Elon appears to be building a large ground-locked monument to demonstrate his argument in this tweet:
Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure.
Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars. -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354862567680847876
The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket. The FAA is standing athwart the most effective effort to move in that direction, yelling Stop. The more fragile our environment is, the more protection it needs, the more important it is for them to get out of the way of projects like this.
The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction. There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that. I'm as much into spaceships as the next nerd, but people need to get real. The world isn't going to end because his next launch is a month late due to pesky safety regulations or whatever else. This effort is going to play out over many generations and centuries. Meanwhile our entire species stands no chance against one slight more deadly virus released tomorrow.
Criticizing regulators is Elon's MO, whether it is the SEC for his Tweets, various transportation departments for self driving software safety, labor departments for covid restrictions for worker safety, FAA for rocket launches... You'd think there is some national conspiracy against him at this point.
Instead of parroting what you read on social media, how about doing a bit of critical thinking on this. What about all the resources going into video games, sports, movies, music, amusements parks, television, weapons systems, desserts, travel and vacations, etc? They dwarf everything put into space exploration, and are arguably less useful. Do you make the same tired comments when those industries are brought up?
And that's not even getting into the fact that multiple things can be done by humanity at once.
edit: apologies for the first sentence here which was unnecessary to make my point.
> Instead of parroting what you read on social media, how about doing a bit of critical thinking on this
Totally unnecessary. That gratuitous dig doesn't advance your argument at all.
> What about all the resources going into video games, sports, movies, music, amusements parks, television, weapons systems, desserts, travel and vacations, etc?
That doesn't seem like it's u/paxys issue to address. The person they responded to made a _very_ strong claim: "The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket".
It seems entirely consistent with both the original argument and the reply that humans could have two very important jobs to address (climate change, and becoming multi-planetary) and still have resources to dedicate to all those other things you describe.
> Do you make the same tired comments when those industries are brought up?
I would make a similar argument that u/paxys made if the amusement park industry claimed that building amusement parks was the single most important job that humanity had. Similarly, for sports, video games movies, or most other industries. Claiming the mantle of "the most important job humanity has" is a very big claim.
> And that's not even getting into the fact that multiple things can be done by humanity at once.
u/paxys didn't say that we could only address one thing at a time. They were disagreeing with the claim that becoming multiplanetary is the single most important job humanity has. Disagreeing with which singular job we have is the "most important" one makes absolutely no claim as to how we should be dividing our time.
Ultimately, I actually agree with the original poster that becoming multiplanetary and multistellar is an important feat we should be aggressively perusing. But I also think surviving any extinction-event filters that may come along the way is equally important.
> There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that.
I didn't read it as indicating that we should fully postpone humanity's problems. For example, the next few sentences read:
> The world isn't going to end because his next launch is a month late due to pesky safety regulations or whatever else. This effort is going to play out over many generations and centuries.
That indicates to me that the delay the person is considering is on the order of the delay imposed by FCC regulations (i.e. months or years), not "start working on it after we've solved humanity's problems".
Those comments were added after I responded. In fact it's still being edited. This was the entirety of the comment I responded to:
> The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction. There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that.
The nation with the largest amount of military force and nuclear weapons, as well as control of the globally used & prized currency ($ USD), and even the universal language of the skies (well, maybe you could say it's England's language, but the central power of the U.S. is the reason it's the language of the skies), has around 1/3rd of it's nation that actively would like to see at least an other 1/3 of it's nation die, and said other 1/3 really only wants to get things like nationwide enforcement of basic human rights (like in all other, I think, 32 of 33 highly developed nations do), and to actually embody the meaning of "welfare state" that the U.S. has been defined as for... idk how long tbh, but for quite some time - Along with a want for the aforementioned 1/3rd not wanting to literally kill them.
And they're simply unable to come to any understanding, after decades of botched discourse.
