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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFSnRx3ZoX0
It will be beautiful to see it from an observation tower at the Mars base.
Latest from Marcus House:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIv1I7nsYrc
According to MH, Elon Musk still thinks the first orbital flight will take place Jan/Feb 2022 at the latest... would make a 2024 launch to Mars very tight I think.
Yes, I said "you can add in food waste" e.g. plate waste, potato and other vegetable peelings and unused stalks from things like cabbages. And I also mentioned crop waste which is very substantial. Yes, expired food will be available as well.
How often would a crew member not finish every morsel of food on a plate and what about food that is expired in spoiled; these both can be added into that waste stream that makes soil possible.
We need to remember that the wind force on Mars never gets above something like the equivalent of 8 MPH on Earth. There is also no driving rain and no snow drifts to contend with. I can't see any danger of a hab massing a couple of tonnes perhaps being moved by the Mars wind.
Something like the Bigelow inflatable units seem the best approach to me. A small one was tested in space I recall but the company seems to have gone pretty quiet having laid off all staff at the beginning of the Covid pandemic (a good excuse? were they going bust?). Anyway this link gives some idea re radiation protection (scroll down):
https://www.bigelowaerospace.com/pages/our-technology/
I think if a Bigelow style hab was supplemented by a steel frame over the hab which could carry a thick layer of regolith above and also be fitted with side containers that could be filled with regolith that would provide a lot of radiation protection for Mission One pioneers.
The interior could be fitted with "video display windows" taking a feed from outside to give the residents a sense of the outside vista in different directions, and the natural passing from light to darkness.
I can remember an interesting discussion on the provision of habitable volume on Mars that recommended the use of ETFE membranes anchored to the surface using high strength cables. Zubrin suggested something similar. A 50m diameter polymer dome could be decked out with internal decks, some 3m apart, suspended from the inside of the dome and stabilised by an internal brick column. This would be relatively easy to build, but would provide no additional protection against cosmic radiation.
Another option is to heap regolith over frames assembled within a crater or other depression. This seems like the smartest option to me for bulk habitable volume. It provides pressurised volume, that is protected from cosmic radiation and Martian nighttime freezing temperatures, with the minimal amount of engineering. Fine regolith can be compressed into hard tiles that line the top of the frames, filling gaps between them. This is followed by several inches of loose filtered regolith and then mixed fines a flat stones. Untreated regolith can then be bulldozed over the top of the structure. The inside is coated in paint, to seal any small leaks. On Mars, a layer of regolith some 5m thick will counteract internal pressure of 0.5bar.
Internal walls can be built from mud brick or using stones, with Martian regolith compressed in place as mortar and then painted to produce a smooth surface. Ceilings can be constructed from mud brick vaults, with compressed regolith infill to produce flat floors. With 5m of regolith above the structure, internal electrical equipment and body heat will provide sufficient heating to keep the volume at comfortable temperatures after an initial thermal soaking time.
Here's a link to soil composition:
https://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/mauisoil/a_comp.aspx
Organic matter is some 5% of the total, so in 1 tonne of soil, 50 kgs will be organic material. A community of 1000 people might make 1000 Kgs of faecal matter a day/sol and you can add in food waste and crop waste - so maybe overall something like 1500 kgs - enough to make 30 tonnes of soil, or over an earth year, something like 10,500 tonnes. That might feed 200 people possibly.
Basically a lot of your organic matter is going to be imported as food that is then consumed by the Mars residents and turned into waste. I think the process could be speeded up by importing highly concentrated nutritional feeds.
The air for the soil will have to be manufactured but that should not be a major issue, I think since the whole colony will be geared up for that. Likewise water will not be a big issue and nearly all of it can be recycled after transpiration from plants.
Minerals are the problem area. I think it makes more sense to source fairly pure raw materials e.g. iron ore, silica and so on and mechanically grind them down to required particulate size, then mix according to required formulae for different crops. The vast majority of minerals can be sourced from Mars but there may be a requirement to import some of the rarer ones.
I think a soil factory will be less energy intensive overall than a system of soil cleansing and rebalancing (you are going to have to mix in minerals in any case).
A soil factory could be largely automated.
We'd probably want to be aiming to double production every Earth year, to keep pace with a growing population.
Nope.
Fully understand the issue and parameters.
It's just I think 365 days/sols is unreasonably short. On any mission you are going to have at least 500 sols before you return. Bear in mind also, that some fuel production could take place robotically on the cargo Starships that land some two years before the main arrival. Eg you might have a water vapour extractor that splits off oxygen and hydrogen etc - that could give you a head start.
For Louis re #99
Thank you for an excellent question.
