Musk's plans for Mars

Mark Friedenbach · 2016-10-06 00:39:54

Terraformer wrote:

This means, of course, that you can't get a mining claim without any actual mining. So companies are going to need non-disclosure agreements for their probe results. But I don't think that's an insurmountable problem.
...

I believe this is a much larger hurdle than you are letting on. If you look at areas of active prospecting on Earth (e.g. the Canadian north), there is division between those who do the prospecting and those who prove out a run, and those who build and operate a mine. You see small groups of people, often individuals, seeking on the ground indications that a plot of land might be valuable and then filing mining claims. Then larger companies get involved that do detailed ground studies (core samples, etc.) to establish the size of the find, an entirely different company that buys up established mining claims as a portfolio of reserves, and then finally companies established to build and operate a single mine on that location.

There's 4 different stages here. And although sometimes various stages are done by the same people, or many times there are incestuous ownership tables, there are many examples to point to where the mining claim changes hands, sometimes multiple times, between each of these steps. One reason is that the pipeline is a steady transition from high-risk/high-payout to low-risk/steady-dividends that attract vastly different investor profiles. It's a feature that high-risk tolerance people and hedge funds can focus on the prospecting side and using their information asymmetry to make big bets, but just as importantly cash out as soon as the bet pays off. Likewise you need to support low-risk investors looking for steady, 4% per year return on their investment from mining out established reserves. They don't want the risk of being uncertain about whether prospecting will find anything, even averaged over a large area.

Furthermore, it is important that the divisions between these stages are regularly spaced at around 4-5 years or so, and no more than 10 years at the worst. This is because that's the timeline at which major investment funds operate -- stakes in projects are acquired over the coarse of a 10-year period, and then sold off or transitioned to different funds at the end of it. 30-year thinking is pretty much unique to companies like SpaceX, and enabled only because of the cash cow of the satellite launch and ISS resupply market. But going from prospecting to established reserves to mine construction to operation will take AT LEAST 30 years for a Martian mine. Probably 50. You're not going to find investment dollars for that kind of project, no matter the return, because the investment money is tied up with restrictions that keep it from being put on such projects.

This works because there is an established mechanism for acquiring and proving the provenance of exclusive-right mining claims, and seeking remunerations when claims are jumped. Those claims are established in the first step, and then resold at each step along the way, often with aggregate information regarding the magnitude claim entering into the public domain, or at least freely available within the industry and among investors. Without such a system of mining claims that information would need to be kept secret yet still acted upon by a vertically integrated organization over the coarse of 30-50 years, with absolute perfect information and operational security over two generations of career employee turnover. To say that is unrealistic is an understatement. The project will never get funded.

This is a domain I actually know a fair bit amount. I sell technology to investment banks and the larger fintech sector, an industry I entered into with the purpose of creating extraterrestrial commodity and mining claim markets. I've since found bigger fish to fry though and would happily pass this project to someone else.

Impaler · 2016-10-06 01:52:20

How can private industry achieve remuneration for claim jumping, even if industry got together and created their own claim system and their own system to adjudicate infractions, both highly unlikely, they have no enforcement means. And no they can't do it with contract law, nothing forces a new entrant to the sector to sign up to the regime unless your still on the idea that a launch monopoly is going to be used to bar access, you would be in court immediately for restraint of trade. That's why a state comes in and has to be the one recording and granting claims as the whole point is that the state is on record that it will use force to protect the claim.

Mark Friedenbach · 2016-10-06 01:55:19

Impaler wrote:

you would be in court immediately for restraint of trade

Nope, it's called self-regulatory organization. It exists.

louis · 2016-10-06 07:38:22

I think you haven't got the right perspective on Mars mining. There is no reason why on Mars there shouldn't be precious metals at or near the surface. We're not talking about deep mining. If a vein of gold ore is found it can simply be drilled out by hand or a mining robot and then the ore can be processed by flame before being shipped back to Earth.

A 100 kgs of gold would perhaps be worth $ 2,500,000 back on Earth.

Space X might drill out the gold themselves or more likely partner with a gold mining specialist and split the proceeds.

As long as the US government authorises the mining activity maybe on a licence baisss, where's the problem?

Mark Friedenbach wrote:

