You mean like the "hallmark of stereotypical leftist thought" that build the entire Soviet space program that first put a satellite into space, that first put a man into orbit, that first launched a space station into space, that did the first EVA, that did the first rendez-vous in space, that send the first vehicle on the Moon, that was the first and one of the 2 most successful space programs and the one with the longest duration manned space flight records ? Some people are still living in such a cloud of political delusion that they totally forget the hard facts.
Similarly, the Chinese (despite the particularly damaging extreme and uneducated social and environmental experiments of Mao) are now the factory of the world and the 2nd largest economy of the planet (soon no.1 no doubt at the rythm they are going), and they are still "leftist rags" (...), to borrow the totally uneducated and insulting expression of another poster.
Go figure, there must be some type of magical mushrooms in the cereals of some people in the West to continue to be in so much denial.
We all saw the same thing again and again with Iran, North Korea, and before that Russia:
"Bwa-ha-haa...! They will never get there ! Their rockets are blowing up all the time ! "Bwa-ha-haa...!, it will take them 30 years to build a single atomic bomb !" RRRMMMMBB....!! Uh,oh... wait.... WHAT was THAT...!!?? And they did all that by perfecting a WWII vintage descendant of the SCUD missile (a weapon which in its time was so bad it would generally blow up in flight or burn up on reentry). I guess they did the same thing as in the West... who also started by COPYING German WWII V2 rockets to develop their entire space program. None of these people (Russia, USA, China, N.Korea invented the wheel. The Germans did (with the V2) (Oups, no, the Chinese did, lets give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar).
Not properly analyzing risks you say ? Oh, i think i remember seeing a LOT of movies of US launched V2 and their derivatives as well as pretty much all the rockets that followed up to and including many Atlas blow up in flames one after another. So my guess is, there must have been a lot of clones of Mao and of Che Guevara in the US space program. And even today (how many Space Shuttles did we lose already because of human stupidity and "typical leftist" insane risk taking at the expense of the Shuttle crews ?).
You should also look at how the Dyna-Soar X-20 military bomber/satellite killer was designed from a structural and from a heat shield point of view: it was a flying oven with a man in it. The idea was pretty much flying by the seat of the pants for the technology that was available back then. And from a reusability point of view, it was more a: "Ooops.. we fried the heat shield by heat corrosion after just one reentry... it needs to be completely rebuilt..." thing than an actual real "space shuttle" type of vehicle with airliner flight frequency (the MOL Project was trying to do in Earth orbit with an FDL-7 (similar in structure and heat shield concept to X-20) what Elan Musk is trying to do with Mars today). Again, technological limits of the materials of that time, but they were willing to do it. Today, NASA would not even get within a 100 mile of such a concept (and when X-33 showed up, we already had decades of new material development and used a vastly less risky fairly low lift-to-drag-ratio reentry trajectory versus the Sanger-Bredt type of trajectory of the X-20 which would have been very taxing on its structure (but that's not to say that a private company should put at risk the lives of 100's or 1000's of people by using such risks to send them colonize Mars. Those were military missions for war fighters where they were anyway expecting to die in combat at any moment. NOT civilian missions to go start families on a different planet).
So ya, there was plenty of risk taking, now it have all but disappeared thanks to the very heavy (and inefficient, and counter progress) structure that large organizations like Nasa, ULA, Lockheed, Boeing, etc, have turned into (and lets not forget that these people are feeding each other, large industries don't care if the next Nasa project is a success or gets launched into space or not, they just want to continue getting the taxpayers money. Success is not a pre-requisite anymore for them since a long time. And anyway, each time the US changes administration, the head of Nasa goes bye-bye as well as the current space program (exit Venture Star, exit Constellation, etc). Of course, those programs were not without their own defects. Venture Star was nothing but a new rehash of the old FDL-5 and Star Clipper designs (with a round nose instead of a sharp one and just a slightly better set of metallic heat tiles and stand-off clips. The engine was also a derived from the old aerospike engine from the 1960's), and the idea of sending an old chemical rocket with a (gasp...) space capsule on a years long voyage to Mars and back with just 2 or 3 more men and women than Apollo (and then see that capsule constantly shrink to the point it reverted to practically the same tin can as Apollo instead of sending a spaceship equipped with something called a VASMIR engine which could do the trip in a much shorter time is stupid.
Who will pay for the hundreds of "test" flights to develop airline-like operations and safety ? Why, of course but the lemmings (i mean the space tourists and the taxpayers) ! This seems to be going in the direction of the typical crass business plan where the billionnaire does not pay much out of his pockets, it is the people who will travel on his rockets who will pay the bill. And the most brilliant declaration of all this totally narcissistic business plan is his declaration: "You will maybe die but it will be fun !".