It provides an opportunity for clarification.
The fuel must be prepared and in storage ** before ** a human leaves Earth.
The scenario you are imagining is that a crew would land on Mars without having return fuel already in place.
No prudent mission planner would take such a risk.
To the best of my knowledge (admitting it is limited) NO responsible author has suggested sending a crew to Mars without already having the return fuel and oxidizer in place.
(th)
I accept we would have to build in a margin of error = say 10-20% outage. But I think 345 days/sols is unreasonably short.
Luois, I think a target minimum day count of 365 is the worst case for showing that we can achieve the quantity by time a first crew would get there. I think this was the 30 - 40 % of fuel we would require for a fast return on a crewed mission.
Calliban, we also have electrical for assist to that initial and following needed shaft RPM under load of the compressor which we can also make use of from a Stirling generator depending on design of 10kw - 40 kw. I am think of an inline baffled expansion tank to get the water out of the super critical co2 that we are generating.
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/ctmatch.html
https://files.asme.org/igti/knowledge/a … /13051.pdf
Introduction to Gas Turbines for Non-Engineershttps://www.irjet.net/archives/V2/i8/IRJET-V2I8121.pdf
ANALYSIS OF INLET AIR TEMPERATURE EFFECT ON GAS TURBINE COMPRESSOR PERFORMANCE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVroTFWyYFE
The "marine reptile" featured at the beginning of the video reminds me so much of the dead seal my wife and I came across walking along the UK coast. It was already in a state of some petrification - the skin having turned into something like leather. I could well imagine given a few hundred thousand more years it could look like the "marine reptile".
I'm definitely keeping an open mind on this. If Mars suffered some unbelievably catastrophic event e.g. maybe a highly oxgenated atmosphere caught fire in a kind of global Apollo fire event or the planet was subjected to some particularly severe asteroid bombardment, life could have been ended in a matter of a few sols.
For me there is a pressing need to get people to Mars to investigate all these interesting "rocks" or "finds".
Why does it have to be that short a time? Won't the stay be more like 18 months minimum - a minimum of 500 sols I would think.
For SpaceNut re #71
You need to develop a continuous process to deliver 1200 tons of propellant in 365 Earth Days.
Edit: Corrected 2021/10/20 from 2400 .... the original quantity of 1200 tons was given by GW Johnson earlier in this topic.
This would be slightly fewer Sols.
My recommendation is to design a plan that feeds output continually from one stage to the next.
If you have to operate in batches, then each batch from one operation needs to feed automatically into the next.
Multiple lines can (and obviously must) be operating in parallel.
(th)
Thanks for that - interesting.
As regards "washing out" perchlorates, given water will be quite a precious resource on Mars, I guess the issue of how many tonnes of water are required to clean up one tonne of regolith is an important one (although I supposed with water recycling, it might not be such a big issue). The other thing about perchlorate that I have read is that they are more a surface phenomenon, so it is quite possible I would think that if we dig out regolith from several feet beneath the surface, we won't find that concentratino of perchlorates. If so, then that would probably be an easier solution: dig down and dig out (DDDO) rather than dig up and wash out (DUWO).
The ecoli problem can be substantially mitigated by using thermophilic bacteria in the anaerobic digestion tank that receives the human waste. These operate at temperatures of around 70°C, which will kill most toxic bacteria.
Perchlorate compounds are highly soluble and may be washed out of filtered regolith, along with much of the heavy salt content. Sludge from the digester can then be added to the regolith to produce a clay like soil. Solid wood like biomass can be disposed of by pyrolysis, which will yield liquid fuels and a solid residue of charcoal and ash. The finely ground residue can be added to the soil to improve its fertility.
Robotic construction machines do already exist and it is moving into the commercial world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwBLSRJmmEQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHSYEH133HA
You can construct a building in under 24 hours.
I have never advocated total dependence on solar power. I advocate solar plus methox. We will of course arrive on Mars with some methane and oxygen still in the tanks which can be drained off and used to power methox generators if necessary. But the video maker was totally wrong in suggesting that dust storms prevent PV systems from working. In a dust storm, while you might have a few days of very low insolation, typically it's 40% or more of normal.
louis wrote:I of course object to the nonsense in the video about solar power being "useless in a dust storm" and the failure to note that if you are producing methane and oxygen, you obviously have stored power available to operate methox electricity generators (so not at all clear why you would go to the trouble of also using Kilopower units - if they ever do become available. But of course we have dealt with all these issues in great detail here.
Oldfart1939 wrote:Here's an interesting White Paper analysis of the fate of used Starships...
