We’ve been mars-capable since Apollo. It’s a matter of will, which is a political function of cost, which is falling rapidly.
serious citation needed!
you cant make shit up. Apollo and saturn5 were nowhere near getting humans to mars. Not even close.
It got us to moon with bare minimum. A weekend trip vs 6 months trip.
The scale up of needed resources is mind boggling. At every step. I mean pick any step and explain how Apollo could achieve it.
The gist of it is that the Saturn V has enough delta v to get to Mars, on the count of Mars having an atmosphere, which can be used for aerobraking.
Given the capability of reaching Mars with a Saturn V, the rest of the plan revolved around using Apollo hardware, with some modification, for both transport and habitats(re-use of empty stages featured prominently).
Ultimately even if we had hit some roadblock with martian soil or what have you, in an alternate timeline we could have at least sent uncrewed test flights to Mars and back.
You have roughly 40t at best for a craft that needs to land there.
quick google. astronauts need around 1.7kg of food per day, x3 crew, x(8x30) days is:
thats 1200 kg of food - one way - just to get there food.
And then you are doing to do what exactly?
> the rest of the plan revolved around using Apollo hardware, with some modification, for both transport and habitats(re-use of empty stages featured prominently).
This is basically handwaving problems away, massive problems.
The best I can agree is that a crewed fly-by could have been possible. But landing on mars would mean death sooner or later.
It's over 400 pages and contains some of the details you seem to be curious about.
And no, it's not a good plan against a nuclear war, Mars is far far far less hospitable than the Earth would be if we launched all of the nuclear weapons we have today. It's far more radioactive, dusty, cold, toxic, and everything.
What now? Will Elon stop? If Elon doesn’t stop, does that make you right?
Of course, building a "city" on Mars is well beyond our capabilities, so that will either not be attempted at all, or it will fail. Maybe by 2124, but more likely 2524.
"No point" here means "no reasonable goal". In this case reasonability is subjective - somebody sees obvious reasons why Mars colony could be useful for humanity, somebody doesn't. Pro arguments are science, learning how to live off another planet, certain insurance against planet-wide cataclysms, general progress in space engineering. There are contra arguments as well, but which are more important is also subjective - we don't have hard data or commonly accepted facts which would solve this arguments one way or another, so, to some, it's natural to investigate the matter further...
Elon's job is to massively accelerate that timeline.
Cuz probability of both are closer to each other that to probability of them being achievable.
Getting to mars would require a technological leap. Planes -> rockets kind of leap.
Currently we have yet to be able to get back to the moon.
Creating self sustained colony on earth would require some kind of technological miracle.
And it will not be enough to use few nukes to malt ice caps on mars.
In general, human-based space exploration makes 0 sense. We have robots that can do everything a human in a life-support suit can, and don't need to carry 100 times their mass just to not day on the way there and back. Doing a few experiments with humans in space, like we do on the ISS, is indeed worth it for exploring the unknown unknowns of biology. Maybe some day, far in the future after we have explored Mars with many hundreds of robots, it will even make sense to send a human there. But until then, it's just a waste of everything.