[DennisP]

Start by assuming SpaceX will be successful with Starship and Starlink. That means they drop launch costs to $20/kg at scale, find themselves with NASA-level funding from Starlink subscriptions, and start building permanent installations on Mars and the Moon.

Figure out something they're going to need for those. Musk has said they're relying on other companies to provide the infrastructure to actually live on Mars. Be one of those companies. If it's something modest but really useful, you don't have to be a big company at first.

Or, recognize that everybody's building lightweight, expensive, super reliable satellites because launch is expensive. Figure out how to build the cheapest possible satellites instead. Your financial constraints will give you a different mindset than people with serious resources.

[bloopernova]

That statement about the funding received by SpaceX via Starlink is a revelation to me. I hadn't thought that particular thing through.

According to a very cursory search, SpaceX's revenue in 2018 was around $2B. NASA's budget in 2018 was around $20B.

A tenfold increase in money flowing through a company would bring its own challenges, but assuming SpaceX navigates those OK then they'll be able to fund massive projects.

I wonder what the space exploration landscape would look like if all that happens? Would NASA focus on probes and research, launched from SpaceX vehicles? Thus leaving the launch business to SpaceX, who could concentrate on throwing as many humans out of the gravity well as possible?

Would $20B/year allow SpaceX to build bases on the Moon and Mars? I wonder if SpaceX would get into the asteroid mining business, mostly to prevent having to heavy lift quite so much stuff from the bottom of Earth's gravity well.

Exciting times! Hopefully this all happens in the next 40 years or so, I'm 45 now and would love to see humanity step out of the cradle for good.

[jvanderbot]

NASA has a few trajectories, IMHO.

One they can become the "FCC/FAA of space". The last A is "Administration" of course. This should not be considered depressing, as the scientists and engineers currently on the front line of NASA discoveries are already often associated with other institutions and could easily follow the trend.

Two, they can become the science arm or funding agency for space-related science. This is very close to their actual role. You don't see a ton of commercial submersible traffic, for example, and Earth should definitely be considered fully commercialized and infastructure-supported, and yet NASA still funds, designs, and operates missions for Earth science. So, there's no reason to think that NASA will somehow fade into the background for good. As I've often said, if someone "solves" launch and "solves" telcom over interplanetary distances and "solves" transport of humans and "solves" logistics at a dozen AU, then NASA can finally focus on just instruments, experiments, and science. It's like you've been building your own car and highway and computer every time you want to go to work, and someone comes along with commercial versions. You are more productive.

The third trajectory is liquidation. NASA can become a funding agency like DARPA or NSF, leaning on their past glory to inspire a new generation with fancy-titled grant calls for science experiments at scale.

I personally believe it's a convex combination, and my favorite weights are about 1/5, 3/5, 1/5, meaning they'll focus mostly on deployment of science instruments supported by commercially-designed platforms, technology, etc, and release calls and grants to other institutions to propose science experiments and develop non-profitable technologies that industry will necessarily ignore.

Coincidentally, this is about how they operate on Earth.

[jobigoud]

The first one would be very weird considering there is also ESA, JAXA, etc. in the game. The world is not regulated by the US. Focusing on research seems to more likely.

[jvanderbot]

This is a little strange to say, given there's things like the FCC in every country as well. There's also corresponding international organizations, but the FCC is the US's version.

[DennisP]

NASA could also contribute a lot towards habitat technology. SpaceX is purposely leaving that to others, and NASA has done a lot of work in the area already.

Plus they do some work on advanced propulsion for deep space, including fission and fusion rockets.

[ryanmercer]

>Would $20B/year allow SpaceX to build bases on the Moon and Mars?

I don't see why not.

>That makes the total Apollo Program cost $163 billion inflation adjusted to 2008. [1]

Zubrin said in 2012 that if given to NASA Mars Direct would cost 30-50 billion but a private company could do it for around 5bn. That's for 6 manned flights to Mars over 10 years. Let's be overly paranoid and make some much broader assumptions.

