Elon Musk says Harry Potter and Bob the Builder will get SpaceX flying to Mars SpaceX, Tesla and Boring Company CEO Elon Musk has suggested Bob the Builder and Harry Potter will help his space exploration efforts. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session dedicated to the Big F**cking Rocket, but which quickly veered into discussion of the Big F**cking Spaceship (BFS) he plans to fly to Mars, the magnate …
"There is no CGI BtB"
I assume you mean this in the same way as "there were no sequels to The Matrix".
Bobnotes:
There was a CGIed Bob The Builder spin-off - Ready, Steady, Build!, and a poorly received 2015 CGI series of Bob The Builder on Channel 5 (and now moved to some obscure children's channel).
I actually quite enjoyed the new Thunderbirds, but I have to say the half-hour timeslot really hurt it. Everything was a bit to frantic to get the story completed.
I loved the way they made the ships believeable with little details like manouevring jets, warning labels, etc.
"Asked how the internet could be extended to Mars"
... doesn't need to reinvent everything. I seem to recall from long distant USENET days that there was an RFC that proposed extending the DNS system to add a level of planet codes above the rxisttingcountry code TLDs (with also providion for having 2nd level doamins for under planets for moons). Idea was a system had a domain rooted in the planet where it was or was in orbit around along with duscissuion of rules for handling craft that either travelled between planets or never orbited or landed on planets/moons.
In the past I've tried to find this (mainly to confirm my memory is still working!) but haven - its was sometime in the mid 80s and was probably issued at the beginning of April!
To be honest there is no need to re-invent the wheel. While TCP/UDP can be the transport mechanism while on the ground, when you transmit it over space you will need a different protocol. Firstly it makes sense to extensively use forward error correction to reduce the need to resend packets. Secondly use dynamic compression techniques to reduce the data based on the content. For example voice and images can be greatly reduced based on the level of quality that is acceptable, while data less so.
To be honest GSM/CDMA use a variety of these techniques to solve similar issues i.e variable quality transport medium and relative low bandwidth. Going back even further X.25 solved many of the same issues to allow data to be sent via plain old telephones(ask your parents about modems kids).
I'm sure satellite and space agencies have already pretty well got this covered. The bigger issue is maintaining a line of sight connection between Earth and Mars. If we had a constellation of MASER satellites at Lagrange points, we could probably ensure high levels of data integrity and reasonable bandwidth. Nothing is going to help you on the packet delays however
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, there was Vint Cerf, and WorldCom. And a vision for an 'Interplanetary Internet', to expand certain vendor's support contracts. CCIE's needed, must have own transport, and ideally love the tang that perchlorates add to a smoothie. Meetings were held to explore how to conquer things like how to conquer TCP's window & LFP issues, and the rocket scientists kept trying to point to their perfectly good protocols as used in various manned & unmanned missions that travelled far beyond the realms of any digitised cat pics.
So there are perfectly good protocols already in use by probe designers that communicate waaay more reliably and efficiently than TCP/IP. But pointing that out meant not being invited back to the workshops, which were quite fascinating. It's a variation on the age-old Bellheads v Netheads arguments that often derive from RFC791-
The internet protocol does not provide a reliable communication facility. There are no acknowledgments either end-to-end or hop-by-hop. There is no error control for data, only a header checksum. There are no retransmissions. There is no flow control.
And despite transitions from DARPA to IETF and 36yrs of kludges and jollies.. The Internet still relies on a reliable transmission layer. But Vint Cerf moved on to Google, so it'll probably be Alphabets in space, where no-one can hear netheads scream..
Given his boasting about his profits from BitCoin I have just taken the opportunity to sign up Julian Assange for a one-way ticket to Mars. Mr Musk assures me that as Mr Assange has spent a number of years in seclusion he would be ideal for the first mission, as he has already undergone training.
He is also sure that they can cancel any Intergalactic Arrest Warrant in the event that 1) We actually discover life on Mars and 2) Julian Assange attempts to have sexual relations with it.
The delay will be just too damn long for anything. The only solution will be a Mars-Local instance of the internet where sync to/from the Earth is done over the currently proposed store-and-forward interplanetary data link.
