SpaceX shifts focus from something that it will never do on Mars to something it will never do on the Moon.
— Missing The Point (@missingthept.bsky.social) February 8, 2026 at 10:32 PM
BREAKING: “in my 24th year of my quest to settle the planet Mars, I have just been informed of a basic fact of celestial mechanics.”
— Jim Henley Music (@jimhenleymusic.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 5:31 AM
Maybe Musk’s latest round of thimblerigging — I mean, consolidation — will turn out to be the marker for the business community giving up on him? I realize that a trillion dollars can buy many, many years of immunity, but… a woman can dream…
This is one of things. Bigtime.
— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 4:23 PM
This is because Blue Origin got a chance at a backup contract after it was clear SpaceX was shitting the bed, and NASA has been signaling they're about to cut the Cybertruck of the Stars out of the moon program and now the company is scrambling to make up for 6 years of passed deadlines and fuckups
— Rude Law Dog (@esghound.com) February 6, 2026 at 6:52 PM
Watching Eric Berger (historically a Musk fanboy) struggle with the revelation that Musk is a fake engineer conman white supremacist never loses its entertainment value
— Karl Bode (@karlbode.com) February 9, 2026 at 10:31 AM
just amazing how openly Berger reveals that the only fixed point in his worldview is "whatever Elon is saying now must make sense"
— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) February 9, 2026 at 10:41 AM
"be not troubled my brothers, the whole Mars city wasn't a realistic prospect anyway"
gosh that seems like something a journalist might have wanted to reveal a while ago— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) February 9, 2026 at 10:44 AM
how does it not bother investors that Elon Musk never actually delivers the thing
if he didn't deliver affordable EVs, the 100% solar-powered Superchargers, the "alien dreadnought" factory, the game-changing solar roof, or L5 self-driving why believe he'll deliver data centers in space or whatever?— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) February 9, 2026 at 1:03 PM
Just maaaybee?…
one maybe major problem with rolling up his companies like Musk is doing is that whatever liability he was sitting on in X for things like CSAM or GDPR is no longer quarantined
— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 9:19 AM
just the sheer optics astounds me. now it isn't X's offices being raided for horrible reasons, it's SpaceX's offices!
— updog sinclair (@jonchristian.net) February 9, 2026 at 9:25 AM
like, SpaceX is not without its problems. but by a long shot it felt like his most serious project, and now it's tied in with his absolute murkiest controversy machines
— updog sinclair (@jonchristian.net) February 9, 2026 at 9:26 AM
The real purpose of the SpaceX/xAI merger is to be able to generate child porn IN SPACE.
— Xeynon (@xeynon.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 11:55 AM
And then again: Seriously!:
Musk will have to testify over his role in shuttering USAID, a judge has ruled.
The DOJ tried to protect Musk from testifying, arguing it would “intrude on White House activities," but as Musk wasn’t a secretary or agency head, this reasoning doesn't excuse him. trib.al/EGROKkN— The New Republic (@newrepublic.com) February 7, 2026 at 1:49 PM
Been sitting on this post:
lmao was this source named mlon eusk
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) February 3, 2026 at 3:03 PM
… Supporters have praised the tie-up as further evidence of his genius, taking advantage of his reusable rockets and Starlink network of satellites, combined with the data from X and models from xAI.
His critics see it as the latest example of financial engineering, using his personal brand and SpaceX to prop up xAI as it burns through $1bn of cash a month.
“None of the valuations are based on any rational multiple,” said one person who has invested in xAI. “They’re all trading off Elon.”
A merger had been rumoured since SpaceX invested $2bn in xAI in the summer. Still, when news of formal negotiations started to leak last week, most shareholders were kept in the dark and were blindsided by the speed with which the deal closed, multiple people told the FT.
Investors were briefed on hurried calls by SpaceX financial chief Bret Johnsen and xAI’s Jared Birchall. After delays and poor audio quality, many struggled to hear the scant details about the $1.25tn tie-up.
