"No ground in reality"? Sure, the plan is extremely ambitious. But it relies on no fundamentally new technology and comes from someone with a proven track record in the field. They're talking at almost seven years before the first Mars launch with this system. I'll remind you that seven years before Apollo 11, this was the state of the art for American spaceflight:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_LV-3B

Further, Musk explicitly admitted that his ability to create realistic schedules is poor, and the timeline should be considered more aspirational than concrete.

To me, "no ground in reality" would apply if they had announced, say, plans for a warp drive, or a teleporter. This plan looks extremely grounded in reality to me, which is why it's so exciting.

The technology to put people on Mars is not fundamentally new. The technology to make such a colony self sustaining is. We've never built any habitat which is entirely self sufficient even just in food, water, and air. Even the ISS needs resupply to generate breathable air. Even simple problems like "how do we replace failed bolts" will require resupply from earth for a long time.

I'm also dubious of the economics of this venture. I simply don't understand how living on Mars is advantageous for anybody. Mr. Musk is welcome to set his money on fire if he wants, of course, but I don't see a Mars colony ever being a rational investment for those of us on Earth, nor do I see paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to live a hard life and die in a frozen wasteland to be rational. I suspect after the initial enthusiasm dies down, very few people will choose this.

Elon actually had to state this point explicitly on the livestream because it seems to be not getting to people - SpaceX is not in business of colonizing Mars, it's in business of getting colonizers to Mars (and back). I.e. transportation infrastructure. Elon leaves setting up a colony to other people. That's why he keeps repeating that the idea is to drop the price per person to ~$200k - he seems to believe that if he can pull this off, the rest will be done by others.

A very rational argument for colonizing Mars is, we're 1 solar flare, 1 gamma ray burst away from total extinction. Having presence on a second planetary body is the best way we have to insure ourself against planet-sized cataclysmic events.

Also, why would someone do this? Same reason people crossed the Atlantic, to take part in something greater than themselves. That's why I want to do it. Don't care it's cold and dry. It's obvious to me that it's the most meaningful thing I could do with my life. To each their own, but I'm pretty sure you can see how I come to this idea; it's not far fetched.

A solar flare or a gamma ray burst might knock out satellites and electrical equipment and damage earth's atmosphere. In the worst case, they could kill a few billion people. But Earth will still be more hospitable than Mars.

>Same reason people crossed the Atlantic, to take part in something greater than themselves.

People crossed the Atlantic because they wanted gold, or slaves, or timber, or land, or because they wanted to escape from religious persecution, or because they were slaves or prisoners transported against their will (by someone who wanted gold, or timber, or land). They received resupply, not as charity, but from companies which expected to receive gold, tobacco, timber, or other goods in return from their investment.

Colonization is driven by economics. That's why thousands live permanently in Norilsk, Yellowknife, La Rinconada,and Kalgoorlie, but nobody lives permanently at Amundsen-Scott, under the sea, or in LEO. If history is any guide, "how will this turn a profit" is the question any Mars colony needs to address if it is to have any hope of prospering.

> People crossed the Atlantic because they wanted gold, or slaves, or timber, or land, or because they wanted to escape from religious persecution

That was before the industrial revolution - the new world offered relatively mild opportunities; nowadays people still cross the ocean - but these are all people from third world countries, or countries destroyed by civil wars; i think that in order to move people from the first world you would need to promise to make them really rich.

This conveniently ignores the fact that people will do it just for the sake of it. Don't always need economic incentives.

For instance: I'll try to do it for the sake of it. Sampling folks around me, a dozen would. It's not that crazy or rare a proposition. Arguably my environment doesn't represent an unbiased share of the population, but it's still a certain amount of people.

These natural events are rare enough that, to me, they don't create a sense of urgency that we need to get off the planet in the next decade.

This is the big question to me... when is the right time to go? If we wait 50 years, wouldn't the technological progress make such an endeavor cheaper, safer?

