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Post by airc777 on Jul 4, 2019 2:39:34 GMT
Did some loosely related to the subject of space warfare math while trying to guesstimate the cost of a mars colony for fun.
Falcon Heavy claims a capacity of 16,800 kg to Mars transfer orbit at a launch cost of 150 million per unit. I wanted an approximation of the mass of a small self sufficient city, so I decided to use an aircraft carrier. Wikipedia lists the the mass of USS Gerald R. Ford at 100,000 tonnes and a crew size of 2,600. So it would take about 5,953 Falcon Heavies to launch 100,000 tonnes to Mars transfer, costing a total of 892.95 billion for just the launch vehicles. At Jeff Bezos's 157.7 billion dollar net worth listed on Google this would take 5.7 Bezos's, or about 1.3 years of the US defense budget.
So then you would need 100,000 tonnes worth of re entery vehicles, and then you would have to assemble your prefabricated structures on site with either drones or the most expensive man hours in all of human history.
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Post by cipherpunks on Jul 4, 2019 3:31:31 GMT
This is why you have to first prospect, and then to land (and power) mining robots to do ISRU to the max, with only minimal human supervision at first. This implies launching/landing nuclear reactors - greenpiece smoothie addicts (and their uneducated aunts) will want to crucifix you. |
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Post by airc777 on Jul 4, 2019 5:01:29 GMT
Well yeah, but I'm expecting the drones we land to mine and build the first structures to by themselves be massive things. Unless we get really good at miniaturizing the mining / 3d printing robots that build the much bigger mining / 3d printing robots. I'm also expecting that for a viable colony we would ideally want a crew of thousands, and if there are that many people there we would want a lot of redundancy on all mission critical systems.
Actually what I'm expecting is we will definitely start smaller then 100,000 tonnes, and our first crews won't be thousands. Probably the first thing we'd do would look like fairly normal but much smaller scale earth moving equipment, but semi autonomous and remote piloted. If we're serious about this that means the equipment will need a maintenance crew to engineer around unforeseen problems, which if I had to guess in it's earliest form will be a human like robot remote operated from earth with a verity of tools not too dissimilar to normal hand tools. Having a human crew there would be great but it's probably not completely necessary, 3D printers are great but I have a feeling we're going to reach a point where something has gone wrong and we just need a set of arms and fine manipulators.
So then it would turn into a question of what the line between a research outpost and a viable colony is. So I'm going to be a bit conservative and guess high and hopefuly I'm surprised when it turns out the reality is cheaper then I was prepared for. So a few thousand is more then enough to be genetically viable for long enough that you should eventually get immigrants. A work force of a few thousand seems like it would be enough to be specialized in as many fields as you would need to run a small town, even with the added complications of space pioneering. I don't have any idea what the tipping point in of tonnage of infrastructure would be to expand fast enough to keep up with increasing housing and food demands due to birth rate, but I'd imagine in space that would be higher then on earth because your farms and housing are also pressure vessels. Figured if I was going to pick a completely arbitrary value then an aircraft carrier seemed as reasonable as any.
My decision to use the launch cost of a hypothetical space aircraft carrier on a martian transfer orbit was what made me decide to post this here. The stock gunship in CDE would be the single most expensive object humanity has ever made by probably at least an order of magnitude over the ISS, and it's only a bit over 1/10th the mass of the current us navy flagship.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jul 4, 2019 6:58:50 GMT
This is why you have to first prospect, and then to land (and power) mining robots to do ISRU to the max, with only minimal human supervision at first. This implies launching/landing nuclear reactors - greenpiece smoothie addicts (and their uneducated aunts) will want to crucifix you. You'd think they would approve of moving those nasty and dangerous nuclear reactors off Earth, and yet... |
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