Zubrin's take on Elon's Mars plans

Elon Musk has revealed his true nature over the last year.  I used to admire him, believing that he wished to make the world a better place.   I no longer think that.  Nevertheless,  I am going to continue to report news and opinions about SpaceX's Starship,  as I have been a keen follower since it was first announced nearly ten years ago, and because I believe that mankind should go to Mars.

Starship remains far ahead of any competitor.  There's the DreamChaser, but it's been in development for 20 years, and its first lauch has just been postponed again.  Jeff Bezos's New Glen reusable booster has only just had one launch, which wasn't completely successful.  Unlike SpaceX, which has landed its booster, and will soon land Starship, New Glen has yet to return safely to base.

Starship had its first successful flight two days ago, after several failures.  SpaceX's development method is to test its rockets in action, see what's wrong, fix the issues, and then test again.  It's taken 10 Starship launches to get its first success, and there is still a long way to go.  Reusable rockets are essential, to cut costs, and for Starship, that means getting the heatshield tiles to work.  Perhaps another 10 launches will be needed for the technical problems with the heatshield to be solved.  A first step will be to launch Starship and let it land at Starbase, rather than into the sea, so that the engineers can see what's wrong by inspecting the damage to the tiles, the hull and the fins.

Despite the technical difficulties, I have no doubt that Starship will over the next couple of years become as reliable a workhorse as the Falcon 9.  But will it be the foundation for a Mars city?  Well, probably not.  

I've talked before about Zubrin's plans.  He points out that there are no great grasslands or oceans on Mars, and that we can't colonise it in the same way the New World was colonised.  We will have to grow all our food inside domes or caverns.  The initial populations on Mars will be limited by this.  He also argues that a "Starboat" (a rendering is shown below), about 1/5th the size of the Starship, would be much more practical, because the energy needs to produce propellant for Starship for the return journey to Earth would require 60,000 square metres of solar panels, which by themselves would need 3 Starships, and therefore another +-20 launches of refuelling tankers.  A Starboat would require only 1/5 of that.  In addition, a "Starboat" could be lifted  fully fuelled from Earth into orbit by a Starship, ready to head to Mars, and would not require in-orbit propellant transfer.

Musk is fixated on having just one workhorse: Starship.  Yet it has already morphed into 4 distinct variants:  the passenger Starship; the fuel tanker; the cargo version with its huge bay door; and the Moon landing vehicle.  One more wouldn't make much difference.

A concept for "Starboat"

Here is a video about Robert Zubrin's take on Musk' Mars plan.

Will we get to Mars?  Yes.  Will Mars have a million inhabitants by 2060?  I doubt it.  

But the first scientific bases will expand, and eventually there will be small towns with a few thousand inhabitants living in domes and caverns.  It will take decades to reach a Martian population of a million.

Meanwhile, the need to make it all work will be powerful technological driver, providing incentives to develop the technology needed for a space civilisation, all of which will be good for Earth.  Think for example of the need for vat meat and fish, for air and water purification systems, for workable, safe, small nuclear reactors, for plant varieties which can flourish in very different conditions from on Earth, and for more efficient, cheaper and faster transportation between Mars and Earth.  Just as space has already led to incredibly useful new technologies on Earth--solar panels being just one--so will Mars lead to improvements in Earth-based technology and science.

Thank you

I started this blog in July 2010.  I felt I had something to say about economies and economics, about politics, and about the environment, and not enough people to say it to.  When I first started, you had to use HTML to write the blog (you still have to use it now, sometimes, to fix mistakes), I had no idea how to post graphs to the blog, and I didn't even have a Twitter account to promote the blog.  I've learnt a lot since then.

In the first month, I got 3 views.  In August, 1.  In September, 17.   Talk about exponential growth!  By July 2012, this had grown to 247.  Last month, May, nearly 15 years later, there were 39,950 visits!  I wonder how many of them are from AI scrapers, though.  Am I too cynical?

So I wanted to say thank you, to all of you who read my ramblings.  My interests are my own, and I'm sure many people aren't interested in the things I am.  I find the world fascinating.  It's interesting to see connections, to understand how things work, to consider how public policy should shift to make the world a better place.  I'm more interested in good policy and good government than in any left or right view of the world, though I incline leftish.  It's just so happened that most of the damaging policies and laws have come from the Right and oligarchs since I started this blog.

15 years ago, I had become convinced that neo-liberalism was wrong, and that it would lead to greater and greater inequality and division, and I was right.  

I was wrong about action on climate change.  I kept on hoping that, given the inescapable logic of the impending climate catastrophe, we would (collectively) act to slash emissions.  But there was organised and cynical opposition and lies from powerful and wealthy interests; there was hypocrisy and greenwashing from politicians and elites; and too many ordinary people felt helpless in the face of the fossil fuel juggernaut.  But I am not giving up.  We must keep fighting.  Every 0.1 degree of heating avoided is absolutely worth it.  If I have played some small part in galvanising ordinary citizens into action,  I'm glad.

What will the next 15 years bring?  

Well, I think neo-liberalism is in its death throes.  Covid showed conclusively that governments can do some things better than the private sector.   And China's success in creating new renewables industries from scratch shows that government-driven industrial policy can work.  The triumph of Trump and MAGA in America shows the perils of ever rising inequality, and may yet galvanise the Democratic Party to become a real workers' party.  Will they ever support a rising minimum wage?  A wealth tax?  High taxes on billionaires?  Taxing companies like we used to in the 50s and 60s?  We'll see.

Will we make it to Mars?  It would be an extraordinary achievement.  I know the Left thinks it's a waste of money, and that we should fix up Earth first.  But as I have argued on these pages, I am convinced that setting up even just a scientific outpost on Mars will engender a technological revolution which will improve our lives right here on Earth.  Will it be Elon who gets us there?  Doesn't look like it right now, as he visibly disintegrates.  Yet, until his lurch into far-right lunacy, he had transformed EVs and Space.   Maybe he's the only one driven enough and rich enough to make it happen.  The Trump administration is too corrupt and inept.   He made EVs cool.   And others followed his lead.  Will others follow the path he's created to cut the costs of space?  

Will we cut emissions by 90% by 2050?  Probably yes.  Battery and EV and solar costs will just keep on falling, despite fossil fuel companies and half-witted and corrupt politicians.  And big majorities everywhere now accept the reality of climate change and its likely catastrophic consequences.   So as costs fall, and awareness rises, we'll get action.  Hopium?  Again, we'll see.

