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A comment on Colonizing Mars: A Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System. Parent comment

Re:Colonizing Mars: A Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary ... by nabla9 on Friday October 21, 2016 @10:35PM (#12766768)
If you need to replace wheel on Mars rover or take a aspirin and you need to transfer it from earth, the cost will be enormous. Colony that can't support itself economically will collapse when outsiders stop supporting it. When the honeymoon is over, people don't' want to pay.

To make the colony self supporting, you need to transfer factories, chemical plants, machine industry, mining industry, etc.

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Re:Colonizing Mars: A Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary ... by Teever on Friday October 21, 2016 @10:54PM (#12766852)
You need to transport a seed factory.[1] The clever thing about the Mars Colonial Transport is that it includes solar panels to generate electricity as well as the machinery needed to produce methane and oxygen which serves as fuel for a return voyage.

The really cool thing about this is that methane can be used as a feedstock to produce many plastics and the oxygen can be used for humans to breathe.

The MCT is a prototype for a seed factory style Von Neumann probe.

[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories

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Re:Colonizing Mars: A Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary ... by elsonrodriguez on Saturday October 22, 2016 @04:20AM (#12767786)
I'm skeptical about how feasible it is to send enough solar panels to Mars in order to power a base.

Everyone's keeping quiet about the inevitable role of RTGs or fission reactors in early human Mars exploration.

Solar will come either via an abundance of payloads delivered to Mars as things ramp up, or via panels produced on Mars itself.

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Re:Colonizing Mars: A Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary ... by Teever on Saturday October 22, 2016 @08:32PM (#12771260)
Musk briefly commented on nuclear during the MCT announcement. He said it was ultimately dependent on environmentalists on Earth allowing it.

Other viable methods for power generation that are amenable to in-situ production include geothermal heat loops and solar concentrators.

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Re:Colonizing Mars: A Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary ... by pavel_lishin on Friday October 21, 2016 @10:46PM (#12766813)
> To make the colony self supporting, you need to transfer factories, chemical plants, machine industry, mining industry, etc.

Like they said, most of the cost is transportation. Which gets cheaper.

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Re:Colonizing Mars: A Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary ... by snrplfth on Friday October 21, 2016 @11:06PM (#12766894)
I mean, it has to! You simply cannot build the kind of permanent presence on Mars with disposable rockets and ships, unless you have some sort of super-advanced Von Neumann robots that can be sent once and set it up on their own.
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