Johnsen told them that SpaceX would buy xAI for $250bn, matching the price of a recent $20bn funding round that valued the two-year-old start-up at $230bn…
Musk had also marked up the private valuation of SpaceX to $1tn, citing increases in revenue from its Starlink broadband service, $200bn more than the company was valued at in December for a secondary stock sale.
Birchall said on his call that Musk would run the combined entity, the deal would close on March 16 and investors would have the option to cash out rather than swap their xAI stock for that of SpaceX…
The Musk lieutenants also confirmed that SpaceX was still aiming for an initial public offering in June — a date Musk has pushed for because of a rare alignment of the planets Jupiter, Venus and Mercury that month.
The SpaceX IPO could raise as much as $50bn, which would make it the largest flotation of all time, exceeding the $29bn raised by Saudi Aramco in 2019.
Investors believe that the rapid timeline is less to do with celestial conjugations and more about Musk’s desire to beat OpenAI and Anthropic to the public markets.
Both rival AI start-ups are in talks with advisers to go public this year and boast more advanced models than xAI that generate greater revenue. However, bankers fear that there may not be enough cash in the public markets to shoulder all three at once, giving the first mover the advantage…
Some long-term SpaceX investors harbour wider concerns, believing that combining with the heavily lossmaking xAI will complicate or even imperil an IPO. To pay for the transaction, SpaceX will issue $250bn in new shares, diluting the holdings of existing owners.
However, as Musk controls both private companies there is little anyone can do to stop him…
Lol meanwhile The Economist is running the hed "Elon Musk's mega-merger makes little business sense"
Potato-potash I guess— Eastern Tony (@easterntony.bsky.social) February 3, 2026 at 3:10 PM
dmsilev
The tail end of that Ars Technica story:
Emphasis added. That’s enormously generous to Musk. The “Starship” rocket which ostensibly is being developed to drive Mars settlements is mostly functional. But there are a couple of big pieces left undone before it can be used to send anything to Mars (or the Moon); in-orbit refueling being the biggest one. And then beyond that, all of the “how are we going to keep people alive on Mars” bits of the project are completely un-done beyond pretty concept art. Also the promised “use Mars water and air to refuel the rocket so people can get back” bit; the basic chemistry is well understood, but there’s a hell of a lot of missing steps in terms of actual hardware.
This is the second time in a week that Eric Berger has gone overboard simping for Musk. Last week, it was the AI IN SPAAAAACE thing.
WaterGirl
Why do all these people get uglier so fast once they are part of the T orbit? It’s astonishing, really.
Case in point: Musk
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@WaterGirl: Trump somehow gives them permission to show who they have always been.
dmsilev
Also, that bit in the second quote about basic celestial mechanics? It’s even worse than that. The periodicity of the distance between Earth and Mars (the “synodic period”) is something that astrologers going back to Ptolemy or thereabouts knew about, and once Kepler figured out the basic orbits of the planets, that was enough to calculate it. If it really was novel to Musk, there have to be teams lurking outside the SpaceX mission planning rooms with “shoot on sight” orders out for him.
Really, he’s just pumping up the hype because he needs a big big cash infusion and SpaceX going public is a way to get that.
dmsilev
@WaterGirl: Musk was ugly even before he glommed onto Trump and went rampaging through the government. The incident in 2018, with the Thailand cave accident and Musk calling one of the expert rescuers “pedo guy” because said expert (accurately) pointed out that Musk’s proposed solution was Really Fucking Stupid, was a good case in point.
Captain C
I realize Lone Skum has rigged the board and shares in his favor, but if I were a large shareholder of/investor in one of his companies I’d insist on him passing daily drug tests as a condition of his bonuses.
Lone Skum is what would have happened if Howard Hughes and John Delorean had a baby.
rikyrah
it’s a scam and a fraud.
why isn’t this obvious to everyone?
mardam422
“how does it not bother investors that Elon Musk never actually delivers the thing”
Have you seen the stock market since 2000?
