More to the curiosity about why so many rockets and what is the point beyond a bit of exploration and satellites. Yes a big asteroid full of money dust would be a very keen prize
Butch and Suni could have returned as a part of crew 8 return or anytime on a Soyuz or crew 9 capsules if needed due to health. Crew dragon Freedom is currently docked.
Launching a crew dragon and returning it coats NASA about 500 million. In this case it would have had ongoing additional costs and impacts to future crew schedules and resupply missions.
Timing of a Mars human mission is nowhere near happening. It won’t happen in the 2028 window.
The first missions will be only to land supplies and possibly Optimus robots.
To setup a colony on mars it is estimated that you need 2 million tonnes of supplies. That is 10,000 starships. 200 tonnes per starship. And the materials of the starship itself is in addition of the 2 million tonnes is needed.
As to why, this would be the greatest human endeavor of all time.
I can understand that many say that all the money spent would be better spent elsewhere. What he is doing will overwhelmingly be using money SpaceX / Elon have earned via their businesses.
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It’s all very exciting for sure, and being a scifi nerd the planet B notion is very appealing, if only as a leaping off point to elsewhere. It’s very difficult to get past the idea that if there is sufficient wealth concentrated in such a fraught endeavour, not only how and why was that ever allowed to happen, but why wouldn’t it be appropriated to repair Planet A? At some point some radical socialism has to occur or we are utterly ■■■■■■.
Preferring Mars to even attempt mitigating Earth’s problems is perverse.
(Yes, I know both are possible, but also both are improbable)
Sorry, editing away, I’m also all for research in space directed toward solutions for earth, of course.
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Can we get an Essendon premiership before Mars please
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Why do you always ask for the impossible?
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There are many countries and companies spending a lot of money that focus on resolving earths problems.
It doesn’t have to be an either or choice.
To Elons credit he does a lot with Tesla in the fossil fuel transition to renewables space which is arguably the biggest existential threat currently. At least in the top 5.
EV’s, solar, home power walls and large scale mega packs. Every few weeks there is another announcement of MW mass storage projects.
I just wished he never got political. He is threatening all the food his companies do.
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I wonder why?
Sweden, where a mechanics’ strike against Tesla is now in its second year, saw demand for its cars slide 44 percent last month, while sales in Norway dropped 38 percent.
In France, sales of new Teslas fell by 63 percent, while total car sales in the country fell by just 6 percent
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I do payments software for a major bank.
The BEST case here is that Musk is over-egging his real plans and is only actually intending to do stuff like cut off payments to people he doesn’t like. Data changes targeting individuals. Absolute corrupt dictatorial banana republic stuff, but not structural.
Worst case is he thinks he can actually make legit changes in how such a massive, complex, finicky, and probably legacy-code-riddled suite of systems fundamentally works, and he could break the US economy more deeply than the most terrifying Y2K predictions.
Here’s the thing. Sometimes the economy is good, sometimes it is bad. But that definition is based on how much money is moving from place to place, and who has it, etc. if you break a major financial system like the US federal payments system (and there’s not many systems more major), then you don’t just tank the economy, you BREAK it. It’s not a matter of the money doing undesirable things any more, it’s about nobody knowing where the money is, how much money there is, or who owns it, or where it came from, or when it was transferred.
You’re not just looking at an economic downturn or a bad economy, you’re looking at not having an economy any more.
Theres a reason we have to take every line of code we write through literal weeks of testing before very very carefully rolling it out to real people, usually quarantined to 1% of transactions to start with. But Musk’s got a bunch of fkg cowboys testing in prod in the biggest payments system on earth, having had zero experience with the system before last week, and it’s only a few years since those same cowboys broke Twitter, again and again, and again, doing the same thing.
Payments is not Twitter. Payments can’t afford to get ANYTHING wrong, ever.
This is UNBELIEVABLY terrifying.
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Trump… by a ■■■■■■■ landslide
There are so many layers to this discussion.
A dozen different earth environmental monitoring satellites have been launched by SpaceX in the last year.
The ISS and future replacement space stations in the future are one of the greatest sources going forward to solve health issues and thechnology constraints. Many experiments currently on developing medications and materials which can only be developed in zero gravity.
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I would be very wary of SpaceX having a major disaster at some point. They’ve already lost one craft; thankfully nobody was injured or killed.
People who have little time and patience for regulations at the expense of the bottom line eventually make mistakes. One day a corner will be cut where it shouldn’t, and it will be costly.
I’d never have given him a second thought if he had just stuck to his business endeavours. But he now has access to my social security number and my US tax returns, as well as my wife and kids’ personal data as well, and probably my parents’ pensions.
I don’t care how many rockets or electric cars he builds; if he steals money from my parents’ social security they paid into for 50 years, then I will staple his nuts to a cybertruck and push it off a cliff.
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Agreed, and obvious typo but I like the image of Elon heavying a carrot. He’s a man in a hurry and possibly all this ill advised shredding of regs and entire governmental departments, and deliberate stirring up of chaos on various fronts is what he thinks is going to get him where he wants to go before he’s dead. It won’t, it will probably hasten our decline and put him in a psych ward. In the short term he might also burn out and alienate the very people he needs to do the work.
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Trump or Musk for president?
Well at this point I’d say Trump, only because he actually won an election. I mean people did vote for him. Nobody voted for Elon.
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I think getting political sets his space goals back and risks it in the medium term if he ■■■■■■ off Trump or the political winds change and the dems get back in.
Dems have already terminated awarded contracts and not awarded others when Tesla and SpaceX were the best equipped to deliver services.
Dems cancelled a contract to provide starlink to rural areas. Spent 46 billion in 4 years and no one has been connected.
Awarded EV supercharger contracts to other companies and few have been delivered at 10 times the cost of what it would of costed with Tesla.
I try to keep away from commenting on what his political and DOGE activity are.
All I will say is that Trump ran on this and for better or worse Musk is contributing to delivering it.
I’ll crucify him as match as anyone if he misuses his access to private data or prefers his companies:
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In a sense all the people who didn’t vote elected Elon. In a massive episode of “I Don’t Support any of Them Yet the Leopards Are Still Eating my Face!!”
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That has already happened. Nothing good will follow
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I mean, I guess Trump did more or less promise Elon would be brought in, and people seemed okay with that.
I personally never thought he would actually seize personal control of the treasury… maybe he does nothing with it, but I can’t help but feel supremely violated.
I’m a nobody who lives in another country so I don’t really have much that he wants or needs anyway… but my parents are a different story. They’ve already been screwed in their retirement years by recessions and unethical business partners. They don’t need this.
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Sure I get that, but why not use all this technology, money and scientific expertise to fix the planet we’re already on the way to ■■■■■■■ up?
From above.
There are many countries and companies spending a lot of money that focus on resolving earths problems.
It doesn’t have to be an either or choice.
To Elons credit he does a lot with Tesla in the fossil fuel transition to renewables space which is arguably the biggest existential threat currently. At least in the top 5.
EV’s, solar, home power walls and large scale mega packs. Every few weeks there is another announcement of MW mass storage projects.
I just wished he never got political. He is threatening all the good his companies do.