[RD] Pessimism about Mars

hobbsyoyo said:
tl;dr: Jurassic Park CONFIRMED
Click to expand...

That was on topic. To (almost) quote the film:

"God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man creates dinosaurs. Dinosaurs eat man. Mars colonization irrelevant."
 
I'd been under the impression that it was vaguely understood that, by the time we had the technology to colonise Mars anyway, it would have become more resource-efficient to simply construct artificial habits in space. Mars doesn't need to accomodate more than robots mining for whatever minerals we can't more easily get in the asteroid belt.

I'm honestly sort of surprised to learn that anyone was still taking "colonise Mars" as a serious item on humanity's to-do list.
 
Traitorfish said:
I'd been under the impression that it was vaguely understood that, by the time we had the technology to colonise Mars anyway, it would have become more resource-efficient to simply construct artificial habits in space. Mars doesn't need to accomodate more than robots mining for whatever minerals we can't more easily get in the asteroid belt.

I'm honestly sort of surprised to learn that anyone was still taking "colonise Mars" as a serious item on humanity's to-do list.
Click to expand...
I honestly think personal preference will play a large part in that, a lot of people want to go to Mars because of their romanticized ideals of what it is and would be like. That same affection isn't there for space stations and asteroids.

And that's why I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that there will be mass off-Earth movements of humans. Right now it's fantasy and romance but once people are faced with a real choice to sell all their belongings to strap into a rocket with the contained energy of a small nuke* that hurls them at the sky at 3g's where they face radiation, space sickness and tons and tons of discomfort and hard work, I think a lot of that enthusiasm will dissipate. Add in hyper realistic simulations that allow the experience without the sacrifice and the dream will die.

*Oh and unlike for professional astronauts right now, there's no good abort modes for Musk's Starship either. It either works or it doesn't, a bit like an airliner only without 100 years of safety regulations written in blood to make sure the things are safe.
 
Last edited:
We learn faster now so it probably won't take a hundred years to gather up enough blood to write such regulations though.
 
Timsup2nothin said:
We learn faster now so it probably won't take a hundred years to gather up enough blood to write such regulations though.
Click to expand...
It's notable though that the FAA has taken an extremely hands-off approach to space tourism companies and is effectively letting them self-regulate for the next ~10 years. The thinking is that this is such a new market that they don't want to regulate it out of existence using regulatory models that may or may not apply and is trying to give them some breathing room to figure things out before coming in with a more heavy-handed approach. Whether this is a good or bad thing is something that the first paying passengers will be finding out in real time.

For some of these companies, a single mishap with paying customers will likely push them out of business so they have a lot riding on getting this right. Although I'm somewhat amazed there are still people wanting to fly on Virgin Galactic given they've had two deadly accidents already; one involving an actual flight of the craft, the other being a ground explosion during test.
 
Timsup2nothin said:
Safety regulations are always founded in "whelp, don't do that again."
Click to expand...
Hence the phrase, written in blood. Unfortunately I don't think there is much tolerance in the markets for these sorts of mistakes. Unlike airline travel, you don't have to fly in space. It's purely for fun at this point and in the immediate future. So while we're all spooked by the 737 MAX debacle, we all still fly on airplanes because it's the only viable solution for a lot of travel scenarios. That's just not true for space tourism and so the tolerance for failure with the public is going to be much lower. It's also worth pointing out that for the in-flight failure, the cause should have been readily anticipated and headed off with very minimal design changes but was not. Basically, the pilot pulled a lever to activate the drag brakes right when they went supersonic which caused the thing to break apart. That he was physically able to pull that lever at that time was monumentally stupid - it should have been locked out until appropriate conditions had been met. I can't speak about the test explosion because the details on how that happened are much thinner on the ground.

In any case, you're right that this is how these regulations tend to be written (in the aftermath of a failure, not before) but I don't think that will be good enough for these companies to survive due to their nature as purely tourist enterprises rather than as a utility service.
 
hobbsyoyo said:
Hence the phrase, written in blood. Unfortunately I don't think there is much tolerance in the markets for these sorts of mistakes. Unlike airline travel, you don't have to fly in space. It's purely for fun at this point and in the immediate future. So while we're all spooked by the 737 MAX debacle, we all still fly on airplanes because it's the only viable solution for a lot of travel scenarios. That's just not true for space tourism and so the tolerance for failure with the public is going to be much lower. It's also worth pointing out that for the in-flight failure, the cause should have been readily anticipated and headed off with very minimal design changes but was not. Basically, the pilot pulled a lever to activate the drag brakes right when they went supersonic which caused the thing to break apart. That he was physically able to pull that lever at that time was monumentally stupid - it should have been locked out until appropriate conditions had been met. I can't speak about the test explosion because the details on how that happened are much thinner on the ground.