WTF is wrong with you?
lowtechcyclist
Musk is only NOW learning how long it takes to get to Mars and back?
I’m no space nerd, but I’ve known that since childhood.
Hell, even when the Earth and Mars are at their closest, Mars is still 200 times as far away as the Moon is. And a big problem on top of that is that much of the time, Mars is on the other side of the solar system, 1000 times as far away as the Moon, not to mention the Sun (which one has to avoid at a healthy distance) is in between.
And that’s not even touching the near-impossibility of a self-sustaining colony on either world.
If people like Musk put half as much of their energy (and money!) into preserving the habitability of THIS planet as they do into their other obsessions, we’d have a better chance of succeeding before it’s too late.
Baud
“Did I say the moon? I meant Detroit.”
me
The comments on Bergers SpaceX stories at ars technica used to be full of Musk simps but not anymore.
Raoul Paste
@rikyrah: Yes, it is a scam and a cash-raising fraud.
I recently read (maybe here) how we have transitioned from a manufacturing economy to a service economy to a scam economy.
These articles never mention the 95% odds of cancer via cosmic radiation from a Mars trip.
Tony Jay
@WaterGirl:
One of the main things that fucks me right off about Musk (other than the name, the attitude, the fraud, the waste, the absolutely bloody everything else about the man) is the fact he looks like someone typed “Image of Kermit the Frog as a human” into Google, then went back and edited it to “Image of evil Kermit the Frog as a human”
I love Kermit. That’s just unforgivable.
dexwood
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: This. Permission and encouragement.
Just look at that parking lot
“ On the Big Rock Candy Mountain”
Kjc23
Interesting trivia question – what planet is usually closest to Mars? The answer is the same as the planet usually closest to Neptune. Mercury is usually closest to every other planet because the orbits often have planets on opposite sides of the sun. Seems like important info for anyone thinking of going to Mars to be aware of…
dmsilev
@me: There still are some Musk simps commenting, and it’s greatly entertaining. As multiple non-simp commenters pointed out, they’re pivoting as rapidly as Ingsoc Party members who have just now always known that Oceania is at war with Eastasia, not Eurasia.
mappy!
And Andrew Carnegie built libraries…
RevRick
@WaterGirl: It has to do with their molting season.
Baud
Via reddit
Nukular Biskits
Good evenin’, y’all!
FastEdD
Since I was an engineering teacher long ago I’ve done volunteer work running student contests with JPL/NASA. My colleagues were reminding me a couple months ago, that humans will never set foot on Mars. Mind you, these are the people who designed and built Mars rovers. Not a bunch of pessimistic Luddites, they spend their careers exploring Mars. It is simple physics. It takes a year and a half to get there and a year and a half to get back if you are lucky. No doctors or hospitals to save you if something goes wrong. Your bones degrade and lose calcium in space. The first astronaut to set foot on Mars will literally break their legs the second they do it. Not Gonna Happen. That movie “The Martian?” Very entertaining but also not possible. Nothing will grow on Martian soil, not even potatoes. 🥔 According to the NASA engineers I work with Elon is full of shit.
Chetan Murthy
As does the heart (due to cosmic ray bombardment).
Shakti
Why are we subject to the whims of men high on their own supply?
Grim joke: In a battle of billionaires trying to take each other out who is the last one standing?
FastEdD
@Chetan Murthy: Absolutely.
Steve LaBonne
Whitey on the moon
WaterGirl
@Tony Jay: You have it exactly right!!!
WaterGirl
@RevRick: I guess Musk is perpetually caught in the ugly stage. Makes sense!
Fair Economist
The other way we knew Mars was a scam was that there has been no work on the zillions of things necessary for a colony to survive. No research or planning on dust management, no plans for reliable power sources (nuclear can’t work without spare parts and solar won’t work during dust storms), and most critically (to me), no work on closed ecosystems with humans. You can’t import food to Mars; it will all have to be grown there, and we have never made a closed ecosystem with multiple people. Biosphere 2 was a catastrophe that failed almost immediately, with a long list of serious problems. Has Musk tried to make a Biosphere 3? Of course not, because he’s a fraud.