Terraformer wrote:
This means, of course, that you can't get a mining claim without any actual mining. So companies are going to need non-disclosure agreements for their probe results. But I don't think that's an insurmountable problem.
...
I believe this is a much larger hurdle than you are letting on. If you look at areas of active prospecting on Earth (e.g. the Canadian north), there is division between those who do the prospecting and those who prove out a run, and those who build and operate a mine. You see small groups of people, often individuals, seeking on the ground indications that a plot of land might be valuable and then filing mining claims. Then larger companies get involved that do detailed ground studies (core samples, etc.) to establish the size of the find, an entirely different company that buys up established mining claims as a portfolio of reserves, and then finally companies established to build and operate a single mine on that location.
There's 4 different stages here. And although sometimes various stages are done by the same people, or many times there are incestuous ownership tables, there are many examples to point to where the mining claim changes hands, sometimes multiple times, between each of these steps. One reason is that the pipeline is a steady transition from high-risk/high-payout to low-risk/steady-dividends that attract vastly different investor profiles. It's a feature that high-risk tolerance people and hedge funds can focus on the prospecting side and using their information asymmetry to make big bets, but just as importantly cash out as soon as the bet pays off. Likewise you need to support low-risk investors looking for steady, 4% per year return on their investment from mining out established reserves. They don't want the risk of being uncertain about whether prospecting will find anything, even averaged over a large area.
Furthermore, it is important that the divisions between these stages are regularly spaced at around 4-5 years or so, and no more than 10 years at the worst. This is because that's the timeline at which major investment funds operate -- stakes in projects are acquired over the coarse of a 10-year period, and then sold off or transitioned to different funds at the end of it. 30-year thinking is pretty much unique to companies like SpaceX, and enabled only because of the cash cow of the satellite launch and ISS resupply market. But going from prospecting to established reserves to mine construction to operation will take AT LEAST 30 years for a Martian mine. Probably 50. You're not going to find investment dollars for that kind of project, no matter the return, because the investment money is tied up with restrictions that keep it from being put on such projects.
This works because there is an established mechanism for acquiring and proving the provenance of exclusive-right mining claims, and seeking remunerations when claims are jumped. Those claims are established in the first step, and then resold at each step along the way, often with aggregate information regarding the magnitude claim entering into the public domain, or at least freely available within the industry and among investors. Without such a system of mining claims that information would need to be kept secret yet still acted upon by a vertically integrated organization over the coarse of 30-50 years, with absolute perfect information and operational security over two generations of career employee turnover. To say that is unrealistic is an understatement. The project will never get funded.
This is a domain I actually know a fair bit amount. I sell technology to investment banks and the larger fintech sector, an industry I entered into with the purpose of creating extraterrestrial commodity and mining claim markets. I've since found bigger fish to fry though and would happily pass this project to someone else.

GW Johnson · 2016-10-06 09:26:10

This thread and the other discussing Musk's recent revelations have both strayed very far into (1) space law issues, (2) assumptions about mining unsupported by any Martian ground truth, and (3) quite a bit of acrimony. (They have also jumped straight to the merits or demerits of large colony populations.)

I would recommend that these numbered three be put to rest. Why?

(1) space law will change in response to "what is", as that gets changed over the decades.

(2) assuming that gold (or other precious mineral) extraction is the point of colonization is the same mistake the Spanish made 500 years ago, and it did not lead to healthy economies in the nations derived from those colonies.

(3) We do not need to be calling each other names. That's childish.

My understanding, derived from the video of Musk's presentation, and the downloaded copy of his slides, is posted over at my "exrocketman" site. It's over 2000 words, so it was too long to post here.

The rocket Musk's people are going for is definitely not the "Falcon-XX" / 29-tons-to-Mars thing that we have seen illustrated before. According to Musk's presentation, this thing takes 100 tons to Mars per ship. That leaves NASA, Zubrin/Mars Direct, and just about all the other modern concepts and proposals behind, "in the dust", so to speak.

Basically, Musk/Spacex has said "to hell with artificial self-imposed minimum-thrown-mass constraints". So it actually harks back to the giant-spaceship concepts of the 1940's and 1950's, in some ways.

He plans on setting up a simple small base initially, with a propellant manufacturing plant based on the Sabatier reactor thing often discussed in the forums. Whether that has anything to do with a NASA thing code-named MOXIE, I do not know. But, Musk does not plan on importing hydrogen for the Sabatier device just to make methane, nor on importing the LOX to burn the methane with.

He plans on ice mining to supply the hydrogen and the LOX locally. He plans on making both methane and LOX on Mars. Not to do so he thinks is stupid (and so do I), because you need about 3 tons of LOX for every ton of methane, in that rocket engine. Ice mining being required has very serious consequences for landing site selection, especially since we (as yet) have no subsurface ground truth regarding easily-mined ice deposits.

Over on "exrocketman" I speculated about drill rigs sent to Mars by the Falcon-Heavy/Red Dragon pathfinder missions Musk says he will send.

Musk says the first several missions with his 100-tons-of-cargo ships will be tiny crews and lots of equipment, aimed at expanding the propellant plant, and setting up habitations and infrastructure for a permanently-occupied base with rotating crews. He hopes that grows to a town with permanent residents over time.

There is a date disparity: first big ships to Mars 2022, versus first people on Mars 2025. That suggests the first few go there one-way with propellant-making gear in the bellies. They "are" the first propellant-making plants. Maybe. I doubt Musk/Spacex have thought it quite through yet, in that level of detail. I also doubt he can keep his optimistic schedule, because space flight is hard, and there will be "setbacks". Most of those "setbacks" involve fireballs and destruction. That's just the nature of the risk.

The notion of a million-resident colony was associated with a timeline of 50 to 100 years (or more) in the future, and it was extremely vague in Musk's presentation, although the media jumped all over that, precisely because the notion is so sensational. The plan is vague, precisely because nobody yet knows how to accomplish all the things necessary to support such a population in such a hostile place. No surprises there.

