You keep raising these logistical issues like you’re the only person who ever thought of them. And you seem to be underestimating the resources that can be committed. It’s not like people are planning to send one or two rockets and calling it a day. Serious plans involve sending hundreds of rockets every year, and tens of thousands of tons of cargo.
> You keep raising these logistical issues like you’re the only person who ever thought of them.
Better than to hand-wave them wouldn't you agree? Because these issues are real, hard and very limiting factors, and they don't go away by throwing money at them. And I'm pretty sure I am not the only person who keeps raising these issues.
> Serious plans involve sending hundreds of rockets every year
That would be a really neat trick.
Mars's synodic period with Earth is 780 days (about 26 months) and the resulting transfer window lasts a few weeks at most. So if you want to send even 100 rockets per year, you have to start +200 rockets within that launch window.
To put that into perspective, since 1960 there were a grand total of 50 Mars missions, that includes unsuccessful ones, which were more than half: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars Most of these missions didn't land anything on Mars, and not a single one involved landing the spaceship itself, or had even remotely the kind of payload capacity that a colonisation effort requires.
So unless someone has a workable idea for a completely new propulsion system, I'm afraid there won't be "hundreds of rockets every year".
Edit: Oh, I almost forgot, small question: How do these "hundreds of rockets per year" get back to Earth? Because, if they don't, well, that's gonna up the launch costs somewhat, wouldn't it?
You could launch 200 rockets the same day if you wanted to. These things are exactly what throwing money at works for. If you have a really deep pipeline of several, the rockets could also be coming home - but cheap transfers take a really long time.
> You could launch 200 rockets the same day if you wanted to.
No, I can launch 200 rockets the same day if I have sufficient rockets, launch pads, reload-capacity on these pads, fuel, and personnel.
We have none of these things, and they cannot be solved by throwing money either. Just one example why not: Launch sites have geographic requirements.
> If you have a really deep pipeline of several, the rockets could also be coming home
A pipeline of what, rockets!?
The fuel-requirements of a spaceship far outstrip it's payload capacity. That's not me saying that, but physics.
So I have to launch M rockets to bring N rockets back home, with M being a multiple of N. And then to bring M home, I have to launch L rockets, with L being a multiple of M. Did anyone say "geometric growth"?
Yes, it does. What is doesn't have: lots of available energy, industrial facilities, storage tanks, or any of the other things required to actually make in-situ methane/LOX production feasible.
You don't have to believe me, the helpful folks at CSS have provided all the numbers and background data:
> Starship uses Methane/LOX because almost all modern rocket engines do
That is simply not true. Starship has been built for Mars and Elon has said it himself that making fuel on mars makes it using methane the only option. It's not some exploratory science craft that can live in the luxury of just importing everything from Earth. It's a relatively very cheap, massive water tower free of NASA's hope-ending bloat that is the only current realistic shot at our species being multi-planetary.
Yes that is true, as shown by the link I provided. Methane/LOX is simply one of the go-to options for liquid fuel rocket engines these days, whether or not these engines are intended to go to Mars or not.
And btw. SpaceX themselves market Startship as a transport vehicle "to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond."https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/
> the only current realistic shot at our species being multi-planetary.
I'm curious: How does building a base on Mars, that is 100% dependent on regular support from Earth to survive, contributes neither resources nor self-sustaining living space to our species, cannot terraform the planet, and cannot serve as a backup in case Earth goes boom, make our species "multi-planetary"?
A multi-planetary species has permanent settlements on more than one planet or moon, that are either self-sustaining, or contributing (resources), or both. These settlements serve a role beyond bragging rights and exploration. A Mars base, insofar as we could currently make it happen, doesn't do that.
If a 15th century nation brought 5 guys to some bare-rock-island in the middle of the Atlantic and left them there with the promise to drop by every now and then to bring them food, that doesn't make them a colonial power.
Other than Mars, the moon is near enough to actually make permanent bases feasible, which could provide a platform for further space exploration (Launching something from 1/6th of earths gravity uses a lot less energy). Luna is near enough to support a colony, including rotating crew, and it actually has a resource that could become useful in the not-so-far future, that could be worth exploiting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Moon
Wtf is that "argument"? You proved nothing. Methane is the way because of ferrying all the fuel to mars isn't an option, full stop.
> bla bla because we dont have bases on 10 planets/moons we aren't multiplanetary
With the more urgency we should press on then. Humanity has advanced on other fronts enough that it's becoming a real inconsistency/risk because we can die to nuclear, viral reasons due to tech while still being trapped here
> free of NASA's hope-ending bloat
You actually don't know what you are talking about. Please see SLS's budget per launch/kilo VS SpaceX's offerings. NASA was not going to get much of anything done by itself when it comes to not just science, other than scamming money from congress for things that look good but don't work towards realistic human off-world migration
> Moon
This is part of the NASA-specific not hurrying out when your house is on fire strategy. Yes Spaceship will go to moon, but that's far from the main goal because it's not good enough. The mission to go to the moon is literally more of a PR thing funded by that japanese billionaire for SpaceX
It’s more complicated than that. Cargo rockets don’t all need to be launched at once, they just need to be ready to burn in the launch window. In fact because they’ll need to be refuelled in orbit they have to be launched before the launch window anyway. The passenger rockets will be the last to launch.
Optimal transfer orbits have short windows, but there are other orbits available if you’re prepared to wait longer, including ballistic capture orbits, elliptic transfer orbits, and making use of aero braking (skimming through the high atmosphere) for orbital capture.
As for the return journey, it’s unlikely that many of the initial rockets will be coming back. Return journeys will likely be limited to passenger rockets. There won’t be much else to bring back until there is sufficient infrastructure on Mars.
> Cargo rockets don’t all need to be launched at once, they just need to be ready to burn in the launch window.
So what's the plan, launch all those rockets into LEO, and then have them sit there for up to 2 years before sending them on their merry way?
Whos doing maintenance? Who repairs these rockets when they get hit by space debris? Who'd even know one was damaged? What's the backup plan when almost inevitably some of them will fail come travel-day? More rockets? Whos doing maintenance on them, and who pays for them?
Where are all these rockets coming from btw.? Spaceships aint cheap, they have to earn their keep by doing things like ferrying commercial cargo into LEO. Who can afford to have a fleet of them sitting around doing nothing?
Look, I'm not saying that any of this is impossible. I'm just saying that a VERY hard task, that we have never done before, just got an order of magnitude harder. At what point in this hardship am I allowed to wave a little cost-benefit-analysis and ask what exactly we gain from sending people to Mars (aka. nothing that can't be done better with robotic probes)?
> Return journeys will likely be limited to passenger rockets.
Let's start with: return journeys will be limited to rockets that are still operational after landing in a rock-desert, with zero support structures, on a sheet of powdery regolith-dust, and after having been blasted for months with Martian dust-storms, and subjected to extreme temperature differentials.
