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Making Life Multiplanetary Discussion
Recorded: May 30, 2025 Duration: 1:44:22Space Recording
Short Summary
Elon Musk's recent SpaceX presentation has sparked discussions on ambitious Mars timelines and the potential for lunar resource utilization, indicating a growing trend in space exploration that could parallel opportunities in the crypto sector.
Full Transcription
Hello, can people hear me? Thank you. Can you hold the wave if you can hear me? I've got one. Thank you. Jim, Jim, how's growing?
Hello.
Are you hearing me well?
I'm great.
And what about yourself? I'm good, thank you you i'm going to wait for a few more people to
come on um if anybody wants to come up and speak uh just just um request and i'll add you
uh i want to have sort of a conversation going
um I want to have sort of a conversation going. Is your day going?
Hi, it's nine o'clock in the evening here.
Oh, I mean, it's four o'clock in the evening here, but yeah, I guess so.
Yeah, good.
I've been outdoors most of the day.
There's a place near where I live called Ferry Meadows,
which is effectively terraformed.
Someone took an old quarry and made an artificial lake there.
My son's been learning to sail
right so uh yeah if anyone's joined if you want to come up and join the conversation just send a
request and i will i will add you uh i take it everyone has seen
Elon Musk's presentation at SpaceX.
It's very exciting, very ambitious.
It's nice that we're finally getting real Mars timelines and numbers.
Well, he has been sort of hinting at some of the early stuff.
He said five ships in 2026 last year, I think.
Yeah.
But what's really interesting is actually further on the timeline
where he's going like these numbers of like hundreds of ships
with hundreds of tons of payload.
This is just by like 2033.
That's kind of crazy.
I mean, I've already seen some response from the media
basically saying that 2026 is not possible at all.
Like the...
Sorry for interrupting you.
The Economist had a piece saying that
2026 was off the table completely,
but no one was willing to byline it.
So obviously, nobody felt like
they were willing to put their name on that prediction,
which is probably smart of them.
So I'm just going to bring up the big graphic.
Yeah, the, so they.
Yeah, I see the article you're talking about.
The one where it said Elon Musk's plane to go to Mars next year's toast.
I don't know.
If you've got that link,
you want to post it in the space.
Here, let me find it.
I had a screenshot saved,
but I didn't have the link.
Yeah, that's good.
Don't give him the engagement.
Here, I can just
think if you've
guys, in the meantime, I'd invite everyone to share the spaces to get more people on board.
To share the spaces, you have click uh in the left the bottom corner i'm using ios and i have
to click on the on the blue plus so please share the spaces with your friends let's get more people
here that's a good idea thank you yes that's a good idea i i've not done many spaces before i'm
not much of a host they're really buggy but they're kind of fun
they are this is the first time that i've had one that i'm recording which hasn't crashed
immediately so uh clearly uh elon stepping back from politics has let him fix some things here uh yeah the uh in terms of uh the um the 2026 window i i don't think they'll do full five
um ships to mars because that would take probably about 20 launches over the
window uh yeah go ahead you can speak uh don't need to put your hand up
uh lungo
uh sorry i had some issues with the connection could you please repeat the question
i was talking about the 26 window um i don't think there's going to be five um five flights i think
that's they they will whatever they've got that's working come november next year they'll try and
send um if they can send anything at all i think uh my assumption is that they'll get some level of
they'll get some level of on-over refilling up and running.
And then if they can do on-over refilling at all,
they'll make some kind of attempt,
even if it's only one Starship,
if it doesn't have any payload.
So I'm betting against these people who are saying
that 2026 is off the table.
What do you guys think
well i also think that sorry do you want to go first um yeah i just want to to say that
we will know by the end of this year because it all depends on the refueling capability one important thing that
i'm thinking of is that uh mark mentioned that 80 percent of the
math would be oxygen and it feels like the right way would be to establish an oxygen
production facility on the moon in the next I don't know how many years with
the all the I'm gonna stop you right there because I made that exact same suggestion and
must called me to shut up literally I pointed this out I even calculated that uh the proportion of um
uh oxygen was 69 and I thought that would tickle his fancy but no uh
uh yeah he any ideas why no he says it's a distraction which i think he sort of misunderstood
what i was saying said spacex should go and do a lunar base uh and he says no no no let's just
moon is a distraction we need to go to mars And this actually got picked up by like the press
because they interpreted him saying
that he was out of Artemis, which he was.
And he was just wanting to make specifically
suggesting what you've just pointed out,
which is that like you grab a handful of dirt off the moon.
It's like 40% oxygen.
You don't even have to go to the poles
and start like messing around with the
volatiles and the shattered craters. You can just grab dirt and you can turn it into
like the majority of your rocket propellant. But I think his perspective was they've just got to
focus tightly on Mars and they've got to do everything to get to Mars and nothing that is
not on the critical path to Mars. But yeah, I agree. I think that
given how much basically every propellant combination we use, the majority of the mass
is oxygen. I think mining the moon is a great idea. And I think that somebody else should do it.
Because if you can buy, they'll sell you starships to go to the moon. They have no problem with that.
they'll sell you starships to go to the moon.
They have no problem with that.
And if you then come back and you're able to sell them liquid oxygen
at a half or a tenth the price, which they can launch from the sunset,
they're not going to say no.
So, yeah, SpaceX shouldn't be doing that.
I mean, what do you think?
I think I kind of just agree with Elon.
I think the data gathered from the lunar landing
and the lunar base is irrelevant to the Mars program,
which is ambitious.
I think they're going to do both at the same time, obviously,
and they're going to get a permanent base for Artemis
just to go above and beyond the contract and make it a little
easier for Artemis to establish future planes that'll happen around Artemis 5, Artemis 6.
I don't think that...
You know, I'm just thinking about this a little bit.
I don't think Elon really cares about Mars 2026 despite what he says because I don't think
landing on Mars in 2026 is going to be
the limiting factor of the Starship program.
I think production
and launch capability
are going to be the big factor and I don't
think a two year delay is going to affect
the 2033 and 2035 plans
that much.
I don't know, maybe I'm just being a little insane.
Well, I think he does care actually because what he was i mean if you listen to what he's just been saying
recently he's always going about the protection system and that is a big headache like if people
talk about things like the hazards of mars like radiation and things in deep space if i was going
to mars i would not be worried about the radiation i would be worried
about the entry descent and landing on mars because that's scary and they need they need
live data they're simulating it they showed like the um the sort of torch um with the oxygen um
but they need to actually go to mars to find out if they can actually land on mars ultimately
as they are they need to test this early and they test this often so i think i think he does care
about the 26th window for that reason uh but you either uh they'll have to crank up production
and launch rates anyway to meet that because not only for the aim
of launching five ships in a single window
they'll need to be launching a lot faster
they'll also need to bunch
up these launchers because
when you start sending
cryogenic fuels up in orbit
the sun's going to hit it, it's going to start
boiling off so
you'll be in a race against this
boil off to get
enough fuel in the tanks to make your trans mars injection burn
i uh i wonder if um you noticed on the slides that they said 10 tons
um on the first ships so i think that would require fewer refueling yes uh um for those
i had a blog post about this last year I think I had a
graph
let me see if you can find it
but yeah
that's probably what they're intending
because if they could if they have
a bunch of refueling ships
to refuel five starships
they could put more of them into
a lesser number of
starships and send with full payload but the fact they're sending more starships with very little
payload suggests to me that they are focused on getting as many shots on goal as possible
so i agree yeah even if they could even if i think they would rather send them with zero
payload and send five and send like four with 10 tons payload uh because yeah that's for the
first window they just want to know or prove they can land on mars i mean except for like maybe ISRU, there's not a lot of payload they can get with five
ships there that will meaningfully affect like the long-term plans.