But unless you start small-time, you will never learn how! So the point here is not the end result, it is about making that small start!

His overall point was to provide the practical transportation to enable all this to get started. Very much like the introduction of the Ford Trimotor and DC-3 that enabled the start of an airline industry, although he never mentioned those. His list of 4 enabling technologies should have had a 5th entry: large size, which is also a major driver in cost reductions.

The colonies in the New World were not established using small boats. They were established with full size ships that could carry the people and supplies to start small settlements. Not cities, very small settlements. "Bases", if you will. Sometimes in one load, more often (and more successfully), in several loads.

Want more proof about that contention of large vehicle size? There are no small cargo container ships. They're all 700+ feet long. There are no small airliners (except regional feeders), they're all 100+ seats, most now 300+ seats. There are no small interstate long haul trucks, they're all 18+ wheels and 80,000+ lbs. There are no small trains anymore. Mixed freight or unit trains, they're all 1+ mile long now.

So now you know why I said what I said about Musk's revelation, and why I think much of the bickering about large colonies in these two threads is so premature that is nonsense, like angels on the head of a pin.

GW

PS -- to the best of my knowledge, NASA has little in the way of methane-fueled engines. They have paid XCOR to build small ones for them, and they participated with Musk in the large one, by letting him test components at the Stennis facility. As I understand it, that big methane-LOX engine has now come "home" to the Spacex test site in Texas for further development and test.

Last edited by GW Johnson (2016-10-06 10:05:54)

Antius · 2016-10-06 16:40:20

GW Johnson wrote:

This thread and the other discussing Musk's recent revelations have both strayed very far into (1) space law issues, (2) assumptions about mining unsupported by any Martian ground truth, and (3) quite a bit of acrimony. (They have also jumped straight to the merits or demerits of large colony populations.)
I would recommend that these numbered three be put to rest. Why?
(1) space law will change in response to "what is", as that gets changed over the decades.
(2) assuming that gold (or other precious mineral) extraction is the point of colonization is the same mistake the Spanish made 500 years ago, and it did not lead to healthy economies in the nations derived from those colonies.
(3) We do not need to be calling each other names. That's childish.
My understanding, derived from the video of Musk's presentation, and the downloaded copy of his slides, is posted over at my "exrocketman" site. It's over 2000 words, so it was too long to post here.
The rocket Musk's people are going for is definitely not the "Falcon-XX" / 29-tons-to-Mars thing that we have seen illustrated before. According to Musk's presentation, this thing takes 100 tons to Mars per ship. That leaves NASA, Zubrin/Mars Direct, and just about all the other modern concepts and proposals behind, "in the dust", so to speak.
Basically, Musk/Spacex has said "to hell with artificial self-imposed minimum-thrown-mass constraints". So it actually harks back to the giant-spaceship concepts of the 1940's and 1950's, in some ways.
He plans on setting up a simple small base initially, with a propellant manufacturing plant based on the Sabatier reactor thing often discussed in the forums. Whether that has anything to do with a NASA thing code-named MOXIE, I do not know. But, Musk does not plan on importing hydrogen for the Sabatier device just to make methane, nor on importing the LOX to burn the methane with.
He plans on ice mining to supply the hydrogen and the LOX locally. He plans on making both methane and LOX on Mars. Not to do so he thinks is stupid (and so do I), because you need about 3 tons of LOX for every ton of methane, in that rocket engine. Ice mining being required has very serious consequences for landing site selection, especially since we (as yet) have no subsurface ground truth regarding easily-mined ice deposits.
Over on "exrocketman" I speculated about drill rigs sent to Mars by the Falcon-Heavy/Red Dragon pathfinder missions Musk says he will send.
Musk says the first several missions with his 100-tons-of-cargo ships will be tiny crews and lots of equipment, aimed at expanding the propellant plant, and setting up habitations and infrastructure for a permanently-occupied base with rotating crews. He hopes that grows to a town with permanent residents over time.
There is a date disparity: first big ships to Mars 2022, versus first people on Mars 2025. That suggests the first few go there one-way with propellant-making gear in the bellies. They "are" the first propellant-making plants. Maybe. I doubt Musk/Spacex have thought it quite through yet, in that level of detail. I also doubt he can keep his optimistic schedule, because space flight is hard, and there will be "setbacks". Most of those "setbacks" involve fireballs and destruction. That's just the nature of the risk.
The notion of a million-resident colony was associated with a timeline of 50 to 100 years (or more) in the future, and it was extremely vague in Musk's presentation, although the media jumped all over that, precisely because the notion is so sensational. The plan is vague, precisely because nobody yet knows how to accomplish all the things necessary to support such a population in such a hostile place. No surprises there.
But unless you start small-time, you will never learn how! So the point here is not the end result, it is about making that small start!
His overall point was to provide the practical transportation to enable all this to get started. Very much like the introduction of the Ford Trimotor and DC-3 that enabled the start of an airline industry, although he never mentioned those. His list of 4 enabling technologies should have had a 5th entry: large size, which is also a major driver in cost reductions.
The colonies in the New World were not established using small boats. They were established with full size ships that could carry the people and supplies to start small settlements. Not cities, very small settlements. "Bases", if you will. Sometimes in one load, more often (and more successfully), in several loads.
Want more proof about that contention of large vehicle size? There are no small cargo container ships. They're all 700+ feet long. There are no small airliners (except regional feeders), they're all 100+ seats, most now 300+ seats. There are no small interstate long haul trucks, they're all 18+ wheels and 80,000+ lbs. There are no small trains anymore. Mixed freight or unit trains, they're all 1+ mile long now.
So now you know why I said what I said about Musk's revelation, and why I think much of the bickering about large colonies in these two threads is so premature that is nonsense, like angels on the head of a pin.
GW
PS -- to the best of my knowledge, NASA has little in the way of methane-fueled engines. They have paid XCOR to build small ones for them, and they participated with Musk in the large one, by letting him test components at the Stennis facility. As I understand it, that big methane-LOX engine has now come "home" to the Spacex test site in Texas for further development and test.

