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ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17933 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
 Posted: 27-11-2012 14:31 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Elon Musk Wants to Build 80,000-Person Mars Colony
By Adam MannEmail AuthorNovember 26, 2012 | 8:31 pm | Categories: Space
Elon Musk doesn’t just want to send a person to Mars — he wants to send 80,000. According to Space.com, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX spilled details about his hopes for a future Mars colony during a talk at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London on Nov. 16.
Earlier this year, SpaceX became the first private U.S. company to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. Musk has never been shy about his ambitions to take human colonists to another planet, mentioning in the past that he wants to provide flights to Mars for about $500,000 a person. But now he’s talking about building a small-city-sized settlement on the Red Planet, starting with a 10-person crew in the coming decades to begin establishing and building infrastructure.
That first flight would be expensive and risky but “once there are regular Mars flights, you can get the cost down to half a million dollars for someone to move to Mars,” Musk told Space.com. ”Then I think there are enough people who would buy that to have it be a reasonable business case.” Musk added that he sees the future 80,000-person colony as a public-private enterprise costing roughly $36 billion.
Science-fiction inspired plans are one thing. Musk still has many challenges ahead of him before such a scheme could become reality, including figuring out exactly how to deal with radiation on the way to Mars, how to land humans on the planet’s surface, and how to keep them alive once there. Wired Magazine Editor Chris Anderson interviewed Musk in the November issue, where he outlines a few ways that could help us get there:
Chris Anderson: How were you drawn to space as your next venture?
Elon Musk: In 2002, once it became clear that PayPal was going to get sold, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, the entrepreneur Adeo Ressi, who was actually my college housemate. I’d been staying at his home for the weekend, and we were coming back on a rainy day, stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway. He was asking me what I would do after PayPal. And I said, well, I’d always been really interested in space, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do as an individual. But, I went on, it seemed clear that we would send people to Mars. Suddenly I began to wonder why it hadn’t happened already. Later I went to the NASA website so I could see the schedule of when we’re supposed to go. [Laughs.]
Anderson: And of course there was nothing.
Musk: At first I thought, jeez, maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place! Why was there no plan, no schedule? There was nothing. It seemed crazy.
Anderson: NASA doesn’t have the budget for that anymore.
Musk: Since 1989, when a study estimated that a manned mission would cost $500 billion, the subject has been toxic. Politicians didn’t want a high-priced federal program like that to be used as a political weapon against them.
Anderson: Their opponents would call it a boondoggle.
Musk: But the United States is a nation of explorers. America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.
Anderson: We all leaped into the unknown to get here.
Musk: So I started with a crazy idea to spur the national will. I called it the Mars Oasis missions. The idea was to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars, packed with dehydrated nutrient gel that could be hydrated on landing. You’d wind up with this great photograph of green plants and red background—the first life on Mars, as far as we know, and the farthest that life’s ever traveled. It would be a great money shot, plus you’d get a lot of engineering data about what it takes to maintain a little greenhouse and keep plants alive on Mars. If I could afford it, I figured it would be a worthy expenditure of money, with no expectation of financial return.
Read the rest of the interview. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/ |
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| kamalktk Great Old One Joined: 05 Feb 2011 Total posts: 705 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 30-11-2012 01:11 Post subject: |
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November 29th update.
http://nasaupdatecenter.us/press.html
Curiosity found plastic. A type of plastic that only can be made from a type of oil that, as far as we know, only forms from algae and zooplankton.
"The small spheres at Matijevic Hill have different composition and internal structure made completely of plastic. Curiosity's science team is evaluating a range of possibilities for how they formed. The spheres are up to about an eighth of an inch (3 millimeters) in diameter.
Last week Curiosity was able to use its SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) device to confirm the discovery. A robotic arm with a complex system of Spectral Analysis devices was able to vaporize and identify gasses from the sample, concluding that it is in fact plastic. How plastic formed or ended up on the Martian surface is quite an exciting mystery that sparks many questions. The type of plastic sampled as we know so far can only be formed using petrochemicals, meaning not only that there could possibly be a source of oil on the Red Planet, but that somehow it got turned into plastic. Even more interesting is that oil or petrochemicals used to create this type of plastic are only known to come from ancient fossilized organic materials, such as zooplankton and algae, which geochemical processes convert into oil pointing to the earthshaking evidence that there was once life on mars." |
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| Timble2 Imaginary person Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Total posts: 7114 Location: Practically in Narnia Age: 58 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 30-11-2012 01:59 Post subject: |
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| Autons? |
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| Monstrosa Joined: 07 Feb 2007 Total posts: 506 |
| Posted: 30-11-2012 08:54 Post subject: |
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Sorry, that's bullshite.