Like 50 tons is not a lot of resources to build a base with.
And they care, like you said, they care more about the data of re-entry and landing than
they do about the actual payloads, whatever they might bring.
Luke, could you move your microphone a little further from your mouth?
Oh, I'm so sorry. Yeah, my mic is just really, really finicky. Give me a second to fix it.
I was wondering on the political aspect of a possible new space race as the um i think 80th anniversary of the pla in china is 2029 and they want to have
it's the 80th anniversary of the declaration of the prc i think i mean the pla oh prc sorry my
mistake and um so somebody made a point that um we could have a space race again where we have uh america versus china or whatever and have
tons of money and political will pushed into that i just wanted to ask is that better for my mic is
it better now it's a little better yeah okay i can turn it down more if you need to just let me know
that's yeah i think there's a there's getting towards a space race with China. I think a few years ago, it was mostly in the minds of the Washington DC establishment
who just wanted to gin up a space race
to get more political support.
But I'm more thinking that it is actually happening
more of the Chinese end as well,
especially with regards to the moon,
because they're taking that quite seriously and
there's a chance now with at least artemis that china could get the first boot since 1972 on the
moon they could land the first woman they could make the first landing the south pole and they
could get to the south pole and then say oh we've established an exclusion zone
you can't operate here because we're operating here and this could conveniently cover a bunch
of resources like for all mankind really i mean yeah the first series for all mankind was i think
it went off the rails a bit later uh lunko did you want to speak yeah i just want to add that
just a couple of days ago china has successfully landed their rocket to to see so they're working on
same technology as a mask obviously they are i don't know like five ten years uh beyond uh
spacex but um with the
china approach i believe they would they would get there and i think it's great for all space people
because now we are entering the new space race meaning that
other nations will join as well at least they will try to join they will put more resources so
my bet is that by 2040 we will have cities both on mars and the moon i think well we'll have
basis for sure i'm not sure that everyone's going to live permanently on the moon i think well we'll have bases for sure i'm not sure that everyone's going to live
permanently on the moon i think mars maybe we can live on mars it depends on a few things but
the moon i think is just a little too hostile for permanent like
habitation i think it'll be more a scientific outpost in industrial base it'd be like it'd be
like an oil rig like you can you can go to an oil rig for six months and
live there and work there but you won't want to like have a house on an oil rig
yeah for sure it does make sense to live permanently on the moon but it makes sense
to have a permanent basis yeah and getting back to the discussion for sure oxygen must be supplied
from the moon or yeah yeah of course like for the
first mission must want to get straight to mars which makes total sense but it's not sustainable
to make the space economy and to make humans truly interplanetary species the only sustainable way is
to get on the moon and have a permanent settlement that would be
able to supply us with the valuable resources starting with the oxygen i mean i don't um i don't
i tend to avoid being overtly sort of descriptive and saying this must be the way because i mean
like you could if you establish a market for buying oxygen in space,
then either the, if the moon is correct, the correct place to mine it, it'll develop.
The US Space Force has been toying with the idea of a strategic propellant reserve,
where they essentially pay a fixed strike price for propellants delivered to, like,
a depot they set up somewhere like an l1 or something
uh they're a grand point between the earth and the moon so they'd that essentially set the depot
up they would put right out this kind of open contract anyone who delivers us uh a ton of
propellant here gets a million dollars or whatever and then just wait for like people
to figure it out so it would be moon asteroids whatever i'm encouraging the uk government to
look into something similar
because i think i think it's very good to have contracts with a sort of physical
outcomes like the SpaceX contract that deliver a cargo to the ISS I mean yeah
all the things that the government attempts to do or attempt to pay people
to do they have very pay people to do,
they have very ill-defined objective functions which causes problems.
Like in the UK, we have the National Health Service
and they have targets to provide good health care.
I mean, like, how do you refine what good health care is
to, like, a small set of numbers?
Inevitably, these targets get ruthlessly gamed
uh sorry hang on a second
and um and so I'm just having to check up on something
yeah the targets get gamed
but with like physical ones
like you have to deliver 3000 kilos of cargo to the ISS
how do you fake that
and that's sort of the same principle behind
establishing a strategic propellant reserve it's how do you fake that and that's sort of the same principle behind um
establishing a strategic propellant reserve
uh do we have a new speaker uh rudica hello
yeah hello uh yeah about the moon so i can really see why he's not too eager to to do the moon thing because i mean he's got a
the plan is to have a system that can launch once per hour once maybe two hours so why would you do
the moon um i mean sure it might be a little bit cheaper from the moon but this is a very long-term
thing yeah but i mean he will definitely definitely if you you will sell you
a starship if you want to go to the moon and you'll buy oxygen from you if you manage to get
oxygen from the moon so they cannot do everything that's yeah i don't think spacex should focus on
in fact if they could sort of walk away from the hls contract that might actually be a good thing i don't know how good
it is for them internally um but blue origin seems pretty keen on building bespoke moon landers
uh and they they run on hydrologs so they'll be able to use isru more easily um
and the the crew access point isn't like 40 meters off the ground which I think is a plus
I always wondered why the Starship HLS had to land vertically because it's not using the same
engines that it normally uses to land it's got some extra engines at the top why couldn't it
just not have pairs of them on each side and land horizontally which would seem to be a more sensible arrangement
i don't know i think all the to be the renderings that we have seen i'm not sure how much they
they match reality they are just very notional i think yeah so it might be that the i mean
there might be that things change very much now that the whole Artemis, everything is in flux now.
And they might land horizontally.
I mean, it's not...
It's much more sensible.
I mean, it makes crew getting out easier.
And if it's on its side, if it's going to stay there,
you can just pile Regolith on top for shielding
and bam, instant massive lunar base.
Yeah, you can also land normally and then just tip it over with rocket engines.
That's all.
I mean, it's not as complex as landing a dragon capsule or something propulsively.
So I think it's all doable, but we'll see what they do now what that they have
a little bit more um freedom I mean they had to really really the entire Artemis design was so
constrained by politics uh they had uh to to walk very walk carefully to not to step on anybody's
toes uh for example no no dragon cannot go to
the moon it's impossible we need to use orion now now that's probably out of the window I think so
it should be quite interesting what what they come up with now that they have freedom uh to to think
about it really I think we might see some very interesting new developments in the next six months or something, some new mission concept.
Going back to Mars, though, I mean,
if you look sort of beyond 2026 at the diagram of like 20 launches in the 28-29 window and 100 launches in the 31 window and 533 does this seem credible um lung code you
want to go
i'm sorry i had again an issue could you please repeat the question with the connection uh yeah the the the further on timeline the 20 launches in 2029
going to 500 in 2033 do we think that's credible i think it's doable i much love
mask's approach frankly when he introduced the concept of mechazilla, I thought that it's crazy that it won't work.
But it did work, so I think it's doable and it's actually much more realistic than a 2026 mission.
Just maybe it would be shifted, because obviously in space most of the missions are shifted by a couple of years.
And in case of Mars, exactly by two years.
But there is a huge chance that by the time, even if they won't make it in 2026, as they expect,
still they will get the technology.
And there'll be plenty of Starships ready
that will fly to Mars.
So it's really hard to predict.
This year, I think, will be crucial.