Thanks Gary. I agree that it is somewhat premature to start drawing conclusions about what really amounts to an aspiration to establish a Martian civilisation. It is merely fun to speculate about how it might work.

You noted in the other thread that eventual trade between Mars and Earth should focus on finished products. The problem I can see is that the only advantage a Mars product has over an Earth product is its position outside Earth's gravity well. For most products that could be shipped to Earth itself, the transport cost is like the ultimate tariff barrier. Satellites are so complex that it is difficult to see them being made on Mars for a long time to come and launch costs tend not to dominate satellite cost anyway. Solar power satellites might be more easily assembled in Mars orbit, with pre-fab sections being made on Mars and clipped or bolted together in Mars orbit. But Mars is a lot more massive than the moon and SPS sections would presumably need to be launched from Mars by SSTO. Would this be cost effective with all costs considered?

In terms of economy of scale for Earth launch rockets, how big can we practically build such things? Is there a point at which diseconomies of scale begin to increase unit costs? Musk's proposed mega-rocket would lift 550t of payload into orbit in expendable configuration. Is a 1000t to LEO rocket credible? How about 10,000t to LEO?

Last edited by Antius (2016-10-06 16:47:32)

Impaler · 2016-10-06 20:24:27

louis wrote:

I think you haven't got the right perspective on Mars mining. There is no reason why on Mars there shouldn't be precious metals at or near the surface. We're not talking about deep mining. If a vein of gold ore is found it can simply be drilled out by hand or a mining robot and then the ore can be processed by flame before being shipped back to Earth.

As someone with a basic understanding of geology I can assure you their are LOTS of reasons to to expect no ores beyond perhaps some low grade iron. Mars dose not appear to have ever had plate tectonics or intrusive granitic rock formations which create nearly all out ore bodies on Earth, gold in particular requires hydro-thermal activity which deposits quartz veins in a parent rock, and placer surface deposits require flowing streams, not brief floods as have been theorized for Mars but slow grinding down of mountains followed by low energy separation of the sediment.

Also their is no such thing as 'flame processing' to extract gold from a raw ore, ore must be pulverized to nearly dust and then separated by a flotation process which requires huge quantities of water, power and chemicals here on Earth. The resulting product is far from pure and requires further processing, but the general rule of all mining is that the first processing steps are the most heavy and energy intensive and have to be located at the mine site and the later steps are less energy intensive and can be at a distance because so much less mass has to be moved.

This is why mining off Earth is so impractical, you need a massive scale at the site to have any hope of competing with production on Earth and the outbound transport to set up the mine will dominate the costs, the retrieved metals value density is nearly irrelevant.

kbd512 · 2016-10-06 22:28:17

Impaler wrote:

As someone with a basic understanding of geology I can assure you their are LOTS of reasons to to expect no ores beyond perhaps some low grade iron. Mars dose not appear to have ever had plate tectonics or intrusive granitic rock formations which create nearly all out ore bodies on Earth, gold in particular requires hydro-thermal activity which deposits quartz veins in a parent rock, and placer surface deposits require flowing streams, not brief floods as have been theorized for Mars but slow grinding down of mountains followed by low energy separation of the sediment.

What about mining Phobos or Deimos or objects from the main belt with robots and using the Mars colony to service the robots? The dV's to get back to Earth from those places aren't all that crazy in most instances. If we could obtain water from Asteroids, could we refuel that giant ITS that Mr. Musk is building without dragging all that fuel with us from the surface of Mars on the way back?

Impaler wrote:

Also their is no such thing as 'flame processing' to extract gold from a raw ore, ore must be pulverized to nearly dust and then separated by a flotation process which requires huge quantities of water, power and chemicals here on Earth. The resulting product is far from pure and requires further processing, but the general rule of all mining is that the first processing steps are the most heavy and energy intensive and have to be located at the mine site and the later steps are less energy intensive and can be at a distance because so much less mass has to be moved.

