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A comment on A Recap of the Mars Terraforming Debate. Parent comment

Re:A Recap of the Mars Terraforming Debate by lmm on Friday May 14, 2021 @02:38AM (#27151414)
LEO is 0.0005% of the way to the Moon, and yet once we'd done the first it didn't take us long to scale up to the second.
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Re:A Recap of the Mars Terraforming Debate by OmicronCeti on Monday May 17, 2021 @02:56PM (#27186878)
That's simply a facile comparison because most of the fuel is needed to get out of the atmosphere. The energy required for that 0.0005% distance is nearly 66% of the total.

Let's say it takes ~8 minutes to get to LEO vs 4,380 minutes to get to the Moon. That's a factor of ~550x longer flight time for a distance 2000x further.

Alpha Centauri is 1500x further away than Mars. It currently takes ~7 months to go from Earth to Mars (at 25,000 mph), assuming similar scaling that comes out to only 400x the flight time, or just about 230 years.

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