Baud
Mai Naem mobile
I noticed years ago when I was on Twitter, if anybody said anything even mildly negative about tesla there’d be a swarm of twitterers attacking them. I don’t know if they were bots or a tesla fanboi cult but it made me suspicious about tesla.
schrodingers_cat
@Mai Naem mobile: He has many fanbois.
Shalimar
@Baud: They keep doing shit that I do not remember being covered in law school. How do you dismiss a case after the defendant has been convicted and served time? He clearly committed the crime. The facts are not in dispute. “Last administration shouldn’t have prosecuted this” is not a legal argument.
Baud
@Shalimar:
If you read the article, the case isn’t final because Bannon has a cert petition pending. At least he served his time.
dmsilev
@FastEdD:
A normal transfer to Mars is a lot shorter than that, about half an Earth year. To pick one random example, here’s Wikipedia on the Perseverance rover that your colleagues built:
We’ve certainly had people spend that long or longer in space on board the ISS, and they didn’t snap like twigs after landing.
Not to say that Mars is a plausible destination anytime in the vaguely near future, but that particular issue is overstated.
currawong
I read a skeet on Bluesky a while back predicting Elmo would be the first “world’s richest man” to go bankrupt.
I think he’s got a chance of being right.
Socolofi
Sigh.
OK, y’all remember when xAI bought X, and normies were all like, “Huh?”
Well, this was a financial move where Musk turned his, and his buddies’ shares of X into something slightly less toxic, bundling them with a new xAI startup. Cool!
And now we’re doing it again, although instead of a dubious also-ran xAI famous for making it easy for the kids to make revenge deepfake porn on the girls that told them no to a date, it’s SpaceX buying the distressed assets that are xAI and X. But unlike xAI and X, SpaceX has created some things of actual value, and there’s that yummy, yummy government money.
But Elon broke up with Trump! you may say.
Lol, no. Liberals apparently don’t watch seasons of WWE – it’s keyfabe all the way. You’ve got buddies, there’s a beef, allows them to fight and sell tickets, then they become buddies again. Fans love it.
So anyway, Elon is gonna take SpaceX public, thereby making himself a ton of $$, and also making his investors a ton of $$, and simply ignore all the shit that was X and xAI. He also has to do this because the Tesla meme is rapidly coming to a close – sales are way down, and in markets that would be friendly to him, BYD is gonna eat his lunch, and in markets that aren’t friendly to BYD, they hate him and Tesla even more.
Anyway, the shift to the Moon is, “let’s make sure we cock-block Bezos and get that yummy, yummy government money” which will make for an inflated IPO for a few years. The fix is clearly in.
Eyeroller
@Chetan Murthy: We could shield against that, but it would add weight to the spacecraft. More weight->more fuel->more weight so we just increase the difficulty.
As already noted, the problem with sending humans is that we are actually pretty fragile and we require a lot of food and water to survive even short term, and those are heavy. The logistics of getting that support to Mars is daunting. We can get to Mars, we’ve sent multiple robots, that’s not the problem. We could also send humans if we wanted, but seems like everybody wants them to be alive when they get there and to remain alive.
Matt McI keeps repeating that Musk’s fantasies are based on 1950s-1970s science fiction and that’s very accurate. There isn’t going to be any “city on the Moon,” much less a “self-growing one.”
And I’m deeply offended by the whole “humans must expand to THE STARS” attitude. It’s never going to happen, we’re wasting resources pursuing it, and why are we doing this? So we can soil our nest here and escape, searching for some similar planet where we might be able to exist? But if we can exist on some distant planet, wouldn’t you think it pretty much certain that some other lifeforms would have evolved there? What would we do with them? What would they do with us? Even if not “intelligent” by our standards, they might be able to put up a fight.
Baud
She chose living free over dying.