I'll keep working on my sword and sorcery fantasy novels and short stories, which I don't normally talk about here.  Eight novels and counting!  I'll keep on learning languages or refreshing those I already know.  This year it's French and Italian, and I'm relearning Ancient Greek.  I'll get back into music--I play the clarinet and the saxophone, but need to practise more. 

And big news (I think so!) is that I'll be starting a linked YouTube Volewica channel soon.   And you can follow the blog on Bluesky or on Mastodon.

Anyway, I hope I'm spared for another 15 years.  The odds are low, but I'll keep going as long as I can, convinced that my informed 99% vegan diet has extended and will continue to extend my life.

Thank you all, again. 

An interview with Robert Zubrin about Mars

 A fascinating interview with Robert Zubrin.  The most interesting bits are about how frontier societies drive technological innovation.  Also, about why the USA is English-speaking not French (I didn't see that coming!)

Settling Mars

 Another extract from Robert Zubrin's  article The Mars Dream is Back  (See the previous extract with my comments here)

Mars can and should be settled. But it is important to be clear about how and why this should be done.

Elon Musk has propounded the idea that thousands of Starship flights should rapidly land a million people on Mars to create a metropolis that will “preserve the light of consciousness” after the human race is destroyed on Earth. This idea, which Musk says is inspired by Isaac Asimov’s noteworthy Foundation science fiction trilogy, is seriously misconceived.

In Asimov’s novels, a group of scientists are sent to settle the planet Terminus (also the name Musk has suggested for his colony) on the edge of the galaxy, so that after the anticipated collapse of the galactic empire their descendants can emerge to reconstruct civilization. It’s a grand read. But it is not applicable to the task at hand.

A human Mars civilization cannot be created in the manner of the D-Day landings, delivering settlers to land on the hostile shore 100,000 people at a time. The troops on Normandy beach could be supported from England by Liberty ships capable of carrying 10,000 tons of cargo each across the channel in a matter of hours. In contrast, Starships will be able to carry only about 100 tons of cargo from Earth to Mars and will take 6 to 8 months to perform the transit. Consequently, a Mars settlement of any size cannot be supported from Earth. Before large numbers of people go to the Red Planet, the agricultural and industrial base that are needed to feed, clothe, and house them will have to be developed, built, and up and running. The settlement of Mars must therefore occur organically, as the settlement of America did, with small groups of pioneers creating the first farms and industries that provide the basis for supporting ever larger waves of settlers to follow.

Furthermore, Martian civilization is very unlikely to emerge in the form of a million-person metropolis, as any city of that size requires a well-developed system of long-distance transportation to provide it with necessary materials. That is why million-person cities on Earth were rare until the invention of railroads. Instead, the initial settlement of Mars is most likely to occur in the form of a multitude of smaller towns, with locations optimized to access different types of material resources, and populations of thousands to tens of thousands, with perhaps 50,000 (the size of Renaissance Florence) representative of a cultural capital.

Regardless of how it is distributed, no Martian million-person civilization could possibly survive the collapse of human civilization on Earth. Technological civilization requires a vast division of labor. Given the multitude of the components and alloys in a good electric wristwatch, it is unlikely that a society of 1 million people could produce one, or even a wristwatch battery, let alone an iPhone.

So, the idea of sending people to Mars to survive the extermination of terrestrial humanity simply won’t work. Furthermore, it is so morally repulsive that its embrace would doom any program so foolish as to adopt it. Coated with ideological skunk essence, its protagonists would appear more like the selfish characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” dancing in a castle while everyone outside dies in an epidemic, than the heroes of Asimov’s Foundation series.

We are not going to Mars to desert humanity. We are going to Mars to strengthen humanity — to vastly expand its power to meet all future challenges by establishing new highly-inventive branches of civilization. We are not going to Mars to “preserve the light of consciousness” in an off-world hideaway. We are going to Mars to liberate human minds by opening an unlimited frontier to human hands. We are not going to Mars to party while the Earth burns. We are going to Mars to prevent Earth from burning by showing that there is no need to kill each other fighting over provinces when by invoking our higher natures we can create planets.

Together to Mars, then together with Mars, human freedom will expand into the cosmos.

See my piece from July 2024 Will there ever be a viable colony on Mars, where I come to not dissimilar conclusions.  We might be able to get to Mars (that seems very likely), but the economics of settling on Mars is a different story.  There aren't going to be a thousand ships packed with settlers, because they have nowhere to settle.  There are no grasslands, no forests, no seas.  Just a forbiddingly cold world with a very, very thin and poisonous atmosphere.  Yes, technology will allow us to live in domes, and maybe survive.   But that will be costly, in dollars, and in terms of resources, especially energy.  We will need energy to transform regolith into food and shelter.  We will need time to transform regolith (toxic rubble and sand) into soil.  And even then, for hundreds of years, we will need to grow our plants under protective domes.  Mars is not the New World, with all nature's bounty.  It's a harsh, lethal, dangerous world where mankind will have to work hard to make ourselves a garden. 

Note that Zubrin does NOT see Mars as a bolthole for billionaires (which of course it isn't and won't be for centuries) and also regards the very idea as "morally repulsive" (which it is.)

Why go to Mars?

This is an extract from Robert Zubrin's article in New Atlantis, The Mars Dream Is Back — Here’s How to Make It Actually Happen. It's a long piece, and covers several topics, so I will post more extracts later.

There are three reasons to send humans to Mars: for the science, for the challenge, and for the future.

1. For the Science

The early Earth and the early Mars were twins. Both were warm, wet, rocky planets with atmospheres dominated by carbon dioxide. Earth evolved life. If the theory is correct that life emerges naturally from chemistry through a process of complexification that occurs whenever conditions are right, then life should have evolved on Mars too. We need to know if it did, and if so, what forms it took. We now know from observations made by the Kepler Space Telescope that, out of the stars that are like our Sun, an estimated one in five have roughly Earth-size planets orbiting in their habitable zones. This means there are perhaps as many as 80 billion such planets in our galaxy alone. If life evolves wherever there is a decent planet, it means life is everywhere. Furthermore, since the entire history of life on Earth is one of development into diverse forms, including those manifesting ever greater capacities for activity, intelligence, and accelerated evolution, if life is everywhere, intelligence is everywhere. If we find evidence of past or present life on Mars, it means we are not alone. This is something that thinking men and women have wondered about for thousands of years. It is worth risking life and treasure to find out.