I don't see how some group of people focusing on space travel as a way to potentially divert the end of humanity as something that bad
This whole "whatever I don't like and/or understand isn't worth doing" philosophy is just not interesting. Humanity is not a hivemind. We can do more than one thing. History has countless examples of innovation in one area leading to breakthroughs in another. Just make your own contribution to humanity where you can, we will be fine.
You said that GP "clearly" intended one thing, yet I've seen you in two other threads with people who did not share your reading of those words.
It's fine to state your own reading of what they said and respond in kind, but dictating that your reading is universal when your comment is directly under evidence that it is not is a big leap.
It's basic English dude, let's not complicate it. It's very easy to see what was meant by that, and it's a common sentiment all over the internet that these "space barons" should reallocate their resources towards saving the planet.
If you insist on using 3rd party interpretation rather than 1st party intent to decide the meaning of a statement, I've got 16 upvotes on my comments here so others seem to be reading it the same as I.
But we don't need to vote to understand what "until after" means. It's not esoteric philosophical language - my 6 year old would understand it.
>If you insist on using 3rd party interpretation rather than 1st party intent to decide the meaning of a statement, I've got 16 upvotes on my comments here so others seem to be reading it the same as I
"Argument by upvote" is weak, especially in a forum where I can't actually see your comments vote totals.
Also, you are not the first party, so why do you feel so confident in being able to claim sole interpretation of "1st party intent."
They clearly meant that that space colonization was such a far off goal, that the difference in intensely focusing on it and moderately focusing on it won't cause measurable differences in our lifetime.
Or they didn't, I'm not a mind-reader, but I've given just as much evidence to back up that claim as you have yours.
I don't know first party intent, which I why I asked the user directly in this exact thread, but instead you responded. They still haven't said what they mean.
> They dwarf everything put into space exploration
If you want to make it into a discussion about comparing & contrasting impacts, you're going to have to take the collective impacts of those pushing the space-colony agenda: everything from perpetuating individual road transport & UK airline companies to the largest "bookstore" in the world and lots in between.
Space exploration is an extremely important and worthy scientific endeavour & orgs like NASA have been criminally underfunded for decades.
What is absolutely not worthwhile and shouldn't even uttered in the same breath as the history of efforts on ISS and similar, is a bunch of budding space cowboys sending phallic representations of themselves into orbit on PR missions and hiding their own destructive impact on our planet behind a colinist fantasy so thin only a complete scientific illeterate would fall for it.
SpaceX has contributed positively to benign public missions by being a contractor, but all the marketing bullshit outside of that around Mars is demonstrably nonsense.
Who looks at a rocket and thinks "Hmm, I bet the engineers could have gone with a more efficient design, but they decided to go with a dick?"
Like do people really think that there's better shapes to go with? And if people really believe this, what part of our public education system failed them most? Because my money is on critical thinking.
Well if you're really looking for alternative shapes, one of the Mars fantasists I was alluding to actually went to space recently in a rather flat triangular vehicle. Which is of course completely irrelevant when one is evoking a male ego megaphor and not opening an engineering discussion on aerodynamics. I would have hoped critical thinking could also help with that distinction in topics.
Fwiw, I'm at least glad that single word seems to be the only part of the comment above you found objectionable.
Lol, the last time NASA built a space plane to do real work in space, it was grossly inefficient than the previous giant dick it replaced, wildly more dangerous, and NASA had to attach it to three other dicks just to get it to space.
Face it man, people making fun of dick shaped rockets are seeing dicks where no one else is seeing them and calling themselves clever.
"Lol", "Face it man", you're laser-focused in on a tiny, fairly irrelevant detail of my comment while very ardently ignoring the substantive points. No-one cares what shape the rockets are.
Fwiw the space plane I was referring to above was SS2, not a NASA vehicle. But yes, I agree, it is unlikely to be good for doing "real work in space". Which is the actual substantive point here, irrespective of vehicle shape.
Just to repeat since you seem to have missed it in my comment above: the phallic comment was not, I repeat NOT a literal commentary on rocket design. Yes, good rockets are long and cylindrical. Not what I was referring to.