If SpaceX could spend 40 billion over 10 year sand six 6 manned flights, and 6 supply flights via ITS/BFR/Starship /Muskship/whatever it's going by at the time of this comment you could absolutely build a decent semi-permanent structure as well as test, on Mars, creating in-situ building materials.

If you found a viable way to make structural bricks from regolith, you could develop automated earth moving machinery that could be updated and 'controlled' (not unlike a rover) to just churn out bricks between missions which could be used for bunker/vault construction to act as surface shielding and for just acting as a barrier for limiting exposure to dust storms as well.

---

Take the moon, the moon would be much cheaper to build a semi-permanent/permanent base on. First, supplying it with materials is going to be cheaper and quicker, communication delays are going to incredibly smaller which means higher bandwidth. Transit times are orders of magnitude shorter so you can adapt structures/hardware with more generations and modify more on the fly.

First step I'd just live on the craft for short periods before returning. Get some sort of regolith-moving machinery and simply create some flat areas and/or trenches. Try and process the regolith into bricks again with automated machinery, using the long lunar days for the energy to process the regolith and shutting down for the long lunar night. Then you just build vaults from the bricks, pop in something along the lines of the Bigelow inflatable modules that are then protected by the vaults for the first semi-permanent structures and work on a more rugged construction as you collect lots of data and experience.

While you're doing all of that you're working on energy storage for getting through the long lunar nights and building out your PV array for the long lunar day.

The expensive part is going to be the development of the machinery (including the rocket and manned spacecraft). If they lifted a tunnel boring machine in pieces and developed some sort of earth/regolith-moving space-CAT and a brick manufacturing operation (collect regolith, sort the smallest particle size stuff out for smelting/compaction/some sort of 'concrete' use) and start making rubble piles of larger rocks that could possibly be used via traditional stone carving/masonry techniques and you can get into the construction and material business too and hire that all out to companies/countries to create another revenue stream not to mention license any technologies developed to traditional companies like Caterpillar for use developing their own Mars/Moon machinery.

---

You'd also send a lot of satellites to Mars and the Moon for use as communication relays, really you could even put some in various positions between the Earth and Martian orbits so that you have relays for when the sun is between them and to also keep your bandwidth up with the power demands of any given satellite down and you could rent usage on the network out to whoever.

You could also sell excess power to anyone that lands near your site(s):

"We will have this much power available during this time period during our brick-oven maintenance, pricing is at x per kWh"

Hey Bob, SpaceX has decent rates starting in a few hours, we could go ahead run an extra cycle of thing with our widget or top off the batteries in everything so we can run 2 more days of projects before night. What's the budget looking like for this cycle?

---

I think once you have the rockets, even 2 billion a year lets you start to do a lot of tinkering, especially if you start with the moon.

[1] https://christopherrcooper.com/blog/apollo-program-cost-retu...

[haspok]

"That means they drop launch costs to $20/kg at scale..."

Yeah, probably not in your lifetime, buddy: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/background/facts/...

"NASA’s goal is to reduce the cost of getting to space to hundreds of dollars per pound within 25 years and tens of dollars per pound within 40 years."

Starting a business based on that _now_ seems to be a bit... premature :)

"...start building permanent installations on Mars and the Moon."

Not in this century, unless there is a very high incentive for doing so (think: WW3 or something equally disruptive).

[Ajedi32]

That's NASA's goal. SpaceX has historically been much more ambitious than NASA: https://www.inverse.com/article/60712-spacex-starship-elon-m...

(($2M/launch) / (100 Mg / launch) = $20/kg

Now obviously those are aspirational numbers; Starship is too early in its development cycle for anyone to be making truly accurate cost projections. Furthermore the cost per launch to SpaceX isn't necessarily the same as what they'll actually be charging their customers. But even if Elon's guess is off by an order of magnitude, it'll still be way cheaper than "hundreds of dollars per pound", and it'll happen much sooner than "25 years".

