There has been on ongoing debate between the Moon and Mars as the destination for our first permanent off-world outpost. Not counting the venerable ISS of course… whose life and capacity are limited.
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Per their vid, the nearStar fusion chamber contains the reaction with a cylindrical waterfall of molten salt that does not touch the chamber wall, designed for a heavy-G environment (gradient perpendicular to the railgun,) so it would need to be re-engineered for a zero-G/micro-G environment.
I have always been in the camp where industrialization of the Moon made the most logical progressive sense rather than Mars direct. Space liners going to-and-fro from Earth’s orbit to Mars in comfort and safety has its attractions. In that Elon Musk doesn't overtly embrace the plan I think is not because he doesn't see the logic of the method, but rather he believes it will take too long to progress to that level of development before it is practical. I don't speak for Mr. Musk, but I share the rationale that to save humanity from potential extinction it needs to be interplanetary. It takes no genius watching the news to conclude that humanity has entered a precarious phase where global conflict has an increasing potentiality. Technology, both biological and nuclear, to destroy ourselves is rapidly progressing beyond our ability to control societal impulses. I am not sure we can wait for the optimal method of safe and efficient colonization of off world locations. The moon is a bit too close to act as a humanity life boat.
One shot per second? how on earth are they going to cool the gun firing at 6km/sec? Didn't the US Navy pretty much give up on the rail gun idea because the shoe would melt when they really tried to crank the velocity? Now they can fire it every second?? 😉 Good luck to them.
As a practicing structural engineer for the past 20 odd years, I hope everyone appreciates these videos and “assignments”. Very much the kind of practical figuring one might do, albeit more of a back-of-the-cigarette-package type. Only true engineers with the love of physics & math would intrinsically champ at the bit for the challenge.
Although I still think a spaceship “ship-shape” is more interesting. Perhaps a future assignment for crude design of a 100-person vehicle…
Elon Musk has a plan. He is not only the most intelligent person in ANY room, he is brighter than the sum of ALL others in any room. He founded Paypal, Tesla, Neuralink and several other high-tech and huge companies. ALL he wants is to save humanity.
Take enough inflatable modules & connect them in a circle & rotate , or attach them at the end of spokes to spin. Put it in orbit around the Moon & let astronauts live there while operating robots on the lunar surface. You could probably even anchor it at the pole with a steel cable & run an elevator.Use it as a construction base to build a larger, permanent base in orbit. Then build another one, pack it full of supplies & launch it in a Hohman Transfer to Mars. When it arrives, then send your manned ship, also with a rotating habitat section. Use the planets as raw materials & build O'Neil Cylinders, or Stanford Tori.
Did you send this information to Elon Musk?
where solar wind follows the suns magnetic fieldlines planets occur as in mars receives more mass than it looses
(the sun has magnetic fieldlines and solar wind consists of charged particles -objects/particles are at their slowest/spend most time at apogee )
melt large amounts of ice with reflectors for greenhouse insulation and atmospheric pressure -once it rains fish can survive mars nature
(we only need enough atmospheric pressure for water to stay liquid in the deepest valleys )
to surrect planets is how to live in a universe
(life as center of the universe )
For me I see tug and barge system like on the Mississippi, but instead a large nuclear powered tug made up of Specially made starships for building material to make the nuclear tug, barges will be Starships themselves. The fusion reactor mentioned seems Impractical for zero gravity operations, a aneutronic fusion reactor I think would be preferably, and a reactor that the fuel is more easily accessible would definitely be a plus.
The whole point of going to Mars, at least according to Elon, is making humanity multi planetary, in case something happens to earth. Going to the moon does not do that.
Finally! FINALLY!!!
I've been saying that for years!
And people talk about the richesses of mining asteroids, forgetting that the moon has millions of asteroid impacts, all waiting for us to mine them.
I keep asking myself why Musk is so bent on skipping the moon. I have to believe that Musk isn't being completely illogical all of the sudden, not saying he's correct, just usually has a reason for his actions. Is it too close to earth? Too close to the sun? Too close to governments?
You need to see this 3d titanium algorithmic engineering optimized rocket engine with optimized central injector nozzles. 48 hour print time.
https://youtu.be/hxKI4XBwBjU
I knew mars one was a joke from the start
Great video! I obviously have to weight in here though :p
You mentioned that multiple Starship resupply launches per human mission to Mars could be technologically feasible to supply human Mars explorers with all that they would need, but wrote off this option.
The only reasons I can see to write this option off would be A: cost, or B: risk.
The alternative proposed was to build much larger colony ships that could carry everything needed in one shot, constructed on the Moon using lunar resources. You say in the video that this alternative option “would require a large colony on the Moon first”.