You really want me to speak to your point where you claim Jeff Bezos is starting a space tourism business for the explicit purpose of hiding Amazon's environmental impact, all while doing it with giant dicks?
I think the best way to save the planet is to move heavy industry into space. Move our power generation into space and beam it down. Make advanced technologies in space which benefit those on Earth. Move people into real orbital habitats.
Make Earth proper a gigantic park / nature reserve.
We can't "wait" for anything, or the window during which we can develop space travel will close. 10 or 100 years from now we might no longer have the motivation or the means to fund and build new vechicles like these.
> I think the best way to save the planet is to move heavy industry into space.
Good luck dealing with the absence of cheap oxydizer and the lack of convection which makes heat dispersion a nightmare.
> Move our power generation into space and beam it down.
Our power is already generated in space, and beamed down to us. It also comes with no infrastructure cost, which is truly an engineering wonder when you think of it.
> I think the best way to save the planet is to move heavy industry into space. Move our power generation into space and beam it down.
Wasn't one of the disasters in Simcity 2000 having your power-beaming space laser miss your power station instead light your city on fire? It seems like such a thing would cause massive hazards.
> Move people into real orbital habitats.
> Make Earth proper a gigantic park / nature reserve.
Or force people to live deep underground. Then when they save up enough money to buy a ticket, they can be transported there much more economically.
A 1 hectare receiving plant taking in 2kW/square metre won’t be burning any cities, but generate 120MWh continuous base load even with just 25% efficiency.
Dial that up tenfold and I suspect you’ll be fine - especially with the plant in the desert (nothing to burn)
1GWh/y/ha. That’s a 4,000 ha requirement for the US electrical needs, about 10 square miles.
If we charged industry fair costs for dumping pollutants into water, land and air on Earth - we would have no uncosted externalities.
If we then pointed out that in space or on the surface of a lifeless rock there are no costs of pollutants there might be a bit of incentive to move.
But you are correct, those companies would need to be self-sufficient in gathering all resource inputs and be able to ship finished products back where they are wanted. Much more complex than renting an industrial unit in an industrial town.
He's not claiming there is a national conspiracy against him. He is claiming that between regulatory capture and regulators trying to justify their existence, government agencies are not acting in humanity's interest.
No, you’re wrong. Every little bit of friction counts. Funding, regulation and public support all contribute to the end result. It’s already super hard, the only way any progress has been made is because we rolled one in a trillion with an super genius who is immune to stress and is interested in space. The amount of stress, the relentless pressure of doing all this and doing it in the public eye and suffering the cosmic level of irony of being publicly maligned for it… it would crumple you. It would crumple ten of you.
If it were at all easy or probable then there would be other players in the space. There aren’t. If you contribute to the friction that opposes spacexs forward progress then you bear the responsibility for working against the things that you claim to love as a self proclaimed nerd.
There were people who put on demonstrations against wealthy people spending their money on being patrons for scientists and early biologists. It was very unpopular for rich people to sponsor nonsense, the collection of random fluids and samples. All of which is the basis for modern biology and medicine. So which side of history are you going to be on? The idiotic mob or the people making things better?
> > The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket.
> The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction.
Aren't these two sides of the same coin? If we colonise Mars, but leave Earth a smoking ruin, then we've made things worse by trading a planet with a function biosphere for one without. If we wait till Earth is in perfect state before colonising another planet, we'll never leave, and be subject to many of the same risks.
We can fix the Earth's ecology from the damage of the last century and expand into space at the same time - these are not mutually exclusive. There can be enough people and funding to do both. And even better - the technology developed from the latter can assist for the former.
Consider the fact, that the publicly richest citizen on Earth, as well as one of the people behind one of the largest financial transaction sites, may have genuinely already concluded that, as the history of politics among other things have shown, that the Earth/humanity may simply be unsavable, for whatever reasons they find.
He has a lot of talent at his disposable, and presumably information to a decent bit of otherwise locked away studies/reports. Do I think he is correct? Perhaps not, but my nor your opinion really matters.