And the counterpoint is, well... it's been 50 years since apollo and still we don't have the ability to get to mars, so if there's nothing driving the technology then it doesn't just magically happen, and there's nothing to say that it will magically happen in another fifty years either.

To me, it's not the natural extinction events that are driving this, but the thinking that there is a short window of perhaps 200 years between technological enlightenment (particularly in nuclear and biological engineering) where the risk of self-annihilition is considerably increased, and the only way to decrease it is to add the redundancy.

To be sure, we will not achieve redundancy during the first decades or even perhaps centuries of this colonization. I think that terraforming needs to happen first

We don't need to invent new physics to do this. The challenges are very real; by various definitions the Saturn V was the most powerful machine ever constructed, and Musk proposes a rocket with several times the thrust. Mankind has not stopped developing spacecraft and rockets since the Apollo era. Whether or not we colonize Mars, we have to start by getting there. I'm sure waiting for a space elevator would be ideal, but if we can do this economically with rockets there's no particular reason not to. We've done this "build a big rocket" thing before. The only thing really standing in the way of it happening again is sufficient motivation. It's not yet extremely politically useful for US politicians to do more than talk about going to Mars, but so far aerospace has proven to be a pretty good source of pork and high-paying tech jobs, and NASA still has a pretty good public image. The only thing we've really been missing is a popular, charismatic leader who can get common people excited about space again. A national threat wouldn't be bad either, but those are pretty easy to gin up.

>This is the big question to me... when is the right time to go?

Could a natural extinction event happen in the next 50 years?

If the answer is 'yes', I think we should go as soon as it is possible.

Humanity has been much closer to self-annihilation in the past. That gives me hope that we wont nuke ourselves before a giant rock falls from the sky ;)

Add one kickass meteor impact to your list of things that could bring us to extinction.

Old, but gold: http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

Didn't he say that you get to be the founding member of a new civilisation? Transforming the planet, mining, building cities. It all sounds very exciting to me. It's certainly not for everyone though.

> how do we replace failed bolts

Use that gray stuff in your head to think of a way to do it. It depends on the type and grade of bolt and how it's holding the things together. You could broach & thread the hole and replace your broken bolt with a larger bolt.

Then you can collect your metals, melt them down, work the metal with some oils to imbue it with some carbon, and make reclaimed bolts.

With power, a lathe, and time you can build anything round. With some more tools you can build anything of any shape.

Just recycle everything.

> The technology to put people on Mars is not fundamentally new. The technology to make such a colony self sustaining is. We've never built any habitat which is entirely self sufficient even just in food, water, and air.

This is, thank god, incorrect. We have closed loop systems for food, water and air.

I have in front of me a shelf of books relating to closed loop systems. They were designed for two purposes, space travel on one side, and on the flip side as a final resort against nuclear annihilation. I can give you sources to look up if you're interested.

The details were worked out in the 70s and 80s, but the projects were closed down when the West began to lose faith, no thanks to exponential energy shocks but that is a separate story for another day.

> Even simple problems like "how do we replace failed bolts" will require resupply from earth for a long time.

I would not call the manufacture of steel bolts a simple problem except in a colloquial sense.

This is something different to food/air/water, but we should be able to accomplish this in a new closed loop project.

The secret to space colonization and closed loop systems is not physics, but chemistry, knowing the correct procedures for the synthesis of new compounds from more basic elements.

> I don't see a Mars colony ever being a rational investment for those of us on Earth

This is another subject again, but many rare things exist in abundance in space that could be used to create an economy unlike that of Earth, such as platinum and the isotope helium-3. Then there is the ability to use nuclear systems in a way we cannot without political and environmental problems on our home planet.

To lift all restrictions on the use of nanotechnology, biotechnology and nuclear engineering would unleash a torrent of creativity from our society that is presently bound up in other things.

