>Following the example of colonial America, let’s pick as the affordability criterion the property liquidation of a middle-class household, or seven years’ pay for a working man (say about $300,000 in today’s equivalent terms), a criterion with which Musk roughly concurs. Most middle-class householders would prefer to get to Mars in six months at the cost equivalent to one house instead of getting to Mars in four months at a cost equivalent to three houses.
Colonization of America was extractive. You send colonists and they survive on their own and even pay taxes and you get products back. That's not what would happen on Mars. There is nothing so valuable that it would be worth carrying back to Earth. At the same time it would take huge amount of money to support high-tech colony in Mars until it can support itself.
I imagine that the cost of moving people would be insignificant compared to the "colonization kit" that would enable the colony to become self sufficient. Developing that kit would probably cost more than all technology needed to move people to Mars. Just imagine the amount of technology transfer needed to build and maintain maintain systems for breathable air (air tanks, seals, valves, inspection equipment, instrumentation, automation electronics) without help from the Earth. Until Mars settlers can build things in-house, they need constant economic support from the earth.
ps. We don't even know how to sustain biosphere in closed environment yet.
>Until Mars settlers can build things in-house, they need constant economic support from the earth
This is where digital manufacturing (CNC, laser cutting, 3D printing) actually makes sense. You go with the base materials and blueprints, and you can survive without transferring goods. You manufacture on-demand, and the blueprints can change based on feedback/results. Mars SHOULD have a prototype culture, the same as with explorers. With engineering/research help from earth, a fab lab on mars would be incredibly valuable. Science the shit out of it!
(And probably the transportation cost will be still high enough to make it mot profitable.)
The economy is just not going to work.
The goal of Mars colonization is to create a second (eventually) independent base, so humanity has a chance in case of a catastrophic event.
I'd say even if it costs a trillion dollars, it's worth it. US GDP is what, 18 trillion per year?
If humanity is wiped out on Earth, people in Mars are fucked anyway: they will be one depressurization accident from extinction.
How could they even begin to try to rebuild civilization when they can't even go outside without an apparatus that took thousands of years of science to produce? What is the speed divisor for advancement of a society marooned on a world it didn't evolve to live on?
I'm all for Mars colonization, but as a backup plan for Homo sapiens, it kind of sucks.
It is when a private company is doing it.
That said, I am also doubtful. I don't foresee a trade-hub attracting 1 million people - if there are really a million people who want to go. Who the hell wants to risk their life and net worth just for the privilege of living on a rock less hospitable than Antarctica?
Launches, yes, but landings? Athmosphere is your enemy during launches, but your friend in landing.
Mars has an atmospheric pressure less than one percent of that of earth. That makes losing speed other than with rockets a problem, and that requires bringing lots of fuel.
In addition, the athmosphere that's there can be windy and turbulent. That can directly affect a spacecraft, but also causes dust storms that can make it hard to measure distance to ground.
That's pretty much the whole of the economics. People and governments will jump at the chance to send humans to Mars, if there's a way to do it at a reasonable price.
The cost of the things that are necessary on Mars that will have to be shipped from Earth will be rolled into the ticket price. Hence the first few rounds of tickets will probably be quite expensive.
How exactly do you know that? The only experiment about creating closed human colonies was deemed complete failures and not to be replicated due to ethical concerns.
To make the colony self supporting, you need to transfer factories, chemical plants, machine industry, mining industry, etc.
If the real extraction happens on asteroids, then Mars or even the moon are a better base of operations just due to the smaller gravity well. And Mars isn't without its own mineral wealth. Several that would be important for growing food.
If you look at the delta-v map of solar system, everything massive like planets, is not going to be hub or center of extraction of minerals for other places. Mars would sit at the bottom of gravity well and be economical sink.
Deep space mining (robotic or semi automatic) of asteroids can be economically viable, but just few relatively small asteroids would provide Earth or Mars for centuries.
But raw materials are not enough, you would need industry to build all stuff you need and maintain it. If you can't manufacture 3D printer or CNC milling machine by yourself, you need to buy it from Earth. Just being able to make cast iron is not enough, you need high-tech equipment and manufacturing for them to survive.
Making Mars self sustaining circular economy would be massive systems engineering challenge.
Isn't that what that documentary Biodome was all about?
People already stay on the ISS two to four times as long as Musk's proposed travel time to Mars, and they'll be landing somewhere with a third of Earth's gravity. They might all need to hang out for a day or two to get their Mars legs, but I don't see an issue here either.
Micrometeorite impacts haven't done the ISS any appreciable damage in its nearly 20 year service history. Again, doesn't seem like a problem.
People can definitely survive living almost entirely indoors. I expect VR will be big on Mars. But I think the lack of natural light will really limit the comfort level.
If someone can invent an invisible electromagnetic radiation shield that would change the game.