If he's made the decision shits truly FUBAR, ala Foundation, then leave him alone while he works on what he may genuinely believe to be a shot at surviving the FUBAR long-term.
The publicly richest citizen on Earth doesn't believe that at all - in fact, he believes earth is savable, and is the best home for humans and should be kept pristine by performing all (polluting) manufacturing in space. Sure, it's not as romantic as "Let's colonize Mars", but IMO, its a lot more practical. Not polluting earth is far easier than terraforming Mars
Or you know it's vaporware again like FSD and he is just making bank in an industry that is new? Now that technology allowed capital to keep up with government cheese enough to take on space freight.
> Space is clearly a mild curiosity to you at most.
I think it's extremely unhelpful to tell people what their interests are, or what they believe. How much could you possibly know about this person's interests from that one post?
How could the OP possibly know how interested other people are in spaceflight? They did exactly as much, by claiming they were as interested as the average nerd.
> The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket.
We are very far from a self sustaining society and economy on Mars. Easily a century or more. I'm cheering on SpaceX, but find this talking point of Elon's very tiresome. It's little more than sci-fi fantacism. As just a simple example: no one knows what childhood development is going to be like at 40% of earth's gravity. And that's just one issue among millions.
For better or worse we need to fix the planet we have. And we don't need to invent new technology to do it, though we certainly should pursue new technologies that might help or accelerate the process. What we lack fundamentally right now is political will/unity.
We can arrest climate change. We can end famine. We can extend modern medical care to the entire world. All of these are directly possible, today, with no new invention.
But we have to, to paraphrase Sagan, become a species more prudent than we are today.
Yes, it makes a substantial difference, particularly in child mortality.
Hans Rosling has been dead some years now, but used to do great talks going through the basic data and trends.
I'm not sure why you're adopting a tone of debate/rebuttal. Every problem you mention is something I think we should address exactly under what I said originally, whether its inequitable access to healthcare in the US, or straight up lack of modern facilities in low income nations.
There are a couple of major reasons the FAA is involved:
1. Fuel-air explosions at ground level can injure people or destroy property (even kilometers away)
2. Rockets on unplanned trajectories can ruin people's day
3. Lots of fuel is toxic, we need to mitigate this.
Basically someone has to walk through all the worst case scenarios and ensure that everyone (and nature) remains safe or as safe as it is possible to be.
Toxicity and polluting aspects of Rockets is of a negligible concern, Everyday Astronaut (Youtube fame) gets this so often that he did an entire hour long video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4VHfmiwuv4
> Rockets on unplanned trajectories can ruin people's day
So the FAA should hand off regulation of one particular rocket to a different agency because it is not dangerous to the public in one particular aspect? What if they decide to use hydrazine in the maneuvering thrusters? Then it should be handed back?
The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket.
Perhaps that's true, but space launches are important enough that going "slowly"[1] is a good idea. One catastrophic accident with the destruction of a spacecraft leaving a large amount of orbital debris would make space launches much, much harder until we clean up. Rushing to space could slow us down a lot.
[1] The space race has only been going for 70 years, and less than 25 years commercially. The idea that anything is happening "too slowly" is quite baffling really.
From Musk's perspective, any timeline which does not establish a permanent presence on Mars within his lifetime is too slow. It looked like that would be impossible before the Starship program, now it merely looks unlikely.
> The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket.
This is a defensible opinion, as are the others saying that the most important job of humanity is to fix our current basket.
While neither agreeing or disagreeing, I will note another very important thing SpaceX is doing:
"The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad."
A lot of what SpaceX is doing is extremely inspirational, and I think the world could use more things to look forward to in the future.
> This is a defensible opinion, as are the others saying that the most important job of humanity is to fix our current basket.
It's always presented as a false dichotomy, though. We can have both.
People insist we should be spending our money fixing the planet, but we already are, including Musk who just sponsored the largest XPrize in history for a carbon sequestration method.
First we must overcome the political hurdles to get people to even recognize that climate change is a problem. Obviously money is only barely starting to trickle in to carbon sequestration tech.
