Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "The Evolution Of Elon Musk's Mars Vision" video.

  1. NO KNOWLEDGE WHATSOEVER. We who have been studying the problem know what resources are on the near celestial bodies. You who want to seize our investment to squander on programs that make no progress however much is spent on them (except progress in making a fiefdom for the spenders) do not. This frontier, like all before it, will be opened by private investment and developed for profit, and all of mankind will be richer for it except for those who would rather steal their way than make it. The government has a limited (and optional) role to play in exploration and science in the solar system, but space development will more than pay its way, making an economy that dwarfs our present one. This isn't something you have to vote on (except changing the real estate laws for homesteading). Private industry will do it on their own dime and investments, and what folk do with their own money is not anybody else's business.
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  2. The reason he chose methane/oxygen for his propellant mix is because both can be made on Mars. This has been explained in every description of the Mars mission profile. If you had studied the plan, you would know that. Mars in situ fuel making was also featured in an earlier plan by Robert Zubrin called Mars Direct. One difference between the two was that Mars Direct had the Earth Return Vehicle stack carry hydrogen to Mars for making methane and oxygen out of the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere. Musk's plan uses local water resources which were not known to be handy when Mars Direct was devised.
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  3. What is your limit on how fast it can be fueled on Mars?
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  4.  @KEB129  I will assume you misunderstood my question, but I struggle to say it more clearly than I did at first. I am not asking about your deadline for fueling, I was asking what factors limit the RATE of fueling so that it must take longer than several months.
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  5. We don't know that we aren't able to live on the Moon. We only know we haven't tried. Space enthusiasts know far more about the Moon and Mars than you do.
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  6. I'm not too thrilled about the Mars terraforming part. Mars is quite useful as it is. Unlike Venus which is mostly useless until it is at least partly terraformed. But you seem a bit confused about nukes: "A very large part of those weapons will reenter Earth when shipments fail." And then what? Do you think there will be a H-bomb explosion when they hit the ground? That's not how nukes work. They don't "cook off" like chemical explosives. The fissibles in the triggers would be a small local cleanup problem depending on where they where they crash, but not an apocalyptic disaster, unless the fissibles fall into the wrong hands. ICBMs are kind of hard to make, but atom bombs, at least just fission bombs, are easy if you have the right fissibles, and H-Bombs are just a little harder, so the launch trajectory has to never fly over the wrong countries. I think his "terraforming" notion is just a bad idea for Mars.
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