Love it, great job SpaceX!

I watched the Martian again the other day and I marveled about how much has changed. With Starship progress, almost none of the plot really makes sense (bespoke vehicles and payloads etc). The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years. And if some dude were stranded on Mars, SpaceX could start lobbing things in his direction within maybe 30 days?

The Martian is a vision for a 2035 mission from 2011. We seem likely to beat that!

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FireBeyond 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years.

> The Martian is a vision for a 2035 mission from 2011. We seem likely to beat that!

What, exactly, is that guy doing for those five years? We don't know how to terraform Mars, and it's questionable what having someone on the surface will add to the knowledge we have of surface composition. And then what? That equipment is still on earth - after it's built.

Oh, and how's he planning to get off Mars?

I would comfortably make a $100 bet that there is no chance that we have sent a manned mission to even orbit Mars by 2035, let alone are "settling" it.

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WalterBright 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

At a minimum, it would be a major test of the habitat's ability to support human life for 5 years.

A major activity for the Martian would be exploring the location and prospecting for necessary raw materials, like digging for water.

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sho_hn 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...

	▲	FireBeyond 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		From this: > The effect of this no-abort condition is to make Mars mission design acutely risk-averse. "Acutely risk-averse" is not SpaceX. And being acutely risk-averse also underscores my point. If we are actually acutely risk-averse, we aren't going from "still test-flighting and developing the launch vehicle" to "manned mission" in 9.5 years.

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jjk166 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> What, exactly, is that guy doing for those five years?

Waiting to be rescued. We're not talking about sending one guy to mars for funsies, we're talking about one person left after an emergency. In the book he gets off mars by going to the launcher staged for the next mission, which again is a case of prepositioning extra hardware before sending someone to the planet.

If you assume a team of 5 people with an intended stay of 6 months, 5 years of supplies is a factor of safety of 2. If you send enough supplies to keep the whole team alive till the next launch window, that would keep a single person alive for about 2 decades (ignoring potential storage lifetimes).

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FireBeyond 5 days ago | parent [-]

> In the book he gets off mars by going to the launcher staged for the next mission, which again is a case of prepositioning extra hardware before sending someone to the planet.

There's a "world" of difference between the Eagle returning to Apollo 11 in low lunar orbit, and prepositioning a interplanetary vehicle capable of Mars-Earth (after getting from Earth to Mars), landing it (and without live feedback/guidance, because of roundtrip radio time, not to mention, this isn't some Rover, it's a really large rocket) well in advance of the manned mission (8 month flight time, IIRC, which means realistically it's going to be hanging out on Mars for a minimum of 6 years, even if you launch the manned mission within a couple of months of its arrival, which seems ... risky) and hoping that one solo astronaut is going to be capable of fixing any issues that arose during landing or during its ~year, untouched, and five years of his habitation.

Martian dust storms are a thing. "Smaller", continent-sized ones lasting weeks at a time, hit a few times a years. And then you have the planet-covering ones.

> Individual dust particles on Mars are very small and slightly electrostatic, so they stick to the surfaces they contact like Styrofoam packing peanuts.

So many issues. We're not solving these by 2035.

We are still at the point where unmanned, tiny craft with none of these challenges routinely fail. We're making progress, but we're not making that much progress, not that quickly.

	▲	jjk166 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Actually in this case it is an Eagle-like launcher meant to rendevous with a craft in orbit. I'm not sure why you are arguing this when you're completely unfamiliar with the premise being discussed.

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patall 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> SpaceX could start lobbing things in his direction within maybe 30 days?

If Earth and Mars are on opposite ends of the sun, nobody is going anywhere within 30 days. I do not see how anything will change from the one transfer window per ~2 years for the foreseeable future

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Teever 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

While this doesn't apply in the scenario that the person you're responding to has given there are ways to get many more transfer windows between Mars and Earth using Aldrin Cyclers.

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ashishuthama 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

'lobbing things' i.e launching things, OP didnt mean it would reach there in 30 days.

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jjk166 5 days ago | parent [-]

You couldn't start launching things in 30 days, you need to wait for a launch window, which happens every ~2 years. The transit times are on top of that.

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ricardobeat 5 days ago | parent [-]

The launch windows are for the most fuel efficient transfer. You can still launch outside of the window if you’re willing to pay the cost elsewhere.

	▲	jjk166 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Higher energy transfers can widen the launch windows, but their frequency remains unchanged. The frequency is due to the synodic period of Earth and Mars. It doesn't matter how fast you can get to a point in Mars' orbit if Mars doesn't happen to be there when you arrive. Any given trajectory will only work when the planets are in one specific configuration relative to one another; having more delta-V to play with means you can choose from a broader range of possible trajectories. In the limit, there are hyperbolic trajectories that would basically give you such wide launch windows that you could launch whenever, but you're not doing that with chemical rockets.