Moreover, while there are forceful arguments that can be made why life must be based on complex hydrocarbon molecules and aqueous chemistry, there is no a priori reason why life must necessarily employ the same DNA–RNA information system utilized by all life on Earth. In trying to understand the phenomenon of life, biologists today are like untraveled people who, having encountered only the Latin alphabet in their homelands, think it is what alphabets are. But in fact, it is possible instead to achieve the same purpose using the Cyrillic or Arabic alphabets, or even Chinese characters, which not only look different, but operate according to an entirely different set of principles. What alphabet does life elsewhere use? The question is of more than academic importance. Biotechnology is going to be one of the main engineering sciences of the twenty-first century and many to follow. It is nanotech made real. A different bioinformation system could offer engineering possibilities as much greater in comparison to DNA–RNA as silicon computers are to ones based on vacuum tubes, electric relays, or mechanical Babbage machines.

Fossil hunting to find evidence of past life on Mars will involve, as it does on Earth, hiking long distances through rough terrain, using intuition to search for subtle clues, doing heavy digging and pickaxe work, and performing delicate work to reveal traces of past life pasted between pages of hardened sediments now turned to rock. Finding current life will require wide-ranging field exploration followed by setting up drilling rigs to access liquid water a kilometer or more underground, bringing up samples, and analyzing them in a well-equipped lab on the Martian surface. These tasks are light years beyond the capabilities of robotic rovers. Only human explorers can achieve them. If we don’t go, we won’t know.

2. For the Challenge

Nations, like individuals and institutions, grow when they challenge themselves and stagnate when they do not. A humans-to-Mars program would pay us back with massive generation of intellectual capital by inspiring millions of young citizens to develop their talents with a bracing challenge: Learn your science and you can be an explorer of new worlds! In the 1960s, the Apollo program issued precisely that challenge. What followed was a doubling in the number of our science and engineering graduates, whose innovations have since repaid us the program cost many times over. With the scientific professions now open to young women and minorities in a way that was simply not the case in the Sixties, the social impact of a bold Mars exploration program would be even greater today.

Forcing NASA to engage in a brave Mars program is precisely what is needed to transform the agency into an effective instrument for supporting all of the nation’s goals in space. NASA today is like a peacetime military with plenty of talented and enthusiastic junior officers but whose upper ranks have become filled by dead wood. It must be thrown into the heat of battle in order to purge it of its McClellans and find its Grants.

Finally, it is by rising to the challenge of Mars that we can demonstrate both the courage and the excellence that we need to show if we are to maintain world leadership. Americans were the first to fly to and the first to reach the Moon. The world needs to know that it is still true that Americans are the ones who can do — and who dare to do — what others can only dream of. So we need to be the first to Mars.

3. For the Future

Philosophers who claim that we are living at the end of history could not be more wrong. We are living at the beginning of history. A thousand years from now there will be hundreds of new branches of human civilization thriving not only on Mars, but on scores of planets orbiting stars in this region of the galaxy. What language will they speak? What traditions and values will they hold dear?

Only people who choose to be parents get to have descendants. Only those nations that take part in the settlement of space will get to put their stamp upon the future.

Of all the worlds beyond Earth currently within our reach, Mars is by far the most viable candidate for human settlement, as I’ve shown in detail in The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet (2024) and elsewhere. On the Moon, outside of a few ultracold craters at its South Pole, water exists only in concentrations of a few parts per million diffused in its soil. In contrast, Mars has oceans of water, including vast amounts in liquid form deep underground, continent-sized regions of frozen mud ranging from five to sixty percent water by weight, and massive formations of pure water ice glaciers, containing perhaps as much water as the American Great Lakes or more, extending from the North Pole down to 38 degrees N, the latitude of San Franscico on Earth. The Moon is lacking in any meaningful supply of carbon or nitrogen, elements essential for life. Mars, with an atmosphere that is 95 percent carbon dioxide and 2.6 percent nitrogen, has plenty of both. Mars not only possesses all the elements needed for industry but has had a complex geological history including both vulcanism and water action that has allowed many rocks to be concentrated into useful mineral ore. In contrast, the waterless Moon lacks many essential industrial elements and those that it has are all mixed together in trash rock. As thin as it is, averaged across the dome of the sky, Mars’s atmosphere provides the equivalent of about two feet (65 cm) of water’s worth of radiation shielding to its surface. That is well above the thickness required for a solar flare storm shelter, and thus fully adequate to protect both astronaut explorers and thin-walled greenhouses taking advantage of Mars’s 24-hour day to grow crops using natural sunlight. In contrast, the Moon has a month-long cycle of day and night and no atmosphere at all, making greenhouse agriculture on its surface a non-starter. Instead, plants would have to grow underground using electrically generated artificial light to support photosynthesis. The power requirement to do this at scale would be enormous. (For radiation concerns, see Endnote 1.)

For the coming age of space settlement, Mars compares to the Moon as North America compared to Greenland during the age of European maritime exploration. Greenland was closer to Europe, so Europeans reached it first. But it was too impoverished an environment to host more than a few outposts. In contrast, America was a place that could be not only settled but become the home for a huge vibrant new branch of Western civilization.

For our generation and those that will follow us in this century, Mars is the New World.

I would add two more.

4.   Mars will be a powerful technological forcing function  

Technological need drives technological advances, and these benefit not just the industry where they were developed, but spread out from there to benefit the whole economy.  Space has already led to or encouraged many technological leaps, such as these, and these, and of course, solar panels.  From before the first rocket leaves for Mars, and on Mars itself, we will need to develop technologies which are cheap and energy-efficient, such as:-

• Air purification systems
• Water purification
• Machines to extract CO2 from the atmosphere
• Vat meat, fish and milk.  There are no great grasslands on Mars, no seas to fish.
• Materials to build domes and habitats
• Genetically modified fast-growing plants to provide fresh food
• Medical advances to treat the illnesses caused by radiation on Mars
• Safe and workable nuclear reactors, fusion or fission.
• Rocket propulsion systems.

Each of these technological breakthroughs will be immensely useful on Earth too.

5.     Mars will change the way we think about ourselves and our place in the universe

Just as the first picture of the Earth, taken on the first Moon landing, and showing Earthrise over the horizon on the Moon, changed our perspective of what we are, so will the televised images of our first trio to Mars and our first colony there widen our horizons. We will never be the same again.

A Mars moss

Source: Wikipedia

Mars is bitterly cold, has only a very thin atmosphere, no soil, and what gravel and sand it has is contaminated with toxic perchlorates, no liquid water, and it's bathed in lethal radiation.  In short, not a particularly welcoming environment for life.  And yet, researchers have found a moss which might, just, be able to survive on Mars.  

 From Science Daily

The desert moss Syntrichia caninervis is a promising candidate for Mars colonization thanks to its extreme ability to tolerate harsh conditions lethal to most life forms. The moss is well known for its ability to tolerate drought conditions, but researchers report June 30 in the journal The Innovation that it can also survive freezing temperatures as low as −196°C, high levels of gamma radiation, and simulated Martian conditions involving these three stressors combined. In all cases, prior dehydration seemed to help the plants cope.