As Matt mentioned, the key technology that they need is orbital refueling. Yeah, Astro... Something. They successfully made a photo, made a video of an old rocket working on the debris removal technology.
So it's...
Even nowadays we live in the world where even without...
Where satellites can reach uncontrolled vehicles. So when you have two controlled vehicles, it's definitely doable.
So as I've said, it's really hard to predict, huge chance that in 2028 there'll be several missions.
And this year is crucial.
This year and early this year is crucial this year and early this year uh is crucial as
it all ties to the refueling technology so let's wait for the refueling i think they said they're
going to demo that next year that's been pushed back a bit presumably because we've had like
three launch failures in a row well at least two failures and one partial failure um well they
the i think that before they get there they need to get wrapped to three working um
because i'm not sure that uh i mean if you look at the ninth test flight, the payload was announced as, I think, 16 tons.
If that's the limited payload of the current generation,
I don't think they can do,
I don't think they can carry enough propellant
to do a service Mars mission.
So they need to get the next generation Starships going
with Raptor 3.
So that's what they said they'd do by the end of the year.
We've got a new speaker, Rina.
Hello.
Hello, everybody.
And hello, Peter.
I want to say that
on the last
take that I think
that next three years will
define the next century of
space development
and while we
debate Mars timelines
the moon is becoming the most valuable
real estate in the solar
system
but the
main problem I think
is and I'm saying this on behalf of Lunka, is that about 40% failure rate shows that we need better coordination tools and we need them now.
And because space teams, they work in silos,
engineers use like 10, 15 tools at a time,
and they cannot collaborate effectively.
And we're like spending 100 k's on a kilogram to ship.
And bottleneck isn't rockets it's it's really
collaboration and all preventable for this for solution to this is a better
testing and I hope that our work with LUNCO, the platform ecosystem that we built, LUNCO SIM,
it will help us to accelerate this Moon-Mars race.
So I think that Moon isn't just a stepping stone to Mars, it's a foundation, as you already mentioned.
It's about 80% of rocket fuel is oxygen and lunar ice is oxygen and fraction. What we do between now and then is to make or break because NASA is STMD on lunar development.
So the windows are closing fast and we can either build collaborative infrastructure that enables sustainable lunar economy or just watch preventable failures drain billions more and I even don't begin to
speak about space medicine because I'm inside the problems of space medicine, the problem of transportation is not a big problem anymore.
I don't know.
I mean, some of the issues of space medicine, such as radiation, for instance,
if the solution is shielding, then the amount of mass you transport
determines how much shielding you can carry.
This is one of the reasons I've spoken before about the use of cyclers,
where you put a permanent base on an orbit
that sort of automatically pings between Earth and Mars
every 26 months.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And you can just build up a big station
which has a lot of shielding.
And that is actually something that...
I wrote a thread about this and Elon liked it.
So he knows what cyclers are for sure.
And if you look at the amount of mass they're looking to throw in the next few
synodic cycles there's plenty enough to spare to start building up some kind of cycle station
so I mean in terms of meeting the space medicine challenges,
that might be something they do.
And I think they've done more internally than they speak about publicly.
Yeah, of course.
They have missions and collaboration with Tricia.
And the amount of research that's sponsored by SpaceX,
it's massive.
Well, thank you.
I'm not sure that the failures are due to SpaceX with the Starship program are due to coordination or software.
I think...
No, no, no. Sorry, sorry.
To make it clear, I was talking in absolute
with all the missions...
Oh, you mean like the landers?
Yeah, yeah.
Ah, yes, yes.
Yeah, of course.
It's about the acceleration rate
for infrastructure on the moon
to make it sustainable.
So if we...
We need to build infrastructure and for So we need to build infrastructure,
and for that we need to be more successful.
I agree, yes, yes.
Yes, I mean, presumably,
if you can get somebody to build a nice flat landing pad
and put some radio beacon near it
so you can just directly fly to somewhere you know you can land,
yeah, that would presumably make the failure rate of eclipse missions go down.
But interestingly, China has a perfect batting record for the moon landers.
They've literally never missed.
And I think for moon orbiters as well,
which I think is interesting to note,
especially because they're the main competitors for the moon.
So I'm not sure why you've had Israel and Japan
and various other private identities,
and India's had a failure as well.
I think, like you said, there's so many disparate groups
who've failed, and I think that's – and you're saying this is due to lack of coordination?
Yeah, I actually don't have argument on that.
I agree with you that this may look like.
I think they're just lucky.
Of course,
they have
I think that's
the goal
that's driven
their
perspective that they have, the political spectrum,
that in that case, it makes a real impact on the performance of engineers.
They cannot accept failure.
I think that's the thing.
Okay.
Would it be the worst thing if NASA just said,
okay, China, you can have the moon,
and we'll just go
onto Mars because it's better.
Obviously, if you disagree
about the destination, but they could,
NASA could say, oh, we've been there, done that,
so we're going to Mars.
If China lands on the moon first,
is it really that much of a disaster for the
I don't know.
I mean, if China lands like one month month earlier than the us then obviously it's no
big deal but if the us should not or the west should not cede the moon to china because it's
in a way it's more important than mars it is strategically important so ideally for me it
would be that spacex does one moon mission just to demo the
thing and then hands over the implementation to somebody else so basically if if the Starship
program is as capable as they as it seems now and if it all works out then there could be I don't
know National Geographic could do a moon mission or
i don't know some some privately funded missions by philanthropists it could be i mean you could have multiple moon bases at that scale but spacex just has to do one landing just to show that they
can do it and then just say okay if you want to do it here we have one ship uh we know how to do
it just buy it if you want if not we here, we have one chip, we know how to do it. Just buy it if you want.
If not, we go to Mars basically.
That would be ideal, I think.
Yeah, I mean,
it's only in the 29 timescale,
they're claiming they will be able to launch 20 landers
with 75 tons each.
So let's say five refill flights each.
So that's 120 launchers in three months.
But here, that's...
Yeah, they didn't mention anything about propellant depot in the presentation.
So, yeah, excluding depots, that's 480 launches.
If they depot, at the depots, they're talking about 500 launches per year on the timescale.
Yes.
Per year on the time scale that's...
So currently, I really think that the plan, I mean, the plan so far is just...
I've got some requests, hang on.
Yeah, you were saying about the plan?
Yeah, I think the plan, Elon's plan so far is to just launch a ship and then launch tankers
like once per hour once every two hours and just fill the ship so then no there's no depot in the
current plan it's just having extremely high launch rate i'm wondering what happens to the tower
and the pad because he's saying he wants to land launch land on the pad put it down with the arms
refill it and launch again within an hour and then land again so that pad's going to get fried by the
exhaust of the rocket four times in like an hour yeah how's the going to hold up? The second one they're building in Burkutica is extremely overbuilt.
I mean, the current showerhead solution seems to work well at the current flight rate.
But the second one seems to be really made for, I don't know, they could probably do a full duration static fire on that thing.
probably do a full duration static fire on that thing it's so extremely overbuilt uh so i think
It's so extremely overbuilt.
this is the reason that they built it like that because they really want to be able to sustain
this high launch rate so the second the second uh tower in texas is basically a demo for the high
launch rate so it the that they have installed the uh what's it called, the thing where the ship sits, and it's way, way more solid.
Launch type.
Yes, exactly.
And it's extremely solid, and the cooling system,
everything is very, very, it's made for a high flight rate.
So regarding the moon, I mean, if they don't do a depot,
So regarding the moon, I mean, if they don't do a depot, then they will have a tanker fleet that has nothing to do for all the gap between the mass launch windows.