In any case, you're right that this is how these regulations tend to be written (in the aftermath of a failure, not before) but I don't think that will be good enough for these companies to survive due to their nature as purely tourist enterprises rather than as a utility service.
Click to expand...

Oh, the company that suffers the failure is most likely done for, but then the regulation sets in and other companies are "better and safer" and the show goes on. Yes, air travel has the "immunity of indispensability," but back when the blood was being collected to regulate it air travel was just as novel and frivolous as space travel is now.
 
One complication and big difference with air travel are the various schemes being employed to reach space. With air travel, airplanes are fundamentally the same (honorable mention to boatplanes). With space travel, there's a bunch of radically different ideas being put forward that will all need different regulations. There's air-dropped rockets, there's rockets that take off from a pad and there's rockets that take off from runways and they have different schemes for landing as well. This will make it harder to anticipate what regulations are appropriate, much less which regulations can be universalized.

Timsup2nothin said:
but back when the blood was being collected to regulate it air travel was just as novel and frivolous as space travel is now
Click to expand...
I think airplanes went right on being kind of unsafe until the 90's or so, by which point they had long since become the only way to cross long distances. But I'm not super versed in this so I could be wrong. (my edit shows I'm wrong on this)

Edit:
Found a graph and it looks like the number of accidents nose-dived (pardon the pun) in the early 60's, though overall fatalities remained a bit high. I assume the discrepancy is due to the larger volume of passengers that planes could carry as wide-body jets took over air fleets.



Edit 2: Well the graph was showing up fine when I first posted it, not sure what happened. Sorry
 
Last edited:
Wing mount engines vs in line engines. Tricycle gear vs tail skids. Cable or hydraulic controls? Airplane design is reasonably standardized now, but in the early days there was a constant debate over methods, much like there is now with space travel. And most of the debates will likely be ended only by those regulations written in blood, if the development of air travel is any indicator.
 
None of those design considerations change the fundamental mode of operation of aircraft, whereas the examples I gave for the various spacecraft have massive impacts on how they're flown and recovered. The boat plane comes closest to being very different from most aircraft but even then it has lifting surfaces and the same basic engines as other aircraft. Spacecraft that drop from the air are very different from spacecraft that take off from a pad which are very different from spacecraft that take off from a runway under their own power. Similarly, spacecraft that land on a runway are very different from those that land at sea which in turn are somewhat different from those that land under parachutes on the ground. And then you get into radically different engine types and fuels and heatshields and all these other considerations. There's not really a neat analogue to airplane development because of all of these are fundamental differences with a lot of radically divergent design solutions. Then there's the orbital versus sub-orbital differences which is a whole other can of worms.
 
Last edited:
hobbsyoyo said:
None of those design considerations change the fundamental mode of operation of aircraft, whereas the examples I gave for the various spacecraft have massive impacts on how they're flown and recovered.
Click to expand...

Sure, but from a practical regulatory point of view it works out the same. There won't be all these different regulatory packages because...let's used the air dropped rocket as an example...company X, advocates of the air dropped launch, kill a bunch of people, and overnight there is one line of regulation; "air dropped launch shall not be used." So there will never be a need for a bunch of regulations about how to use air drop launch, just like there are really no regulations for tail skid designs on commercial aircraft other than "commercial aircraft shall use tricycle gear, period."
 
That's a fair point but I don't think it will be regulations that drive those major changes. I think it will come down to economic considerations driving some solutions out of the market rather than heavy-handed regulation. It's my hope anyways that this is the case - that economics drive out some solutions before a bunch of people get killed before regulations are written in response to that. But I guess we'll see!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Birdjaguar
  • Poll
AI and Art
2
Replies
25
Views
1K
Hygro
Hygro
Birdjaguar
Warfare
4 5 6
Replies
113
Views
4K
Comrade Ceasefire
Comrade Ceasefire
Narz
Globalization
3 4 5
Replies
93
Views
4K
Narz
Narz
Joij21
Russia Invasion Spillover
8 9 10
Replies
187
Views
6K
saamohod
saamohod
Stew Pid
Selecting One's Children: Genetics & Eugenics
2
Replies
35
Views
721
Arwon
Arwon
Top Bottom