"Our study shows that the environmental resilience of S. caninervis is superior to that of some of highly stress-tolerant microorganisms and tardigrades," write the researchers, who include ecologists Daoyuan Zhang and Yuanming Zhang and botanist Tingyun Kuang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "S. caninervis is a promising candidate pioneer plant for colonizing extraterrestrial environments, laying the foundation for building biologically sustainable human habitats beyond Earth."

A small number of previous studies have tested the ability of microorganisms, algae, lichens, and plant spores to withstand the extreme environments of outer space or Mars, but this is the first study to test whole plants.

Syntrichia caninervis is a common moss species with a widespread global distribution. It grows in remarkably extreme desert environments including Tibet, Antarctica, and the circumpolar regions as part of the biological soil crust -- a widespread and resilient type of ground cover often found in arid lands. Given the moss's ability to survive extreme environmental conditions, the researchers decided to test its limits in the lab.

To test the moss's cold tolerance, the researchers stored plants at −80°C (in an ultra-cold freezer) for 3 and 5 years and at −196°C (in a liquid nitrogen tank) for 15 and 30 days. In all cases, the plants regenerated when they were defrosted, though their rebound was less rapid compared to control specimens that had been dehydrated but not frozen, and plants that were not dehydrated prior to freezing rebounded more slowly than plants that were dried, then frozen.

The moss also demonstrated the ability to survive gamma radiation exposure that would kill most plants, and doses of 500 Gy even seemed to promote the plants' growth. For comparison, humans experience severe convulsions and death when exposed to around 50 Gy. "Our results indicate that S. caninervis is among the most radiation-tolerant organisms known," the researchers write.

Finally, the researchers tested the moss's ability to endure Mars-like conditions using the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Planetary Atmospheres Simulation Facility. The simulator's Martian conditions included air composed of 95% CO2, temperatures that fluctuated from −60°C to 20°C, high levels of UV radiation, and low atmospheric pressure. Dried moss plants achieved a 100% regeneration rate within 30 days after being subjected to the Martian conditions for 1, 2, 3, and 7 days. Hydrated plants, which were only subjected to the simulator for one day, also survived, though they regenerated more slowly than their desiccated counterparts.

"Although there is still a long way to go to create self-sufficient habitats on other planets, we demonstrated the great potential of S. caninervis as a pioneer plant for growth on Mars," the researchers write. "Looking to the future, we expect that this promising moss could be brought to Mars or the Moon to further test the possibility of plant colonization and growth in outer space."

This research was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Leading Talents in Technological Innovation Program, and The Third Xinjiang Scientific Expedition Program.

At the bottom of Gale Crater (close to Mars's equator) daytime temperatures can reach 20 degrees in summer, but average 2 degrees daily.   Night temperatures fall to as low as -76 C.  The bottom of Valles Marineris or Hellas Planitia (which are deeper than Gale Crater) might be warm enough to let this moss survive.  In Valles Marineris, humidity may briefly reach 100% at the coldest point in the night, and frost deposition might provide this moss with enough moisture to survive.  The moss might well also survive on the rims of Mars's ice caps, going dormant each winter, and growing in that hemisphere's summer.

Most interesting.

Will there ever be a viable colony on Mars?

Mars lander over Valles Marineris by William Black

The Technology

In May 2018, I wrote a piece about what was then called the BFR (now renamed Starship) entitled Full speed ahead--Mars by 2024.  Musk had announced his "Mars Colonial Transporter" the previous September, and he described this goal as "aspirational".   Spoiler alert: we won't get to Mars by the end of this year.  But it looks as if he will prolly be just 2 years off.  Given that 7 years ago when Musk announced this project, most people thought that it would never happen, that's a signal achievement.

Why two years?  Mars and Earth are in "opposition"  (i.e.  Earth is between Mars and the Sun)  roughly every 2 years and two months, which is when they are closest in each current orbital period.  And that is when we would launch an expedition to Mars, because that is when the journey would have the shortest duration.

The next opposition will be on January 15th, 2025--we're not going to make that one.  The opposition after that will be on February 19th 2027.  I think that will be the date, more or less, that ships from Earth will land on Mars.   Assuming a six months flight to Mars, the expedition taking advantage of the February 2027 opposition would have to leave in September 2026.  A return journey will not happen until the next opposition, on March 25th 2029.  Once again, any ship that returns to Earth will leave 6 months or more before the opposition.  

Why am I convinced that SpaceX will be able to do it on this timeline?

Let's start with the success of flight 4 (IFT 4) of the Starship/Super Heavy booster combo.  Both the booster and the ship managed soft landings, despite some problems with re-entry and the rocket engines.  Each flight has gone further and achieved more than the previous one.   This is how SpaceX works, by iteration.  It tests, learns, redesigns, and tests again.  The gaps between each test flight have grown shorter.   

Musk has said that there will have to be "hundreds" of flights before humans climb aboard.  NASA's Artemis program to land astronauts on the Moon will be using Starship, and that is (coincidentally) also scheduled for September 2026.  So by then there would have had to be hundreds of successful Starship flights.  How will that be possible?  Well, the whole point about Starship is that it is meant to be re-usable.  So each Starship will be able to fly often, perhaps once a day, to test its ability to launch and re-enter safely.  And SpaceX plans to ramp up its production line to a Starship a day.

But ... re-usability depends on the heat tiles working and not needing to be completely replaced after every flight.   The Space Shuttle was supposed to be re-usable, but the time and expense needed to refurbish its heat shield after every flight made it very expensive.  Musk has said that the heat shield tiles, made from a kind of ceramic, are like china plates attached to the outside of the ship.  They are vulnerable to vibration, cracking, chipping and breaking up.  They have a different thermal expansion coefficient to the stainless steel of the ship's body.   

It is a formidable problem, if you want full re-usability.   Videos from IFT4's re-entry showed that most of the tiles visible to the on-board cameras were OK, but debris from the re-entry showed that some tiles were disintegrating.  IFT5 (end July?) will test new shielding, including a layer of fibrous heat shield under the solid heat shield tiles.  If the heat shield has to be replaced after every flight, this will mean the Starship is not fully reusable, which in turn means that my putative Mars timeline won't happen.

SpaceX has already faced up and solved many technological issues with Starship.  But this is the most formidable yet.  Will they solve it?   