It's not from the NASA/JPL site which has .gov and some of the english is poor and doesn't make sense.
ETA Plus the image looks like mardi gras beads were badly edited on. |
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| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 30-11-2012 09:02 Post subject: |
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| Monstrosa wrote: | Sorry, that's bullshite.
It's not from the NASA/JPL site which has .gov and some of the english is poor and doesn't make sense.
ETA Plus the image looks like mardi gras beads were badly edited on. |
Thought that was what they looked like... a string of blue and green plastic beads!  |
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| kamalktk Great Old One Joined: 05 Feb 2011 Total posts: 705 Gender: Unknown |
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| Mythopoeika Boring petty conservative
Joined: 18 Sep 2001 Total posts: 9109 Location: Not far from Bedford Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 30-11-2012 20:59 Post subject: |
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It's a hoax, folks!
The server is now down and Slashdot issued an update saying it was a hoax. |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21365 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 08-12-2012 09:02 Post subject: |
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Nasa's 'Oppy' rover could be rolling on Martian clays
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco
Nasa's Opportunity rover appears to have reached another milestone in its amazing nine-year mission on Mars.
Scientists report the robot has been trundling over what they believe to be clay-bearing rocks on the edge of a wide bowl known as Endeavour Crater.
Clays are water-altered minerals, but very different to the ones seen by the rover so far on its travels.
Those previous minerals were in contact with acidic water; clays are formed in the presence of neutral water.
"What drives us to investigate the problem of water on Mars is the fact that water is a necessary condition for life; but there's water and there's water," said Prof Steve Squyres, Opportunity's principal investigator from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
"We've been seeing sulphate minerals from day one with this rover. These sulphates form under very acid conditions. And even though water was present, if it's that acid it would be very challenging as a place for life to take hold.
"However, if it's not acid, if it's the kind of water you can drink, it's the kind of water that's going to be more suitable for life; and that's what the clays point to," he told BBC News.
Prof Squyres was speaking here this week at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest annual gathering of Earth and planetary scientists.
He was updating the meeting on the most recent work of the robot which landed on Mars in 2004 to investigate its potential for microbial habitability in the past.
Since August 2011, it has been driving across the western rim of the 22km-wide Endeavour depression.
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Opportunity continues to exceed all expectations. Its twin, Spirit, which was landed on the other side of Mars, succumbed to the dust and cold of the Red Planet in 2010. But "Oppy" keeps on rolling.
"We voided the warranty on this thing a very long time ago," Prof Squyres told the BBC.
"It was designed for 90 days; it's been almost nine years - this thing could drop dead tomorrow.
"I hope it lasts a long time but nothing's a given this late into the mission.
"We have the equipment that we need [to answer the questions we have about these rocks], I just hope we have the time that we need."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20649462
Fingers crossed!  |
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| Bigfoot73 Great Old One Joined: 19 May 2009 Total posts: 1079 Location: Leeds Gender: Male |
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| Bigfoot73 Great Old One Joined: 19 May 2009 Total posts: 1079 Location: Leeds Gender: Male |
| Posted: 16-12-2012 18:32 Post subject: |
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| A shameless bump, but at least the anomalies I'm claiming to have found are quite easy to discern, prominently plasced on individual rocks with nothing but sand in the background! |
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| Zilch5 Vogon Poet
Great Old One Joined: 08 Nov 2007 Total posts: 1527 Location: Western Sydney, Australia Gender: Male |
| Posted: 17-12-2012 00:52 Post subject: |
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| Bigfoot73 wrote: | | A shameless bump, but at least the anomalies I'm claiming to have found are quite easy to discern, prominently plasced on individual rocks with nothing but sand in the background! |
Interesting theory - but unfortunately impossible to verify at this stage. |
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| Bigfoot73 Great Old One Joined: 19 May 2009 Total posts: 1079 Location: Leeds Gender: Male |
| Posted: 17-12-2012 03:38 Post subject: |
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Zoom in on the original and have a look at the furthest end of that rock - I'm more inclined to think it's coral now. The detail on some of it is elaborate, stalks with small blobs at the end, stems with heads.
I've since found another pic featuring a rock with a cluster of short tubes on the top. Good resolution too. |
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| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
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| Zilch5 Vogon Poet
Great Old One Joined: 08 Nov 2007 Total posts: 1527 Location: Western Sydney, Australia Gender: Male |
| Posted: 17-12-2012 10:45 Post subject: |
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| Could be simulacra = without getting the material back here, it is impossible to tell, that's all I am saying. |
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| gellatly68 dashing,handsome & modest Joined: 16 Jan 2004 Total posts: 80 Location: Where the beer tree grows Gender: Unknown |
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