I think i'll be off so start developing a Cloud company developing extremely high capability but extremely low weight data center modules based on an aluminium shipping container.
But there are still important questions to be addressed. Like who gets to control and allocate IP addresses for/on Mars? Or how much of the Internet to take with them. If there's space/mass constraints then priority would probably be lots of textbooks. Which thanks to technology is fairly straightforward, ie books on how to build/fix pretty much everything can be stuck on a flash card or Kindle. Then it's just a matter of building stuff, and surviving while you do that.
I think it'd be better to stage everything, ie first establish orbital or lunar fabrication plants. NASA did some neat stuff with lunarcrete, so freighting construction and components from Moon to Mars could be done using concrete spaceships. Then there's the potential to do some asteroid mining to get more raw materials. The economics of that don't really add up for delivering to Earth, but for interplanetary economics, it'd avoid hauling mass out of our gravity well. So maybe launch a semiconductor fab plant to the Moon or orbit, then they could be stuck into lunar or marscrete datacentres.
That kind of staging could also feed into data shipping.. Diageo and some other corporates used to ship data on Concord because that was much cheaper than transatlantic capacity, and quick enough for their needs. So bulk data could be ferried the same way & leave interplanetary links for critical communications.
Musk's plans are.. Ambitious, but it's nice to see someone trying :)
"A rough analogy is that we are trying to build the equivalent of the transcontinental railway."
Unless the transcontinental railway was required to transport, on its very first trip, all the infrastructure, tooling, factories and starter material to build *another* railway for the return trip, then no, there is very little similarity. In fact it's an analogy so useless as to be dangerous—which is the mistake people have been making about interplanetary travel since Tsiolkovsky's first wet dream.
The problems of huge distances, utterly hostile and completely unforgiving environment, enormous chemical rocket energies requiring bleeding-edge engineering with limited contingencies, simply monstrous energies required to transport pitifully tiny payloads ... even managing a local bus-stop 240,000 miles to the lo-gee Moon for a few days required the resources of the world's wealthiest nation state. Mars is exponentially harder and much, much more dangerous because of its distance *and* the fact that this varies so much. Rescue is not an option.
I'd love to see proper off-world operations, interplanetary exploration, asteroid mining (Lagrange habitats even), and and all the rest that's needed to get our eggs out of this one fragile basket that we are destroying so fast—but the use of rockets for the heavy lifting seems like such a dead end. Even partly reusable ones.
With a five-year international effort costing (adjusted dollars) less than Apollo, we could launch 20,000 tonne Orion-style nuclear ships and put enough mass and people onto Mars and the Moon to have instant colonies big enough to have a chance of long-term survival and actually be useful. Warheads can be made clean enough that there wouldn't even be any particular fallout risk on Earth. Perhaps instead of faffing about with glorified fireworks, we should be serious, use the technology that's just been lying around, and just Get Out There at last?
And rescue was possible for the lunar astronauts? It took so long to prep an Apollo rocket for launch they would have run out of oxygen before it got there. If memory serves it took them roughly 3 days to get to lunar orbit.
Mars is a bit easier since as a planet with some sort of atmosphere and more varied terrain than an airless moon there is more sophisticated chemistry and geology available for making stuff out of.
The problem is that not having a mass of Mars stuff to pay with in advance developing the tech to utilise Mars stuff is going to be VERY difficult even though we have lots of data from the rovers. The killer in good enough industrial processes is what look like minor impurities.
Sometimes they can be good, like the titanium which contaminates the ironsands NZ Steel turns into steel. Periodically they have to scrape the titanium out of their iron furnace. But they actually make more dollars exporting the titanium than producing virgin steel for the domestic market. But it took a LONG time to develop the techniques to utilise ironsands involving experts and experiments in both the UK and Germany.
> transport, on its very first trip, all the infrastructure
It doesn't have to do all that on its very first trip. There will be several ships used to test entry, descent and landing, and these will bring cargo which will help found the Mars based. Part of the point of Mars is that it has resources in situ from which fuel and oxidiser can be made. It's certainly a challenging project. Musk's point here is that he knows he can't do it alone.