Consider how far SpaceX has come since Musk's announcement of the BFR is September 2017.   A carbon-fibre ship was the first proposal.  Then SpaceX pivoted to a stainless steel ship and booster, because of its superior ability to withstand the heat of re-entry as well as its far lower cost.   In effect, they started from scratch at that point (2019).  Observers mistook the first test vehicle at Boca Chica for a steel water tank.  It's been just 5 and a half years since SpaceX started with the current Starship design.   So progress has been remarkable. 

Therefore, I do in fact expect to see boots on Mars in 2027.

The Economics

So we will have a scientific outpost, as we do in Antarctica.  But will it ever be more than that?  Will there be colonisation?  Will there be a city of a million inhabitants?   The issue now shifts from the technical challenges of getting to Mars (difficult but doable) to the economics of settling there in enough numbers to reach a self-sustaining million people (much more doubtful).

Before I answer these questions, read about all the problems of living on Mars in this piece I wrote.   To summarise that piece: Mars is very, very cold; has practically no atmosphere, and what it does have is poisonous; there is no soil, and the rock and dust on the surface (regolith) is contaminated with poisonous perchlorates; the planet's surface is bathed with lethal radiation; its gravity is just 40% of the Earth's.  

Terraforming Mars will take at least a century, prolly many more.  So everyone will have to live in domes or in caves.  To preserve the researchers' sanity, spouses and partners will be permitted to stay too; there will be parks under the domes or in the caves to provide some Earth greenery; there'll be guest suites, and tourists.  Tourists?  Surely, yes.   Just a few in the early years, but numbers rising rapidly as costs decline.

The research stations will require fresh food, water purification, air purification, genetically modified plants, dome construction technology, and above all, energy.  There will be powerful technological forcing functions in all these areas, and in the spaceship technology to get us there, resulting in huge cost reductions over time.

There were 350 settlers at the Jamestown colony in Virginia in 1610.   By 1630, there were 4.6 thousand settlers (and descendants of settlers), a compound growth rate of 14%.  By 1650, 50 thousand, a growth rate of 13% per annum for those two decades.  There are many more people on Earth now than there were in 1610, so there could in theory be more settlers.  But on the other hand, back in the 17th century, once the settlers had arrived, they could hack themselves a field out of the forest, build a log cabin, and start a new life.  On Mars, they'd have to live in a dome, pay for the dome's maintenance and upkeep, and find themselves a job.  No homesteading, no going off into the wilds to make your fortune.  Not only will you have to find the fare, but also enough money to live on in a high-tech environment where everything has to be paid for, including air and water.

Musk talks about a million people on Mars by 2050.   It could happen, maybe, if technological advances are enough to cut costs rapidly.  But I hae me doots.  

The first passage to Mars will cost $6 million per person (assuming 10 people per ship, with the rest of the payload being stuff needed to keep them alive).  But they'll be scientists, with their fares paid by Earth's space agencies.  The second expedition will perhaps cut that to $300K per person, and the one after that to, say, $200K.  

But that's still far more than most people can afford.  

Only a millionaire could afford these fares.  There are 59 million millionaires in the world.  I suppose it's possible that 0.1% of them will give up their lives of comfort and luxury on Earth for a hardscrabble living on Mars.   That's roughly 60,000 people.  60,000 in total who can both afford it and also want to do it.  

There's no way there are going to be a million people on Mars by 2050 --- unless there are big subsidies from Earth to achieve this.  It would cost, say, $100 billion a year to send 200,000 people every opposition (2,000 Starships!), at a million dollars per colonist (fare plus living costs), until the Mars colonies are self-sustaining, and all you'd have to fund is the fare.  Whatever you think about the desirability of colonising Mars, no government is going to provide that much money.  Unless .... geopolitics intervenes, and the US funds settlement to secure a hold on Mars.   Will that happen?  I can't tell.  But it has to be a possibility.  Without that, maybe 10,000 colonists every two years, at $1 million a pop?  $5 billion a year?  Yes, possibly.  110,000 residents by 2050, assuming deaths are balanced by births (can mammals even have offspring in lower gravity? No one knows.)  A long way from a million.

So, will there ever be a viable colony on Mars?  I used to think there would be.  But I don't know, any more.  What do you think?

See also:

Living on Mars -- I

Living on Mars -- II

Living on Mars -- III

Imitation & vat meats the norm by 2040

Domed forest on Mars 

Terraforming Earth 

Cost of the Mars expedition 

Cheap access to space

Cost of launches per kg will plunge

In the US, they think we're communists

In the Red Mars--Green Mars--Blue Mars trilogy, the author Kim Stanley Robinson posits a society dominated by co-operatives, driven not just by the need to survive on Mars (which requires a collective approach) but also a hostility to capitalism and its inherent inequality and greed. The capitalists, billionaires and multi-national corps are emphatically the bad guys.  In these novels, the new members of a co-operative also have to buy their way into the co-op, and should you leave, the co-op would buy back your share. It seems a very attractive alternative to raw capitalism and doctrinaire socialism to me.  I think he must have had the Mondragón co-operative in mind.



From The Guardian

The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the globe’s largest industrial co-operative, with workers paying for the right to share in its profits – and its losses. In return for giving more to their employer, they expect more back.

When Marisa Fernández lost her husband to cancer a few years ago, her employers at the Eroski hypermarket went, she says, “above and beyond to help me through the dark days afterwards, rejigging my timetable and giving me time off when I couldn’t face coming in.”

She had a chance to return the favour recently when the store, in Arrasate-Mondragón in Spain’s Basque Country, was undergoing renovations. Fernández, 58, who started on the cashier desk 34 years ago, and now manages the store’s non-food section, volunteered to work extra shifts over the weekend along with her colleagues to ensure everything was ready for Monday morning. “It’s not just me. Everyone is ready to go the extra mile,” she says.

Such harmonious employer-worker relations are the stuff of corporate dreams, and they are no accident here: the Eroski retail chain is part of Mondragón Corporation, the largest industrial co-op in the world. As a fully signed-up member, Fernández co-owns part of the supermarket chain that also employs her. “It feels like mine,” she says. “We work hard, but it’s a totally different feeling from working for someone else.”

That sentiment is echoed by Mondragón’s 70,000 other workers. Made up of 81 autonomous co-operatives, the corporation has grown since its creation in 1956 to become a leading force in the Basque economy. Eroski is one of its most conspicuous manifestations, with 1,645 outlets across Spain. In addition to food, the chain has profitable sidelines in white goods, electronics, insurance and holiday bookings.

More than its economic success, though, Mondragón has become a beacon for the co-operative model, as a more humane and egalitarian way of doing business that puts “people over capital”. Every worker has a stake in the company’s fortunes and a say in how it is run, and receives a share of the profits. But the goal is more about creating “rich societies, not rich people”. That means looking after workers during not only the good times but the tough times, too.