Eyeroller
@Fair Economist: What soil and what insolation are we going to use to grow food on Mars? We’d have to import soil and do something about the lower light levels (and the dust storms). Giant grow lights powered by nuclear reactors? Built how?
The insolation may not be such an issue on the Moon but the soil is if anything worse. Toxic and sharp.
Baud
MarsMoon, Bitches!RAM
The only way Musk will ever get a city on the moon or on Mars is if someone builds one up there and he buys it. The guy’s simply not capable of doing new stuff, only seizing what others have done and claiming he did it himself.
Fair Economist
@Eyeroller: In terms of Mars, we’d have to import nitrogen in some form, because Mars has very little. Otherwise we could theoretically make it from Martian materials – but, again, “theoretically” is the big issue; a Martian colony would actually have to *do* it. Or plan to import Earth dirt, which would add a lot of material to transport. And, again, zero work on any of this.
On the moon, yeah, we’d basically have to import soil. That little video is yet more evidence of how much of a scam this is – nobody’s going to be walking around on the Moon; it’s just far too nasty an environment. Not on Mars either but it’s not *quite* as ridiculous. Everything would need to be underground.
azlib
@Raoul Paste: These articles never mention the 95% odds of cancer via cosmic radiation from a Mars trip.
Also the soil on Mars is toxic and who wants to live underground so you do not die from cancer due to radiation poisoning. The Galactic Background Radiation is a huge problem. All those iron nuclei whizzing through your body at near light speed are not good for your health.
me
@dmsilev: Once a few years ago I saw someone post there something along the lines of “Musk doesn’t have time to pay attention to his critics”. I replied that he “Has so many solutions to finalize, so little time”. They did not like that.
suzanne
@Eyeroller:
I have always thought of it as the most antisocial, Hell-is-other-people fantasy we have. Like white flight, but when you also hate white people. The fantasy in sci-fi usually seems to have an element of selection to it.
The real answer for these people is that they should go do some Walden nonsense. Live by yourself in the woods, write poetry, leave your corpse for the bears.
cckids
The fanboys still simping for Musk must have an affinity for the early Mormons, chasing Joseph Smith’s ever-changing golden tablet pronouncements.
Gin & Tonic
@Fair Economist:
And simpler things, like, uh, oxygen, and water. On Mars there’s at least some theoretical possibility of the latter – on the Moon there is nothing.
TONYG
What a fucking idiot. The fact that ANYBODY takes this asshole seriously really illustrates the stupidity of the human species.
lowtechcyclist
@FastEdD: I always figured someone like Elon could make a one-way trip to Mars if he was willing to throw all his money into it. But yeah, nobody’s living there any length of time, and nobody’s coming back.
Snarki, child of Loki
Hey, MAGAs!
Watch out for Musk. I hear he wants to colonize Uranus.
Steve LaBonne
The Phantom comic strip actually lampooned this Musk idiocy a couple of years in advance.
FastEdD
@dmsilev: The information I am referring to comes directly from the people who designed the Perseverance rover (Percy.) It is an order of magnitude more difficult to design a spacecraft that returns humans to earth than it is one that tosses a robot out there on a one way mission.
Miss Bianca
@Tony Jay: Oh, THANK YOU for that image, aagh! Cuz I love Kermit the Frog as well!
Westyny
Musk could “save civilization” by colonizing the Sun.
Eyeroller
@azlib: Iron nuclei? Cosmic rays are almost entirely protons. Heavier nuclei are rare and would not be moving as fast as lighter particles.
But high-energy protons are bad enough. There are also some high-energy photons.
Gin & Tonic
@FastEdD:
That’s less complicated than I’d have guesstimated.
Shakti
Removal proceedings against Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk have been stopped. (pdf)
FastEdD
Also, too, you can’t fly to Mars, conduct science for a week, plant a flag and return home, even if you could solve all the problems with our fragile bones and susceptibility to radiation. The planets literally “have to be aligned” to use Mars’ gravity (what little there is) to throw the spacecraft on the right trajectory back to earth. Neil deGrasse Tyson points this out as well. The amount of time the spacecraft spends in transit is only part of the equation.