I have a feeling Musk and the FAA have very different standards around public safety. He has his differences with the SEC and NTSB too, but I feel the FAA hews far closer to the public safety end of the spectrum, and not the "move fast and break things(bones)" end.
There are a couple of points where I disagree with you, but one in particular I hear very often and should be debunked.
A colony on mars, even of significant size and population, is 100% condemned to certain death if separated from Earth. It would be, for all intents and purposes, in the same "basket".
Google "how to make a pen from scratch" for a quick primer into why, but the tl;dr version is that it takes having a huge industrial base already existing in order to keep, let alone advance, our current technological level. And Mars is not friendly enough to support us with lower tech.
Our intuitions go the way of "we can put 1000 smart people there, that's enough to survive and thrive". Well, we as a species can't move our microprocessor factories from Taiwan in less than a decade, and you expect them to be rebuilt on Mars from scratch?
> A colony on mars, even of significant size and population, is 100% condemned to certain death if separated from Earth
It would be in the near future, true. In fact, the key milestone for humanity being truly multi-planetary is that each planet must be independently self-sufficient.
There's no laws of physics that would prevent human life on Mars or Venus from eventually becoming self-sufficient.
The time-frames to get to that point are large (mid-hundreds to low-thousands of years by my random guess). A thousand years isn't that long in terms of the evolution of the species, though, and are the time scales we should be thinking of multiplanetary life on.
Watch 'Mars Industrialization Roadmap' by Casey Handmer. That is exactly what he is addressing. He literally mentions the 'I, Pencil'. And btw a million people is the goal, not 1000.
The full conversation is a bit longer, and should veer into things like economic incentives: Mars will build nails pretty soon, electric screwdrivers a bit later, but microprocessors probably never, because it's many orders of magnitude cheaper to import them from earth, even if they have to sell electric screwdrivers in exchange.
There are quite a few steps to proper, long term self-sufficiency. You need the colonists to get there, to form a permanent settlement, to get to reasonable numbers, to make a place where people would want to raise families into, to get to a point where it has a balanced trade deficit and so on.
Everything up to here is mostly science fiction material, but if Musk lives long enough it might actually happen.
Now, from this point you need a nation-sized colony on Mars make a strategic decision to duplicate critical infrastructure on Mars just to be self-sufficient. This is the step that the OP with his panicked "must not put all eggs in the same basket let the rockets fly now" is not even aware it exists. As an order of magnitude is probably at least equal to everything up to then. Partly because it's objectively hard, and also because when you have a nation-sized bunch of people, you have to convince them to invest half their resources to build factories that will make microprocessors that by the time you finish will be more expensive than those imported from earth, and probably also obsolete. And you have to keep investing in such obsolete industries because a million people can't compete with 10 billion that don't have to manufacture their air. Multiply this for every domain where you need such critical high-tech industries, like medical.
I'm probably not going to debunk it either, not by any real standards. But...
It seems to me that our level of technology has increased, partly through new discoveries, partly through new ways of applying those discoveries, but also at least partly through increased specialization. You've got a farmer growing huge amounts of food. But that's because there's a tractor factory, and the tractors are smart because of the chips in them, and the chips connect to the GPS satellites in orbit. To make that work, you need more than the farmer. You need the workers in the tractor factory, but also the workers in the chip plant in Taiwan, and the chip factory needs the equipment manufacturer in the Netherlands. And you need the rocket manufacturers so you can put GPS satellites in orbit. And the rocket fuel manufacturers. And so on. It basically has taken a globally integrated material culture to achieve that level of productivity on the part of the individual farmer. Which we can do, because the farmers are so productive that we don't have to spend very many people on farming.
A fair chunk of the progress of the last 200 years has been made possible by increasing scales of integration. But I worry, because we're running out of globe to integrate. (Africa, maybe?)
So, back to Mars. Yeah, none of this proves that 1000 people couldn't be self-sustaining. But for them to do that, they'd need a fair amount of tools. And that means that they'd need someone who knows how to repair and/or replace every one of those tools (and any tools they use in the process). And there's a hard cutoff below which they cannot fall, due to the need for oxygen. They can't just fall back to being hunter-gatherers.