The lowest point for Maite Aguirrebeitia, for example, came back in 2013, when, after 20 years’ service, the Mondragón co-operative that she and her husband were affiliated to, Fagor Electrodomésticos, filed for bankruptcy. Demand for its ovens and household appliances had plummeted after the 2008 financial crisis and despite help from a Mondragón “solidarity fund”, it never recovered.

“I felt this overwhelming sense of pain and grief at the time, as if someone close to me had died,” the 56-year-old communications specialist recalls. “Plus we had two kids and bills to pay and so on. The mental stress of it all was huge.”

Rather than thank the redundant workers for their service and wish them on their way, Mondragón committed to find alternative employment for as many of Fagor’s 1,900 or so workers as it could. After temporary stints in five Mondragón co-operatives in 2022, Aguirrebeitia found a permanent placement with Mondragon Assembly, a manufacturer of equipment for process automation.

Although it has meant a shift in career – she now works part-time in human resources, and part-time as a receptionist – the security of having a fixed job is a “huge relief”, she says. “I always felt confident that somehow I’d be looked after. I talked to other people who were out of work at the time and they had none of that. They were out on the street, totally alone. If I’d had to compete in the open job market against all the youngsters coming out of university, I’m not sure I’d have ever found another job.”

Mondragón’s human-centric approach originated far from any business management school. Its roots lie in a socially engaged form of Catholicism that gained ground in the 1940s, during the early years of the Francoist regime. Its initial champion was a Basque-born cleric named José María Arizmendiarrieta, who, in 1941, arrived in the small town of Arrasate-Mondragón, about 30 miles (50km) south-east of Bilbao.

Taking it as his pastoral mission to revitalise the local economy, the diocesan priest set up a technical school for young men. A few years later, he arranged for some of them to take distance-learning degrees in industrial engineering. “After graduating, they all found jobs in conventional companies in the town, but they felt stifled … they wanted more of a say over their destiny, but their employers thought otherwise,” explains Ander Etxeberria, head of Mondragón’s outreach programme.

With Arizmendiarrieta’s encouragement, five of these first 11 graduates decided in 1955 to set up the now defunct Fagor Electrodomésticos. Seeking a model that reflected their Christian socialist philosophy, they turned to the Rochdale Pioneers, a group of tradespeople from the Lancashire town who, more than a century before, had established the world’s first co-operative. That venture grew to become today’s Co-operative Group, home to the UK’s fifth biggest food retailer and its largest provider of funeral services.

Mondragón’s founders adopted wholesale many of the Pioneers’ core tenets. In their modern-day headquarters, located in a renovated 14th-century tower with a spectacular mountain backdrop, Etxeberria counts off the group’s 10 “basic principles”. The list ranges from the sovereignty of labour and democratic organisation (one member, one vote), to wage solidarity and “social transformation” – which includes reinvesting surpluses to create new jobs, supporting local charities and community development projects, and strengthening the Basque Country’s Euskara language. Top of the list is voluntary and open membership – namely, the opportunity for everyone to have a personal stake in the enterprise where they work. As an early version of the principles reads: “The first form of elemental justice that we need to practise is to consider each other as free human beings.”

These values hold true into the present, Etxeberria explains. The salary differential between the highest and lowest paid workers in Mondragón, for example, remains about six to one; for the largest 500 listed companies in the US, the gap is closer to 272 to one. At the year end, members of Mondragón’s co-operatives also decide collectively on whether they should pay themselves bonuses and, if so, how much. This profit-sharing comes in addition to a base pay rate that, on average, is 40% above Spain’s minimum wage.

Despite its social responsibility credentials, Mondragón remains a competitive business. When Etxeberria presses “play” on an introductory video, the screen shows not pictures of happy workers doing yoga but gleaming industrial facilities and straight-faced technicians in lab coats. Overlaying these images are facts and figures that would have mainstream financiers salivating: €10.6bn (£9.1bn) in annual revenues; a dozen research and development facilities; a global roster of blue-chip clients; and a diversified sector spread – industry, retail, finance and education.

The same no-nonsense, professional vibe is on show at Fagor Arrasate, a Mondragón affiliate located on one of the many industrial estates that ring Arrasate-Mondragón, a vibrant town of cafe-strewn streets and busy bars. A specialist in metal presses and stamping systems, Fagor Arrasate boasts several hangar-sized workshops full of robotic machinery and giant components ready for export. “Some of the installations we make for customers can be three to four storeys high, so these are massive, multimillion-euro investments,” enthuses Edorta Mendieta, the venture’s marketing manager.

Pinned to a cork noticeboard beside a busy production line are photos of a recent charity run, a printout of donations to local causes (including €60,000 for a nearby organic food association), and a poster about a forthcoming “women in science” event. In the centre of the board, an A4 sheet of closely printed text gives notice of the co-operative’s general assembly, where next year’s strategy plan will be put to an all-member vote.

Mondragón’s collective spirit also offers an edge with innovation. In a process that the movement refers to as “inter-cooperation”, co-operatives within the group frequently swap ideas between themselves and engage in joint research.

Over the years, many of the best innovations have come from alliances with Mondragón’s homegrown university. Located on a leafy campus in Arrasate-Mondragón, the university was set up with a strong practical bent to both its teaching and its research. So much so, in fact, that the European Commission recently selected it to co-lead a major “dual training” programme aimed at blending academia with business to tackle global challenges such as the climate crisis.

Mondragón’s approach has proved itself profitable and resilient, so could it become a realistic alternative to the modern corporation?

It’s a moot point. Despite their worker-first philosophy, the movement’s leaders are reluctant to denounce the wealth-maximising nature of modern market capitalism. The reason is as simple as it is awkward: Mondragón must actively participate in that same capitalist system for its survival.

This tactic of being “in, but not of” the world of mainstream business has seen the Basque-based movement face charges of double standards. In particular, critics highlight its outsourcing of some of its production to low-wage countries with weaker labour standards, such as China and Mexico. Mondragón argues that it has checks and balances in place to ensure that its foreign business partners uphold workers’ rights, and that keeping costs low is part and parcel of staying competitive. “For us, workers will always come before capital. But capital is still important because without it we cannot fulfil our mission of social transformation,” says Javier Marcos, Mondragón’s director of communications.

Radical as that mission is, its focus is and always has been primarily on el territorio (the local Basque region); less about rewriting the global economic order and more about improving co-op members’ lives. That said, if others want to copy the Mondragón model, then its doors are always open, insists Etxeberria. In the past month alone, he has hosted large groups of policymakers and business students from the Philippines, Brazil and the US. “They come to see if our approach works in practice,” he says. “They all go back pleasantly surprised, I think.”