What about the platinum rich asteroids? That has to be worth something to someone. How much energy are we talking about? High kW's, MW's, or more?

Impaler wrote:

This is why mining off Earth is so impractical, you need a massive scale at the site to have any hope of competing with production on Earth and the outbound transport to set up the mine will dominate the costs, the retrieved metals value density is nearly irrelevant.

It sounds like transport back to Earth from a gravity well is out of the question, no matter what we find.

SpaceNut · 2016-10-07 21:02:24

So back to the misk plan to which is a bit thin on particulars such as totalling up the size of mass to support the 100 man ship to mars let alone the mass to continue this on the surface. From what little is there it seems that its a one way trip to colonize, very little science and a whole lot of making surviability possible from the start.

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/everyd … ds-fs.html

When astronauts travel into space, NASA scientists determine how much food will be needed for each mission. For example, an astronaut on the ISS uses about 1.83 pounds (0.83 kilograms) of food per meal each day. About 0.27 pounds (0.12 kilograms) of this weight is packaging material. Longer-duration missions will require much more food.
A trip to Mars and back, for instance, may take more than three years and require the provision of thousands of kilograms of food. A crew of four on a three-year martian mission eating only three meals each day would need to carry more than 24,000 pounds (10,886 kilograms) of food.
On Earth, the average American uses about 35 gallons (132 liters) of water every day. Water is heavy, so attempts are made to minimize the amount of water carried on board spacecraft.

There is a table in this document that gives a bit more of a breakdown when compared to here on Earth for the numbers. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/146558main_Recy … _10_06.pdf

Of course the document also covers the systems needed to keep the environment safe for those that must live in such a ship to mars.

One of the key processes is in the recycling of Co2 and waste water in more clean water and oxygen with the process of electrolysis.
http://www.cres.gr/kape/publications/pa … OLYSIS.pdf
ore on this is based on the Space Station
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/s … st13nov_1/

These are just some of the issues that Musk must solve in order to make his plan work....

RobS · 2016-10-07 21:22:51

Musk's plan focused on the transportation system only. If he can land 100 tonnes on Mars at a time at a fairly reasonable price (he hopes eventually for $140,000 per tonne, so $14 million for 100 tonnes), 1 cargo flight with 100 tonnes would be plenty to support 6 astronauts for 2 years (Mars Direct supports 4 astronauts for a little over 50 tonnes, and that includes the Earth return vehicle).

Someone commented that the mission would be one way. No, the plan is to refuel the lander and send it back, with or without crew. But it might be that the first crew would end up staying on Mars through 2 or even 3 launch opportunities before a return becomes possible. It might take that long to set up enough solar panels to make the return fuel. But if the Mars Direct's return vehicle can be refueled with about 10 tonnes of panels (maybe 5 tonnes; I calculated it once), then the ITS can be refueled with maybe 50 tonnes of panels. That's half a cargo flight.

If you can drop 100 tonnes of cargo on Mars per flight at a reasonable price, all sorts of possibilities open up. That's the revolution that Musk proposes. If drops 100 tonnes of frozen food and some water at the landing site, how long could a dozen astronauts live? Several years, by the above numbers. Let's say you send three cargo flights, two years before the crew arrives, and all three land safely. Flight four follows with a dozen people, and they have 300 tonnes of stuff. They could do a helluva lot with 300 tonnes of stuff: drill for water, set up a big solar power farm, set up green houses, they could have some construction equipment and vehicles for semi-long distance expeditions, a good sized habitat complex, etc. You might not even need highly efficient closed cycle life support because if you have enough water and power you can make all the oxygen you need.

louis · 2016-10-08 17:49:27

Interesting post, Rob but Have some concerns:

1. Musk aims to benefit from the economies of scale but economies of scale only apply if you have a market. Otherwise if we are talking about a small scale build up, that is loading a lot of cost on to a few missions.

2. Are there really a million qualified people on planet earth who have the right skills, personality and willpower to colonise Mars? I doubt it. We're talking about probably the top 10% in US universities in terms of intellectual ability and scientific understanding but then also people who meet the requirements of special forces training programmes, and people prepared to say goodbye to their families and friends on a permanent basis.

3. What do you think the KwH requirement is for manufacturing the propellant for a return flight?

RobS wrote:

Musk's plan focused on the transportation system only. If he can land 100 tonnes on Mars at a time at a fairly reasonable price (he hopes eventually for $140,000 per tonne, so $14 million for 100 tonnes), 1 cargo flight with 100 tonnes would be plenty to support 6 astronauts for 2 years (Mars Direct supports 4 astronauts for a little over 50 tonnes, and that includes the Earth return vehicle).
Someone commented that the mission would be one way. No, the plan is to refuel the lander and send it back, with or without crew. But it might be that the first crew would end up staying on Mars through 2 or even 3 launch opportunities before a return becomes possible. It might take that long to set up enough solar panels to make the return fuel. But if the Mars Direct's return vehicle can be refueled with about 10 tonnes of panels (maybe 5 tonnes; I calculated it once), then the ITS can be refueled with maybe 50 tonnes of panels. That's half a cargo flight.
If you can drop 100 tonnes of cargo on Mars per flight at a reasonable price, all sorts of possibilities open up. That's the revolution that Musk proposes. If drops 100 tonnes of frozen food and some water at the landing site, how long could a dozen astronauts live? Several years, by the above numbers. Let's say you send three cargo flights, two years before the crew arrives, and all three land safely. Flight four follows with a dozen people, and they have 300 tonnes of stuff. They could do a helluva lot with 300 tonnes of stuff: drill for water, set up a big solar power farm, set up green houses, they could have some construction equipment and vehicles for semi-long distance expeditions, a good sized habitat complex, etc. You might not even need highly efficient closed cycle life support because if you have enough water and power you can make all the oxygen you need.

RobS · 2016-10-08 18:54:24

I have my doubts that Musk can get the prices down the way he thinks. He assumes manufacture of many, many boosters and vehicles and their repeated reuse. Let us say he is right and he achieves the intended price by 2045. Meanwhile, he'll be sending people to Mars in the 2020s before the investment has been amortized, so the price per tonne and per person will be much higher at that point.

There's a big difference between the Falcon Heavy, launching stuff to orbit for a bit less than $2 million per tonne, and the IPS launching stuff at $140,000 per tonne TO MARS. Considering each cargo flight to Mars requires 5 refueling flights to low earth orbit, that means a LEO launch price of less than $20,000 per tonne! That's 1% of what the Falcon Heavy can achieve.

I would not be surprised if, by mid century or late in the century, the price gets down to $20,000 per tonne to LEO. That will create a revolution we can't even begin to imagine in orbital tourism, orbital manufacturing, scientific exploration of the moon by permanent crews of many dozens, lunar tourism, a huge increase in unmanned exploration of the outer solar system, possibly a human outpost in orbit around Venus or at one of Mercury's poles . . . you can go on and on about the possibilities. If Musk can send people to Mars in 80 days, he can send crews to Callisto in about a year, Saturn in two, and that's with chemical propellants (because they are so cheap, there's no incentive to develop other propulsion systems). The asteroid belt will be opened up to all sorts of expeditions, manned and unmanned. But I doubt we'll see this very low price for some time. It will take decades.

As for who will go to Mars, Musk was very clear about that: anyone who wants to sell their house and other assets on Earth and buy a ticket. He is not thinking of organized recruitment of salaried crews; he's thinking about building a civilian population. Several times he mentioned opening pizza restaurants on Mars. A civilian economy on Mars would be very complicated to jump start. We don't even know all the steps. My Mars novel has speculated about it. The big initial problems are the cost of all the equipment; if you sell a house in Silicon Valley for a million dollars and spend half of that to get you and your wife to Mars, what sort of tiny pressurized igloo could you buy there with the remaining savings? What would you do to earn a living? If you are selling pizzas, how expensive are they? If taxes pay for the life support system, how much would they be? On the other hand, if (1) immigration keeps the median age of the population low, you greatly reduce retirement and end of life medical bills, AND if you don't need to spend any money on the military, you've just freed up about a third or a half of the budget of the United States government, by percentage. That percentage of the Martian government budget can be spent on expanding the very expensive infrastructure. I suspect in thirty or forty years on Mars, also the cost of the life support system ("environmental management" because it would include open spaces and agriculture) would probably come down a lot through technological maturity and mass production of the equipment. In my novel, once Mars gets to have several tens of thousands of people on it, its Space Program is as large and sophisticated as most terrestrial countries, because they spend wisely (via their own universities, too) and have an incentive to make Mars the economic center of the emerging solar system economy.

Terraformer · 2016-10-09 02:57:54

Are there really a million qualified people on planet earth who have the right skills, personality and willpower to colonise Mars? I doubt it. We're talking about probably the top 10% in US universities in terms of intellectual ability and scientific understanding but then also people who meet the requirements of special forces training programmes, and people prepared to say goodbye to their families and friends on a permanent basis.

(1) Why would they need to meet the requirements of special forces training programs? Regular military, sure - space doesn't tolerate lax discipline, and you have to be willing to accept privation - but not special forces. (2) Plenty of people throughout history have been willing to do this, it's not a particularly rare trait - nor would it be permanent, just a very long temporary period.

louis · 2016-10-09 06:30:08

"However, froth flotation processes may also be used to concentrate the gold. In some cases, particularly when the gold is present in the ore as discrete coarse particles, a gravity concentrate can be directly smelted to form gold bars"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_extr … _processes

Obviously we would be looking for that sort of gold deposit.

Whether they exist no one knows for sure.

Finding them is not a top priority but we may come across them in exploration.