MattF
Also, Musk promotes a Data-Centers-In-Space thing composed of thousands of satellites. And, (surprise!) it won’t work. No, you can’t get the amount of required power from solar arrays, and no, radiative cooling in space can’t shed heat fast enough, and no, you can’t shield quadrillions of transistors from radiation to keep them all working. Everything fails by multiple orders of magnitude.
FastEdD
@Eyeroller:
”We could shield against that, but it would add weight to the spacecraft. More weight->more fuel->more weight so we just increase the difficulty.“
You are correct.
Baud
True geniuses aren’t limited by such mundane things as the laws of science.
Eyeroller
@Gin & Tonic: If, as stated upthread, the chemistry is understood for extracting components from the Martian environment for fuel, then the design of the rocket may not be all that much harder than the design to get there (given that one order of magnitude isn’t too bad, as those things go). Getting those components and assembling them into fuel, that may be a lot harder.
My late husband used to like to make a distinction between a science problem and an engineering problem. In an engineering problem, the desired goal is understood, and most of the steps required to get there are understood (in principle, not necessarily how to do it optimally or even practically). Given enough resources, it ought to be possible to solve any engineering problem. The catch is that “resources” requirement. Resources are not infinite. Sending humans to Mars is mostly an engineering problem. But the resources required are likely to be unacceptable to spend.
Going to “the stars” is more of a science problem at this time since we do not know how to do interstellar space travel and we have some well-tested theories that make it effectively impossible.
JetsamPool
@azlib:
I’d hesitate to call it soil, as that implies a mix of organic material, minerals, and water capable of supporting plants. Whatever you want to call it, the surface sediment contains perchlorates.
I’ll be cheering him on if Elmo himself decides to go to Mars.
HeleninEire
Hi. Did you just say “Hey, what’s up?
Well thank you for checking in.
7 days. That is crazy. Just nuts.
Baud
@HeleninEire:
Tick Tock
HeleninEire
@Baud: Just NUTS.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
I don’t understand why anyone thinks it’s possible to colonize the Moon. And if it was even just a case of people being cycled in and out of a moonbase and back to Earth, the physical changes (possibly permanent) that will happen after extended periods are significant. living in 1/6 gravity over time will cause bone density lose, muscle atrophy, cardiovascular deconditioning and fluid shifts to the head possibly causing vision changes/damage. Returning to Earth/dealing with 1g again, would be very hard on the body. I know Musk and his fanboys would just handwave all this away with “Technology will magically fix it!” but biology doesn’t care, Nature always bats last.
FastEdD
We can learn so much about the universe by exploring it with spacecraft. I’ve spent 50 years encouraging kids to do that. I’ve spent time with colleagues who wake up every morning and see things no human has ever seen before. We just don’t need to physically send humans to do the job that instruments can do right now. It isn’t as sexy as sending humans, but Percy and Oppy can accomplish more science than a human can.
Eyeroller
@FastEdD: I am not sure how one would use a gravitational slingshot starting from the planet intended to be the slingshot. Jupiter is usually used in such a scenario. But it’s been a long time since I studied anything about orbital mechanics.
(I actually solved a Jupiter-slingshot homework problem and have no idea anymore how I did it other than it’s simplified by an appropriate change of coordinates.)
What would need to be considered is the tangential velocity of Mars relative to Earth, which isn’t its gravity per se but its orbital parameters.
JetsamPool
What happened to my comment? I just tried to post and the page reloaded.
Anyway, I wanted to say that the Martian surface contains perchlorates, so that’s another challenge to consider (or not) before sending humans, depending on whether the humans are expected to survive. Despite all these challenges, I encourage Elmo to go to Mars himself, clearly the project needs his personal attention to succeed.
Eyeroller
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: It’s not feasible, that’s why science-fiction stories like 2001 postulated a rotating space station with 1g acceleration (and shielding and whatever else), where the humans would live longer term while making forays to the lunar surface to explore.
