The big gating problems in space flight to Mars are almost tailor-made to stimulate Elon Musk's boredom centers—bone loss, kidney stones, degenerating eyesight, figuring out how to reliably grow a salad. The exact kind of old man problems he doesn't want to think about on Earth.
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Musk is gonna put the Tesla full self driving team to work on all that just as soon as they are done with FSD.
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Plus, for a lot of the life support stuff, Musk can recycle his brilliant submersible design from Thailand.
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No. I get the feeling he's hoping someone else (NASA) would fund a mission once the rocket is capable to solve those problems.
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I’d love to see them do a trial run. Set up a starship-sized base in Antarctica, weld the doors shut and come back in a couple of years.
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This has been kind of tried. The problem is the real problem issues are caused by a combination of high radiation and microgravity, so can't be tested on Earth.
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AFAIK radiation isn't really an issue (small hardened shelter for solar storms + accepting some increase in cancer risk over decades), life support is non-trivial, but there's the ISS experience and initially it'll be a few people on a vehicle sized for 100, so lots of margin.
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Radiation is in fact a very serious issue, since we know little of the effects of long-term exposure to cosmic rays outside the magnetosphere. It's a direct risk but also indirectly compounds the bone loss and vision problems.
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Bunch of issues with a colony too. Big one for me is, the ethics of having babies in low gravity environments. Can fetuses properly develop much below 1g?
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They're largely following The Case for Mars.
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