Louis--the only person convinced about the total dependency on Solar power here, is you. I'm not opposed to some use of Solar but initially, the use of Nuclear is imperative. We've had never ending discussions about this. Nuclear has one overriding factor in it's favor: transportability and set-up time and labor with no massive project to emplace it before getting the power required for survival of the crewed base. Your dependence on Robotics is simply not happening, because no one has even started building even the simplest ones you envision.
I applaud your enthusiasm, but it's disconnected from reality. You are arguing with professionals like GW; I myself am a Ph.D. Physical Chemist with extensive background in Thermodynamics. I don't know the backgrounds of others here but there are some additional "heavy hitters" in this group.
The authors don't really address anything we haven't discussed here. Seems we are back to the figure of 100 tons per Starship for cargo (although the way its phrased in the video is a bit ambiguous). Well I will be sticking with that figure for the time being.
I of course object to the nonsense in the video about solar power being "useless in a dust storm" and the failure to note that if you are producing methane and oxygen, you obviously have stored power available to operate methox electricity generators (so not at all clear why you would go to the trouble of also using Kilopower units - if they ever do become available. But of course we have dealt with all these issues in great detail here.
Space X I feel are in a bit of a dilemma.They probably want to plan the mission themselves, using their trademark innovative flair, but on the other hand they are and will be dependent on NASA/JPL for satellite info on Mars and for communication between the two planets.
Regarding using the Starship tanks as habs, to my mind that will be the wrong approach. Adapting them - installing air locks and so on - will be a demanding technical task and will require a lot of labour/EVAs (doesn't sound the sort of work that robots could easily handle. Why make life difficult for yourself? For the first few missions it makes much more sense to import ready-made inflatable habs of the Bigelow type that don't require any complex assembly. Later on, robotic construction e.g. extruded cement or concrete will be a better option.
Steel from disused Starships should be smelted down and used to fashion a wide range of tools and other items. Of course we will want to keep some of the early human passenger Starships as monuments and tourist attractions on Mars.
Here's an interesting White Paper analysis of the fate of used Starships...
Ah yes, designing out stupidity - that's much more challenging.
Robert,
Alternatively, you could simply lock the car and then the problem is solved.
Just occurred to me, that a suitably sized crater might be the perfect location for a Starship launch facility, as it would naturally baffle the sound waves. Maybe about 3 miles across? Then you could have a tunnel connecting to the spaceport facility which could be closer to the launch site than would otheriwise be the case. You would have the spaceport connected to the city the spaceport served by a road or hyperloop tunnel or tube. Pressurised, if road, unpressurised if hyperloop.
Nope, that wasn't the point I was making. I've been talking about all-cause mortality for vaccinated and unvaccinated. Death is about the only reliable statistic. The point is that a vaccine that saves you from death by one disease (if it does) but causes you to die from another is not much use. There is a strong suspicion, borne out by the statistics, that this might be the case.
The other point that I have made, that people who are really dying from cancer or heart disease or general respiratory failure are being listed as "deaths from Covid" is a different point and won't be affected by the stats given in your link which is looking at excess mortality (excess from a 5 year average for all cause deaths) across the population at large.
The fact you have nearly 10,000 excess deaths across both vaccinated and unvaccinated people tells you nothing per se, except that something odd is going on. The fact these excess deaths occur at the same time as a whole population vaccination programme is reaching its height should make anyone sensible pause and reflect. This link shows how vaccination in Sweden is associated with a very large uptick in excess mortality:
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/ano … bout-covid
This has been happening all around the world. It needs investigating.
Sadly the medical and epidemiological professions are so totally corrupted by Big Pharma they engage in a conspiracy of silence and refuse to speak up.
I know that Luois has been talking about deaths not covid related and those being blended in even though they were not so here is the poroof that we were paying attention to that and not putting them together after all.
Alarm grows as mortuaries fill with thousands of extra non-Covid deathsThese are the deaths as caused by hospital getting so full that they get deigned that help when they need it most.
Nearly 10,000 more people than usual have died in the past four months from non-Covid reasons,
Office for National Statistics showed that England and Wales registered 20,823 more deaths than the five-year average in the past 18 weeks. Only 11,531 deaths involved Covid.
It means that 9,292 deaths - 45 per cent - were not linked to the pandemic.
Weekly figures for the week ending November 5 showed that there were 1,659 more deaths than would normally be expected at this time of year. Of those, 700 were not caused by Covid.
Personally I don't envisage rail being a big part of the transport scene on Mars. I wouldn't personally pursue the rail option. Hyperloop is a definiite possibility. I could see that maybe connecting the big cities of Mars once you have a few tens of millions of people living on the planet.