JetsamPool
Third attempt to comment, maybe this time I will leave out the link to perchlorates on Mars.
JetsamPool
Comment worked! It must have been the link.
Scout211
Federal judge blocks California law banning masks for law enforcement
Hopefully the changes in the new bill will be acceptable.
Aziz, light!
The Ars Technica article says Musk is determined to establish a “Kardeshev-level civilization,” in which all the Sun’s energy is captured (think Dyson Sphere).
What Musk creates will be a Kardashian-level civilization.
Baud
Chetan R Murthy
I had a physicist manager who explained the same thing using the terms “hypothesis risk” and “execution risk”, which map precisely to your respective terms. Musk doesn’t understand that colonizing Mars (or the Moon) involves hypothesis risk. Nobody knows if it’s even possible.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Scout211:
Why did Newsom think CA state officers should be exempt?
Librettist
@rikyrah:
Con artist gonna run cons.
SFAW
@Aziz, light!:
Talk about oxymorons.
cain
@Aziz, light!:
or a Cardassian one!
WaterGirl
@HeleninEire: We are counting down with you!
piratedan
as an avid SF reader, the colonization of space is a huge thematic endeavor based in part of the penchant of humanity to shit where it lives.
There are multiple scientific scenarios that come into play, colonization of the Moon and Mars, with the Mars endeavor being made with a huge effort at terraforming the planet itself, not so much to shape it into a duplicate Earth immediately, but in stages of helping to build an atmosphere to allow an actual introduction of nature to introduce nitrogen and oxygen…. some have posited introducing pollution as a mechanism to build an atmosphere by creating heat and CO2 as foundational elements to start the process. Is it a long term project, you bet your ass, but man has always had a desire to shape his environment. The question is if there is a life currently in existence and what form it might take, various persons argue that we don’t know what we don’t know.
All of this is well beyond any kind of planning being done by Elon Musk, who applies magic pixie dust thinking to all of his endeavors, as he positions himself as an idea man.
There are other targets that may offer better opportunities, say certain asteroids or the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. The issue as always that niggling issue of life support and lack of self sustenance.
HeleninEire
@WaterGirl: Thanks
Scout211
He asked for that to protect undercover local and state officers or something like that. It makes sense that the requirements should be the same for state and federal officers so I can see why the judge ruled that it was discriminatory.
The judge today let stand the requirement for all of the federal officers’ badges to be clearly seen, though, which is good.
dmsilev
@Eyeroller:
That in fact was, until yesterday, the SpaceX plan. It’s not original to Musk; I think the first proposal along those lines was Zubrin’s Mars Direct scheme. In any event, the science is the Sabatier reaction, which takes carbon dioxide and hydrogen and produces methane and water. You get the hydrogen by electrolyzing water, both from the secondary product of the reaction and from outside.
So, that’s the chemistry. Well established. CO2 is easy; on Mars, that’s just “air”. Water is a lot harder. We know it exists on Mars, but it’s not exactly “put hose into ocean” accessible.
MagdaInBlack
I feel that the folks commenting here know a whole lot more about Mars than Elon.
And after reading the comments, I’m pretty sure I do too.
lowtechcyclist
@HeleninEire:
Now it’s time to move along to the end of the song
Things are gonna finish strong, we’ve seven left to go
:-)
Lyrebird
@Shakti:
THANK YOU and THANKS ACLU, sounds like the legal fight is not over for Ms. Ozturk, but at least she is actually being lawfully protected now.
Was looking for news but had forgotten how to spell her name, got busy, etc… saddened but not shocked that the biggest 1st amendment screaming orgs I had heard of did not use much of their energy to support her.
Eyeroller
@Chetan R Murthy: No, I think Mars is an engineering problem/execution risk, but solving it would require immense resources, much more than many people are willing to admit or understand, and it may never be feasible with the resources we would be willing to commit to it.
