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According to Musk, one of the keys to colonizing Mars is the ability to reuse his Starships for round trips to Mars, requiring the ability to fuel the vehicle up using resources in the Martian atmosphere.
We run the numbers.
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So your argument is that isru on Mars will be difficult?…. We already know that! Your just being negative for the sake of being negative. Instead of throwing math and statistics, although accurate, inform your viewers of your biases and your opinion so they can actually understand what your argument is.
TANSTAAFL is a concept that most entrepreneurs like Musk always forget.
I wasn't nearly as much into space before finding Common Sense Skeptic, this channel has me curious about so much now. Everything that Elon seems to overlook as a complication to being on Mars also just ends up being a fascinating difference about the environments of the solar system. As always, appreciate the content!
Realistically, they will have many tanks, since there are many more Starships needed to deliver material to the surface than will be returning. In the short term, it is more feasible that some of the delivery will be water, which can be broken down to deliver hydrogen as needed for the synthesis. In addition, it is probably practical to store the hydrogen in the form of ammonia, since it is easy to convert it back to hydrogen when needed, and produce the methane towards the end, in order to minimize the time needed to store it cryogenically.
Couldn't the Sabatier process happen while the tanks with methane etc are still filling up? Seems unnecessary with all that storage space. Otherwise, death blow to the Mars project.
Perfect video ! Thanks a lot. I personally think that the first Starship landing on Mars will only have Tesla Optimus robots 🤖 and the cargo bay will the ISRU refueling plant, or most probably an experimental one and will run for 4 years or more. Your magistral demonstration might raise some eyebrows in the SpaceX weekly meeting room 😄
Musk desperately wants to get to Mars so he can claim he invented the planet.
It would have been nice to add a comment on the fact that if any component breaks or malfunction, they're all dead.
So not only is the gas factory that big, a viable mission with spare parts would basically need to bring two of them.
I swear I thought he was saying squirrel compressors. Got it, carry on!
im curious what you think about the artemis program after they selected starship as the lander system. Obviously you hate starship and dont think it'll ever get off the ground so what do you see as a viable alternative
What we should all want and what is needed, is for space grifters to stop lying to people and redirect all that money and effort into making the only planet that will support life a better and happier place. All this money being wasted on Space Travel pipe dreams for humanity is a giant sick joke.
If these people and govts were serious about eventually becoming a space-faring civilization then they'd do all they could to prevent the biggest threat to ever achieving that goal. The biggest threat will always be collapse of the Societies and systems that make funding these dreams even possible. The way things are going, this iteration of civilization won't be the ones to achieve it. The viciousness and destruction of insatiable Greed will collapse us long long before if left uncorrected. Like all that came before us.
I still think they should just bring a teeter totter and redirect an asteroid to hit the other side, launching the person back to earth.
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pie in the sky 10 generations ahead if we don't kill ourselves in the next year or two
if we just all got along we would be already on mars.
love your show CSS : )
Then there's the issue of gravity, and what happens to the human body without it.
But here's my question… Can Starship even make it to space, in the first place?
How sound is the engineering for an orbital launch of a fully stacked Starship rocket powered by so many small engines? Is it viable?
Please show me on the doll where Elon touched you. 😎
I think I can actually poke a bunch of holes into what you have presented here.. but I don't really care about that Mars goal. For sure it will be way harder than a bunch of Elon tweets make it sound. I really don't know to what degree Elon thinks he has mastered it and to what degree he is just using sensationalism for viral promotion of his businesses. What I am impressed with about SpaceX is that they have at least made reusable first stages almost mundane. Elon has unfortunately shifted further and further to the batshit side of US politics recently so I really hope to see other companies in multiple countries appearing that also mundanely reuse first stages.
Elon is proving to be an A-hole, but I think I will still always be grateful for him sticking it to a couple of worse A-holes, such as the military industrial complex corporations that have been ruining our space dreams for decades with their absurd space shuttle derived pork rocket that serves absolutely no purpose but to funnel billions of dollars into their pockets. The other A-hole is Russia. I wish the best to all their engineers and hope they find employment in other countries that are not run by fascist narcissistic sociopaths that are turning that country into a horrific joke.. Or maybe the other A-hole is Bezos.. I haven't decided yet.
Re Elon's mars ambitions. I think it will be hard enough and impressive enough to land starships one way. From memory his presentations talk of a couple of unmanned starship being sent before the first manned one but I suspect that unmanned part of the process will just keep stretching out.. and it would still be a massive achievement and the tonnage they could deliver one way would dramatically change what our robotic missions to mars can achieve.
I think the real hurdle is just to make Starship a commercial success around earth. If he can do that then we could see an occasional unmanned starship being thrown at mars to see if we can get it to survive to the ground.