This is something that is not anybody's area of expertise. It is the area in which businessmen are going to have to come up with exploits.

And let us not forget one important thing from geopolitics. He who controls the skies, controls the earth. So going up is not really an option. The full weight of military support should be behind any spacefaring entrepreneurs. You want Iran or Korea slinging rocks at our cities? You do not need nuclear weapons if you have that much kinetic force on your side! You cannot be at the Apex if there exists a rock hanging over your head.

Fortunately our enemies disapprove of science fiction, or we'd be in a spot of trouble!

I'd love to see the sources on closed-loop systems.

Small note on helium-3: if you can get net energy from He3 fusion, you can also get it from the easier D-D reaction. The output of D-D is half He3, and half tritium which decays to He3 with a 12-year half-life, so you can breed He3 from deuterium and get energy in the process.

The D-D reaction does produce neutron radiation but it's lower energy than D-T neutrons and more easily shielded. The fusion startup Helion is attempting a hybrid D-D/D-He3 reactor, and says only 6% of the energy output would be in the form of neutron radiation.

Spaceflight Life Support and Biospherics Peter Eckart Man-Made Closed Ecological Systems JGitelson The Garden in the Machine Claus Emmeche

The famous Biosphere 2 project:

Biosphere 2 John Allen The Human Experiment Jane Poynter Life under Glass Abigail Alling

There exists other biospherics projects but not much information on them. The ESA and Russian projects have materials but in languages I cannot read.

I suspect a lot of this stuff is also classified under sources and methods for other secret government projects.

> Small note on helium-3: if you can get net energy from He3 fusion, you can also get it from the easier D-D reaction. The output of D-D is half He3, and half tritium which decays to He3 with a 12-year half-life, so you can breed He3 from deuterium and get energy in the process.

That is nice. I know it is an important subject but am ignorant of even the most basic physics. Nuclear engineering appears to be dying which is an indictment of our society.

> The fusion startup Helion is attempting a hybrid D-D/D-He3 reactor, and says only 6% of the energy output would be in the form of neutron radiation.

I saw that, I think sama posted something about it or it was on techcrunch. I wish them the best of luck, because like I said, it is dying on the vine. Society, at least in the West, appears to be turning its back on all forms of science that could lead somewhere and the inmates are not just running the asylum but adding new wings to it.

Social dysfunction to me is the most likely calamity to strike us down, which is why we need to go to Mars, we need some kind of control group!

Re: hyperloop: I think he specifically said he didn't have the time/energy/money/focus necessary to work on an implementation.

Musk is a visionary, and I think we need people like that. He said of Tesla and SpaceX that he went in with a fatalistic view: that there was a 10% chance of success.

In his talk yesterday, he repeated a phrase he used before, about moving the ball forward as far as he can.

So I'm an Elon Musk fanboy because he has real vision, tempered by reality and pragmatism.

I think what a lot of vocal skeptics react to is less Elon Musk (or whoever), and more to the seemingly mindless fawning of some of his 'followers'. That also bugs me.

As an engineer, I'm always looking for the ways something can fail. At the same time, I try to add as much vision as I can to my professional work, so long as its tempered with real engineering skepticism.

And Elon Musk appears of the same mindset.

By the way, did I note correctly that at the price tag was 'only' ten billion dollars to get the first humans on Mars? If close to true, that's pretty awesome, in my opinion at least. I and he suspect that once that benchmark is reached, the additional billions necessary to get a real civilization going there will flow more easily.

> By the way, did I note correctly that at the price tag was 'only' ten billion dollars to get the first humans on Mars?

Yeah, he did make that claim. I think the specific claim was meant to ONLY cover getting the initial transportation system running, not the cost of setting up an initial colony there. He is focused on the transportation problem and wants other people to figure out how to support human life there.

I was also particularly impressed by the assertion that they would start sending some vehicle in every transit window to mars. Regular cargo flights to mars will be crucial to getting started on the science required to support the initial colony.