With a tag line like that, i "SUUURE would fly on his death traps.... When a billionnaire guy tells me you may die if you fly on my airline but it will be fun, i say they should be put him in prison. Kind of reminds me of the even worse scheme of the Dutch company who wanted to send a bunch of people on a one-way-trip there.
At least the Bleriot and the Wright brothers flew their own contraptions and took the risks on their lives themselves, and some of these early pioneers died doing it, like Otto Lilienthal and others. But a rich guy who is sending others to take chances by busloads of 100 in his place ? No thank you. There are more agreable ways to commit suicide than having all the liquid in your body come out of your mouth, ears, eyes and other orifices while you freeze by minus 300 degrees at the same time, or burn up in a big fireball and shrapnel, or just get lost in space, out of fuel, run out of air, slow death, etc.
Of course i hope some of you studied history and remember that almost none of the people who were sailors in the time of Christopher Columbus or Jacques Cartier were volunteers. The job of sailor was nearly one of slavery and most sailors were dragged out by force to work on those voyages, because they knew very well that most of the people who participated in those trips (even the routine commercial ones) had more than 50 percent chances of not coming back. Even during the much more recent era of the large Clippers and Cap Horniers, the term being "shanghaied" meant what it meant. People really didn't want to serve on merchant ships, it was slavery and very high risk. So most of the time they would make a sailor drink until he pass out or drug him, and then he would wake up on a ship that already left port.
There were no colonists that left to the other side of the world of their own free will in the early days. Most of the people who got sent there were either condemned criminals or people that European powers wanted to get rid of (opponents), and soldiers, and slaves, or some unsavory characters who were running from the authorities in their own country, and refugees fleeing religious persecution in Europe. There were also poor people and European children who got moved overseas to the colonies as cheap labor (or slave labor) (that happened even after WWII in the UK). And then of course the non-ending stream of people who wanted to convert the native populations or who wanted to die at their hand to win their paradise, or greedy people with weapons looking for gold (wasn't it the first motivation anyway for both explorers and their backers and for pillferers back then ? To reach the riches of China, the country where "everything is covered with gold").
Today, it is another kind of irrationality, one where people think it is preferable to run from the problems we created here on Earth, where we used to have a paradise (we still have, in many places) instead of working at solving them (which is quite simple actually), and run away to live in a tin can on another planet that does not even have a breathable atmosphere and where sand storms can tear the flesh off your bones and where you have to recycle our own poo and urine to drink water and take "shower" only once a month, and pray you won't die of decompression or starvation the next day, weeks, or month).
Don't get me wrong, i am for space exploration, but not like this. This is not space exploration, it is the nonsensical egocentric trip of a rich guy at the expense of other people's lives. We DON'T even have a permanent space station on the Moon, and the International Space station with 2 guys inside does not even count, it's a JOKE, they just spend their whole time patching it up and keep it running and pretty much nothing else. It was supposed to be a factory in space for new molecules for pharmaceutical companies, new metals, etc. The Space Shuttle frequent flights were supposed to make it possible... and so on.
We are using 3000 years old technology to send people into space. What we need is lightcrafts, micro-wave crafts, electric propulsion, fusion engines (they all exist or they all can be built with today's know how and some more testing, but we are not pouring money into it}. You know how fast it took the Europeans/Germans to go from inventing jet engines (from Henri Coanda in the 1920's) to flying ballistic missiles ? 20 years.
We already Have the VASMIR engine and some people just invented a Fusion engine for interplanetary exploration (and might even work for long duration extra-solar travel)(University of Washington). But nobody is putting the necessary amounts of money into these to put them into service. People who are in the industry are still thinking into that old box. Airliners continue to all look the same. All the aeronautical giants laughted when Mr. Picard said he would build an aircraft that could fly around the world only on electric power. They all refused to give him any money or to be partners in his adventure. It is only when he was about the land to his final destination, having nearly completed his flight, that Nasa and other aerospace giants announced all of a sudden in a panic that they would develop solar powered airplanes... (and did so only when they were about to lose face in front of the spectacular success of Solar Impulse).
There is no point traveling to another planet with a steam engine. We have to use the much more efficient and more modern tools that we have at our disposal. There is no point traveling for months or years when we can do the same thing in days or weeks with just a little bit more push and development work (i would say no more than 10 years of intense development and testing would get it done). The Germans could do what they did in just 4-7 years in WWII. I don't see why we couldn't do today's equivalent technological leap in 10 years time for new (non-chemical) propulsion systems. The Manhattan Project took only 4 years and did cost a billion dollars at the time (half of which only to keep things secret) and only to build something to kill people. It would take a fraction of that today to develop propulsion systems in the open and get results, because we have invinitely more tools and tech at our disposal today versus in the 1940's to develop existing discoveries.