Young people, in particular, are attracted to the notion of business and entrepreneurship going beyond just the pursuit of profit, but they “don’t know the co-operative possibility exists,” says Ana Aguirre, a graduate of Mondragón University. The 33-year-old now co-runs Tazebaez, a worker-owned consultancy and education provider that she and eight fellow students created during their bachelor’s degree. For the few who have heard of co-operativism, she adds, most relegate it in the folksy, do-gooder box. “The problem is that it’s portrayed as something to do with charity or [philanthropic] foundations, rather than as a credible business model.”

Pursuing a co-operative model is far from plain sailing, however. Numerous hurdles exist. For one, membership does not come cheap. To join a co-operative, workers typically put up a one-off payment of about €17,000 each. Plus, just as they are entitled to a share of any profits, so, too, are they liable for any losses.

Commercial pressures can also prove acute, as Fagor Electrodomésticos’s troubled history shows. The fact that all major investment decisions have to be put to the vote can also make Mondragón’s co-operatives less agile than their conventional competitors. And finding financing can be problematic as the private capital markets are effectively closed to them, admits Fagor Arrasate’s Mendieta: “We can’t incorporate external capital into the co-operative’s share capital because we are governed by the principle of ‘one person, one vote’, which no capitalist investor would accept.”

In some parts of the world, Mondragón’s approach just looks downright weird. No one bats an eyelid at the co-operative model in countries such as Germany, “but with these ideas in Texas or Kansas, you’re basically a communist,” says Mendieta, only half jokingly.

Across Europe, at least, the co-operative model is widespread. In Norway, for instance, co-ops have a strong heritage in the social housing sector. Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region boasts a long tradition of industrial co-operatives similar to that of the Basque Country. And, as well as the Co-operative Group, the UK’s almost 7,000 co-operatives include the mighty John Lewis Partnership, which has a turnover of nearly £10bn. In total, the EU hosts about 250,000 co-operatives, providing 5.4m jobs.

Increasingly, the movement’s footprint is also being seen in company law. Germany has long required corporate boards to have worker representatives, for instance. Similarly, Spanish law allows unemployed people to lump together their unemployment benefit to set up small businesses – known as Sociedades Laborales – as long as they are majority owned by their employees. The rise in mainstream corporations now talking the language of employee autonomy, horizontal management, dignified wages and similar themes suggests co-operativism is leaving its mark on business company practices if not – yet – on capitalist ownership

Back in Mondragón’s fort-like headquarters, Etxeberria is quietly confident about the movement’s prospects. Co-operativism, he says, is a little like zirimiri – the Eusakara word for “drizzle”. “It’s the same ideas that keep falling; they’ll settle eventually.”

Some trenchant and insightful quotes from the Mars Trilogy:

“What we need is equality without conformity.”

“Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often expressed in curves.”

“Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.”

“You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”

“That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”

“We were outside the world, we didn't even own things -- some clothes. . . . This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from 3 millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, to make things, or satisfy one's curiosity, or play. That is utopia.”

“And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning.”

“Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.”

“History was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren't looking -- an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.”

“That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.”

“That's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.”

[Quotes from Goodreads]

Life on Mars?

 

Life on Mars? This tiny South American mouse might hold the answer

[Hmmm.  Maybe not.]

From Melbourne's The Age newspaper

There was a reason biologist Jay Storz braved 21 volcano summits in two years, battling bouts of altitude sickness and fissures belching sulfuric fumes.

That reason lay nestled next to a pile of rocks at the 6000 metre-high summit of Volcan Salin, a mountain on the Argentina-Chile border – a mummified mouse.

The Mars-like flanks of Volcán Salín in northern Chile, which researchers scoured for signs of life.CREDIT:MARIO PÉREZ MAMANI

For years Storz, an expert in high-altitude biology from the University of Nebraska, had chased evidence that mice live on the cloud-splitting peaks of South America’s mountains, thousands of metres above what was considered the altitude threshold for long-term mammalian life.

The freezing, dry, low-oxygen environment is one of the habitats on earth most similar to Mars, and the discovery of the mummified mouse – reported in Current Biology – has redefined our understanding of the physiological limits of mammals.

So what can we learn from these mummified mice about our search for life on Mars?

After stumbling upon their first mouse mummy, Storz and a colleague started searching through a nearby rock pile and uncovered seven more cadavers.

They found another five mice – mummified by the thin atmosphere and extreme cold – while trekking to other volcano summits across the Andes.

There was a chance the mice were ferried to those heights by the ancient Incas, who once performed ceremonial sacrifices on the peaks.

But radiocarbon dating revealed the oldest mouse mummy was 350 years old, and many had died only in the past few decades.

Researchers set traps and captured live specimens, proving populations of Punta de Vacas leaf-eared mice roam more than 6700 metres above sea level. Previously, anything higher than 5200 metres was considered a mammalian no-go zone.

Extremophiles are usually bacteria, but you could say the leaf-eared mouse – found far above the normal mammalian altitude threshold – has joined the ranks of microbes that live in permafrost and radioactive waste.CREDIT:MARCIAL QUIROGA-CARMONA

“Well-trained mountain climbers can tolerate such extreme elevations during a one-day summit attempt, but the fact that mice are actually living at such elevations demonstrates that we have underestimated the physiological tolerances of small mammals,” Storz said.

“The most surprising thing about our discovery is that mammals could be living on the summits of volcanoes in such an inhospitable, Mars-like environment.”

Creatures that thrive in toxic, acidic, radioactive, anaerobic, searing hot or deadly cold habitats – called extremophiles – rewrite biologists’ understanding of life on earth and the sheer force of evolution. But another group of researchers pay attention, too: astrobiologists.

These scientists scrutinise how life may have sprung up on Earth and where it could be lurking elsewhere in the universe.

“You might classify these mice as a type of extremophile,” says Dr Albert Fahrenbach. He’s the director of UNSW’s Australian Centre for Astrobiology, the only centre of its kind in the country.

Fahrenbach’s colleagues have scoured the globe for the most alien environments to help them deduce what we might find on seemingly barren exoplanets.

For example, the centre’s Professor Belinda Ferrari discovered bacteria in the soil of hyper-arid deserts in Antarctica, where there’s little available water or organic carbon, and the sun can vanish for months, precluding photosynthesis.

The bacteria were consuming hydrogen, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, generating energy and water to stay alive – essentially, living off thin air. Their discovery provided a new model for how bacteria might thrive on harsh alien planets, nourished only by the atmosphere.