I was just reading that the curve of radius on a hyperloop bend would have to be less than 80 kms if you were travelling at 1000 Kph. So some big curves might be allowed. I guess it will depend on where the big cities are located as to how practical hyperloop will be. A quicker journey by Starship might be a preferable option in terms of infrastructure. Noise is far less of an issue on Mars.
The problem with gradient and bends is wear on the track and velocity change, which requires reaction forces to be exerted on the wheels by the track. This results in horrible amounts of wear as speed increases. Not so much energy consumption, though that could increase as well. A bendy track consigns trains to low speeds. Bends or bumps in hyperloop tracks would result in the vehicle hitting the sides. There can be no bends at 500mph. The track or guideway must be near as possible a straight line in both vertical and horizontal axes. The radius of curvature of any deviation from straight must be measured in tens of miles. If there is a hill or depression, you either remove it, go through it or over it, with minimal change in trajectory. That means tunnels or bridges.
You do know Tesla actually sell cars...to willing buyers...who then drive them for years...and are happy with the product, going on to buy new Teslas? (Oh yeah, and China already has 4.5 million EVs.)
Louis,
louis wrote:Well there are undoubtedly dystopian elements to the future and there are many people determined to make car ownership untenable in urban settings. For a young person the ambition of owning a car while living in the city is unlikely to be that attractive as they have to live in box flats with no parking. The electric bike or scooter and public transport options (which have certainly improved in most cities) look more attractive.
Electric motorcycles / scooters / mini cars are far more practical and not required to be built to the same standards as NHTSA-approved highway vehicles, so I can see those working acceptably well inside of a city, or pretty much anywhere off of a highway.
louis wrote:However, I think these supply issues are likely to be temporary. We've seen problems with petrol car production as well which is why second hand prices have been rising.
If the supply chain issues were fleeting in nature, then they should've been solved by now. Current estimates are 2 to 3 years for JIT to start functioning as intended.
What you wrote sounds an awful lot like what the TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing) people thought of the motor vehicle microchip issues, and that they'd have the production backlog resolved within a couple of months. Six months later, the automotive manufacturers are now shut down because none of their electronic gadgets work without specialty microchips that they still can't get from CSMC or TSMC in the required quantities.
Underestimation of the scope and scale of supply chain related problems has been a persistent theme throughout the course of the COVID pandemic.
louis wrote:The good thing about this is that it's a matter of price (real price as opposed to dollar prices). If Tesla can achieve its objectives the real price of Tesla cars will fall.
The real price / fake price / dollar price / pricey price, is going up, up, and away.
louis wrote:I don't think you have to be a "techno utopian" to see that tomorrow's world will definitely be green and electric powered. Hard headed business people see that. Why, if you were a diesel truck operator would you stick with diesel, if you can use electricity from an overhead power line to power an electric truck at a much lower cost per mile?
The future you envision will definitely cost a whole lot more green, if that's what you meant. It's a great plan for making people poorer than they already are. Apart from that, there's nothing environmentally friendly about over-consumption and the poverty created by lack of energy availability.
Hard-headed business people are the reason we're in the total mess that we're currently in. If you are looking to the people who created the problems to solve them, then you're going to be unpleasantly surprised when the exact opposite of what you claim to want eventually takes place.
Diesel truck operators aren't looking to completely replace vehicles that they've already paid off, using technology that is nowhere to be found. That's another "bridge to nowhere" project. There are no overhead power lines to power their trucks. If there were, then a few dozen big rigs on a major highway would require around 8 MegaWatts of continuous power to push their vehicles around. Otherwise they need batteries that reduce their load, requiring more trucks and drivers, or they need a combustion engine capable of powering the truck, which largely defeats the purpose of having a catenary wiring system. It's additional weight and cost added to their vehicles for no real benefit, since someone ultimately has to pay for all of this stuff you think is solving problems, despite the fact that real engineers are all too aware that it's only creating new problems that are far more difficult to solve.
The US public roads include 164,000 miles of highways that are part of the National Highway System, with a total of around 4 million miles of public roads. Trying to supply tens of megawatts of power to millions of miles of roadways would be an even bigger cluster-F trainwreck than the current power grid already is. If the power isn't there, then the electrification technology is dead weight that must be carried everywhere, regardless of the availability of electricity.
Basically, our present technology has done a bang-up job of painting us all into a corner. As a result, there's no shortage of snake oil salesmen and cheerleaders for snake oil salesmen willing to sell ice to Eskimos.
Louis, this is an excellent topic! Whilst I think some individual points are debatable, I would agree that the fact that Mars is effectively a global continent, does simplify transportation. Though it won't necessarily make it easier. For railways and hyperloop, there will still be a requirement for some bridges, as these modes benefit from keeping the track as straight as possible. But doubtless, there will be fewer such bridges than on Earth as there are no water courses to traverse.