Oh, and in typical communist, social assistance person who does not want to pay out of his own pocket (the rich and the military industrial complex are the worst offenders in that domain: they all suck the taxpayers money to make their dosh), Mr. Musk says that "Ultimately this is going to be a huge public private partnership". THERE YOU GO, it's not him who will pay most of it, it is the taxpayers who will pay for his toy and so called "business". When you are a billionaire and that you start crying for money from the State to build your projects, i say you should not even exists as a business, because in a TRUE Capitalist world, if you are NOT able to exist without the crutch of the State, you should not even be a company. That's the way i see the bloodsuckers who balk at paying out of their own pocket, or who produce hare-brained schemes like this one where their so called "business plan" cannot even say "how" they will pay for this, and oh, ya, we will need the public money..." ("Brilliant", in its all its most pathetic sense). But given that capitalism is already just a game of casino played at what they call the Stock Exchange with other people's money and pensions, little surprise there... If i went to a bank with a "business plan" like his and told the banker at the end, oh, by the way, i think the State should foot up half the bill for me, then it will work (!). Guess what he would do. He would slam the door. But someone like Elon Musk says the same publicly, and just watch, he may succeed at sucking taxpayers money for his toy. It's as if people's brain go on "park" when people like that start to blabber about their next "project". So, he build an extremely expensive electric 2 places sport car with the money he made with Paypal ? Big deal, Toyota did much better with a car which is a lot more affordable and lot more usable by the general population. He started a fairly conventional satellite launching company with same money with promises of huge savings to clients (surprise: it costs nearly the same despite supposed advantages of the reusable booster), big deal. Every new billionaire is playing with space companies as a new pride toy (it used to be who would have the biggest mega yacht, now it's who's got the biggest space launch or space tourism company).
And by the way, Musk never invented anything with the so called "hyper-loop", that was already in Science&Vie back in the 1970's when i was a kid, the difference is that, unlike Elon Musk's scheme, the bullet trains were not going to travel to Mach 1 or 2 into tunnels, they were going to travel at 25 TIMES the speed of sound in vacuum tunnels as Maglev projectiles !! He just recycled a 40 years old idea in a far less ambitious way.
When European colonists and explorers arrived to the Americas, their main motivations were: gold, and "lets convert (and then enslave) those heatens"... Today, the "lets get rich quick" and the religious mantra have been replaced by a new, bizarre, quasi-religious mantra of "lets go live on Mars to save the human race from extinction because we are too incompetent and lazy to even want to try fixing global warming and man-made pollution and lets run away to Mars thinking that it will fix all our problem by magical thinking and lets not forget an asteroid might fall on our heads and kill us all" (insert magician avatar with rainbow vomit here).
Then there are the extremely important aspects that no one is talking about in this grandiose plan to put in place a city of a million people on a planet where there is no air and no life and where no plants grow and where only potentially a small quantity of water does exist, heavily dispersed in the ground: Put a population in isolation on another planet where there is no air in a tin can for a prolonged period of time (years, decades), the longer humans stay there, the weaker their immune system gets. Then send newcomers to their colony, and just watch the massive epidemics and decimation of space colonists happen, because this is what happens when you isolate a small population group for a prolonged time with relatively little or no contact with the outside world. Even a simple flu bug could eventually kill them. Because lets be honest, there wouldn't be "hundreds" of regular airline flights to Mars. Who would pay for it ? Would be colonists ? Let's be serious, the costs would be totally out of this world even if they flew hundreds of flights, no one could afford the ticket, except maybe the few top billionaires. You think countries would have the budgets (and the motivation) to send colonists to Mars on a regular basis at the cost of billions of dollars per ship ? Not a chance.
2. I don't know if you have read the latest reports from Mars missions, but it appears that Martian soil is a material which is toxic to humans. On Mars, that soil would get everywhere, on space suits, on vehicles and tools, and on and inside the habitats.
3. The idea of setting up a colony on a world where the gravity is much smaller than on Earth with the idea of making humans a "space based species" supposedly to "save" the human specie from some impending looming future giant asteroid catastrophe also forgets the following: the next generation of children these people would have, either on the Moon or on Mars would look like anorexic giants with elongated thin limbs and big heads who would bear little similarity with the mankind we know, and would like mentioned above,have a very weak immune system making them prime victims for a massive extinction of their population from just a common virus. So the very idea of putting a population in space on a planet with no air, living in thin cans or inflatable tents and with weak or non-existent immune system is non-sensical as a "solution" to avoid a potential mass extinction of our specie here on Earth.