Going to interstellar space, however, is definitely a science problem/hypothesis risk.
Sally
@dmsilev: And that so called pedo guy isn’t in the trump-Epstein files
Eyeroller
@piratedan: It could be possible to extract enough oxygen from the thin air of Mars to support a few people, but terraforming is a completely different issue. Mars has 38% of the gravity of Earth, which means it would not be able to retain some atmospheric components we have here at all, and it leaks gases like oxygen at a much higher rate than Earth without a means to replenish them. On Earth the oxygen and most of the nitrogen are extracted from the water and soil by biological processes and the loss rate is small, so they were able to accumulate to an equilibrium compatible with the life that created the atmosphere. That would not be the case on Mars.
F*ck, we struggle to survive near the South Pole, which is comparable in many ways to the Martian surface (except that we can at least breathe at the South Pole), and that’s on our own damn planet where we can fly planes at least part of the year, and don’t have to send rockets on six-month voyages every two years to resupply a tiny colony.
pluky
@Eyeroller: More likely they will have developed a physiology that is mutually toxic with our own.
Matt McIrvin
@Captain C:
All of the dream
How does it mean?
When the rhythm is glad
There is nothing to be sad…
Sally
If they spent this money making life on Earth better, life on Earth would be better.
azlib
@Eyeroller:But high-energy protons are bad enough. There are also some high-energy photons.
Take a look at this:
academic.oup.com/mnras/article/539/3/2435/8087347
coin operated
perchlorates…I learned something new today
Martin
@Chetan R Murthy: It’s most likely possible as a humanity scale activity. We understand the problems in the effort – they are substantial but they are all execution risks. We know how to keep astronauts alive for the journey (it’s not easy, but it’s possible), we’ve done longevity experiments in orbit (Mark Kelly, for instance), we know how to do radiation protection, but holy shit are there no recovery options. But we’ve done that before – the lunar missions had no recovery options and we had even less experiential testing to lean on there.
But Musk isn’t undertaking a humanity scale activity, he’s undertaking an economic one. You lose out to economic risk long before you get close to execution or hypothesis risk. There are loads of engineering problems we can solve that we will never attempt out of the free market because they’ll hit the economic wall long before the engineering one.
When we undertook the Apollo program, there were a number of hypothesis risks. We didn’t know how to do orbital docking. This was the subject of Buzz Aldrin’s doctoral thesis – in 1963, a year after Kennedy announced the effort. We didn’t know if it was possible, let alone if we could engineer it. And the only reason we undertook the effort was that we waved away the need to pay for/get a return on any of it. Musk doesn’t have that luxury and he knows it, and everyone participating in a discussion of going to Mars knows it.
Mr. Bemused Senior
The notion of colonizing Mars is of course absurd. Even assuming terraforming technology from science fiction (giant icebergs towed from Saturn’s rings?) the trouble is Mars has no magnetic field so the atmosphere can’t persist. Never mind the enormous resources required. This isn’t even a pipe dream.
Martin
@MagdaInBlack: I’ve relayed comments that engineers I sent to work for Musk in the early days of SpaceX told me – Musk segregates disciplines into what he considers to be easy and hard. Hard problems he’ll defer to experts on and easy problems he believes he’s smarter than the PhDs. That differentiation is a pure measure of his ignorance and hubris and its why he’s sometimes successful with really challenging matters – SpaceXs engines are extremely good, because he considers it hard and listens to the experts, and his cars suck because he thinks industrial engineering is trivial and the experts are idiots. He thought streamlining the federal government was trivial because institutional management isn’t something he respects. That’s really all there is to it. He thinks going to Mars is fundamentally easy – the logistics of it, the application of known engineering, etc. It’s not, it’s really hard. Almost certainly possible, but really hard. And even where it is possible, if it’s not perfect people will die and you’re going to have to live with that. Sometimes we’re willing to do that, but not as part of a vanity exercise.
different-church-lady
SHUT…
THE FUCK…
UP…
MUSK.