Yes "global continent" is a good phrase. I might use it myself!
For Mars (happy with them on Earth!) I am not a fan of railways. Way too labour intensive for an early colony. And way too slow for a later colony. I would agree that a Hyperloop system might incorporate some bridges. But if Musk's "Boring" technology comes good, we may find it's a lot simpler to build longer tunneled sections. I don't think energy will be a problem on Mars so I am not so sure gradient will be as a big an issue as you imply.
Paved roads, whilst not essential, would offer the advantage of allowing higher speed by reducing rolling resistance and would keep abrasive dust away from wheel bearings and other moving parts. To begin with roads will be dirt tracks and transportation will involve large multi-trailer trucks. It will be a lot like Ice Road Truckers, but without the ice.
Yes - Ice Road Truckers makes me think of Mars as well. For me though, most freight transport on Mars will be robotic (we clearly have the tech for that already, good to go). Robots aren't paid by the hour. As long as your supply chain is there, the speed of the robot rovers is not that big a deal I think (the faster they go, remember, the faster they wear out). I think as long as we can get an average speed above 20 MPH that should be OK.
The absence of oceans is not really an advantage for transportation. On Earth, seas and oceans are low friction media that allow large volumes of goods to be moved over long distances with very little energy involved. On Mars, we could do the same thing with railways or maybe even floating goods in capsules in pipelines. But both options involve continuous infrastructure between one end of the journey and the other.
Yes I do appreciate that sea transport is very cheap (China would be effed if it wasn't!).
However, I was referencing the sea transport infrastructure which does require a huge upfront capital investment.
Am I right in thinking that the reason sea transport is very cheap is because of the buoyancy force that counteracts gravity? I think that's right.
Of course on Mars the weather is very clement, so you don't have to worry about building huge port installations.
I wonder whether on Mars it might be possible to build canals (yes canals on Mars, finally!)...these could be water courses that were 95% covered in black floating plastic balls (to increase insolation effect) and maybe also heated by solar reflectors and PV panels on the banks. You might even have some sort of heat retentive covering over the canal that is activated after sunset.
Anyway. clearly the question here is whether the energy gain for transport is greater than the energy cost of building and maintaining the canal. I am a bit doubtful about that.
It's partly a question of how we see Mars developing. If it's mainly very cheap PV powered robotic transportation, if the need for transportation is hugely reduced by local 3D printing technology then the ocean going Earth model probably doesn't make much sense.
Airports are unlikely. The thin atmosphere makes aerodynamic lift more challenging, but sub-orbital trajectories are much easier to achieve. We could launch vehicles using something like a rocket sled. There is even the potential for most of the energy required to be provided by direct electric power. Vehicles would only need to engage their own engines to achieve fine course correction and landing at the end of a flight.
We can agree that the current Earth airport model is not relevant!
Energy supply on Mars will be provided by a mixture of sources. We have discussed problems with large scale photovoltaic power at length before. This seems to be a topic on which you are utterly impervious to facts. The facts are on record none the less. On Mars, there is potential to make use of rammed soil berms to support PV panels in place of steel frames. Wind loadings are lower, although still significant in dust storms. Dust accumulation is a problem that would require constant attention. The potential for solar dynamic power, exploiting temperature differences between night and day, is largely unexplored in a Martian context. The inherent simplicity and low embodied energy of the requisite components, may make this a favourable option in situations where modest amounts of power are needed. I say modest, because there are scale limitations imposed by the need for fluid transportation.
I think then we can agree that the hundreds of miles of power transmission lines will not be required on Mars.
I would agree that recycling of water is more sensible than discarding it on Mars. Water is an energy intensive product when it must be mined from solid ice. The Martian environment is harsh. Most habitable areas will be underground. This will be done partially for radiation protection and conservation of heat, but more significantly because it is cheaper to build pressurised volume by excavating than it is to build a pressure vessel above ground. Food production is another case. We either build pressurised, heated greenhouses above ground, or use artificial lighting beneath ground. Which one will prove more cost effective I do not know. I do know that both approaches necessitate a much higher investment of energy per calorie than comparable food production on Earth.
It's really not that difficult to mine water ice and, I would suggest, if you are also recycling the water the overall cost may not be so different because you don't have to pay for all that expensive post-usage treatment.
I'm not saying I know the answer but in terms of how much resource input is required to produce one litre of potable water on Mars v one litre on Earth in an advanced economy, I think it's still an open question. The water on Mars will be very pure at the outset which makes everything a lot easier.