4. Some twit even started mentioning in the on National radio no less that Martians would soon start to replace their body parts with mechanical parts, changing themselves into cyborgs to "adapt" to their environment and to survive. I don't know, but i think someone's been reading too many science-fiction mangas... Last time i checked, cyborgs could not have offpsrings, and even if you stretch it (very much) into the realm of sci-fi and have these Martians tweak the human genetic code and do in-vitro fertilization and build artificial uteruses to grow human brains into tanks and then transplant them into cyborg bodies, somehow i "don't think" this is going to happen. Beside, even IF Martians turned themselves into cyborgs, it is kind of counter-productive versus the whole initial idea which was to "save our specie" from possible extinction. Cyborgs are essentially machines and (even if you somehow you make abstraction of the reproduction problem) the very idea of moving human beings to another world to then turn them into machines, is again, nonsense. You might as well have continued to send roboy probes into exloration missions, that would give the same end result: machines and saved us a lot of trouble and efforts.
5. Feeding a population of say a thousand (and even a million, as is the plan) would be incredibly difficult to realize. Imagine the size and quantity of crops that would be necessary to accomplish this, and which would have to give crops all year long. All it would take for these plants living in an isolated enclosed environment is a single fungus, disease or parasite to start dying off en masse, and then your colonists would starve. You think there is a magical solution ? Ever did gardening ? Ever planted food crops ? Try it, and then learn. The hard way. Then try the same in space, and we'll talk about it again. I think Nasa tried to put plants in space only once. And that was not even for a sustained, food producing crop. ONCE, in a 55 year long space program. I am not impressed for the future.
6. Mars might be a sterile world, where, if there were ever bacterias long ago when water used to flow on the surface may long have disappeared (though this is not yet a given: there are still traces of water underground). However, if it was sterile, human beings may very well already have contaminated it with bacterias and viruses from Earth. Ever read reports on the sterilization of Nasa martian probes ? Not all the probes that were sent to Mars were sterilized the same way, some were more poorly treated then others. They ran tests and many methods to see how they could most efficiently eliminate all traces of viruses and bacterias from all the surfaces of their probes. They also combined methods such as UV irradiation, chlorine, ozone, etc, when single methods did not give acceptable results. They found out a combination of all the methods could eliminate "most" micro-organisms (but was costly), but not all. There always remain some, and, worse, when you combine all those methods, you actually create stronger, more resistant bugs generation which, like we saw on Earth with antibiotics, the more you use antibiotics against pathogens, the more you make them resistant to counter-measures. And, now, the very last antibiotic that we had as a last ditch barrier against epidemics is already starting to not work against several viruses. And it's been quite a while that there is a syphillis virus as well as other similar illnesses that are resistant to antibiotics in the Asia. So colonists on Mars may end up with a nasty man-made surprise, which will have the chance to mutate some more thanks to the fact there is no ozone layer on Mars to filtrate UV rays and stop stronger mutations from happening to these bacterias (no tentacle jokes please, we all know what happened when the Europeans reached the shores of North and South America: it was a massive extinction of the local populations who's immune systems were totally unprepared to the new viruses they came in contact with. We are talking a 90% loss of the original populations).
7. Some will probably mention terraforming... Lets not mention Michael Zubrin here... (Michael Zubrin writes books. He is not a botanist nor a farmer). Terraforming is a project that, IF such an utopia would ever happen would take at the very best, hundreds, if not thousands of years. And there is no guarantee is would last or even work. By the time you are done devoting colossal energies and centuries trying to turn a small ball of iron oxide into a vague facsimile of Earth, other people would already have reached a Earth-like planet with a breathable atmosphere on Proxima Centauri or on another close solar-system. So it is, again, a non-sense. With today's new propulsion technologies, you could already launch a long range mission with a few hundred people in say 50 years that would make a travel of 50 to a 100 years to a solar system close to ours and probably colonize an exoplanet more suitable to human life than Mars, and with far fewer efforts than trying to terraform a whole planet. Though we still have to pinpoint and precisely make sure such an exoplanet would indeed already have oxygen in its atmosphere, and water (or ice) on its surface (the new Webb telescope might help to do that)(it's still better to wear winter coats all year long rather than space suits). If we sent enough spaceships with colonists (say 10 ships), the chances of surviving the long trip and seeing their offsprings reach those habitable worlds would be far greater than just sending 1 ship. It would obviously not be easy even for those who would reach their destination without major problems, they would no doubt face a whole series of problems on the surface itself and in adapting and surviving to their new world, but compared to living on a planet without an breathable atmosphere while using a life support systems all the time, forever, their life would be infinitely safer and more simple and would't depend on so many critical mechanical systems for survival.