The cost of building a large colony on the Moon would be very significant (and would likely still require the use of Starship). Propulsive Delta-V is the primary factor in determining the cost of transporting supplies between locations in space, and the Propulsive Delta-V required to land cargo on the Moon is very similar to the Propulsive Delta-V required to land cargo on Mars. So all of the cargo that would be needed to develop a large colony on the Moon first could simply be sent to Mars instead for a similar cost.
There are Delta-V advantages of launching a mission to Mars from the Moon if you assume everything you want to send to Mars is already on the Moon ready to go, but in reality most of the supplies (and all of the people) that will be going to Mars will need to be sent from Earth. (High tech equipment, food, anything carbon based, and even water and oxygen unless you want to build significant additional infrastructure on the Moon first to extract enough water and oxygen from the lunar surface to support both the large lunar colony AND exports to Mars.)
A large colony ship built on the Moon could come to LEO to pick up supplies and people from Earth before heading off to Mars, but then you still have to use rockets to get those supplies out of the Earth’s gravity well (and getting out of the Earth’s gravity well accounts for the majority of the Delta-V budget when sending things to the Moon or Mars) and the larger ship would have the extra Delta-V burden of getting into LEO as well as departing from LEO to Mars (instead of from Lunar orbit). Instead, it is likely that anything sourced from Earth would have to make the trip from Earth to lunar orbit first to rendezvous with the larger ship, which requires basically the same amount of propulsion as just sending it directly to Mars in the first place.
It seems clear that building a large base on the Moon first so that larger colony ships could be launched to Mars is not more cost effective than sending multiple Starship launches to Mars per human mission.
So what about risk?
It is true that the most luxurious human mission to Mars would be on a large colonial transporter, hopefully with artificial gravity from spinning compartments as well as large spaces for entertainment and significant radiation shielding. Such a ship would be very heavy, and would require in orbit assembly. It is of course most efficient to build such a ship using lunar resources and a lunar railgun system as you described. Such a ship could be positioned in an elliptical orbit around the Sun such that it routinely intersects with Earth’s and Mars’ orbits with little need for propulsion. These cycler spacecraft will be the ideal form of transportation between the Earth and Mars.
Cyclers would, however, be limited to a 9 month Hohmann transfer for each leg of the journey. Faster transits would require a much greater Delta-V, and for such a heavy ship this would require a very significant amount of propulsion.
But is such luxurious transportation to Mars necessary? And is it worth the additional costs (and risks) associated with building an entire Lunar colony first? If the sole purpose is setting up a Mars colony, then the answer in my mind is definitely not.
There are obviously many other reasons that developing a large colony on the Moon would be beneficial, and we should do so for those reasons in and of themselves, but a Lunar colony with in orbit assembly is simply not required to build a colony on Mars. It would not reduce the cost, nor would it reduce the total risk, since you would have to add to the calculation all of the costs and risks associated with building a Lunar colony first, which are in many ways analogous to the costs and (to a lesser extent) risks of building a Mars colony.
It’s more sensible to send robots to Mars to set up a well supplied underground base camp to protect astronauts from cosmic radiation and radiation from the sun. There are caves and lava tubes.
Today we probe the moon, tomorrow Uranus!
You had me wondering where my math was off on the MPD fuel calc. I knew there was something up! 😉 Nice concept and great food for thought as always! Amusingly, YT chose to give me an ad for Holland America after the video LOL
I couldn't help but notice the Fhloston Paradise in the lesson. The Fifth Element is in my top five all time scifi greats.
It was never a choice for a colony. Elon wants to build a base to do what has been planned for over fifty years – mining the asteroid belt.
The only reason Mars is mentioned is not its feasability, its to rip off gullible investors
Mars is better (safer) for human beings, the Moon is far better for industry
The candidates were young because they knew they weren't gonna launch in at least 10, perhaps 20 years. By the time the first launch was gonna happen, they would have been 40-50. If they chose candidates that were 50+, they would have been 70 at the time of launch…
Well done, can you do a vid about VASIMER and if we'll see the thing actually fly? I know Zubrin is highly critical of Chang-Diaz and all the time and funding that's gone into it with little result @terranspaceacademy
Great video! And while I agree the Moon COULD provide the needed materials to build a planetary "cruiser" I don't think it's very likely (and besides the humans would still need to come from Earth).
If I could bend your ear for a minute I've got a terrible idea for a spaceship, but I need someone smart to explain why it's terrible.
Ok, imagine a spaceship to Mars in 2 parts…
One part houses the crew with the fuel source (and radiation shielding) water stored in the walls.