Long-distance electric power transmission is in some ways easier on Mars. With high voltage DC, we could in fact build a truly global grid. Martian nighttime temperatures can reach -90°C even at the equator and regolith under near vacuum conditions is an excellent insulator. High temperature super conductors are a more promising option for long distance power transmission on Mars compared to Earth. Ultimately, it may turn out that a heavily populated Mars will choose to exploit the economies of scale offered by a global grid and construct multi-GW fusion powerplants Close to the poles, using ice as a heat sink. Likewise, eventually a global pipeline system may allow air and water to be transported globally, such that individual colonies are not so critically dependant on the functionality of their own life support systems. Time will tell.
I just don't see the need for transmission lines and grids really. PV power and methane or hydrogen storage plus batteries for smoothing out power output in response to demand will meet all local needs. PV facilities will be built where the power is required.
I could see a global air pipeline being useful if it means small settlements dotted around the planet don't have to go to the trouble of producing their own air mix. That could be useful. Water? Not so much I think. There are good deposits of water ice in many Northern Hemisphere locations - robot mining of water ice (coupled with water recycling) will meet the needs of these smaller communities.
There's something telling me Musk would have gone down this route if it was the best path. Is there any mention of noise? How noisy is a compressed air vehicle? I'm think how noisy anything like a leaf blower or a vaccuum cleaner is where air is blowing through.
EVs are already outperfoming petrol vehicles in many respects e.g. acceleration, pollution and fuel cost. The point is that we are still right at the beginning of the modern EV iteration...Musk's plans are realistic and if he can achieve his aims then ICEs are going to be a thing of the past.
Calliban,
To your point, the AirPod is a 4 seat and 4 wheel urban vehicle, better known as "a real car". It uses a 7kW / 10hp air motor and achieves a range of 130km/80mi to 150km/93mi. It can travel at speeds of up to 50mph. It has a curb weight of 280kg / 617lbs. The most luxurious model sells for $10,880 USD. You could either use the expanding / cold air as air conditioning and mount a solar panel to the roof to provide fan power. Their vehicle uses a CFRP chassis (CF fabric over a PE foam, sandwich core construction) and CFRP air tanks, which is why it costs so much. If mass manufacturing can cut the cost of batteries, then it can certainly cut the cost of CFRP compressed air tanks.
It takes 3 minutes to fill the tank using a service station air compressor and uses $2USD worth of electricity. The CFRP tanks are rated for 20,000 refill cycles (1.6 million to 2 million miles of driving). The air tank has sufficient capacity for a 100mile range when driven at 25mph or less speeds, so your cost per mile is $0.02USD to $0.025USD (2 to 2.5 pennies). No electric or gasoline powered car will ever beat that cost of ownership. Atmospheric air is also the only kind of alternative fuel that doesn't require extreme technology, that can refill in mere minutes without bringing down the entire electric power grid. Going faster is a matter of adding more tanks and an additional air motor.
The air motor does require 0.85 quarts / 0.8L of lubricant oil and requires 50,000km oil changes. The onboard air compressor can recharge the car in 3 to 4 hours using a standard 120V AC wall outlet. Since there's far less danger of burning your house down, you can probably leave the vehicle in your garage unattended while it's "charging".
louis wrote:Calliban wrote:The longer the allowed recharging time, the less the burden on the grid.
I don't see how that could be. Or are you arguing that there will be peak charging times. Surely the answer is to use differential pricing. If, say, nighttime electricity was offered at 50% of daytime cost, I think most people would charge their cars overnight on home induction pads. In the UK, we do have a problem in that maybe something like 25% of motorists don't have off-street parking.
So let me get this straight. You have a 200 mile journey ahead of you. You leave the motorway ready to use that wireless recharging technology only to find that differential pricing has increased the cost of power to £1/kWh. Are you really going to wait until 2am, so that you can use the wireless charger to recharge your car in 6 minutes? At what point do you get real about this?
Electric roads? You really think that governments are going to be able to afford to embed induction coils in hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, all around the world? Wake up to reality. Government deficits are exploding. Unfunded future liabilities of all kinds are growing far more rapidly than tax revenues. Government debt is following an exponential curve. You remember the final salary pension? How many people in their 40s have one of those now? What proportion of people in their 20s can afford to run a car compared to twenty years ago? While you fantasise about things like this, the world is collapsing around you.