So, yeah, I didn't debunk it. But, seriously, what's the maximum number of sophisticated kinds of machines that 1000 people can run and maintain? 100? 500? Can you build a self-sustaining colony on Mars with only 500 kinds of machines?
If you have ever lived next to the incarnation of this philosophy, you might be able to see through its holes. It's the plot of any number of bad scifi movies. Evil aliens travel from solar system to solar system, using up a planet, then moving on. They've now reached Earth.
There are plenty of industrial/mining sites that argue they need to be able to create huge hazard dumps for the sake of the future of the human race. It tends to be a very poor argument for those left holding the bag when the owners have taken their money and skipped town.
If the danger is so great that we have to get off this planet in the next five years or we all die, well, then we might justify more urgency. If we've got 10 or 20 years to do it, let's take the time to protect the environment while we do it.
If you want to argue that none of this bureaucracy is protecting the environment, that's a different argument.
To be honest, I can't tell you what kind of future innovation is going to result from cheaper spaceflight. But there is serious scientific and engineering potential to be unlocked. What SpaceX is doing seems environmentally unfriendly, and I know no-one wants to hear "but xyz is worse". But we really do need to keep such things in mind, because SpaceX's footprint here is completely dwarfed by domestic carbon creation. The Apollo Project lead to all sorts of spinoff technologies that we use today. It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect some of the future technological advancements to reduce pollution or carbon emissions.
It could. That's pretty much the entire argument in favor of exploration actually.
We are going to need far more advanced technology than we have today if we are going to reverse the effects of climate change. If we move heavy industry to space that can dramatically reduce our carbon emissions here on Earth. The technology to do that may also lead to breakthroughs in other areas like energy generation or storage.
I run thousands of hours of batch data processing jobs a day. They aren't particularly time sensitive, as long as they finish in a day I am happy. There's no reason the computers doing that need to be on Earth consuming precious water and electricity resources.
There's a swath of people who have adopted the position that it's best to let industry be the primary agent of regulation, largely for ideological political reasons. As we saw with the MAX debacle, such a position is foolish, as companies will always be cravenly willing to cut corners in the interest of short term profits.
This is one of the biggest political changes I've gone through. In my early 20s I was much more sympathetic to what I'd now call naive libertarianism. Today I realize there's no magic bullet, and you need healthy leadership in both the private and public spheres. Ideally the two buttress each other against their individual flaws. However in the US the process of regulatory capture has hijacked this ideal.
We won't be able to fix it unless we vote in politicians who see this as a top priority. We get the quality of government we ask for.
Probably because while regulatory capture is a real thing, and the FAA did bend for Boeing, the FAA was partly the cause of the MAX disaster. If there had been a small incremental training sub-type certificate program, then Boeing would have trained pilots in how to handle the different pitch moment of the MAX. Instead the type certificate thing led to... well, everything that happened -- not inexorably, no, because Boeing screwed the pooch in many ways, and perhaps they would have found other terrible mistakes to make. But inflexibility at the FAA was -ironically!- a cause. I say ironically precisely because then the FAA relaxed the redundancy requirement and so on.
There's a subset of this places reader's that are pretty aggressive with the libertarian stuff. If you know the quip about people thinking they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires, I think that's close to the root of it, something more tangible when you work in tech and the possibility of earning truly big money is more near at hand than most other vocations, even if still something of a luck shot.
Musk is very good at getting public support on his side. Please, we’ve already lost the public support for so many important institutions in the US. I get they are slow, and this is frustrating but I don’t want the FAA to be on the chopping block because someone didn’t plan ahead. If the FDA gets in the way of vaccine development you bet musk would tweet against it.
It should be remembered that the unspoken rule of any agency or institution is to justify its own continued existence. For be bureaucracy that is the FAA, all the onerous requirements they place on spaceflight is a feature, not a bug.