> he went in with a fatalistic view

He even did that with regard to the chance of surviving the trip to Mars: he emphasised that there was a high risk of death for the first travellers and that he wouldn't want to do it. He actually stated that the first travellers would have to be comfortable with the high risk of death.

He's not saying "I'll colonize Mars". He's saying "We should colonize Mars. I'll make sure people interested in doing it can get there."

Isn't the first step in reaching for a goal to announce it so people will hold you to it?

I feel that saying, "So far I've seen him put a rocket in orbit and land it again" is along the lines of when you come up with an invention called the potato peeler and everyone says, "But isn't that just a dull knife?".

People constantly downplay new ideas, they're only recognizing the similarity and not the genius the slight alteration an existing invention offered them.

On a positive note, Elon Musk has somewhat of a track record for executing on his dreams/goals and making it happen. :)

People praise him because he has a plan in the first place and is working towards achieving it. Whether he succeeds or not, he's atleast making the effort.

This is why people get irritated when he gets criticized because the arguments boil down to "this is so ambitious and will likely fail, so why even try?"

SpaceX is showing that this sort of thing is within reach. Before the last few years, I would have looked at the current state of the art and politics of rocket technology and space exploration and dismissed this plan as a fanciful dream that could never happen. SpaceX has been killing it, though. They've been building new engines, landing rockets, and it's only a matter of time until they re-fly one; this is the sort of real progress we haven't seen in decades, and it's all in service of solving some of the thorniest bits of the "new" plan. I think it's time to reset our expectations and believe that something like this is possible. Musk himself said it's a long shot, and obviously it is, but I don't think it's rational to dismiss SpaceX after what they've already shown us they can do.

Yeah, SpaceX is doing good work, being economical like many other space agencies and yet being able to land back the stage 1 booster. Of course, they haven't reused even one yet, and have not studied the effects of multiple reuses.

But going from this to imagining a space taxi and a space settlement? There is so much work that needs done first, effect of radiation on people? Effect of lower gravity? Effect of high concentration of heavy metals on plant life? Recycling everything? Making propellant on Mars? And so much more, he just hand waives it saying that is easy, all their idea relied on was reusing their booster 1000 times, even when they have not reused it once! If I wanted science fiction (not that I think it is impossible), I would read a book.

It's really like the Wright brothers doing their first test flight, and then imagining a commercial airline system, complete with Boeing 777, airports and hell even SR71 Blackbird. It's just too far off, and feels like a sci-fi con. Plus you can see what kind of people this thinking attracts, like that idiot who thinks that Burning man is what mars is going to be like, completely ignoring the thin atmosphere, lack of gravity, cold temperatures, and all its' effect on humans, plant and building materials.

I think your example actually harms your argument. The SR-71 is a nice plane, and certainly much more advanced than the Wright Flyer, but it is completely outclassed by the Saturn V. The space technology is much more complex, and much more energetic, and has far tighter tolerances, and less room for failure. You should have been making this same argument in the early sixties. Right now we do have the technology, the engines, the fuel, the deep-space communications network. We need to scale up the engines to rival the power of God Almighty, but we don't need new physics to do so.

Musk is pointing out, correctly, that this is possible with existing rocket technology -- at least the transportation. Keeping people alive once they're there is apparently somebody else's problem, but until we have the materials science for a space elevator, an obscenely heavy lift vehicle will probably have to do. Ultimately he's going to be asking a lot of people to climb on top of a monstrous Engine and hope that it explodes correctly, and I hope that his conscience is clear when that day dawns. Probably you are right that we're going to have a hell of a time keeping people alive on Mars, but we seem to have a tough time of that here as well.

This is not science fiction. There is no new physics required, just some fiendishly difficult engineering challenges. The Wright Brothers were able to build their plane because there was nothing physically stopping them. They had the scientific knowledge and the dedication, and everything else followed. Really it's not that people -- even Presidents -- haven't been talking about doing this and working on details and preliminaries for decades. This is news precisely because it's not science fiction. This time, it could actually happen.