Yes, it will make a difference. People will make sure their cars are charged up before starting on a Motorway. In fact for the vast majority of people this won't be an issue as they simply park over their home induction pad. I think with digital technology, you can in all likelihood make this very subtle in terms of pricing. So every user could have an initial allowance - let's say 1000 miles at the lower rate. So this might cover 3 or 4 major trips to see relatives in a year. But after that you would be paying the higher rate to use electric roads. So that might catch some regular commuters who will certainly maximise the cheap rate nighttime charge but may still use daytime charging on the motorway. You would probably find that with fleet cars where people are doing high mileage every day they might opt to use big battery cars rather than rely on electric roads because they can charge overnight.
IIRC the cost of inserting induction coils as part of a motorway maintenance programme was something like £1 millon a mile. So 100s of thousands of miles would mean 100s of billions of pounds but that would be over decades and across the whole planet - affordable. We have 2300 miles of motorway in the UK. If my remembered figure is correct, then if say we had 1 in every 4 miles of motorway fitted with induction coils that would be 575 x £ 1 million every 5 years perhaps - only about £100 million per annum. Even if every single mile was covered that would still only be £400 million per annum. And of course you can recoup that cost through charging (as in money!).
Well there are undoubtedly dystopian elements to the future and there are many people determined to make car ownership untenable in urban settings. For a young person the ambition of owning a car while living in the city is unlikely to be that attractive as they have to live in box flats with no parking. The electric bike or scooter and public transport options (which have certainly improved in most cities) look more attractive.
However, I think these supply issues are likely to be temporary. We've seen problems with petrol car production as well which is why second hand prices have been rising.
The good thing about this is that it's a matter of price (real price as opposed to dollar prices). If Tesla can achieve its objectives the real price of Tesla cars will fall.
I don't think you have to be a "techno utopian" to see that tomorrow's world will definitely be green and electric powered. Hard headed business people see that. Why, if you were a diesel truck operator would you stick with diesel, if you can use electricity from an overhead power line to power an electric truck at a much lower cost per mile?
Meanwhile, back in the real world, this is happening...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 … osts-soar/
The same cost increases are being seen across many industries, including wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers. Some of it is due to transportation bottlenecks. We spent years developing minimum cost JIT supply chains instead of resilient ones. But China is now past peak coal production and peak oil. This has led to supply shortfalls of key industrial materials, as they restrict exports and power shortages that have shutdown a lit of factories. They are racing to build 150 new fission power reactors, but this may end up merely cushioning their decline.
I have a very different prediction for you. In 5 years time, fewer people will be able to own cars of any kind. Cars will get more expensive and the average man will get poorer, with less disposable income. Up until recently, car ownership has remained fairly constant, with the average number of miles driven per year declining since 2008. But a lot of young people can no longer afford cars at all and the price of used cars has been rising rapidly. What does that tell you about the affordability of new cars?
As techno utopians fantasise about an electric future, the energy base of the economy is depleting. This is slowly squeezing the life out of disposable income. If you drive at all in the future, your car is far more likely to be the future equivalent of a Fiat Panda than a Tesla model 3.
The longer the allowed recharging time, the less the burden on the grid.
I don't see how that could be. Or are you arguing that there will be peak charging times. Surely the answer is to use differential pricing. If, say, nighttime electricity was offered at 50% of daytime cost, I think most people would charge their cars overnight on home induction pads. In the UK, we do have a problem in that maybe something like 25% of motorists don't have off-street parking.
The optimum strategy would be to allow vehicle range to decline in proportion to the more limited energy density of the batteries and swap the battery and allow the spent battery to recharge over a longer period of time, say 24 hours. A 30-mile range Li-ion battery would weigh a lot less than a tenth as much as a 300-mile battery, because a lot of the charge needed in the 300-mile battery is used to carry its own weight. That is why a 400-mile range electric battery weighs as much as a small car. A 1000-mile battery may even be infinitely heavy, because in the end, almost all energy would be consumed overcoming the frictional forces imposed by its own enormous mass. If you attempt to build a long range vehicle using a low energy density battery, the mass of the battery required DOES NOT scale linearly with increasing range. You ultimately end up with a singularity. In practical terms, a 300 mile battery weighs a lot more than 10x as much as a 30 mile battery. This is why it makes no sense trying to engineer long range battery electric vehicles. The thing ends up running up its own arse. To be affordable, range must decline in proportion to energy density. So a 30-mile range battery would probably weigh something like 15kg, as the car would weigh a lot less with a smaller battery.
I would recommend the video on the other thread I started (The EV Battery Revolution) which suggests the 300 mile range battery may not be as out of reach as you suggest. But I take your point and it seems to me it's a lot cheaper to install induction coils (assuming the work as planned) and feed electricity to smaller battery packs in EVs rather than building lots and lots of batteries which, as you observe, then have to carry their own weight. Whether a 30 mile range battery will be acceptable in terms of "range anxiety". Probably 90% of the population live within 10 miles of an A road. Things might eventually settle down so people who live in remote areas (plenty of those in places like the USA, Canada, and Australia for instance go for 300 mile range, people living in rural areas might opt for 100 mile range and people living in urban settings might be happy to settle for 30 miles.
