I always feel a bit sorry for the ones in that clip that can’t fly, and have to run over the ground like losers.

Yep. Just like in the ISS, only shorter.

They will make a new world. I doubt there will be much export in the short term, other than science and novelty items. (That said, the rockets have to return to Earth to be reused, and there should be plenty of room for cargo on those return trips if they did have anything to send.)

SpaceX has done a lot of planning that wasn’t in the talk. A lot of those visuals weren’t artists’ impressions, they were CAD renders. They’ve test-fired one of the engines. They’ve built a fuel tank.

The Russian N1 had numerous other problems. They couldn’t even test fire most of the engines. And they were doing it in 1969. SpaceX think they have this covered. The Falcon 1 had only 1 engine. The Falcon 9 has 9, and works. The Falcon Heavy has 27 engines, and although its not flown yet it is well advanced. The ITS…

There are various stages to this and the talk sometimes muddled them. So yes, I think you are right about the early colonists, and when he said that he meant the later colonists. To put it another way, he talking about the requirments of the transport system, and said very little about the requirments of actually…

Some of that video was literal, and some was principle. Elsewhere he’s said it would take 4 or 5 launches to get the propellant up. Depending on how things work out, that might happen over the 2 years of waiting for the Mars window to open, in which case the passengers would indeed be sent up last.

Humanity may not have geological/astronomical time in which to do this. Civilisations rise and fall. Even if you think American civilisation won’t be falling over the next 100 years, it could still have a bad enough recession to put off programmes like this. And if it is delayed, it may never happen. According the…

If they can find a lava tube, or some other cave, they won’t need to do any digging.

No, they’ll go straight in. They use the atmosphere (such as it is) to lose the bulk of their speed, and use retro-propulsion for the final landing. The atmospheric breaking is an important element, and makes Mars easier than you might expect compared to the Moon which has no atmosphere. The lander has a vaguely…

It’s not a suicide mission, unless you assume it’s going to fail. It’s not even a one-way trip. The rockets have to come back to be reused, so people can come back with them.

A lot of these “improvements” are optimisations that can be applied later. And the problem with them is complexity and slowness. The SpaceX design is actually a pretty simple, brute force approach. Here’s their thinking:

I got Netflix for the first time a few months ago, and I’m working my way through Jessica Jones, Daredevil, Stranger Things. And it seemed to me that part of their success was that they took the time to develop slowly, and part of what made that possible was the writers knowing viewers could binge. For comparison, the…

SpaceX say the travel time will be between 3 and 5 months, depending on which window you travel in. http://i.imgur.com/fN23l6C.png

Did his talk this week answer some of those questions for you?

SpaceX wants Mars to have a permanent colony, not just to plant a flag and then come home. They reckon they can get the travel time down to 3-5 months (rather than a year), and the first group will have to stay for at least 2 years until the next window opens. Most of them should stay longer.

That would be nice, but it’s a bit beyond us currently. The ISS shows that people can survive 6 months or so in micro-gravity.

He hopes to get costs down to $500,000 per ticket, and then ordinary citizens will buy their own tickets because they want to live on Mars. Also, his goal with this is not to make money, but to make humanity a multi-planet species. There was talk of his setting up a global internet using satellites in low-Earth orbit…

You know Musk intends two-way journeys? He needs to bring the rockets back to reuse them, to reduce costs, so people can come back too.

It’s possible he knew vaguely but didn’t bother to look into it in detail until he was preparing for his big talk tomorrow. Or he may have decided to change the name in response to recent Blue Origin’s announcements, as PR.