Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Elon Musks $100 000 Ticket to Mars: BUSTED!" video.

I did aerospace engineering and I love your sentiments but unfortunately Thunderfoot is pretty much on with the costs. I love Elon's enthusiasm but what I hate are his ridiculous estimates and I am sorry to say they are ridiculous. On the super plus side of Elon is that he's broken Boeings strangle hold on NASA funding. One thing that's rarely discussed is the change in business model that happened AFTER Apollo. Prior to that pretty much all of the development programs delivered. The X-Plane programs delivered plane after plane. But during the 70s they just stopped ever delivering. Go check how many x-planes never flew in the 70s compared to the earlier programs. A rare exception was the X-29 forward sweep. What Boeing and others had worked out was that NOT completing NASA funded programs was more profitable than completing them. All they needed was to do enough to get the funding for next development project. One of my class mates ended up at NASA and is still there and years ago she told me about how the funding is decided. She also told me the 2 biggest problems they had with manned flight beyond LEO were life support and propulsion. Nearly 20 years later that hasn't changed. One of the great problems with a moon base or a Mars base is that we have dozens of technologies only part developed. Yes there's been lots of research and development but none of its actually ready. And some of those issues are huge. To keep humans alive they need water, food and breathable air. When Trump called for 4 men on the moon for 2 weeks what very few pointed out the enormous difference that was. The Apollo LM was capable of 75 hours life support for 2 guys - that's 150 man hours. 4 men for 2 weeks -> 4 x 24 x 14 = 1344 so its basically 9 or 10x the previous mission. And they have to fly all those materials to the moon and land them. Last I heard they skimmed it back to 3 guys on the moon for 10 days which means the lander only needs life support for 720 hours (3 x 24 x 10). That's way more practical as its basically half as much everything - oxygen, food & water. Just imagine Elon's 1000 people to Mars. That's 1000 people and all their food, water & oxygen for 6 months of flight and several more after they land while they get the systems on Mars up and running. If you can shorten the flight time by any amount its a big deal in terms of how much you have to launch. Yeah its all possible but we need billions and billions spent on the life support & propulsion. Maybe Elon or Jeff really has solved one of these problems if they have they aren't telling anyone.🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️
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@grantadamson3478 Its was actually the classmate who's at NASA you should thank. About 20 years ago I was the one being mouthy and very "Elon like," and she rammed some hard truths back down my throat. What I am really frustrated with the se days is the very same problems THEN are still the same problems we have NOW. Half the problem is that we take so much of what nature does in terms of life support. No matter how you want to consider it - if we want manned spaceflight beyond LEO the life support is an absolute. Only 24 men have been beyond LEO and they did it in equipment that was incredibly limited. Its just kept them alive and just got there and only just got back. One reason why they stopped was they were afraid of losing a crew. By 1972 they really had pushed their luck with 1960s technology. One analogy I like to use for the moon is a remote mine site here on Earth. I actually met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) in 2002 and he told me we were headed back tot he moon to mine it for He3. So I went off into the Australian mining industry for some hard on the ground experience with remote mining. The actual number of similarities between the Australian Outback and the Moon are more than you'd think. For starters the first thing is a long range survey (Satellite & aerial) kind of like they did with the Ranger & Mariner probes. Then they do an on the ground survey with a couple of geologists and an SUV. They go out with all their food, water & supplies check the place out and come home with a few samples. The only go for a few days or weeks. Then they send out drilling crews for deeper exploration. The big difference at that point is the amount of equipment and men and supplies and for the first time accommodation, water storage, toilets, showers, communications and power generation. They don't simply go for a few days - they go for weeks. Some stay out there for months. If they find a suitable site with suitable resources then they go with huge amounts of gear. They send in a cast of 1000s to build a mine, the processing plant, the trucks, diggers, more accommodation, more water, more sewerage, more of everything. All that infrastructure takes time effort and construction people and construction equipment. Apollo was just like those couple of geologists doing the on the ground survey who bring back samples from site. The Apollo LM was like a space SUV, but for the next phase we need trucks not SUVs. I can build a mine site here only using SUVs but it would take 1000s of trips. What we need next is the space equivalent of a Kenworth and I don't know if Elon's new rocket is a Kenworth or just a bigger SUV. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️
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@trashkumaneko4539 The Germans (as part of ESA) are actually working on it. They are doing an isolated lab in the Antarctic at the moment. But the top top guy on complex bio-systems is a guy named Jonathon Trent. He's done a few TEDx talks and other more complex lectures on YT. He recently left NASA after 20years and started promoting what he calls "Up-Cycling" as something different to recycling. From his NASA work he was involve din bio-processes where they converted human waste back into usable materials (food, air, etc.) In simplest terms humans generally downcycle in that they take raw materials and through various process produce waste. Upcycling is where you take biological processes to "Up-Cycle" waste back into raw materials. Its the other side of the biological cycles that mother earth does for us every day. Composting (what gardeners do) is a simple from of an up-cycle process in that takes waste and with bacteria and worms shifts it back up the scale into raw plant food. Photosynthesis is an up-cycle process in that it takes our waste C02 and converts it back into raw O2 for us to breath. Basically, moon and Mars bases can't happen without the sort of work he was doing. What he is into now is doing some of that work and using it to drive food and energy production here in our societies. Instead of simply dumping all our waste into old quarries he wants to fuel society with it. What they worked out is for Moon & Mars bases the shit out of your ass is one of the most valuable resources those bases will have if its used properly. The human gut is great for turning raw material into actively biological raw material that other processes can then use.
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@trashkumaneko4539 The actual key to manned space flight is the life support. Its called manned spaceflight not corpse spaceflight because you want them alive and humans produce waste - waste air, waste water & waste solids. Nothing is better at scrubbing air, cleaning water and providing food as the existing natural environmental solar powered processes. I know I sound a bit like a Greenie, but spaceship earth is what we need to learn to maintain. Because in doing that we can learn how to construct systems suitable for other places. I work in automation and one of the main methods is called integration. It where you take existing solutions and equipment and "integrate" them into a new solution. We need to start doing this with our natural environment. We need to integrate existing systems into our environment. There are people doing this but not enough.
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@trashkumaneko4539 I now it sounds pedantic but the correct term is up-cycling. It took me a bit of time to distinguish it but once the difference you understand why its so important. Re-cycling is a very basic simple process of just converting finished product directly into raw material. There's no fundamental change in what the material actually is. Think about when they re-cycle cans, cars or plastic. The metal and plastic isn't being really changed it just being converted back into raw stock for manufacturing. On the other hand raw sewerage is raw sewerage. There's no machine that simply melts it back into food. BUT there are other biological processes that can be used to "convert" that waste into "different" compounds that can be used in other processes. You can't actually eat shit, but you can use bacteria to convert it into useable fertilizer and you can eat the food produced by the plants that use that fertilizer. If you use really clever bacteria you can also create other usable compounds for other processes. It's called Up-Cycling because your taking waste from the lowest level and converting back up to higher levels. Go watch the talks by Dr. Jonathon Trent, he's easily one of the smartest people on the planet.
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