The bureaucracy at the FAA has protected millions of airline passengers over the course of decades. Just look at how one minor discrepancy in an aircraft can lead to a total loss of the jet and hundreds of lives lost. Now combine that with a rocket loaded with a hundred thousand gallons of fuel and it's understandable that we should be careful. I don't want our space-faring expeditions to look like China's, where they're okay dumping hydrazine on local villages [1].
To be clear, I'm not saying regulatory agencies are bad. What I am saying, though, is that these agencies don't have an incentive to trim down red-tape in the interest of efficiency. On one level, it would be bad for their employees and budget. On another level, something might slip through the cracks so it makes sense for a safety agency to be far more risk averse than what it watches.
Better efficiencies with significantly more launches per year and eventually interplanetary travel would be bad for the agencies that regulate it? How do you figure?
The FAA has no inherent incentive to slow things down. It seems to me that they do have incentive to encourage growth. Without this base for your arguments, they all seem unstable to me.
When there are mountains of red tape it is easy to over-simplify the reasons. But that usually isn't helpful in correcting the problem.
Over the long run, more volume would provide more work for the FAA and its employees. For now, though, loosening the rules in hopes of getting more launches would serve to reduce work for the agency and diminish it's purpose. I could see a business making the short term tradeoff in the name of long term gains but not a government bureaucracy. Does that make where I am coming from a little more understandable?
And they aren't sending passengers on these autonomous test flights. Nor are they risking multi-billion dollar taxpayer funded payloads. It makes total sense to me to allow SpaceX a faster launch cadence for their prototypes.
Sorry, this is such an absolutely absurd argument.
What are minimal capital and time requirements to do this eggs in more than one basket thing? Not talking about an orbiting space whatever but a real, sustainable ecology on another planet.
The depth of our ignorance even about whole classes of basic science there, notwithstanding the number and scale of engineering problems to solve....
Is there any reality where this isn't minimum a century and thousands to millions of $T?
For someone who believes this is the most urgent problem on which to spend capital and time, the most efficient target of advocacy energy has to be the US military which spends $700B a year, not the effing FAA and the relatively small scale projects of this one company- no matter how exciting and advanced they happen to be.
Even making the case for this program, when one considers what could be done with even a fraction of that scale of capital deployed on this planet....Fusion energy itself is probably a $10T investment, orders of magnitude less in money and time.
Space is cool but not for one femtosecond should anyone entertain any of this eggs in more than one basket nonsense.
Almost as if he's thought about the thing he's devoted a good chunk of his life and wealth towards, here's Musk:
“The point at which one says the goal is to make life multi-planetary, it means that we need to have a self-sustaining city on Mars,” Musk said. “That city has to survive if the resupply ships stop coming from Earth for any reason whatsoever. Doesn’t matter why. If those resupply ships stop coming, does the city die out or not? In order to make something self-sustaining, you can’t be missing anything. You must have all the ingredients. It can’t be like, well this thing is self-sustaining except for this one little thing that we don’t have. It can’t be. That’d be like saying, ‘Well, we went on this long sea voyage, and we had everything except vitamin C.’ OK, great. Now you’re going to get scurvy and die—and painfully, by the way. It’s going to suck. You’re going to die slowly and painfully for lack of vitamin C. So we’ve got to make sure we’ve got the vitamin C there on Mars. Then it’s like, OK, rough order of magnitude, what kind of tonnage do you need to make it self-sustaining? It’s probably not less than a million tons.”
That’s not a precise number, of course. It’s a rough estimate. But Mars settlers will need vast quantities of stuff. The settlers will need to build an entire industrial base to mine the Red Planet, and there are many steps in mining. To make consumer products requires a huge infrastructure base to refine and shape materials.
“I’ll probably be long dead before Mars becomes self-sustaining, but I’d like to at least be around to see a bunch of ships land on Mars,” Musk said.
This is a tiring argument of opportunity cost for Space Exploration. It has been discussed ad-nauseum on HN. It is not a zero sum game - we can explore space and simulatenously do the things that are immediately in need and urgent.