> Mars is exponentially harder
It really isn't. The Moon is harder because it has no atmosphere, nights that are 14 days long, lower gravity, less water and generally fewer other resources. There's a reason for picking Mars over the Moon. Musk knows the Moon is there.
> Even partly reusable ones
BFR will be completely reusable for most uses.
> Orion-style nuclear ships
Well yes; but now you are talking fantasy that won't happen for the foreseeable future. BFR has a real chance of happening within the next decade.
Having an atmosphere is not going to make Mars any easier. Yes, it does have one, but a thin one. It is not, however, a breathable atmosphere. As such, I fail to see just how that makes things any easier.
On Mars or on the Moon, a hole in your suit means you die if you can't get to safety quick enough.
On either, you're lacking running water and have to extract it from the soil. On either, you have dust that will get into everything (okay, bonus for Mars on that one because Moon dust is extremely abrasive).
Nope, can't see that Mars is any easier to colonize than the Moon.
And it's a lot farther away (given current technology).
Wouldn't the mere fact that there is at least *some* atmosphere on the Mars-side of your suit/vehicle/etc, compared with the vacuum encountered on the Moon or in orbit, make the design of said suits/vehicles a bit easier thanks to them not needing to cope with such a steep pressure differential?
Mars suits can be a little easier, but not because of the pressure differential. Ultraviolet light levels are lower due to distance from the sun and the atmosphere is going to prevent most of the micrometeors getting to the surface/slow down the bigger ones somewhat, which means less kevlar is needed.
Wouldn't the mere fact that there is at least *some* atmosphere on the Mars-side of your suit/vehicle/etc, compared with the vacuum encountered on the Moon or in orbit, make the design of said suits/vehicles a bit easier thanks to them not needing to cope with such a steep pressure differential?
The Martian atmospheric pressure is roughly 1% that of Earth, or perhaps 3% of that of a reduced pressure space vehicle. Personally I would not be remotely comfortable in a vehicle so marginal in design that the difference makes any difference whatsoever.
On the other hand that thin atmosphere is still enough to need a heat shield, but not so great you can land on a sensibly sized parachute. The atmosphere is also held in place by considerably stronger gravity, all things that make getting there in the first place considerably more difficult.
Also gravity on Mars is a little over twice that of the moon (3.7m/s2 vs 1.6 m/s2), so bone loss and muscle wastage might be less on a Mars base than a Moon base, leading to slightly better long term health for Mars residents than Lunar ones.
"Wouldn't the mere fact that there is at least *some* atmosphere on the Mars-side of your suit/vehicle/etc, compared with the vacuum encountered on the Moon or in orbit, make the design of said suits/vehicles a bit easier thanks to them not needing to cope with such a steep pressure differential?"
Yes. The pressure a suit has to contain is indeed nearly identical for Mars or the Moon, as others have pointed out. This isn't the end of the story though. Any useful pressure suit will leak. On Mars, we can recapture lost gases by compressing the tenuous atmosphere. This isn't possible on the Moon. It's far cheaper to refill our suit by compressing the Martian atmosphere than it is to ship carbon and nitrogen from Earth to the Moon. Economics dictate that the Lunar suit must leak less, therefore more we expect it to be more complex.
"On Mars or on the Moon, a hole in your suit means you die if you can't get to safety quick enough."
With only 3-5psi in the suit(*) (otherwise the joints are so stiff you'll be sweating like a pig after walking 50 yards), even a bit of cheap duct tape will take care of anything up to 5mm diameter
(*) Mars atmosphere is so tenuous it may as well be vacuum for this purpose - see James May flying in a U2 for an analogy and even that was denser than martian atmosphere.
The Martian atmosphere helps not because you're going to be able to breathe it directly nor because it makes any real difference to your suit design but because it's a (relatively) straightforward process to make breathable air from Martian air. That means that on Mars you've got four sources of oxygen: tanks you bring with you; recycled exhaled air; made from atmospheric CO2; and made from H2O. Making O2 from CO2 is also something that a pre-positioned machine could do relatively easily without having to crawl around and dig up very slightly damp soil (water concentrations of less than 10^-3) as it would have to on the moon.