Btw, one of the big reasons im not that concerned with mars is that we don't even know if mars gravity is enough for human bones. Mars could easily be a non-starter just because of that. My own pet idea for space colonisation is far less extravagant. It is just a combination of something like the Lunar Gateway plus continual ARRM style missons collecting samples of near earth objects and returning them to the gateway for ISRU experiments. You would always be only days from earth as you work to master ISRU and self sufficiency technology. At a certain point you would already have mastered all the ISRU and self sufficiency you need to colonise the asteroid belt and you could just float off and do that.
this should be part of a new series called "why no one presently alive is going to mars" lol
We'll have world peace before this happens 😆
In short: Producing energy on Mars takes more energy than what you can produce, making the idea of producing return fuel IMPOSSIBLE. In fact even self sustaining colony that does not return is impossible unless (in an unexpected turn of events) we discover how to generate energy from vacuum.
Idiots think that any engineering problem can just be solved by throwing time and money at it.
Does something like this exist as a video game? Similar to Factorio. I could imagine some folks who would happily play such a game. It should be as hard as Dwarf Fortress, since this whole endeavor is doomed to fail.
Mars is a shit planet compared to Earth. Why would anyone want to go there and work in Musks labor camps + pay for it 100k. It's absurd.
Elon Musk is a legitimate target for haters. Haters are important motivations and encouragement for achievers. That's why the saying, "Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it." The naysayers are almost indispensable cheering squads for those who will get to say "I told you so." Real achievers love those people. Looking forward to "I told you so." is a fulfilling reward. Thank you for motivating NASA and SpaceX to get the job done. You won't be remembered, but you are important.
Rockets do no work in a vacuum. The founders of Physical Chemistry, Thompson-Joules, proved it a century before NASA's fraudulent claims to the contrary were made and continue to be made.
I believe we'll solve most of these problems in due time.
Seems like we would be much better off spending all this time, money and brain power to make life on earth better for everyone rather than trying to make life possible for a tiny few on mars.
Angry Astronaut, or rather the Salty Fan Boi, has 'debunked' your video. Please debunk the idiot's 'rebuttal'. Thank You.
Summary : you ll be working to death if Mars doesn't kill u if u want to get back from Mars . Ever .
Imagine paying millions to work to death 😂
alright ok, the horse is dead, stop flogging it. we are all sold on musk rats ideas just being fantastical dreams. now shine a light on lex fridman and that hollow entity.
Thanks for putting all of this effort into this. And this scenario does not even end well if you exclude murpys law, which I think applies on Mars as well.
On the one hand Elon Musk is one of the greatest bullshitters of all time. On the other hand, SpaceX is delivering on quite a few promises. And it does it the sensible way of putting one foot in front of the other.
Did you take into account that solar panels on Mars will have a reduced effectiveness because they are further away from the light source i.e the sun?
Great pieces. Thanks for the dose of reality!!!
this sounds like a nearly or fully impossible nightmare. i'll just stay home and read today thanks. 🙂
So the first thing Musk wants to do on a new planet is to exploit its scarce resources – way to go Humans!!!
What's MacGyver up to these days? Surely, he could help iron out of few of these problems?
If we slowly throw trash onto Mars then perhaps the trash can be burned for energy/water extraction/atmosphere creation
Perhaps you ought to learn some science!
Don't let your hate distort science!
well done guys, amazing work as always…. id love if husk actually had the brain power to answer in detail like this, but i dont think hes mental resolution is high enough for it….
@10:10 – Why would you store a huge volume of hydrogen in a huge tank rather than using it immediately after you electrolyze it from water, let alone bothering to compress it to a smaller volume of pressurized storage (as you mention in passing without mentioning that that it could be compressed to take a lot less than "77 olympic pools").
Especially since you could be using the waste heat of the Sabatier process to heat the water and reduce the electrolysis electrical energy if you combine those two processes?
Are you SURE this site is "Common Sense" Skeptic? Seems more like "Try-to-Gotcha-Skeptic", pandering to people who love to believe they've got an inside story showing that engineers and scientists doing cutting edge work are all fools or scammers to whom your "insights" are not already an extremely obvious part of their everyday work for which they've already accounted and moved on.
Can you do a break down on the original moon landings in the 1960's like you have done here with the Mars landings? Your work is amazing.
So metaphorically, the human race goes back to the industrial revolution again.
how much methane clathrate in embedded in subsurface ice on mars? If one drills into subsurface ice deposits and evacuates bore hole of atmosphere to what degree and cost could one sublimate ice and methane out of the ground given @ around 1% martian atmospheric pressure and -50C water ice sublimates?