Each time scientists discover an extremophile – from the high-altitude mice to air-eating bacteria – our limited ideas about what life might look like beyond Earth expands, boosting our chances of recognising habitats on other planets that may sustain alien organisms.

In June, another of the centre’s astrobiologists, Professor Martin Van Kranendonk, led NASA personnel through the red dust of the Pilbara in the north of Western Australia to show them stromatolite fossils.

These swirls of dark silica, produced by prehistoric cyanobacteria, date back 2.7 billion to 3.5 billion years – the oldest confirmed evidence of life on Earth.

In 2007, the Spirit rover stumbled across similar silica structures in the Columbia Hills of Gusev crater on Mars, Fahrenbach says.

In particular, the structures resembled microbe-produced silica deposits found at the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile – another landscape used as a proxy for Mars that isn’t far from Storz’s mummified mice.

Silica deposits found on Mars in 2007 compared with silica deposits in Chile, which were shaped by microbes.CREDIT:LIFESPRINGS MARS

“To the untrained eye, they just look like some unusual rock,” says Fahrenbach. “They have these really crazy textures, but from a geologist’s point of view, they’re pretty easy to identify as arising from life.”

The Martian structures, too, could yield biosignatures – evidence of creatures once alive on the dusty red planet.

“There’s only one way to be sure – to bring a sample back and study it on Earth, to see if we can provide evidence that these structures were generated biologically, ” says Fahrenbach.

The LifeSprings Mars mission, led by Van Kranendonk, aims to retrieve that all-important Martian sample for testing. According to the researchers behind the mission, it’s “humanity’s best chance to search for extraterrestrial life”.

But even as our knowledge of earthbound biology expands, there’s always the chance alien life is so beyond our current imagination we’re looking in the entirely wrong places, Fahrenbach says.

“There could be life out there that’s not based on any chemistry that we recognise.”

A very interesting article.  

However, Mars has even more extreme conditions than on top of a Chilean volcano.  Mars's average temperature is -60 degrees C.  The average air pressure is just 6.1 millibars, which reaches 11.6 mbar in Mar's deepest crater, Hellas Planitia.   Even at 6000 metres altitude, air pressure on Earth is 472 mbar.  In fact, Mars's air pressure is so low, the blood in your veins will boil.  If air pressure is below the Armstrong Limit (62.5 mbar) water will boil at body temperature.  At the summit of Mt Everest, your blood might not boil, but air pressure is so low (337 mbar) that your lungs can't absorb enough oxygen from the atmosphere, and you die of hypoxia.   Mars is a long way from habitable even by a miracle mouse from Andes volcanoes.

But the extremophile organisms discussed in the article might well be useful as we terraform Mars.  If we ever do,

Inflatable habitats on Mars

 From The Space Race

 

According to this video, the inflatable habitat's skin is unaffected by micrometeorites and protects against radiation.  However, after the initial few months, it is very likely that inflatable habitats on Mars or the Moon will be covered with a metre-thick layer of regolith as additional protection.   As the video points out, it is unlikely that we will be able to build 3-D printed modules before astronauts arrive at Mars.  And if we take our habitats with us, they'll be far too heavy and use too much propellant unless they are inflatable.  After we've been on Mars for a few years, we'll have more luxurious accommodation.  At first, though, we'll be living in tents, though very high-tech tents to be sure.

NASA is planning to use inflatables on the Moon, so they'll likely be used on Mars too.

It seems plausible that inflatable habitats will also be used to expand the space available to astronauts for the long flight to Mars, which will last 3 months at the most optimistic minimum, but probably more like 8 months.   These inflatable habitats will be uncoupled before descent onto the surface of Mars, to be the nucleus of a space station in orbit around Mars.  

Will Starship lift off soon?

There has been little news about SpaceX's Starship for a more than a year now.  Partly, this was because SpaceX had to get government approval to launch Starship (something which it had inexplicably omitted to do); and partly because its new update of its Raptor engine seemed to have teething problems.  However, it has just successfully tested the booster with a full static fire, the last step before a launch.  In other words, it's just possible that in the next few weeks, the full stack Starship will be launched.  

From The BBC

Elon Musk's SpaceX company has performed a key test on its huge new rocket system, Starship.

Engineers conducted what's called a "static fire", simultaneously igniting 31 out of 33 of the engines at the base of the vehicle's lower-segment.

The firing lasted only a few seconds, with everything clamped in place to prevent any movement.

Starship will become the most powerful operational rocket system in history when it makes its maiden flight.

This could occur in the coming weeks, assuming SpaceX is satisfied with the outcome of Thursday's test.

The static fire took place at SpaceX's R&D facility in Boca Chica on the Texas/Mexico border.

On Twitter Elon Musk said that the team had turned off one engine before the test and that another engine stopped itself, leaving 31 engines firing overall.

But, he added, it was "still enough engines to reach orbit".

Even though this was not the full contingent of engines, it was still notable for the number of engines working in concert. The closest parallel is probably the N1 rocket that the Soviets developed in the late 1960s to take cosmonauts to the Moon.

It had 30 engines arranged in two rings. But the N1 failed on all four of its flights and was eventually cancelled.

The SpaceX Super Heavy booster, with all 33 modern power units, should produce roughly 70% more thrust off the launch pad than the N1. Even the US space agency Nasa's new mega-rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), which flew for the first time back in November, is dwarfed by the capability being built into Starship.

Mr Musk has high hopes for the vehicle. The entrepreneur wants to use it to send satellites and people into Earth orbit and beyond.

Nasa has already contracted SpaceX to develop a version that can play a role in its Artemis programme, to once again land astronauts on the Moon.

Mr Musk himself is focused on Mars. He's long held the ambition to get to the Red Planet, to establish settlements and, as he puts it, to make humans "a multi-planet species". He's also talked about point-to-point travel, taking passengers from one side of our world to the other in rapid time.

If Starship can be made to work it will be a game-changer, not just because of the mass it will be able to lift into space.

The concept is designed to be fully reusable, with both parts - the Super Heavy booster and the ship on top - coming back to Earth to fly, time and time again.

This means it could operate much like an airliner. The long-term cost savings compared with conventional, one-time-use rockets would be immense.

SpaceX will now review its data to understand why it couldn't fire all 33 engines on this occasion. It will also inspect the launch pad to see what, if any, damage occurred during the short firing. Previous, smaller-scale engine tests had fractured the concrete under the launch mount, requiring repairs.

Mr Musk has talked about an orbital attempt of the full Starship system in late February or March.

The ship, or upper-stage of the rocket, was removed for Thursday's test in case there was a catastrophic failure of the booster.