These year long stays were on the space station, which has similar or less shielding. The Earth's magnetic field helps, but really, by the time you get to your Mars habitat with unlimited shielding mass available, your total dose is not that high.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/1/11138102/scott-kelly-year-i...
I guess they aren't well characterized yet.
I'm thinking (no spoilers) specifically of how Ceres, having been spun up to provide artificial gravity, becomes a destination for expecting mothers trying to avoid complications associated with low-G.
I'd guess that if the objectives and constraints used in the design process were revealed, it would all make complete sense. Elon has a track record of making technical and business decisions that turn out to be 100% correct in retrospect. The epic size of the vehicles are a feature, not a bug, for instance.
Musk has been surprisingly silent (or has seriously downplayed) on the radiation question, which is a pretty big deal for travel beyond earth's magnetosphere.
But here's the thing, IMO: Musk is offering ITS as a transport facility, nothing more, nothing less. If you have payload (a living human) that is fragile (sensitive to radiation) you bring your own extra styrofoam (you include weight of shielding water or lead or what have you as part of the payload).
But if he says that out loud, it'll hurt the momentum of the movement.
So there you have it.
If it's a major problem, they might just orient the ship in a direction that gives the best radiation protection to the passengers and just leave it like that for most of the trip.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-17/why-elon-m...
Adjusted for inflation, US gov't spent the equivalent of $65 billion/yr in the 1960's to get a man to the moon:
Every ship produced is a new member of the fleet that continually moves between both planets. Opening up an interplanetary transportation corridor. If you're someone with the spirit of a colonist, an explorer, an adventure seeker (there are many in the world with that attitude) then Mars is going to be the place you want to prove yourself on. It is romantic, risky, badass, and there are no shortage of people who are going to take the challenge.
An ever increasing number of ships leave every 2 years, and you always have the option to come back. I can easily see people doing fundraisers to go, universities offering scholarships, governments setting up stations to claim some land, companies sponsoring infrastructure projects to say they have a presence on Mars, etc..
Correction: some of the smartest engineers in the US, maybe. But US laws don't allow SpaceX to hire anyone from outside the US.
This of course isn't to imply that SpaceX has a monopoly on talented engineers, I'm sure they exist all over the world.
It's unlikely to be a worthwhile export though. One in 2500 hydrogen atoms in Earth's oceans is deuterium. There's enough in your morning shower to provide all your energy needs for a year, and enough overall to run civilization until the sun goes out.
Isolating the deuterium takes some effort, but it's not terrible, and certainly easier than transporting it from Mars, even if isolating it on Mars were free.
Mining might be lucrative if Mars has gold or platinum or some valuable mineral that's easy to extract and worth more than its shipping cost back to Earth.
I'm skeptical that patents are going to be a major export. Inhabitants of Mars presumably will have better uses of their time than filing patents, and they would be competing against Earth-bound innovators against whom they don't have any particular advantage other than necessity. (Ideally, Mars wouldn't itself even be subject to patent law.)
Space Tourism will be a thing unless there's some explicit policy to prevent wealthy thrill-seekers from going to Mars if they don't plan on doing any actual work while they're there.
Science and exploration might be valuable professions. Like, if people on Earth put bids on locations, saying "I'll give you a thousand dollars if you drive your rover out to this location and take a few pictures and pick up some rock samples". Mining companies might be especially interested, but so would Earth-bound scientists who just want to know more about Mars.
Real-estate speculation might be another cottage industry. Developers are going to want to establish homesteads in valuable locations, and then they can sell adjacent lots to newcomers. (This assumes some kind of sane framework for land ownership. Hopefully such a thing will strike a sensible balance between being able to claim "dibs" on entire landscapes vs not having property rights at all.) As long as the population of Mars is growing, this could be a lucrative profession.
Musk has said there will be no screening of the Mars colonists, and that anyone could go. That means someone who's mentally unstable and/or wants to make a name for himself (ala Herostratus[1] or any number of modern publicity-seeking terrorists and murderers) could go and attempt to harm the spacecraft or colony, both of which would be incredibly vulnerable to such intentional attempts at destruction and are guaranteed to get massive publicity were they to be destroyed or even merely attacked.
This could become even more likely if living on Mars long-term actually becomes viable, and people wind up spending decades on there. Some people will likely go stir-crazy and attempt to harm themselves and/or others.
People who are allowed to go live in Antarctica or out in to space are currently screened very carefully to be compatible with each other and able to psychologically withstand the rigors of life there, and the relative isolation. But there will be no such screening for the Mars colonists, according to Musk, and the isolation and danger on Mars will be even worse than it is in Antarctica.
The isolation and danger will be hugely stressful and difficult to deal with over the decades people will live on Mars. I've read that even in Antarctica, people are rotated out within a year or so because of the psychological difficulties of living there, and no one's been in space for much more than a year.