They'll have this giant fleet of tankers with nothing to do whatsoever.
So I think you don't have to worry about the moon.
They will have all this capacity and they will find a way to use it.
So either it all happens or nothing.
But I think the scenario where you go to Mars and then don't do anything on the moon,
it's just not realistic.
I think the moon is of high importance from a standpoint of what you guys are talking about.
Plus, if you think about any other major land acquisitions in history,
like the exploration of the new world,
both North America and South America,
as soon as it was seen that it was possible
and that there were resources there,
it was a massive race.
And what I think we are going to see, if I'm honest, is similar to what was being said earlier. from a very, very highly prized resource center for everyone once it can be done repeatedly and cost effectively.
That's a really good point. Helium-3 as well, if we end up using fusion as a large source of energy.
large source of energy i'm very skeptical of helium-3 um if you want if helium-3 becomes this
like gold mine like you can make it on earth you expose deuterium to neutrons you get to tritium
and then you just wait it's expensive yes but there's not that much demand for helium-3 at the moment if demand
goes up then yeah I'm just going to build like a like a swimming pool reactor or something and
enrich deuterium and sorry so the is it fertilized nutrient yeah 10 to tell him into
tritium and then harvest the helium-3 off it.
And I think I'd probably be able to undercoat
moon miners on that.
I didn't know that.
I didn't know it was that easy.
I mean, you do need
a nuclear reactor, and tritium
has a half-life of 12 years.
But this is done. This is how helium-3
is obtained at the moment, mostly, I think.
But you have to also consider that helium-3 is not just, I mean, you kind of just drill a hole on the moon and helium-3 comes out.
It is there, but it is very, very finely distributed.
So you would have to have a huge mining operation, like a mine millions of cubic meters of lunar material just to get the helium-3.
So it's not like you go there and pick up the helium-3.
It's a giant scale, way more complex than getting water.
I mean, if you take the regolith and you bake at a very high temperature
to get the oxygen out, presumably it'll emit some helium-3 as well.
You can just separate that fractionally as you're liquefying the oxygen.
So it might be just as a byproduct.
Sorry.
Carry on.
Oh, I think there's also a lot of titanium on the lunar regolith as well.
And we'd end up processing a whole bunch of it anyway, just by being there.
And whatever else is in there, which is, it's rich in a lot of metals.
And I think it would be super valuable for building infrastructure on the moon.
And because of its smaller gravity, well, we could also build spacecraft and things like that or whatever we end up needing.
Who knows? But having all of this material, a lot of which is on Earth, but also on the moon,
we could use it there and not have to ship it up from Earth's gravity well. So whatever is there, it would be
pretty valuable to have it up on a lower gravity well than on Earth.
I'm hearing a lot of Moon talk
this evening. No one seems that excited about Mars here.
Oh, sorry. That's fine.
I thought sort of the big big valiant cry for Mars
would be causing a lot more
excitement
sorry if I may
add to
lunar topic as well
not Mars
because we don't know
much about Martian regolith for right now to take it seriously but
about lunar regolith it's the main problem is moon dust and it's razor sharp glass shards and this it's it damage equipment and clocks filters and
so on it's a really big medicine risk and it it can also cause us severe
respiratory respiratory issues so when we talk about the extraction of oxygen and so on, we need to take into consideration that it's a really difficult task. talked about helium tree on Earth. It's really more simple
task than
to make it on the Moon.
I think that the dust
on Mars, despite the obviously
much talked
about perchlorate issue,
there's some weathering
because there is some atmosphere.
Yeah, of course.
It's not as nasty as the moon dust.
Totally.
What about microgravity or the lower gravity of Mars and like deteriorating bone strength?
How realistic is it for people to go there, live and come back?
To go there for a single mission is probably fine.
It's hard to say.
Sorry, to come back from that mission is a question.
Yes, that's the thing.
You can, sort of, if you have various ranges of spinning ships,
you can, like, produce some artificial gravity on the journey.
Yeah.
I would vote for that.
You can create artificial gravity on the surface
if you really need to with sort of like a spinning.
We do this on Earth for like spinning room experiments.
Charles, you're getting some feedback in your microphone, I think.
Oh, can you hear?
Is this bad at the moment?
It's sort of just a bit of a crackle in the background.
All right.
Let me move over here.
It might be a little bit better.
Anyway.
Yeah, the gravity prescriptions being investigated currently at small scale on the ISS.
Very small. Yeah, they have a mouse centrifuge which is basically i what i tell people is it's like the
space station from 2001 a space odyssey for mice yes very but not even not even comfortable for
mice it's that small yes and the uh the pi of the experimenteded talk of the Mars Society and this sort of came up is that
they don't have enough room to get good exercise.
So if you think with gravity,
there's you think of like a two axis plot,
one axis is gravity experiencing,
the other axis is physical activity.
And the edge of this graph which is um 1g we have
a load of data for we know what happens to humans in one gravity if they exercise a lot if they
don't exercise at all we have some data on the zero gravity edge uh about levels of exercise we
we need to fill in the middle um right because there's there's definitely a relationship between um
like the physical activity and the effects of gravity because we know this from the iss
um there's various ways to help they don't fully mitigate but they help
uh yeah and we know that people get very unhealthy on earth if they don't exercise
uh like i don't suspect that for instance if you went to like 0.9.9 for e of g it would essentially
be like earth gravity but well it's harder to stay fit and you just so i think we might learn
stuff about sort of the effects of sedentary lifestyles on humans by filling this plot uh
well the uh um the last thing i had seen on I may have mentioned this to you in some communication,
was that the result was that certain cells were not undergoing what would be their normal changes,
at least to the fullest extent. a gene expression change yes i think
i remember yeah yeah yeah and that's not necessarily debilitating it's just i think
i think it was to deal with the proportion of different types of muscle fibers if i remember
the paper that's right that's right that was what they had you know were able to detect given the time and systems available.
But the point there was that to the extent that they were able to spin it up,
neither lunar nor Mars gravity was sufficient to change that if I recall I did it did
preserve Martian gravity did preserve muscle mass it was just the muscle the
muscle mass was preserved but like I said they switched but the fiber types
and we're not sure that's bad if that's because they they euthanize the mice as
soon as they go back to them.
Right, of course, that's how they ended up.
So more research is needed, but I think they'll take some mice to Mars with them in the SpaceX missions.
Right. Well, the other thing I wanted to mention is in terms of helium-3, I've always been shaking my head for literally decades whenever I heard people bring that up as a lunar resource for sale wherever, given that we don't have fusion in your average household these days still.
in your average household these days still.
But seriously, the market that,
I don't know how many of you caught this thing
that Eric Berger wrote about,
I think it's Eric Schmidt,
the guy who used to be the Google,
and Berger said,
it turns out that these quantum computation units,
which go down to some fantastically low temperature,
they use helium-3 as the working fluid for that.
And it's not all that expensive, but it is expensive.
But that's what the main market that he sees, that is to say Schmidt.
And they're talking about tens of gigawatt requirements for AI or, yeah, I think it was AI systems in orbit.
And I may have been confusing that with the helium.
Yeah, I think that was two separate things.
Helium, quantum, quantum, and powerful AI.
And Dutton, you've been at your hand up for a while now.
Do you want to add something?
Oh, thank you.
It's my first time to talk to some of these people here.
So, hello.