A 15kg mass battery is small enough to remove and replace by hand. If the car has a range of 30 miles, say, then the number of additional batteries needed in a nation, is roughly equal to the number of journeys greater than 30 miles each day, multiplied by the average journey length, divided by 30.
It would make travel a bit more cumbersome, but it would appear to be the only way of allowing low energy density batteries to meet a long range requirement affordably, without placing absurd power demands on the grid. It is a more elegant solution than fitting every car with a 400 mile battery, because the number of batteries the car uses is always proportional to journey length and most car journeys are short. As most journeys are shorter than 30 miles, the average person could be served by a 30-mile range electric car, provided that there remained the option of swapping batteries for longer journeys.
I'm not a fan of battery swapping these days. It was something that was supposed to be happening in Israel but never did.
The other option is for the average person to have a 30-mile range electric car for every day use. At the end of each journey, they can remove the battery and recharge it by plugging it into an ordinary socket in their house or place of work. An 8-hour recharging time would be quite acceptable, if the charging is overnight or during a workday. If they need to drive further, then they hire a petrol or diesel fuelled car for that purpose.
I'm beginning to think you're taking the mickey! lol Remover the battery!! No way, Jose. Electric roads will provide charging that is an improvement on the 4 minute wait filling up you petrol tank. Likewise with stationary induction pads at home.
A compressed air vehicle might be a better form of stored energy vehicle. We can build 30-mile range compressed air vehicles with ordinary steel pressure tanks. And we can store compressed air in pre-stressed concrete tanks at filling stations. Compressed air can be transfered to the tanks far more rapidly than a battery can be charged. And the tanks will not wear out in the lifetime of the vehicle.
One final point to think about. EVs have been the work horses of mass transit in many nations for over a century. They are affordable, fast and their burden on the grid is small. They just don't run on batteries. They draw power directly from grid. It wouldn't be easy to power a car in that way. But it already works for trains, trams and some buses. If we are headed into an electric vehicle future, this is what it is likely to look like.
The video on the other thread indicates Tesla are getting towards the million mile battery - a battery that comfortably exceeds the lifetime of the vehicle. There was a guy in the UK developing a compressed air vehicle. No doubt the technology is feasible but I think there are a lot of issues.
I do recommend the video on the other thread. It explains how really the Tesla Revolution is very profound. I can't see petrol vehicles surviving for more than 10 years at this rate. Why would you buy a vehicle that is more costly than an EV, costs more to run and has higher maintenance bills, plus a shorter life?
Very good video on the EV battery revolution being led by Tesla:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pff085WDs_k
It looks increasingly certain that EVs are going to dip below the sticker price of ICE vehicles in the next 5 years.
Tesla are looking to introduce LFP batteries.
Costs going down, down, down.
Points taken. If the Erebus Mountain region is chosen for the first base (which will likely also become the first city on Mars) , then I expect there will be some destinations that emerge as settlements fairly soon. One would be Mount Olympus. The other would be Valles Marineris (probably more than one vantage point).
Just how many of those rocket hops will there be for a substitute airline?
Whats the refurbishing time frame for each trip to be able to use the same rocket again?
Has it got to be full before we can get to where we are wanting to go?Since at 60mph you can travel a couple hundred miles with no problem in a straight line but if you make that same point a to b several thousand miles we have a problem since its only a couple hundred by straight line.
I do not think there is any reason to travel point a to b being a thousand miles either since population will need each other to be near by to ensure fast response.
Yes I do think something like the Hyperloop system could be useful on Mars. You're right to point out its potential. My oversight!
We don't hear much about hyperloop on Earth now but for Mars it makes much sense as a near equivalent of jet travel. But you would probably need a big build up in population - hundreds of millions of people on the planet before it made economic sense.
I don't think there's much to be gained from road tunnels on Mars. As I say if humans wanted to cut journey time they can get in a rocket hopper - their luggage that went off five sols before them will be there when they arrive! If they are travelling thousands of miles then a Starship journey will make sense.
I would say future mars will be as such.
Robotic road use is as you say not a problem but humans using the same road to travel from site to site is since you must account for the travel time and consumed items that humans need to make repairs or to make changes to a site that robots can not do.
Surely we can make use of the underground tunnels for that fast transport to over come the human use issues as in Musk hyper travel or as in a subway car.
These under ground tunnels can also be used for storage of excess air, water, power ect as well as a means to move these goods from a site to another site.