So it is not because some people have been watching Matt Damon plant potatoes on Mars in a Hollywood movie too many times that sending thousands of people there on a permanent basis would actually work or last longer than until the next catastrophe that would hit them. Don't get me wrong, i love Matt Damon, and i loved the movie. But, it's just that, a movie. Reality is way more complicated. So, hubris aside, the plans of Musk are no more than a wide scale, badly planned, uninformed, badly implemented and badly equipped suicide mission. And then, when they reach there, you think everyone will live forever thereafter in peace and loving each other ? It didn't take long for the American colony to end up in a war/revolution. Humans will remain humans in behavior and character. Wouldn't take long in a situation of conflict or if someone become mentally unstable to completely scrap an outer-world colony, once someone targets the life-support system and the crops, bye-bye...
I don't says that in a tightly controlled environment like a Nasa mission with scientists and professional astronauts (instead of hundreds of average Joe and Jane would be colonists), things would stay mostly under-control (that's the best case scenario, with small groups), but even then, i would not necessarily cross my fingers and assume only for the best, remember a certain Spacelab mission where the astronauts decided to give the finger to Earth control because they were pissed off with their bad living conditions ? Or a certain training mission for Mars where a female astronaut from Canada was sexually assaulted by a Russian male astronaut ? The training mission had to be cancelled as a result. I doubt there will be police on Mars. or if there is, under what jurisdiction ? Under Musk's company ? Under a private security company ? Under US law ? United Nations ? NATO ? Zouave Vatican guards ? No nation is supposed to be able to claim ownership of a celestial body under international law. Perhaps they left a big loophole there as they probably did not mention private companies in that agreement. Leaving room for potentially all kinds of human rights abuse once you set up a colony there and they basically do as they wish in term of dealing (or not dealing) with conflict or crimes. So basically, we are talking about recreating a whole society on another world as well, with all its infinite complexity of laws and customs. What laws apply, which ones do not, who applies them if any ? Where are the judges, jury, police, detention system, re-introduction into society, who decides of the fate of whom and under whose guidance and where are the safety checks to make sure human rights are not violated ? Etc. And then you have religions, political systems, elections if any, and conflicts if there are none. Say hello to the same thing we have on Earth. Moving to a new apartment does not magically solve problems. And asteroids can still fall on their head.
And thinking about it, the whole project of Musk actually is nothing more than a plan to grab himself a lot more money to get richer: that's why he said: eventually, money will have to come from public funds. HIs plan of Mars colonization actually doesn;t even have to work, all he have to do is provoke the sense of pride of nations just enough to make them go into a bit of a panick and re-start their national Mars mission projects (NASA, ESA, China, Russia), and then show up and tell them, we can all join together in MY colonization/Mars mission plan (kashing... sound of the cash register of Elan Musk), and then he might only have to send one mission, which may eventually fail, blow up, and even if it does, he will already have made his money from public funds, and made sure that he had every colonist participant sign a release contract stating that if they die accidentally for whatever technical reason or God's act, they release him of any financial compensation payment to their families, thus protecting his financial assets... Then there will be a long, world-wide commission who will eventually determine that those missions pause too great a risk to human life and wasted huge public sums, and will cancel further flights, but he will already have made his money. Given the way his totally over-bloated plan sounds (totally unrealistic), it is not too hard to tell that this is what is the main plan here. Just another money grab from a big company with big appetite. Given the latest announcement from the US administration we saw in the news yesterday where they announced that they would launch a mission to Mars for 2030, it is clear that the plan of Musk of provoking their pride is working...
Now of course he can do what he wants with his own billions, but the moment he will start pumping pubic money for this, oh boy...
So i am sorry for deflating this dream balloon, but that's what hard reality is. And the "we must become a multi-world based civilization to save the Human race from certain doom from an asteroid" is a Very weak motivation at best, we've got an infinitely more pressing and concrete emergency here that must be fixed within the next 10 years, or we will really face long term consequences that will damage the chance of survival of millions if not billions of human beings here on Earth: Global Warming. So, sorry, playing astronauts and playing human colonists on Mars may work with Legos, but it is not a realistic nor a pressingly urgent proposal in our current situation, we've got things to fix here, move to electric transports (thankfully is is contributing a bit to that change, i give him credit for that, especially for his electric energy stocking system for solar and wind-mill power), eliminate coal-oil based power generation, drastically reduce/eliminate fossil fuels, put in place more recycling and less pollution.
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