Elon is building a satellite launching company. Nowhere in that endeavor is the technology to permanently move a sufficient number of people to some other planet.

The differences between what SpaceX does today and a self sufficient permanent colony on Mars are far far greater than the difference between what SpaceX does today and and the fireworks I shot off last weekend.

You comment is doubly wrong.

Spacex is definitely not limited to satellites, they are planning to launch people in space and are currently delivering cargo to the space station.

There are plenty of information, some by Spacex, that show how their technology could be used for a permanent settlement on mars.

Their goal:

SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.

> Elon is building a satellite launching company.

s/is building/has built

> Nowhere in that endeavor is the technology to permanently move a sufficient number of people to some other planet.

Nowhere in 1999 Google was the technology to autonomously drive cars, either. Yet, Google's cofounders explained their vision in 1999 to collect and organize the world's information. Vision and leadership is an important part of predicting a company's future, and Elon is very clear about this: The purpose of SpaceX is Mars colonization.

If some sort of event (nuclear war, giant asteroid, whatever) killed everyone on Earth then everyone who lived in a theoretical colony on Mars would die too. Maybe not immediately, but the gulf between our current capabilities and what it would take to build a permanent self sufficient colony on a planet like Mars is absurdly large.

It is possible to build a self sufficient colony on Mars and it is also Elon's stated intention. It is not an easy task and we will have a permanent colony before we have a self sufficient one, if we have a colony at all. 66 years passed between the Wright brothers first powered flight (which lasted only 3 seconds) and landing a man on the moon. That is a huge gulf in technology. Perhaps we will have a self sufficient Mars colony in another 66 years.

In 1999 it was pretty obvious that if Moore's Law held up as expected, you could do all kinds of stuff within a few years.

Until we see rocket fuel doubling in energy every eighteen months, any idea of a Mars mission (let alone colony) paid for with private money is wishful thinking.

That's assuming conventional rocketry all the way.

Have you heard of the phrase "once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere" (Robert Heinlein)?

The delta-v from LEO to mars is only ~4.6 km/s assuming you aerobrake once you're in orbit. Or 3.8 if you're doing aerocapture.

For comparison, it costs ~10 km/s just to get into LEO.

Remember the tyranny of the rocket equation. Saving the rocket fuel required to get into orbit drops the total fuel cost by an absurd proportion.

We already have the tech for being able to do at least an order-of-magnitude drop in price to orbit, if not more. Launch loop, etc. (With a launch loop you need ~120m/s additional to get into LEO, but that's peanuts comparatively.) The biggest issue currently is that it's a lot of money to potentially build. And the political components.

Yeah, it'd be a huge chunk of change to build. But it's potentially worth it.

As crackpot ideas go, the launch loop (or variants thereof), is the one that I am (still) most excited for.

The 'microwave thruster' article posted recently circumvents that problem - no reaction mass necessary. A Mars mission is now supposed to be practical, energywise.

Oh yeah! And the rocket can use faster-than-light neutrinos to avoid annoying latency when talking to Houston.

I don't think the people downvoting you realize just how big of a project a self-sufficient off-planet colony is. Nobody really knows how many people it would take to be self-sufficient, but I'm guessing that it's at least 100,000. The total number of people who have been to space, from all countries' space programs over the course of ~60 years or so, is 536, and not one of them has left Earth orbit.

Looks like we need at least 3 orders of magnitude of improvement before we can even start to think about it. If SpaceX's program for reusable rockets succeeds beyond Musk's wildest dreams, we might get like 1 order of magnitude of cost reduction. There's still a hell of a long way to go, and that's if everything works perfectly.

A semi-permanent colony might be doable, but anyone there wouldn't last long without regular resupply from Earth.

Just the difference in energy budget is enough to prove your point. But there are additional issues like radiation exposure to astronauts that make travel to Mars prohibitively difficult even with the biggest rocket imaginable.

Realistically, the only hope we have of seeing astronauts on Mars is if China and the US (or some other pair of countries) gets in a Cold War-style pissing contest.

but look at our personal expense.. how little do we spend on life insurance premium vs. entertainment? That's a reference point for what we would consider as value of protecting a human race wipe out event vs. a messaging app.

Life insurance does nothing to protect us against injury or death, health insurance does. Look how much we spend on health insurance.