That many separate air systems and most importantly the fact that they will keep going for as long as your solar panels, is what you want if you're planning a permanent presence.
Just because you fail to see how an atmosphere makes things easier doesn't mean that having an atmosphere makes things easier. Here is a very brief list of key advantages.
Areobraking - The amount of energy needed to send a craft from Earth to land on Mars and the Moon are similar because the Martian bound ship doesn't have to use fuel to cancel orbital velocities.
Micrometeorite shielding - Specs of dust are an impact hazard on the Moon. The Martian atmosphere eliminates this potential threat.
Radiation shielding - The Martian atmosphere provides far more than the Lunar lack-of-atmosphere.
Temperature regulation - The Martian atmosphere traps enough heat that we can deal with the night time cold. Even with a P-238 heating element, the most recent lunar rover began malfunctioning after only one Lunar night. Solar powered robots without a P-238 heating element can survive over a decade on Mars.
Extractable resources - The Martian atmosphere is an easily processed source of carbon and nitrogen. Virtually all of the chemistry we use involves carbon and nitrogen. A colony will require tons of carbon and nitrogen reserves per person. Based on current knowledge, there are no extracable carbon or nitrogen sources on the Moon.
The last point is very important. Each colonist will require a carbon reserve of 12+ tonnes for the agrarian sector of the economy. When we start adding other economic sectors, such as textiles, plastics, and metallurgy, the per-colonist reserve necessary grows rapidly. On Mars CO2 capture and recycling doesn't have to be perfect. We can simply compress more atmosphere if we need more carbon. Every loss on the Moon has to be replaced with imports. Capturing the CO2 emmissions from aluminium production is going to add mass and complexity, with necessary higher price tag, of Lunar equipment compared to equipment that does the same job on Mars.
The only advantage that the Moon has, and this isn't based on current technology, is travel time.
Not so: days are endless and nights are endless, it just depends of where on the moon you are. [search for "moon tidal lock" on your favorite google ;)]
Err, no. The moon is tidally locked with respect to the Earth, not the Sun. You only need to look at the moon over the course of a few nights to see that specific points of the surface alternate between day and night as the phase changes.
"The position of the earth may be endlessly stable in the Moon's starry sky but there is definitely a 28 (earth) day light/dark cycle."
The point is that it's always the same half of the moon getting lit by the sun. If you were on the moon, wherever you stood would either always be lit or always be dark, because its rotation and revolution periods match practically perfectly.
Nope. Same side always faces Earth (give or take a bit of wobble), but the far side of the moon will be illuminated when it is on the day side of Earth, and the near side will be illuminated when it is on the night side of Earth.
"The point is that it's always the same half of the moon getting lit by the sun."
That's twice now. All you have to do is look up in the sky over a few nights and you can see for yourself just how silly that it. Think about it. If there's a "full" moon then the whole of the visible side of the moon is lit by the sun from the front
Now go look at all the video of the well publicised and reported total eclipse across the USA the other month. Which side of the moon was likely to be illuminated by the Sun while the moon was between the Sun and the Earth?
You almost sound like a flat earther, or maybe think the Sun orbits the Earth.
"Unless the transcontinental railway was required to transport, on its very first trip, all the infrastructure, tooling, factories and starter material to build *another* railway for the return trip, then no, there is very little similarity."
I can't upvote this enough. All analogies to Earthly voyages and expeditions fall over as soon as you remember that all space journeys involve taking absolutely everything with you, including the air you breath.
Building a transcontinental railway, or sailing off to "discover" America, at least you can breath all the way, find local food and water with little or no imported technology and generally have the ability to survive, even if shipwrecked or lost i the wilderness.
But you're both completely ignoring the context of the analogy. It wasn't an analogy about the *difficulty* of the task. It was an analogy about the *defined scope* of the task. He was saying that SpaceX's goal is to provide the service that gets people and materials from point A to point B - and not, for instance, to provide shelter and power and so on and so forth at point B. In the way the transcontinental railway companies provided a way to get stuff from coast to coast, but didn't build wells and houses and all the rest of the stuff that was needed for people to actually live there in comfort.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
