the same in IT services. We were ethical up until about 2003. The first problem was when we started to get a cut from hardware and license sales and that was the thin end of a slippery wedge! A year before I retired I was speaking to a woman who said she didn't like to attend client meetings any more because she felt she was lying by omission. People like me were definitely kept out of client meetings!

 

[russ_watters]

I wish the English language had two distinct words.

The word Impossible (capital I) means that the laws of physics tell us it can't happen. Perpetual motion machines for example.

The word impossible (lower case i) means Possible but so difficult that we can't imagine success. We cheer speeches from visionaries about "making the impossible possible."

Implausible? Impractical? Unfeasible? Uneconomical? (to me the last two are pretty much the same).

Ironically I was just in an argument on Reddit last night about the difference between "possible" and "feasible". He (an engineer!) claimed there was no difference (...and therefore nuclear power is "impossible"). But I think he was just trolling me.

I share Perok's view here that the idea of a future where commercial travel to Mars is feasible/economical is highly implausible. Obviously nobody knows for sure what the extreme future holds, but right now we're just not on a trajectory that gets us there.

I think the backwards motion on commercial supersonic flight somewhat mirrors the backwards motion on human space exploration. They've proven possible, but not feasible/economical enough to keep doing them. People are still trying to make them feasible/economical, but it's been a long time and it isn't going that well. I foresee travel to Mars going the same way. Eventually we'll do it just to prove it's possible. And then we won't do it again for a very long time because it is unfeasible/uneconomical. Widespread commercial travel into LEO or the moon isn't on anyone's time horizon. A hotel on Mars is so far beyond that it may as well be science fiction/fantasy.

 

[phinds]

 

[anorlunda]

A hotel on Mars is so far beyond that it may as well be science fiction/fantasy.

"I'm sorry sir. I realize that you traveled a long way, but I just can't find your reservation."

 

[phinds]

"I'm sorry sir. I realize that you traveled a long way, but I just can't find your reservation."

And I understand the spaceport lost your luggage, but we DO hope your stay on Mars will be enjoyable.

 

[PeroK]

"I'm sorry sir. I realize that you traveled a long way, but I just can't find your reservation."

A "hotel" on Mars is entirely possible. We just relabel one of the Rovers as the "Mars-dorf Astoria". It may not look like a conventional hotel, or have the expected facilities, but it could win you a bet!

 

[russ_watters]

And I understand the spaceport lost your luggage, but we DO hope your stay on Mars will be enjoyable.

Oh, man, and just imagine having to walk around the resort for 6 months wearing the same "My Parents went to Mars and all I Got was This Lousy T-Shirt" shirt that's 2 sizes too small because that's all that was in stock in the gift shop!

P.S., No, mom, I still haven't forgiven you for that!

 

[trainman2001]

On page one, a comment was made about the explorers on Earth finding edible plants, oxygen etc. From what I understand, Hawaii had NO edible plants and the early Polynesian settlers had to bring them from whence they came. That said, certainly Mars holds significant challenges. Whether we meet them for colonization is speculation, but I will not use the word, "never". As to supersonic transports, it wasn't technical challenges that limited them, it was the sonic boom problem. Nobody wanted them to fly over land masses relegating them to transoceanic flights only. There's new research and prototypes being developed for SS transport that will greatly reduce the sonic signature. When they're able to fly over nations and not just water, they will be used.

For all intents and purposes, there were probably many voices that thought the James Webb telescope was impossible. It was too complex, too big, to many fault trains, and being put in a place that wouldn't be reachable by humans in the near term. Lucky for us, the telescope didn't know any of this and is, as I write this, having its fine focus being adjusted one micron at a time.

In the late 1800s, the head of the US Patent Office said, "Everything that can be invented has been invented, so we don't need a patent office any longer." or something to that effect. Again, lucky for us the folks who continued to invent millions of new things didn't pay any attention. Elon Musk has already reduced the launch price a hundred-fold by creating new paradigms about building, launching and recovering space equipment. Who's to say that these kinds of orders of magnitude changes won't be in effect in Mars travel too.

I know this forum eschews speculative discussions, but there are companies actively working on Mars so to them it's not speculation. It is work. And one more thing about technical bias.

James Watt, the father of the steam engine, was convinced that any pressure above atmospheric was too dangerous to contemplate. His engines, while having all the mechanical contrivances to be a working steam engine, worked on the vacuum created when steam condensed in a closed cylinder. In other words, the piston was pushed by the atmospheric pressure differential that vacuum created. It wasn't until his death that all the other builders started making boilers that produced a real working pressure, and the steam engine became a real technological change agent.

We've only been actively working with propulsion by rockets for about 100 years. I don't know what the propulsion systems of the future will be like, but I can assure you, they won't be the chemical energy released by burning hydrocarbons.

 

[PeroK]

From what I understand, Hawaii had NO edible plants and the early Polynesian settlers had to bring them from whence they came.

When do you think we will have the first permanent Martian city of, say, 100,000 inhabitants?

 

[PeroK]

PS how much would you personally pay to go live on Mars? For the journey (one way) and, say, a two-bed apartment?

 

[russ_watters]

For all intents and purposes, there were probably many voices that thought the James Webb telescope was impossible.

I doubt very much that anyone involved in the project ever believed it impossible.

 

[Oldman too]

A hotel on Mars is so far beyond that it may as well be science fiction/fantasy.

 

[anorlunda]

I think I found the perfect example of making the impossible possible.