Yeah, just a thought about, well, thoughts about a lot of things,
but the most recent one is, you know, with the humanoid robots, there might be a need to, like, for these humanoids because the cheaper one probably,
you know, would get a lot of that dust and whatnot stuck in the joints and, you know,
the motors and all the actuators and that kind of stuff, which reminds me, I'm really looking
forward to see the clothing lines develop for these humanoid robots.
But I'm not sure if they're going to be able to put on a jacket by itself or what.
But yeah, interesting topic. Thank you.
Yeah, I think they...
Yeah, I see the picture of these robots on the surface,
and I wonder what the regolith is going to do to their joints and I think the moon is worse but Mars
is still kind of not gonna be ideal for complex actuators I suspect you probably
put him in a space suit or a Mars suit that would duly test the Mars suits and
protect the robots wouldn't't you? Possibly.
I think that's one of the major reasons for making them human-sized,
so that they can use human tools and drive human cars
and run human equipment and everything like that ahead of us getting there.
Yeah.
I was just looking at this company here intermoon which has is building devices to
harvest helium-3 on the moon and of course one of the things they mention is uh is the quantum computing application.
And they do think that's of interest. Now, the business with what I'm going to check again on what
Schmidt's application precisely was so that I don't get that wrong.
So let's see. Anyway, please go ahead. I just wanted to.
What about lava tubes or underground shelters on Mars? Like how much of that are we going to be
doing or how much is that necessary? Like a meter or three of regolith should be enough
to get you down to like earth levels of background radiation is
what i remember yeah i think that most of the cosmic radiation danger on mars is coming from
close to zenithing about a 30 degree um cone above your head because uh at low at shallow angles the
there's enough atmosphere it has to pass through that you get some protection
there's enough atmosphere that has to pass through that you get some protection
there's a rough rule of thumb I use is that the the thickness of the atmosphere
the horizon on Mars is roughly the same as the thickness of the horizon at
zenith when you're on a plane like 40,000 feet or whatever. And that's, we're reasonably confident
that's safe for humans.
So going down into a cave,
probably not necessary.
You just need to have a big thick roof
and a healthy overhang as well
to sort of keep all your angles covered.
That kind of dictates the shape of it.
So your habitat might look kind of like a mushroom.
I had thought earlier
about potentially, you know, maybe they could even
take a special munition that acts kind of like
a bunker buster bomb if they really needed to
pound into some area you know to get and then
later maybe the idea would be they could actually land a starship down in the uh the holy the whole
area well you know some of the some of the starships might fail the landing burns so that'll be a fairly respectable bunker buster
i don't know it just seems a little bit silly to worry too much about radiation for the first like uh two or three uh synods it will be everything else will be so extremely dangerous
like the the the danger of crashing on entry
or the capture not working or some life supports breaking.
All of that is way higher risk than the radiation.
Like I said, if I was going on a Mars mission on a starship,
radiation would not scare me.
will not scare me. Entry, descent and landing would be the scariest
Entry, descent and landing would be the scariest thing for me.
thing for me. Yeah.
It's going to be very scary until they have a few crashes
behind them. I mean, it's called
seven minutes of terror when you're in the mission control at JPL.
I mean, when you're actually on the ship, I think it's going to be even worse.
I like to call it seven minutes of triumph but that's me um i think the thing that i i would be most afraid of is the long-term
food supply um that's that's the thing that i think about the most as far as like how are we
how are we setting up agriculture there how are we setting
up how are we setting up food stores and bringing animals like those things are those things are you
know real life coming you're bringing small animals at best because uh on a mars entry
probably pulling maybe six g's and that's that's that'll turn a cow into lots of burger i'm not sure
any of the larger animals are going to be reaching the surface alive
the chicken the chickens will be fine it may be uh
yeah um to correct the uh thing you were you were right uh peter. The Schmitt's interest in buying relativity space was so that he would have enough these will consume on the order of gigawatts
in the very near future, and it will be a lot easier to add that in space
than to get all the Earth-based permissions.
Earth-based permissions.
And anyway, it can use solar
more continuously.
Yeah. I think the space
data centers, a good idea
that's potentially got legs because the main reason that
space-solar business cases have tended not to close
is the transmission step and if you just
cut that out and just say we're just going to use it in situ then i think you get a lot stronger and
this is something that i'm actually interested in in the uk as well because i want britain to take
a bigger role in space and geographically we've got limits to the orbits we can get to
Graphically, we've got limits to the orbits we can get to.
The most interesting for me is a twilight sun synchronous orbit,
so like a 6 a.m. dusk dawn sun synchronous orbit.
That's one that's face onto the sun.
We can get to it from Scotland or from maybe the Norfolk coast.
So it's nice and accessible from the UK mainland.
That means we can build
our space industries near the launch site and this is an orbit that gets near continuous sunlight
uh you get a couple of eclipses at the summer solstice like and the yeah they um they're not
very long eclipses and the only way to avoid them is to go to, I think, an altitude of about 1,400 kilometers when you start to get into the inner Van Allen belts.
And that's really not a place where you want to be putting like a billion pounds worth of expensive computer equipment.
So, yeah, this would be a great orbit for space data centers. It's not good
for regular space solar power because it has to go into geostation mostly so you can aim
the beam. But if your requirements continuous sunlight, it's like four or five times cheaper
to get into a twilight sun synchronous orbit. And that's something i think the uk should do
as such i'm i've been campaigning for the uk to spend more on space and i also think
it'd be good for us to try and get spacex and other companies with with big modern launches
like blue origin and maybe rocket lab as well to to launch their vehicles from the uk uh i don't
know if that would be sort of legally or commercially feasible though you know it may
depend upon how they're you know uh well yeah no the infrastructure and the whole question of where they're manufacturing the things.
Well, I guess transportation on Earth is pretty cheap.
But still, northern, I don't know.
I think that it would be more likely to try to do it from lower latitudes first but
anyway uh this company interlune is uh is indeed uh they have already sold helium three but just
because they uh i mean they obviously haven't gotten it from the moon yet, but they already have customers.
And let's see.
Yeah, it says announces on May 7th, Interloon agreed to purchase thousands of liters of helium-3 for yearly delivery from 2029 to 2035 so it's not
insubstantial um and it will be used in uh this company this maybell which is named the company
state-of-the-art dilution refrigerators which cool quantum devices
okay so that is the largest
market that I have ever
seen far exceeding
what I thought was
going to be
for power generation
in any
reasonable period
we've asked to stop me setting up a supply
company that just blasts
neutrons at deuterium from the sea uh makes
tritium which i can sell as well and then i just siphon off the helium as it decays
well sure i mean that's an expensive operation but that's probably going to be cheaper than mining
thousands and thousands of tons of lunar regolith and bringing well these guys are promising that
they'll get have it so you know presumably there are outs for the
company that wants to buy and if they if they don't deliver
so and and then of course uh uh yeah so um i already mentioned the business with the uh power
uh heavy lift.
In a sense, you know, everybody talks,
everybody's going from small launchers to,
I mean, that's already started anyway,
to medium launchers started with the Constellations
and, of course, too many launch vehicle ventures in the small category.
But and now, you know, I was thinking, well, now if they're going to have all these computational
things, then everybody is going to be searching for heavy lift cheap, you know, so for computational centers in orbit so
that's uh and and uh by the way as far as radiation thing i'm not entirely convinced that
you're going to get to mars in great condition just because of cosmic radiation.
The rate is about three times what you get at the ISS.
And if you push the starship hard,
you can maybe get a four-month transit.
So it's essentially the year's dose of ISS compressed into four months.
