Sorry to chain post, but I don't like individual ones to get too big or to be edited too many times. Dr. Phil Metzger, whom I cited recently regarding the history of the concept of planets, tweets a new thread
about a subject we've all spent a lot of time talking about: the cost of Mars colonization.
Elon Musk famously
put it at between $100 billion and $10 trillion to establish a self-sustaining colony. Metzger suggests that the price could be much, much lower, especially if Mars colonists begin exporting "zero-mass" products back to Earth. He believes that the net debt undertaken would peak at $2.5 billion before the colony starts paying for itself.
What are these exports, you ask? Services. His tweets don't say exactly what those would be, of course. Feel free to read through if you want more details. Musk thinks that intellectual property developed on Mars would be valuable enough to generate a net positive balance of payments. That said, economies of scale also kick in on transport once the colony really gets going.
A lot of efficiency also develops as the colony is able to manufacture its own goods, especially if a high degree of standardization and commonality arises.
It's an interesting though experiment. Metzger's low end is 4,000 times lower than Musk's high end.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
There's definitely going to be some value from IP. Low gravity R&D, and I do think Mars produced media will find at least some popularity on Earth.
However I'm not sure a Mars colony can be plausibly be made finically self-supporting until it's capable of self-sustaining. IP will help the equation, but I'm not sure if it will shift the break even point by all that much in the grand scheme of things.
For myself the mere fact that estimates vary so wildly tells me that no one really has a good handle on any of this, and any dollar figure is going to have a lot of built-in assumptions that may or may not turn out to be true.
To give one example, the market for Mars Tourism is almost impossible to predict since it would require trying to predict how many sufficiently wealthy people will exist in 50 yearsnote . Which itself requires us to predict what the economy as a whole is going to look like in 50 years, and honestly I haven't a clue what the economy is going to look like 5 months from now.
Mars is effectively going to be a third world country for a long time. Few natural resources of their own, heavily dependent on import and financial support from earth, very vulnerable to disasters, poor living conditions... It's not going to be a fun place to live long term for a long time.
Come to think of it, has anyone thought of how a lack of natural daylight is going to affect Mars colonists long term? All those habitats will have to be shielded from radiation, which likely means they will be underground or at least covered up, with very little window space, if at all. And it's not like going on a walk is going to help there.
Edited by Redmess on Dec 11th 2021 at 9:43:47 PM
Hope shines brightest in the darkest times
Full spectrum lighting I imagine. There are light sources used in places of extreme latitude to help mitigate some of the worst of it.
Also that is probably an argument to be made for the construction of domes. While insolation on Mars is only about half that on Earth, being able to essentially sunbathe for a bit may be beneficial for long term residents.
At least desinfecting your room would be much easier. Just open a window, and the natural UV-C radiation will do the rest.
In other news, China's Yutu 2 rover spots cube-shaped 'mystery hut' on far side of the moon
It's probably just a boulder. Though why is that picture so blurry?
It is 80 meters away, so it is going to take a few months to take a look. I think that is a literal snail's pace.
Edited by Redmess on Dec 11th 2021 at 11:39:23 AM
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesApplication of Occam's Razor says that's a rock by multiple orders of magnitude in any probability matrix you care to name.
Blue Origin's New Shepard NS-19 is about to lift off in West Texas for a 10-minute trip to the edge of space, allowing its six passengers to experience about four minutes of freefall in their capsule. T-0 is 14:45 UTC (8:45 AM CST, 9:45 AM EST), and the livestream will be here
.
I already covered the list of passengers in an earlier post: Michael Strahan, Laura Shepard Churchley, Dylan Taylor, Evan Dick, Lane Bess and Cameron Bess. It'll be the first time that New Shepard will carry its full complement of six and it will briefly set the record for the most humans in space at one time.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 11th 2021 at 8:44:35 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Speaking of funny-shaped things, New Shepard NS-19 lifted off and landed safely just a few minutes ago. Congratulations to Blue Origin and to six new "astronauts".
I will be traveling tomorrow and won't have time to post much in the way of updates until late in the day, so I'll drop a few schedule notes. The next launch we are expecting is from Chinese company ExPace on Dec 13 at 02:00 UTC, followed by Russia with a Proton-M launch on Dec 13 at 12:07 UTC and finally a Chinese Long March at 16:10 UTC.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The fact that we can send a high end camera into space doesn’t mean we do. Such cameras may be more heavy than is effective or it may be so delicate that it’s to risky to send it.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranDo we know how big that rock is? Without that, it's difficult to argue about how big a camera you would need to see it clearly.
Fjón þvæ ég af mér fjanda minna rán og reiði ríkra manna.high-resolution cameras are not necessarily very interesting to bring on science missions. NASA has bothered because it can make for good public relations pics and such. The main purpose of cameras on rovers is obstacle avoidance, and you don't often need very high resolution for that. Scientific instrumentation basically always operates on other wavelengths (UV, IR, X-ray, Radio, etc)
Edited by devak on Dec 11th 2021 at 6:33:35 PM
More specifically, the instrumentation on any spacecraft (or rover, which is a subset of spacecraft in this context) is limited by two primary factors: mass and power. Bandwidth is a factor but is complementary to mass and power for several reasons. Money is also a factor, of course, but in a more general sense, since it determines the overall budget for the other elements.
You don't need to put a high-resolution optical camera on a rover if that camera will only be used to plan its driving route, since the camera would use power, mass, and bandwidth that could go to the scientific instruments.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

CNN: First on CNN: The US gives Bezos, Branson and Shatner their astronaut wings
The FAA has decided that all of the private individuals who went to space from US soil (defined here as above 50 miles or 80 km) this year will be awarded commercial astronaut wings. This includes Jeff Bezos, William Shatner, Sir Richard Branson, Dr. Sian Proctor, and so on, along with the six passengers of the next New Shepard flight, currently scheduled for tomorrow. However, it is ending the Commercial Space Astronaut Wings program on January 1. After that date, people who fly to space will be listed on a website but will not receive any official award.
This is an efficient way to settle the debate over who gets to be considered an astronaut: just wash your hands of it entirely. Note that companies who provide the launches are still able and welcome to bestow any awards they want to their passengers and will undoubtedly continue to do so.
Yusaku Maezawa, happily aboard the ISS, tweeted this photo
of the station taken on his iPhone from within the Soyuz capsule that he rode on. It's almost surreal that we can do this as humans.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 10th 2021 at 3:04:23 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"