Impaler wrote:

louis wrote:
I think you haven't got the right perspective on Mars mining. There is no reason why on Mars there shouldn't be precious metals at or near the surface. We're not talking about deep mining. If a vein of gold ore is found it can simply be drilled out by hand or a mining robot and then the ore can be processed by flame before being shipped back to Earth.
As someone with a basic understanding of geology I can assure you their are LOTS of reasons to to expect no ores beyond perhaps some low grade iron. Mars dose not appear to have ever had plate tectonics or intrusive granitic rock formations which create nearly all out ore bodies on Earth, gold in particular requires hydro-thermal activity which deposits quartz veins in a parent rock, and placer surface deposits require flowing streams, not brief floods as have been theorized for Mars but slow grinding down of mountains followed by low energy separation of the sediment.
Also their is no such thing as 'flame processing' to extract gold from a raw ore, ore must be pulverized to nearly dust and then separated by a flotation process which requires huge quantities of water, power and chemicals here on Earth. The resulting product is far from pure and requires further processing, but the general rule of all mining is that the first processing steps are the most heavy and energy intensive and have to be located at the mine site and the later steps are less energy intensive and can be at a distance because so much less mass has to be moved.
This is why mining off Earth is so impractical, you need a massive scale at the site to have any hope of competing with production on Earth and the outbound transport to set up the mine will dominate the costs, the retrieved metals value density is nearly irrelevant.

RobS · 2016-10-09 07:13:31

On Earth, men "pan" for gold using water to separate particles by density. On Mars, a machine could probably do the same using liquid carbon dioxide.

RobertDyck · 2016-10-09 07:51:56

Impaler wrote:

As someone with a basic understanding of geology I can assure you their are LOTS of reasons to to expect no ores beyond perhaps some low grade iron. Mars dose not appear to have ever had plate tectonics or intrusive granitic rock formations which create nearly all out ore bodies on Earth, gold in particular requires hydro-thermal activity which deposits quartz veins in a parent rock, and placer surface deposits require flowing streams, not brief floods as have been theorized for Mars but slow grinding down of mountains followed by low energy separation of the sediment.

Opportunity was sent to a location where MGS found surface spectra consistent with hematite. Very quickly Opportunity found round nodules. One masters student working for Dr. Carol Stoker called these "blueberries". Of course they were hematite concretions. They form by dissolving iron in water, then when water evaporates iron oxide forms crystals in the soil. When wind blows away the soil, "blueberries" are left exposed. These are highly concentrated iron oxide. Hematite is very hard, while the surrounding sedimentary rock is soft. That allows a rock crusher to break up matrix rock, but leave hematite intact. Then separate by sifting. Hematite concretions are high grade iron ore, highly sought after by the mining industry on Earth.

MGS had a thermal emission spectrometer. It not only observed spectra, but also thermal momentum. That means how quickly minerals warmed up at dawn, and cooled after dusk. Geologists used this data to determine surface minerals. They found two predominant surface types. Type 2 included 9.2% Fe-smectite (probably nontronite), and 2.2% illite. Type 1 included 9.9% illite, and 2.4% kaolinite! These are types of clay. Kaolinite is white clay, used to make porcelain; it's the end product of a long series of weather steps. They are formed by moving water, cannot be formed at the bottom of a lake or sea or ocean. Kaolinite takes at least 10 million years to form on Earth. It's presence means there were flowing rivers and streams, not just "brief floods". For millions of years. The theory is Mars was warm and wet for a billion years.

Impaler wrote:

This is why mining off Earth is so impractical, you need a massive scale at the site to have any hope of competing with production on Earth and the outbound transport to set up the mine will dominate the costs, the retrieved metals value density is nearly irrelevant.

Mining asteroids are particularly practical because of their make-up. Metal asteroids are not oxide ores, they're metal. The Mond process uses carbon monoxide to form metal carbonyls, which are then dissociated back into metal and CO. It's used on Earth as a final refining process. But metal asteroids are already metal, so the Mond process can be used for primary ore processing. And temperatures for the Mond process are much lower than smelting, low enough to be produced in space with nothing but a parabolic mirror to concentrate sunlight. Mond process for nickel is about +200°C, slightly higher for iron, and higher yet for cobalt. The Mond process can be used with even higher temperatures and pressures for platinum group metals, some require addition of fluorine gas. Ease of processing is what makes asteroid mining practical.

RobS · 2016-10-09 08:00:44

Considering all the nickel-iron bodies that have crashed into Mars and not rusted away (like on Earth), it should be possible to find a good nickel-iron or an enriched PGM body on Mars and do processing there as well.

Mars may have had some plate tectonics in the Thaumasia region where there is higher-silicon volcanism, so gold ore may be possible. There should be plenty of sulfate ores associated with basalt volcanism; there's a lot of that. There's also a lot of hydrothermal activity that the rovers have found. Mars will have LOTS of mineralization (in contrast to the moon, which may have little). It may even have economic ores that are rare on Earth, because we don't have the high acid, high-CO2 hydrothermal conditions Mars has. We will have to prospect.

RobertDyck · 2016-10-09 10:06:14

Oh, right, I forgot to mention the volcanoes. Tharsis is a vast volcanic region. Did you notice the shape of Olympus Mons? A huge volcano that tapers to almost flat, but the edge is an escarpment. That's because the mountain sat in the ancient ocean, the escarpment is the coastline. The base is as large as France.