 

[Oldman too]

PS how much would you personally pay to go live on Mars? For the journey (one way) and, say, a two-bed apartment?

Sorry, the title on this abstract caught my eye, couldn't resist sharing it for historical perspective.
Mars on 300K per day
https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/31205/95-1066.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

 

[Tom.G]

Mars on 300K per day
https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/31205/95-1066.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

I liked the closing line of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory report on
"Mars Exploration Program." It puts things in perspective!

Each mission costs about the same as a major motion picture, and the total cost of 10 missions to Mars is about that of a single major military aircraft.

Cheers,
Tom

 

[Melbourne Guy]

When do you think we will have the first permanent Martian city of, say, 100,000 inhabitants?

In a spreadsheet of events for one of my novels the date is 15 April 2169. I didn't note when the first hotel is established, though, that now seems an oversight in my timeline

 

[PeroK]

In a spreadsheet of events for one of my novels the date is 15 April 2169. I didn't note when the first hotel is established, though, that now seems an oversight in my timeline

How much does it cost to travel to Mars in 2169?

 

[Melbourne Guy]

How much does it cost to travel to Mars in 2169?

From where? There are many settlements within the Solar System by then, with many travel options...and costs. For example, the Solar System Cruiser launched on 02 May 2167 as a luxury liner that carried fifty wealthy passengers on a two month tour to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Cabins were two million creds, with all on ship costs covered. A one-way, LEO to the Mars Orbital on a no-frills carrier would cost around five thousand creds.

 

[PeroK]

From where?

Any London airport.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

Any London airport.

Ah, well, the FTL ships that flit between planets don't work that deep in a gravity well, hence the LEO cost I gave initially, so you'll need to add in an orbital leg, that's expensive, comparatively, and there's no orbital near the UK, the King doesn't allow it, so you'll need to zip south to the Majorca facility first, which will add about two thousand creds.

 

[Buzz Bloom]

Mars on 300K per day

Hi @Oldman too :

The document is interesting, but a bit annoying in that there is no date as to when it was written.

Regards,
Buzz

 

[Melbourne Guy]

The document is interesting, but a bit annoying in that there is no date as to when it was written.

Looks to have been published in July 1996, @Buzz Bloom.

 

[mfb]

Impossible means 0% chance of happening. If you make a list of 100 "impossible" things then not a single one of them should happen, or you used "impossible" incorrectly.

Widespread commercial travel into LEO or the moon isn't on anyone's time horizon.

Commercial LEO travel is an industry that started just last year. In 2021 we had the first two dedicated commercial LEO missions in history (Inspiration4 and Soyuz MS-20), for 2022 we expect two or three dedicated missions (Axiom-1 is in space right now, Polaris Dawn and potentially another Soyuz flight). At least three more dedicated missions are planned for 2023. Widespread airline travel took more than a year, too.

We had a backwards motion at the end of the Apollo program, but since then things only went forward, and they are moving faster than ever before now. We went from isolated space missions to early space stations to an outpost that has been inhabited continuously for over 20 years. We have a company flying people to orbit now with a second one joining soon(ish) and more companies are looking into it.

All that largely with rockets that get thrown away after each flight. Imagine where air travel would be if aircraft could only make one flight. Listen to everyone in the aerospace industry whose job doesn't depend on SLS and other money drains: Rapid reuse will lead to a completely new industry. Here two examples from a recent article:

As big and bold as the SLS may be, experts say that it pales in comparison with what Starship could achieve. “Starship holds the promise of transforming the solar system in a way we can’t really appreciate,” says Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas, who helms NASA’s New Horizons mission, which flew by the dwarf planet Pluto in 2015. “It completely changes the game.”
[...]
“Starship is not just an incremental change,” says Jennifer Heldmann of NASA’s Ames Research Center. “This is a significant paradigm shift.”

Expendable rockets were a historic accident from their first application in war - you can't reuse something that's exploding at your enemy. Then people just took it for granted that rockets work that way. With expendable rockets we won't colonize Mars, no doubt. But that's missing what the discussion is about.

 

[Oldman too]

Expendable rockets were a historic accident from their first application in war - you can't reuse something that's exploding at your enemy. Then people just took it for granted that rockets work that way. With expendable rockets we won't colonize Mars, no doubt. But that's missing what the discussion is about.

That pretty well sums it up. The Sci Am article you linked had some great points, while reading it earlier today I came across this one also. https://observer.com/2022/03/spacex-starship-nasa-sls-artemis-moon-rocket-compare/
It deals in depth a bit more with the cost effectiveness of both systems and is a very interesting piece, certainly worth the time to read. Any extrapolation in mission costs should be taken with a grain of salt though, see post #58, "Mars on 300k per day". That's a pretty good reality check on future Program costs.

"Elon Musk has estimated that the development cost of Starship is less than 5 percent of that of Saturn V, which translates into $5 billion when adjusted for inflation, per CNBC’s calculation. Once in use, its operational cost would be less than $10 million per launch, Musk said during a SpaceX media event in Texas last month. That’s significantly lower than what SpaceX currently charges for a launch with its smaller Falcon 9 rocket: $67 million."

 

[mfb]

Mission Architecture Using the SpaceX Starship Vehicle to Enable a Sustained Human Presence on Mars is a publication exploring how to establish a long-term Mars base.

 

[PeroK]

Mission Architecture Using the SpaceX Starship Vehicle to Enable a Sustained Human Presence on Mars is a publication exploring how to establish a long-term Mars base.

Do you really believe this is more than a billionaire's fantasy?