I think there are some false equivalencies in here. There are real serious challenges to be overcome, especially (as you say) dealing with the radiation exposure over >= 3 months in deep space, and we've seen the serious health issues Apollo astronauts have suffered from after enduring the same sort of exposure for a comparatively short time. But overall, the science and engineering are largely in place; to do this it will take scaling, integration, and refinement all on a massive scale, but it really isn't like e.g. going from the Wright flyer to SR-71. The latter was unimaginable back in the day of the former, which simply isn't the case for SpaceX's plan or it would be getting a lot more flak from real experts than it apparently has been (though, let's be honest, SpaceX are the real experts now).

And, again, nobody's saying it's anything other than a long shot, not even Musk himself. But a lot of people seem to be pooh-poohing it for bad reasons. For instance, the awful quality of the audience at the Q&A does not in reality tell us anything about SpaceX's ability to execute on some or all of this plan. In fact, I think Musk was ready for much more challenging questions than he ended up receiving (how could he not have been?)

Where in the recording did he say it was easy?

And where in the recording did he say it was going to be hard?

"No ground in reality" according to you. History is full of the success and failures of people trying to achieve such pie in the sky ideals. While past success is not a true indication of future success, Musk has a history of delivering.

Your argument comes across as "There are unsolved problems, and it's expensive, so don't try". Attitudes like that don't drive human progress. Society was not built on "it's hard, so don't try". I'm kind of surprised that this attitude has to be argued against on Hacker News, of all places.

Wasn't JFKs claim that the US would put a man on the moon within a decade seen as overly futuristic/optimistic at the time?

I think people get excited about his plans because he has a track record of actually delivering. Self-landing boosters on autonomous boats? A lot of people could have thought about that, but he (and his employees!) actually did it!

So when he talk about stuff like this, people have begun to pay attention.

I'll praise anyone who tries this shit, even if it's just a presentation to start. I'd like to encourage more people to try.

Yes, the plan itself doesn't deserve a lot of praise, but knowing Elon, it will likely happen eventually (though usually later than when he says it will :)

" What me and other skeptics argue against is these kinds of overly futuristic announcements that have no ground in reality,"

I am pretty sure this is exactly the kind things people said about going to the moon, build a machine that can add numbers together faster than humans etc... lol

"This is such a grand and far reaching goal that were it to be achieved it would be by far, by very very far, the most important achievement of the human species so far. So far I've seen him put a rocket in orbit and land it again.* So excuse me if I tamper my enthusiasm."

What have people see NASA do when Kennedy announced landing a man on the moon? Would they be able to accomplish if people would tamper their enthusiasm? I don't think so. They had to invent technology that didn't exist to accomplish it and I believe this needs the same thing. Hence the reason I am stoked about it.

Someone who grew up admiring the achievements in space and technology(I was born the same year the Voyagers left earth) that kind of dreaming and willingness, set me on course as a child to study science and work in tech. I am very excited to see announcements like this. Because without dreaming it up and setting a direction we would stagnate. Just like NASA did with the space shuttle program.

Helping out and working on a CubeSat project that is going to be launched in June 2017, I see how much work it is to even communicate in leo never mind beyond that(I can't even begin). Yet I can barely contain my excitement :)

If "overpromise now and (under)deliver later" is the most effective and most efficient way of getting things done, isn't that worth all the disadvantages of such a strategy?

> So far I've seen him put a rocket in orbit and land it again.* So excuse me if I tamper my enthusiasm.

I think you and Musk probably have pretty similar views on his chances for success. He mentions that this is precisely why he likes the name "Heart of Gold" for the first one of these ships he sends to Mars: It is extremely improbable and the Heart of Gold ran on an improbability drive.

edit: typo