Aug 022011
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2389565,00.asp
Short form: Elon Musk wants to set up colonies on Mars.
Goooooood.
Now, if he can only avoid gettign some “good advice” from certain “experts” on colonizing the red planet (and, of course, somehow or other avoid
8 Responses to ““SpaceX Preps for Red Planet Living””
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Are we talking about an “expert’ who wears a Greek fisherman’s hat, hates VASIMR, and once designed a Mars ship with no weight allotment aboard for the crew’s food on the return trip?
This report on Black Horse is a lot of fun, as it’s not till you get into the details that you realize that the thing can reenter and glide land while having an identical mass fraction to a Atlas ICBM:
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/im/magnus/bh/analog.html
That must be some amazingly lightweight TPS it has on it. 😀
> Are we talking about an “expert’ who wears a Greek fisherman’s hat, hates VASIMR, and once designed a Mars ship with no weight allotment aboard for the crew’s food on the return trip?
All I’ll say is that I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Shouldn’t we determine whether or not Mars has life before we colonize? Or even land humans there?
Ummm… why?
Well, two reasons: science and disease. Even microbial life from another world would warrant massive study, and while it’s unlikely that life from another world would be sufficiently biologically compatible with humans to infect them, you never know.
Once the cataloging and study is over with though, I see no need to care. After all, are we seriously going to harbor moral concerns over displacing germs?
> Once the cataloging and study is over with though
Which would be *never.*
Two obvious possibilities:
1) Mars Gots Bugs: We could spend millenia cataloguing. Have we catalogued all the microbes of Earth?
2) Mars Gots No Bugs: and… just when and how do we *know* that? For every robot we send that goes looking, there’s a buttload of rocks that we *don’t* turn over to look for critters.
At some point ya just gotta forge ahead.
Colonization and spacecraft studies are unfortunately a dime a dozen. I would hold off till the current batch of GEO comm sat got launched and see if it can witter the thin seasons. With Arianespace having trouble finding/matching customers for their dual launch system, and not to mention not making any money. I have my little doubts about how Space X is going to launch with the Falcon Heavy….
Space X had certainly go further than AMROC or Beal, but those same market driven obstacles are still there.
VASIMR and a new war of the currents
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1896/1
In essence, both Zubrin and Chang-Diaz are exaggerating their present case. Why would they be doing this? That’s easy. Both realize that science and engineering are starting to take a backseat in space exploration to public relations and entertainment.