The second part is the "engine", but really it's just a large disk that captures incoming energy (microwaves) beamed to it. The "engine" is heated to just under the melting point of the material used to build it. Then our crew docks with it at a single small point to minimize the transfer of heat to the crew cabin, and feeds water into the super-heated exhaust shell to use steam as thrust until it gets up to speed, then it could be disconnected from the habitat and allowed to coast behind so no further heat is transferred and it could be reheated for deceleration.
I know steam is a TERRIBLE propellant, but does not having to lug around your power source offset that? Obviously cutting travel time down to weeks rather than 9 months saves a lot of air and food, but does steam power get us those speeds?
Your "Mission Architecture Goals" proposes "NO pre-deployed assets" – But that ship has ALREADY sailed, we have robotic landers and rovers that have ben scouting the planet, they and their discoveries are pre-deployed assets, and I suggest outside of science-fiction Juoiter-2 style spaceships no human missions should ever be attempted without deploying scouting and other assets first.
Space-stations are also not necessary for planetary expansion but have proven good for experiments and may provide zero-g goods & services that are issues independent of planetary expansion. What is needed is the deployment of robotic avatars to build robotic habitats first, then an industrial base from which they can then construct human habitats – we are not designed for vacuum and hard radiation , we need to drop our egos and make use of robotic extensions to prepare suitable habitats for later human consideration and/or rejection.
Isn't Mercury too close to the Sun? Radiation levels would be extremely high.
Wouldn't one or more space stations and/or a moon base greatly help extending our reach?
My personal take is that we should be doing both a Moon Base and a Mars Colony. The moon is loaded with cheap resources, as you point out, and getting them back to LEO from the moon would be relatively simple. The problem is, as always, fuel, and time. Time makes the human required resources during the journey (to Mars primarily) quite extensive (and expensive). The ISS may have a remarkable water recycling plant, but that adds weight to any such vehicle that is destined for Mars or the Moon. It's more conceivable to send such ahead of time to either location, as well as sending 3D printers for making parts for any such equipment sent to either site. Raw materials on both Mars and Moon should be readily available and (somewhat) easily accessible.
The real requirements are to continue sending autonomous mineral samplers, and return missions so we scout out good colony locations on both before committing to some location on the basis of theories about there being water there and so on, with no mineral resources to speak of. We also will need some powerful automated mining equipment, capable of getting to the ore, extracting it, refining it and processing it into some usable form. I believe modern 3D printers are capable of using various for building both complex metal objects as well as concrete structures (among many applications). The first is a finished "Product" suitable for building more spaceships or other machinery, and the latter is for building habitats that can shield occupants from both space and meteorites.
We're probably still at least a decade out before we see any of this in action. However, I was very intrigued by the NearStar Fusion reactor. I was unaware of the progress in this field until I saw this video, and then went to their web site and viewed some of their material. That's exciting stuff!
At 2:14 it mentions the pressure inside the habitats at 0.7 bar which is 10.15 psi, not 14.5 as implied. Consider this, 13.888 psi cabin pressure is one ton per square foot of explosive pressure , so when designing any kind of habitat it is going to have tremendous pressure on any surface and flat surfaces will all bulge out, domes are out of the question, they would take off like a rocket. Artists often use architectual designs that work on earth but will not work in a near vacuum of Mars.
You don't need 750 kilograms of water per person. Water is recycled through various means and re-used and filtered. For a heavy cruiser 700 to 1000 feet long it would make sense to have a ton of water per person but that must be shared with the same plants and animals that will feed that person . On a dragon capsule it would be a deal breaker. Many waste water systems could use electrolysis to draw out oxygen and hydrogen and then recombine them in a fuel cell to produce clean water, this will give some energy back and produce clean water with just one filter cycle after formed.
I have two heavy cruiser designs and they each have large gravity rotation rings. The whole ship does not spin, just an inside component and this provides triple shielding for occupants, and .6 to .9 G for travel time gravity. It also allows for regular showers, cooking, eating and drinking and toilets that work in the traditional means. A large ship can be a home and a refuge, a small ship is a death trap, … or like you said a Volkswagon.
We don't weight objects in newtons. There is no point. It takes , what,.. 4.4 newtons to equal a pound. Everyone is familiar with pounds or kilograms so why jump over to a scale that few people are familiar with? Like pascals instead of pounds per square inch, or bar instead of psi or Mach instead of miles per hour . Bar and Mach are not fixed numbers and the others add complexity to a problem. I am reporting that this is exlusivism and unnecessary . If you are going to say that pounds are different on the moon or in space the metric you use to translate that into Newtons would also be different, you are still using an earth metric for mass whether in space , on the moon, Mars or on earth the mass remains the same 4.4 newtons to a pound.
im falling asleep