[Ajedi32]

Also, that NASA article is from 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20101013052045/https://www.nasa....

I have to imagine that with the advent of reusable launch vehicles, even NASA has to be a bit more optimistic about future launch costs now than they were 9 years ago.

[Klathmon]

To be fair, people have been saying "not possible in our lifetime" to a lot of things that SpaceX has done or is doing.

While I'm not convinced it will happen in the timeframes they are shooting for, I'm also not convinced it won't.

[DennisP]

NASA's big project for launch is a disposable rocket using Space Shuttle technology. It will cost at least a billion dollars per launch.

SpaceX's project is a fully reusable rocket, with rapid turnaround because it uses methane fuel in the world's first clean-burning full-flow engine. They expect to be able to launch three times per day. On top of that the rocket is built of cheap stainless steel instead of carbon fiber.

With that amount of reuse, each launch basically pays for fuel and ground support, each of which costs about a million dollars per launch. Given their payload of at least 100 tonnes, that's $20/kg. They've already done a single-engine hop test, and hope to reach orbit within six months.

Here's a great video on what makes the new SpaceX engine revolutionary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbH1ZDImaI8

[de_watcher]

Put a Raspberry Pi into a heavy shielding box, use air horn for a thruster.

[larrydag]

Somehow I don't think the delta-v quite works with that setup

[StreamBright]

Living on Mars is a pipe dream without figuring out how to re-create Earth's geomagnetic field and extend it around human buildings.

[DennisP]

Radiation on Mars is about the same as background radiation in Ramsar, Iran. Residents there have normal lifespans and cancer rates.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/omg-space-is-f...

[StreamBright]

This is great article, thanks for sharing! It seems we figured out for most of the things how to manage radiation living on Mars.

[gnode]

I think more importantly: civilisation on Mars is a pipe dream without figuring out a significant motivation to live on Mars.

Mars is an inhospitable place, but technology allows us to live in inhospitable places.

In many ways, I expect Mars is like Antarctica. Once the initial romanticism of pioneering fades, it will have only very niche attractiveness for specific scientific causes. It used to be a popular idea that technological advancement would see us populating Antarctica and underground / undersea environments, yet despite that being possible with modern technology (e.g. nuclear powered greenhouses), we've not justified the endeavour.

[yellowapple]

Antarctica's lack of a population and its niche attractiveness has more to do with the fact that all the countries with any sort of territorial claim to it have signed treaties substantially restricting any use of Antarctic resources (including the land thereof) for anything other than science.

On that note, though, if we want to learn how to colonize the Moon and Mars and beyond, Antarctica is closer to home and less extreme; it could be a valuable place for "baby step" colony proofs-of-concept.

[PopeDotNinja]

The most practical idea I've heard is to create a giant magnetic shield and put it at the L1 Lagrange point between Mars & the sun. [1]

[1] https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo...

[bloopernova]

I guess that depends on what end effect of the magnetic field we are trying to replicate.

If it's protection from radiation, then we have multiple avenues of research and action. We can use particular materials in our domed cities, we can build underground, and we could bioengineer plants and ourselves to better cope with radiation damage. We could even create a huge solar array or nuclear reactor in space and create enough of a magnetic field to deflect solar and extrasolar radiation. It's a difficult problem, for sure, but not an impossible one.

If it's depletion of the Martian atmosphere, then once we've added a whole bunch of material to it, the depletion happens over millions of years. So there's not a huge effect even in the 1000s of years timescale.

[dannypgh]

The idea of terraforming Mars seems increasingly quaint given how hard it's been for us to keep the Earth comfortable for humans.

I think it makes far more sense to work on geo-engineering solutions to climate change first - it's also more likely to have a viable business model, on the assumption that the people will eventually demand action rather than applaud their leaders for pulling out of the Paris Accord.

I think pretty much all of the tech applicable to terraforming Mars could also be useful for reducing Earth's CO2 levels, no? Maybe let the problems on Earth guide development and drive funding, and pivot to Mars once it's clear success is being had on Earth.