Yeah, but you still have the heavier particles particles do you not they get they they get to
the iss i mean there's a there's a paper in uh 2008 where they did an actual dissimetry on the
iss crew and they found they were getting fairly substantial cosmic grados and we've had we've had no radiation injuries from the ISS yet.
All right. And also, we've had guys outside the radiation belts
for about two weeks or so on the Apollo missions.
Yeah, well, you know what?
I remember those Apollo missions
and what sticks in my mind about radiation and probably the reason why i keep on
hopping on it uh is the uh fact that these guys would see these flashes you know across their
retinas as these particles rip through you know i think that has been observed by some people in the ISS. It may have been.
I mean, I'm not saying that isn't true, but that's when that's sort of like, oh, that was startling.
And that was when a lot of people started to talk about, well, you know, we can't possibly find a way around this.
around this. I mean, even for lunar activity, you know, even with two or three meters of lunar
material, the secondaries are going to be substantial. I think once you get to two meters...
I used to hear like two meters would be enough, but then I was reading some stuff that said it was not.
But I don't recall where that was.
It was
not recently that I was investigating it.
It's perhaps a bit of radiophobia, and I don't mean
to get too pop culture on it but there's a
veritasium youtube channel who did a video about the most radioactive places on earth the the
bottom line at the end of the video was that um airline crews get some of the highest doses of
radiation uh iss um astronauts get even higher but the very highest by a lot were pack a day cigarette smokers oh they
get more radiation than on the iss according to this video anyway ah well you know it's also it's
the form it's not just some number that that sort of tries to there is some unknown about the um the
quality factor of the very high energy stuff and so like how you translate from grace to seabirds so you can measure graze is just sort of how much energy is dumped per kilogram
in your body but what it actually does biologically you have to sort of normalize it with a quality
factor for different types of that in the iss i think
we're already doing this experiment whichever way and well look i i always thought about it as you
know if you if you're if you're aware if you're inside uh even a well-protected uh
inside even a well-protected, some kind of pressurized vessel,
and you're getting a lot, let's say, a lot of various radiation,
even to the point where you're in a solar active period.
I mean, getting a lot of those
which don't penetrate your protection
is not the same as getting
a few of the things that are
so high energy that they do.
I mean, like the high energy ones,
the high energy ones, in part, they just fly,
sometimes they just fly straight through you.
I mean, they don't deposit all their energy into your body.
And also, there's the effect that if they do deposit a lot of energy
in one cell, they can essentially just incinerate it.
So it's not sort of from one cell, they can essentially just incinerate it.
So there's no sort of,
the energy relation to like biological damage, you can't create cancer from a cell
which has just been literally boiled
by a high energy particle.
So the relationship between sort of,
and the main risk is cancer.
It's not sort of clear exactly
what that is
guys sorry can I just
jump in
I just can't
wait anymore so
I just want to
have
the step back and refer to the flashlights in your eyes.
It's an effect that's called, named phosphence, ray phosphence.
So astronauts indeed report seeing flashes of light.
seeing flashes of light and its space radiation
doesn't just increase cancer risk,
it directly affects brain function
and we need to not forget about multiplying effects
and when we talk about long-duration missions
and longitudinal effects.
So it's a really complex problem.
And we didn't cover, for example,
hypomagnetic biological effects
that represent one of the least understood aspects of long-duration spaceflight.
And each research group studies, they don't cover main topics because we need monitoring biological needs, constant medical oversight, plant growth,
anomalies, they also impact food security and no single organization has expertise across all these domains.
expertise across all these domains. So plants exhibit root disorientation. You were talking
about chickens and these effects, they affect also on the genetic level. And it's a really complex problem
that we, of course, cannot ignore.
But it's really too many topics to uncover.
A lot of these medicine topics,
I think it's hard to tease out the difference
between the effects of radiation
and the effects of microgravity.
Yeah, exactly.
Like the brain ones, i think that i i'm
not convinced that these are being caused by radiation at all i mean you've got a massive
shift of fluid to the head that's obviously going to affect the brain and also they've been doing
the iss where you have a higher carbon dioxide concentration um so for my experience of there's so many other smoking guns for why you'd experience neurological issues on the ISS.
The radiation, I think, is pretty far down the list.
Dustin, did you want to speak?
Oh, yeah, I was just wondering, you know, like, does anybody know if radiation, space radiation can affect, like, petroleum jellies and, like, paste and machine oils?
I'm assuming maybe that's already been studied.
Yeah, of course.
Of course, it affects all the things.
affect all the things.
And some of the tech and biological,
sorry, medical supplies are tested for radiation.
We even have, for right now,
special software that can produce the traces of galactic radiation
that allows you to test your equipment in long duration.
Well, I appreciate, let me just interject very rapidly here,
Let me just interject very rapidly here that I appreciate that you, the last speaker, Rina,
when you earlier essentially supported my somewhat, supported my concern about the qualitatively different question of this radiation that causes the flashes
or has caused the flashes just because I read it in 1972.
First in the New York Times, I believe,
which was not exactly a pro-spaceflight publication then.
Hasn't been since the 1920s.
Excuse me?
Hasn't been since the 1920s. Oh, no, no, no, no.
They trashed Goddard pretty hard.
Oh, yeah. No, no, no.
But, I mean, in that day, of course, they were ragging on Apollo.
I remember when they were ragging on Apollo during the build-up to Apollo,
you know, to the first landings and so forth.
And, you know, it went along with the rest of the problems
that came from the fact that Apollo was created as a stunt,
unfortunately, and so expensive. But yes, I do think that there are problems,
and I appreciate that I'm not the only one who sees that there are problems that are
sees that there are problems that are a qualitative difference that need to be acknowledged
i'm not saying they're they're impossible i'm just saying that they need to be acknowledged and that
there are some proposals for active radiation protection systems that have been looked at
that have been and and in fact okay, it wasn't on that other thing.
I thought it perhaps had been tested in one situation, but there was a few years ago,
there were a couple of proposals that I think people were developing some combination of methods,
both electrostatic and magnetic protections on vehicles.
That would be what they were.
They were just looking at concepts for that. That was a few years ago.
I shift toward terraforming and get Peter Hague's expertise.
I've heard from a small NASA paper from about 2017 about placing a one Tesla strength magnet in a Lagrange point between uh the sun and mars and uh preventing
the solar wind from eroding the atmosphere within a hundred thousand years or so you could start to
build up a more thicker and substantial atmosphere just from preventing the stripping away of the
atmosphere by the solar wind and the natural outgassing of the the regolith to rebuild its own
atmosphere do you know anything about that, Peter?
What's the actual strength of that word?
I heard that story, but to me this sounds like, why bother?