RobS · 2016-10-09 11:23:30

Where have you seen that, Robert? I doubt Olympus Mons was surrounded by an ocean. The escarpment is a typical feature of slope retreat in some dry climates.

RobertDyck · 2016-10-09 11:57:11

Look at the escarpment around the ancient ocean basin in the northern hemisphere of Mars. There was debate among geologists whether that escarpment was the coast of an ancient ocean, but now the consensus is that it was. They acknowledge the escarpment has weathered since the ocean dried up, but it is an escarpment. In fact, the location where Curiosity landed is an ancient river delta, emptying into that ocean. You could look at altimeter data to work out the water depth, or altitude of the top of the basin escarpment. Then look at altimeter data for Olympus Mons. Of course others have done the hard work for us; there are images of a terraformed Mars showing water once again filling that ancient ocean basin. Notice Olympus Mons stands alone within that ocean. The escarpment around the base of Olympus Mons corresponds to the water line.

Considering the slope of Olympus Mons forms a smooth taper, extending many miles with a slope that's almost flat, then a sudden escarpment? Right at the water line? I doubt that's a coincidence. I suspect it formed as a giant volcanic island in the ocean. Forming with the same process that the big island of Hawaii formed.

Whether Olympus Mons was completely surrounded depends on what you use for water depth. Some simulations show the south-eastern side connected to land. Is that why there are places that don't have a sharp escarpment? Or could it be due to erosion? Scientists discovered the islands of Hawaii suffer catastrophic shoreline collapse. Often large chunks slough off into the ocean, creating long-run-out underwater landslides. They believe this causes a tsunami, so the wast coast of North America was hit by periodic tsunamis from this. Could places on Olympus Mons be the same thing? Or is it dry climate erosion, after the ocean disappeared?

RobS · 2016-10-09 20:21:35

I have never seen a geologist say the escarpment at the edge of Olympus Mons was wave cut, though I can't say I am up on the latest research. Two shorelines have been reconstructed tentatively, and the global dichotomy between the highlands and the lowlands does not match either one, as far as I know.

RobertDyck · 2016-10-09 21:00:34

Wave cut? How about red hot lava freezing solid when it hits water.

RobS · 2016-10-09 22:55:05

Red hot lava hitting sea water doesn't make cliffs. It keeps on flowing and flows along the sea bottom, believe it or not, creating what is called "pillow lava." There's a very dramatic video of it I saw years ago, shot by scuba divers. It may be on YouTube; yes, hers' an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsJn8izcKtg . Amazing to see and very dangerous to photograph, because of possible underwater explosions.

RobertDyck · 2016-10-10 03:16:33

One of the island of Hawaii. Looks like cliffs to me. Beach may extend a relatively short distance into the water, but there are underwater cliffs.
kauai-bathy.jpeg?w=600

RGClark · 2016-10-11 10:34:23

RGClark wrote:

In his presentation at about the 54 minute mark Musk discusses that the second stage in its tanker form or in its spaceship form will be able to reach orbit when used as a single stage. He states though the tanker will not be able to land, presumably because of insufficient reserve fuel. Then it could still be an expendable SSTO.
However, he states it could be used as cargo ship for fast intercontinental deliveries. In this case it would need to land so presumably he means this would be at speeds just below orbital.
http://youtu.be/H7Uyfqi_TE8?t=3240
Also, notable is that the upper stage at about a third the size of the booster could instead be used as the booster for a smaller launch system. You would then develop also a smaller upper stage. This results in a system about 1/3rd the size so could transport 1/3rd the number of people, about 35 or so.
This is interesting because Elon said they may have a development upper stage within 4 years, which could then be used instead as the booster. It may even be possible to use an existing upper stage on an existing rocket for the smaller ITS upper stage we now need, such as the Delta IV upper stage or even the Ariane 5 core used as upper stage. This would clearly reduce the development cost if we could use an existing upper stage.
A quite high payload to LEO could be done using the Ariane 5 core as the upper stage in this scenario:
3820ln(1 + 2500 ÷ (90 + 170 +240)) + 4650ln(1 + 158 ÷ (12 +240)) = 9,100 m/s
So we could get 240 metric tons to LEO with this much smaller system.

By using the ITS upper stage tanker instead as a first stage, we can get a smaller implementation of a Mars transport system. This would be useful as a first flight exploratory mission crewed by professional astronauts, before colonization flights began. Moreover, since Elon says a demonstration upper stage could be ready in four years such an initial flight might even be ready then.

Curiously, according to the calculation, if using the Ariane 5 as the upper stage, this launcher could carry as payload to LEO more than enough to fully refuel the upper stage. Then the same upper stage could be used as the in-space propulsion stage to Mars, and just by a single launch, rather than using multiple launches to refuel according to the much larger SpaceX plan:

A smaller, faster version of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System to Mars.
http://exoscientist.blogspot.com/2016/1 … pacex.html

Bob Clark

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