SpaceX and the prospects of Mars colonization.1) Current unfeasibility of Mars massive colonization.The goal of 1 million inhabitants on Mars in 50 years is unfeasible (
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/06/21/elon-musk-create-city-mars-million-inhabitants/)
With the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), at 100 passengers per flight, this would require 10,000 flights only to transport the people.
But the material support is about 10 times more demanding. So, as Elon Musk recognizes, the system would require 110,000 flights (see
https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-planet-civilisation; see his 2017 presentation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4FY894HyF8).
Even at one flight a day, it would take 301 years. But since this is impossible, because one has to wait for the window every 26 months, when Mars is closer to Earth, transporting all these people would take hundreds of spacecrafts. This is completely beyond the normal resources of any company or country.
To finance the passengers flights, he would need to find 1 million people willing to pay 200,000 USDs to go live permanently on hell.
When he says that the goal is to make the price of the voyage similar to the price of a normal house, he suggest that people would sell their houses to buy the ticket.
I wonder how expensive would be a house in Mars! Is SpaceX going to build and offer a house to every colonist? Because if they are going to spend their savings and the value of their Earth house paying for the voyage, they won't have much left to buy a house there.
What about the standard of life on Mars? Things probably would be very expensive during the first decades, since most of the complex goods will be imported from Earth.
A fantasy company managed to enlist 200,000 people willing to go to Mars. I wonder how many of them had 200,0000 usds and were willing to spend them on the ticket.
So, probably, only the poor would be ready to try their luck, looking for well paid jobs on Mars. But they won't have 200,000 USDs.
Musk might find 1 million people willing to go and work there for very good jobs, but someone else would have to pay for the trip and pay them their wages.
Selling tourism trips won't pay the voyages either. I doubt he will be able to find many groups of 20 people willing to pay 1 million bucks to pay the ticket of the other 80 (he can make first and second class seats) for at least 2 years to go and return from hell, especially after the trip became more common.
It wouldn't be like a month on the Moon or on a tourist space station. With time to wait for the shortest return, it would be about spending more than two years on a living hell.
There isn't many people eager to go live on Antarctica, the most similar place on Earth.
And let's not forget about the complimentary radiation.
On Earth, on average, we get 1 millisievert (mSv) of radiation per year.
On a round trip to Mars, of about 1 year, one will receive 700 mSv!
But one has to add more 200 mSv per year for a person living in Mars.
So, with current technology, a 2 year adventure to Mars would give about 900 mSv to the tourist. Well, 1000 mSv (or 1 sievert) implies a 5% increase in chance to get cancer.
Moreover, radiation has neurological consequences since it attacks the neurons.
For someone living on Mars during several years without proper permanent protection the odds would be nasty.
Let's not forget about the damages that the about 1 year round trip to mars would create on health because of the 0 gravity on the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR).
According to the plans published, there won't be any artificial gravity on BFR.
1 year of 0 gravity can make someone lose between 12 and 18% of bone mass. And exercise can't avoid this consequence (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceflight_osteopenia).
Furthermore, "astronauts experience up to a 20 percent loss of muscle mass on spaceflights lasting five to 11 days" (
https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/64249main_ffs_factsheets_hbp_atrophy.pdf). Daily exercise can mitigate some of the consequences on the muscle mass, but not all.
Even Mars gravity of 38% of Earths one will be very damaging to anyone living there for a few years.
Therefore, unless there are on Mars very valuable resources, that would pay for the trips (people and resources going to Mars and resources coming back to Earth), with current technology of space flight, Mars will be dependent on Earth, with a few thousand or, probably, hundreds, of inhabitants.
We'll be a two planets species, but the second planet will end badly if the first planet ends badly too. Only with new technology on flight, Mars will be able to be independent.
The goal of making humankind a dual planet species is very worthy from the perspective of ensuring that we can endure millions of years more.
But normal people, who care first about how to pay their bills, just do what is practical to this goal and hope for the best. They won't ruin their life to go to Mars and ensure some of us will survive on the remote case that a catastrophe strikes Earth.
If massive colonization of Mars isn't economically feasible, it won't happen.
2) SpaceX deserves credit about its capacity to go to Mars. Anyway, make no mistake, even if its plans to colonize Mars seem too optimistic, SpaceX already showed that it can make the trip to Mars.