I mean, the individual countries on the Earth add mass to the Earth's atmosphere
a lot faster than the sun strips mass from Mars' atmosphere.
faster than the sun strips mass from mars's atmosphere uh we don't have any problem at all
adding gases to atmospheres at this rate um we have a converse problem actually um but the
the process of magnetic stripping is like a geological process it's not something you have
to worry about in terraforming terms because you're if
you want to terraform you're thinking of like how can i make this planet more habitable in like a
century not a hundred thousand years and over a century the um the solar stripping is not going
to be a big problem and you'll you can just top up the atmosphere i mean maybe if you want to sort
of have a like if you might sort of worry
that your future generations are going to get lazy and like, like fall back to like
more primitive society and not be able to top up the atmosphere. But that surely is
not any different than the risk that somebody might fail to maintain your giant uh tesla magnetic field that's
whenever you're placing it like a branch point i guess so yeah the the with me the teleforming
like we have to worry about that after people have lived on mars for a while because they'll
understand the planet better than anybody living on earth does like even people who work on the
mars row because they will have like we know very little about this planet in detail we've looked at it
from orbit we've explored a few very small sites when you get humans on the planet we're going to
our knowledge of it is going to become so so much greater and that's going to inform any future
terraforming plans and also the fact
that terraforming may well be quite a destructive process so you have to decide
like are we gonna have to sort of move off the planet while we're terraforming
and then move back I mean can we sort of create cities that can survive the
process I mean if you just think back to like your school chemistry class you have sort of
anhydrous and hydrous forms of the same mineral and they can be quite different and now everything
on Mars is more or less bone dry if you then sort of introduce liquid water to the atmosphere to
the environment and suddenly a bunch of anhydrous substances become their hydrous forms they're
going to be you're going to be changing the composition of the sort of the mechanical
properties of vast amounts of the surface and you you might imagine like a planetary
scale mudslide as a result as it tries to find nucleolibrium so yeah terraforming is way in the future and it's got several difficulties
i mean sort of the near-term objective i think would be to get it above the armstrong limit
uh if you don't need a full pressure suit to go outside
uh if you can have free bodies of liquid water that would be an immense difference already
water that would be uh an immense difference already um uh i've not looked into exactly how
much co2 you need to add to do that i think then i think robert zubrin mentioned it in his latest book
but i can't remember the figures
and that state is called the armstrong limit yeah uh it's basically um that's the
stronger than it yeah uh it's basically um that's the uh it's it's the point where you can breathe
oxygen through a mask and you don't need a full pressure suit
i can't remember exactly it's it's a very it's a low pressure but it's um it makes sort of survival
outside in the outside environment substantially uh more pleasant and more and easier to deal with
i'd say um one little known thing that i'm always surprised by is the summertime temperatures on
mars like around the equator it's like what 22 Celsius 23 Celsius yeah
yeah and I just recently the high temperature record was 90 Fahrenheit for those in Imperial
um and I guess that's 30 Celsius yeah I mean there's a bigger range on Mars oh sorry I'm
not I'm going to have to side off soon I'm getting tired but yeah the uh there's a much bigger range of temperature because you can get to like
less than minus 100 celsius on mars as well well you've got a big
major temperatures on earth as well earth can go from like minus 80 celsius to like 50 celsius plus
but what about our the thickness of the atmosphere the relative thicknesses
doesn't it mean that like for instance in the martian where they showed the windstorm blowing
people over and that wouldn't be yeah that wouldn't happen because it's so thin doesn't
that also mean that it wouldn't transfer heat um conductively as well yeah it'd be less efficient
it'd be not as bad as the moon where you just have no um conduction at all and you get like hundreds of degrees difference
between light and shadow
this has been a very fascinating chat and i thank you for your time and everyone else's but i've got to go as well all right then uh nice great night i will let people alone myself so finally thank you all right then uh okay so we'll wind up is
there anybody who has not spoken who wants to speak and wants to say something uh anybody
Anybody?
Yeah, I do have some questions, Peter.
I think the radiations also lead to the big flips in the computers of our spacecraft.
Am I right?
That's a problem that's kind of managed well enough already. I mean, like the computers work on space probes
and the computers still work on the Voyager probes
or primitive as they are.
And I do have some more questions that, as we know,
Starship gonna land on Mars vertically.
So if we see that Starship is a white troll and it's have its center of Mars very high.
So as you know, on Earth we are having the flat concrete surface, but on Mars we are
not going to have that.
So is landing going to we safe or not yeah well hopefully they'll find out in 2026.
i'm assuming they've thought of this i mean there is quite a lot of mass at the bottom where the
engines are uh the tanks will be nearly empty but yeah the payload will be close to the top
uh the tanks will be nearly empty but yeah the payload will be close to the top
they didn't seem to have any problem with this when they did suborbital test flights and landed
on a nice flat surface but yeah I would be curious as to the the angle that a Starship can tolerate
angle that a starship can tolerate um this is uh and yeah yes and this is why one of the reasons i
think that robert zubin has proposed a star boat where you do a mini starship to do the surface
segment of the mission and one advantage would be it would not be sort of this ridiculously tall
would not be sort of this ridiculously tall structure.
So I think we are gonna produce our own methane and oxygen
on the surface of Mars.
So how much time we are gonna take to produce it?
So I think we have to put some big equipment
and the machinery to have it in real life.
Because if you think of moxie
sent by the NASA I think it produced some grams of oxygen I think in a few hearts so so in first
starship flights so are we gonna send our machinery that to produce that methane and oxygen for the upcoming
starship right they're going they're definitely planning to do that I'm not sure when the process
they'll use they'll use the combination of that process on moxie and also the sabatia process
where you combine hydrogen with co2 from the atmosphere and you get methane and steam which you can then break apart with electrolysis to get
the oxygen you need and then the hydrogen goes back in and that's sort of the established method
to come back to mars direct in 1990. uh that i'm not sure there's any real question mark about
real question mark about doing that it's not a particularly complex process um but i think that
the main um barrier is electrical power uh when mars director proposes they literally carried a
nuclear reactor with them they had it on over they had it like drive away from the site before it got
hot uh hiding a crater so it wouldn't hurt anybody,
and then just pumped power into the chemical plant.
SpaceX don't have nuclear reactors,
and the regulatory processes for flying nuclear reactors in space
are probably too onerous for them to bother with.
So they'll be using solar panels and they've got a
very big ship to refuel so they're going to need a very big field of solar panels
um presumably that's what the tesla bots will be doing on the surface they'll be unpacking them
from the ship and laying them out and plugging them in like keeping the dust off them and all these things. Yeah, go ahead, Dutton.
I have one more question.
In our spaces, we use lithium dioxide to have oxygen.
So as we know that Mars and surface Mars have a lot of carbon dioxide.
Can't we, we can't use lithium dioxide there to remove the carbon and to use oxygen?
I think it's actually not lithium dioxide.
Lithium hydroxide I think just absorbs a carbon dioxide.
I think you have to use, it's a superoxide.
that it's a superoxide i think it's the one that releases oxygen at the same time
I think it's the one that releases oxygen at the same time.
uh that i imagine the mass of the masses we're dealing with are far too large about to be
feasible i think uh because you just have to take like hundreds and hundreds of tons of i think it's
potassium superoxide they use yeah um so yeah i don't know i think we need to go with the chemical processes like moxie and like um sabatier process yeah
okay uh dutton
uh dutton did you want to speak
you got your hand up
okay You got your hand up? Okay.
So you all guys are from where?
In America?
I'm from the UK.
You're from the UK, yeah.
I'm from India.
That's a good space flight in India.
Okay, if nobody else is speaking, I'd like to ask a couple of questions, open questions,
if that's okay. Hi, okay, so I wanted to know what the plan is when it comes to structural
manufacturing on the surface of Mars. When it comes to habitat building are there any plans to do some kind of
additive manufacturing with martian soil what the properties of the soil can that actually be used
like there's a lot of research going on right now on lunar regolith so is there something that's
already being planned for mars and martian habitat what I don't know where SpaceX having any such plans,
but there have been some plans on this.
Some people sort of outside SpaceX
have looked into having robots,
which will like process the regolith
and sort of lay it out into structures.