Musk seems like an obsessive person. He won’t rest until he takes humans there.
They have been paid by NASA to send and return cargo to the International Space Station with excellent results.
After some delays, they launched successfully their Falcon Heavy, probably will start sending NASA astronauts to the International Space Station on 2018 (or perhaps 2019) and are promising an unmanned first trip to Mars on 2020 (initially was planned to 2018).
Of course, if some of NASA's astronauts ends up killed on a disaster, we can expect another delay of many years.
Don't mix Space X with all those dreamers, without a penny, that have big imaginary or fake plans.
If Space X is able to send humans to Mars sooner than NASA (Space X is saying 2025, but this recent delay of the first unmanned confirmed that this date is unfeasible), even if with NASA cooperation (if NASA figures out that Musk is really going to make it, they will jump on board), Musk will have his deserved place in History, side by side with Von Braun and Korolev (don’t compare Gagarin or Armstrong with them, beside courage, they had little merit: many people could have been in their place; is like comparing Colombus with one of his sailors).
3) Why go to Mars? It will be fantastic to humankind in terms of pride and self-esteem to go to Mars and build a permanent station there for investigation and some scarce tourism, but we won't have more than that until we find economic reason to do more.
Some would say, hell, are we going to spend billions just for pride and self-esteem ("fun"), when we could use this money to eradicate poverty and cure diseases?
Well,
we spend much more (trillions) just for fun on millions of things.
Just
think about how much we spend making movies. Many are now costing more than 300 millions. The Martian had a budget of 108 million.
Mars Semi-direct, a revised low budget human trip to Mars, would cost 55 billion (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct#Mars_Semi-Direct).
But Elon Musk says he can build the Mars rocket for 10 billion (
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/science/elon-musk-spacex-mars-exploration.html?_r=0). But let’s put the price of the trip at 20 billion (probably, it will cost more, but let’s accept this number).
That is the price of 66 movies of 300 millions each. Isn’t worthy? I bet we have spent much more than 20 billion making science fiction movies.
As we seen,
the goal about making us a real multiplanetary species is still science and economical fiction, so we are not going there for this (valuable) reason.
We can say that for humans to have a future, it must be in space, because the sun is going to burn almost all life on Earth on 1 or 2 billion years.
But that is so far in the future that our chances to go extinct for any other reason are much higher and we have plenty of time to improve our technology.
Shore, the trip and the creation of a Mars’ base will improve our technology and might allow some scientific discoveries.
But we don’t want to go there because of these reasons.
We would press to go even if there weren’t any technological advances. Moreover, the rovers are doing a good job confirming that, probably, there isn’t life there.
We do many costly things for non practical reasons.
In the end, economics is an instrument for our real goals and these are purely psychological.
For instance, we want to earn money not for the money on it self, but also to feel some positive emotions, including security, independence, freedom to do what we want, etc, and not just for the goods we can buy.
On the sixties of the last century, the USA and the Soviet Union spent billions on the race to the Moon just trying to show the world what was the best political system.
Musk argues with the idea of converting us on a two planets species to rationalize his quest, but he won't see it on his lifetime (unless he starts investing a lot on anti-aging investigation) or there is a major breakthrough on space flight technology.
He adds that the real goal is to do inspiring things. He also means historical things. He is chasing his place in History, trying to reach out immortality.
And I have nothing to say against that. It is people like him who took us from our stone age caves, since most of us haven't done and won't do anything really important during all our life.
We want to go to Mars because it would make us proud to be humans like nothing else. And this is why we are going there sooner than to any asteroid, even if it had valuable minerals.
No doubt, if we waited 50 years more, we could go for much less money and lesser risks, but
why give the glory to our sons and grandsons? Since our fathers and grandfathers wasted their opportunity, let's take it ourselves.
The way I use the word "we" and "us", even if I won't have any role on the voyage, is similar to the way people talk about sport successes: they never say their club or country won, they say "we won". It's this individual/collective appropriation of the successes of other people that give so much psychological importance to events that in reality are practically irrelevant to our life (at least on the short run), like going to Mars. It will be if all of us had a role on this historical success for Humankind.
Let’s go to Mars for psychological reasons, because life is all about this. We will have time to go again and make it our second home, for more practical reasons.