Most ones I've seen, they use to make a shell and then like inflate a habitat inside it so they're using the the 3d printed part as a
sort of heavy radiation shielding and then putting a lighter inflatable habitat inside it
but yeah there's there's people looking into this I don't know what SpaceX's plans are there
I think they're assuming that the first wave will um sort of live in the ships
um until they can build something more permanent uh they haven't they haven't uh beyond just
renders which seem sort of fairly genetic just oh here's a dome kind of thing uh they've
not talked about it much in public um and they're they're sort of their vendors they're
i mean they are they they have a lot of domes in their renders and you don't necessarily want
domes on mars because you're not fighting compressive loads you're fighting tension
because your habitat is full of air at like earth sea level pressure
and it's pushing outwards and your main problem with the dome is is not supporting its weight
it's it's keeping it attached at the rim uh which actually limits the size of a dome you can have
without having um internal like uh not support like sort of guy ropes holding the thing down.
I see. Okay. It was also interesting for me to know that they're using inflatable habitats,
because I imagine that if we truly want to make life
Multiplanetary then we would have to come up with some kind of airtight structures
And also air that can be recycled so that it becomes a more natural system like what we have on earth
Maybe living inside those ships could be an option,
but I think it would only be a very temporary option.
Yeah, it would be temporary.
One of the things you may be able to manufacture relatively
quickly on Mars is polythene.
I've seen some studies on this, but I can't remember the details.
But you basically start off all with manufacturing
methane from the sabatia process and you then say
well coming back to manufacture ethylene and then and then you can sort of start in principle making
your own inflatable structures out of that on the surface because you want you want big living volume for various reasons, both for comfort and for having a lot of depth in your biosphere
and resilience to leak.
So obviously you've got a very big volume.
It'll take a while for it to leak.
So if the air to escape you, it gets a leak.
So yeah, I think inflatables will be a big part of it yeah also is the soil on mars is it fertile enough to grow crops uh well of course we might
need to bring some uh soil samples for actual growth of maybe bigger farmland for example there have been experiments
that have done uh that have used a martian regolith simulant um to grow plants in successfully
but the main problem is we don't have any martian soil there's never been a single
sample returned from the planet largely due to silly um reasons of space politics.
So, yes.
Have we ever had a spacecraft come back from the surface of Mars to Earth?
No, never.
Never.
Never, yeah. And the technology has been there probably since the 80s, I guess.
It's always required more lift than has generally been available.
So either you have a very big rocket, something like Starship,
or you have multiple launches of emissions,
and that's never really come together in a Western space program.
The Chinese have managed to do multiple launch science missions
for exploring the far side of the moon, they are they had to launch um a relay satellite first and then launch the lander
but generally sort of outside the uh the iss and when you're doing and the manned missions
all the science missions have been single launch on medium lift rockets.
And as such, they've not been able to do Mars sample return.
And it's possible that we actually get humans to Mars
before the sort of NASA program of record for Martian sample return
actually brings anything back.
Yes, that's true.
I've also read in some article before,
I'm not sure if it's true,
but the regulation is that if you send humans to space,
there must always be a way to bring them back as well.
Otherwise, it's not going to be approval as a mission.
Is this true?
Sorry, can you repeat the question?
There's no approval for it.
Oh, because of planetary protection.
I mean, when there is space travel by any human,
then by regulation, it must be possible to bring them back.
Like, there's no one-way cryptomars.
Like, at least in regulation.
It's been proposed, but yes, I don't think NASA would allow it.
Okay. And speaking of space travel by humans, another thing that I thought is,
at this point, there are lots of humanoids being produced, at least there's a lot of research that is going on to build very superhuman capable
humanoids. Do you think that it would be smarter for SpaceX to actually send humanoids to Mars
first so that it would gather data for how humans could actually exist on the planet before we send
actual humans? They're going to send Tesla bots.
They've already made that clear, but they're mostly to prepare the ground for
humans. So it's safer.
Harsh, can I ask one more question? Cause I, I've got to go to bed soon.
It's getting quite late here. So if we just have one more question,
then we maybe type the space.
So I think I had heard of news that
that beside helium tree as you mentioned in quantum computing i think i had heard that
one gram of helium she can produce up to 1600 000 kilowatt uh energy of electricity yeah so
is is this going to be one of the main motive or of mining on the moon and bringing it
back to the earth and somehow we got the process to we actually had this discussion earlier in the
space if you want to go back in the recording look at i'm i'm skeptical of this because
that we don't have the fusion reactors that can burn it and it's possible to produce this stuff on earth and mining it the amounts that occurs in on the moon are tiny you have to like churn
through like thousands of tons of regoliths to get small amounts of helium-3 so it's probably
not going to be worth it and and the last one that what do you think about the chinese as they are
as they are replicating replicating the Starships and the other rockets?
I imagine they'll succeed.
I can't think of a case where they've attempted to replicate a foreign technology and failed.
They eventually get there, no matter how much people try and restrict that access.
I mean, seeing this with AI, they're catching up.
So, I mean, you can argue that the Chinese system is too rigid
and kills innovation, but certainly in terms of just looking
what someone else has done and copying it,
they have no problem with that.
They'll be able to do that.
So, yeah, the clock is ticking for SpaceX to exploit any unilateral advantage they have no problem with that they'll be able to do that so yeah the clock is ticking for
space extra exploiter any unilateral advantage they have um uh pierre if you just come up um we're about to end but if you want to sort of ask one question or say one thing then we can do that
oh yes and thank you peter for giving us time, your precious time.
And I can message you or I have to subscribe?
Well, I don't think you can message me.
You can subscribe for free to my blog.
I'm a student.
It's free.
You can subscribe to my blog for free.
And then that's on Substack.
So, yeah, does anybody else... Pierre, I know you...
Pierre has just joined us.
If anybody else wants to say anything
before we close off the space for the night.
Yeah, I was thinking about a question.
I hope it has not been answered before because
I came after it started. But since I saw in the Elon talk, screenshots, I mean, CGI renderings
of infrastructure on the surface of Mars, I think the Martian atmosphere is too thin
to consume all incoming debris from space and I wonder
if there is a real statistically significant risk of damage from incoming rocks and if
there is a real strategy for defense if we want to have an alternative to underground
infrastructure on Mars if we really have those beautiful domes.
I don't think they're going to have those domes that's part of the reason um it's it does the emotional atmosphere does stop a lot
of debris but um you know more stuff can get through because it's thinner um but on earlier
when we're having the discussion about radiation we're talking about putting one to two meters
of regolith on the roof of the habitat to stop the cosmic radiation,
that would sort out that problem as well.
So I think that the vendors are kind of like,
they're self stylistic.
I don't think that's what an actual Mars base
will look like.
The Mars Society has done some contests
for developing Martian habitats, which were a bit more realistic.
I'd recommend you go and look at those because there's some quite interesting work done.
Like there's a lot of people building things to the side of cliffs, for instance,
which is helpful for that.
All right. Well, thank you for coming this place peter uh i want to suggest
you that we can have a comment section in in this space yeah i think a lot of spaces i don't know
how to do that i'm afraid i mean the best way to comment like said is is go to my my sub stack and
you can subscribe for free obviously i appreciate hey no it's
throwing it's throwing money i said like 500 rupees no no it's free by you you can subscribe
to my blog for free on planetocracy that's my sub stack now obviously it takes it costs money to subscribe on x and i wouldn't ask uh students to do that um yes okay can you repeat
uh what is free and my book planetocracy uh it's a link in my if you go to my uh my bio one here
that the link is in the description uh there's a free subscription tier for planetocracy um
yeah thank you yeah well thanks for coming everybody and uh good night
thank you
