Mostly Open Thread

… Isaacman made headlines earlier this year when he became the first private astronaut to conduct a spacewalk. The five-day mission took place using a capsule built by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. During the flight, Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis donned space suits supplied by the company and floated briefly outside the capsule…

Isaacman is a friend of Musk, and his online payment company, Shift 4, has extensive financial ties to SpaceX. According to financial disclosure documents, Shift 4 had invested $27.5 million dollars in SpaceX as of 2021. That same year, Shift4 announced a five-year partnership that would make it the payment platform for Starlink, the satellite internet service run by SpaceX.

If confirmed as NASA administrator, Isaacman would oversee billions of dollars in contracts that the government has awarded to SpaceX. He would also be in a position to funnel more money to Musk’s company…

In fact, in previous posts on Musk’s social media platform X, Isaacman appears to have shown a strong preference for SpaceX. He has supported allowing SpaceX to increase its launches out of California, after lawmakers there voted to restrict its flights from Vandenberg Air Force Base. He’s also been critical of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) to carry astronauts to the moon, as well as the agency’s decision to award a lunar landing contract to Blue Origin, the spaceflight company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Blue Origin award came after NASA gave a multi-billion dollar contract to SpaceX for the same mission…

Farrar says Isaacman would not immediately be able to restructure NASA’s large programs, such as its Artemis mission to deliver astronauts to the moon. That’s because many aspects of those programs are dictated by Congress, which sets the budget for the space agency. “The real question for NASA is whether Congress will permit it to abandon legacy projects like SLS so the budget can be redirected to SpaceX,” he says…

Back during the first Gilded Age, plutocrats started the trend of buying themselves vast Western dude ranches (frequently using government dollars), where they could live out their manly Cowboy & Indian dreams. That’s still popular, of course, but Space, beyotches! has both a technocratic sheen and the imagined advantage of becoming an actual God-Emperor in a whole new realm. Especially for a soutpiel like Elon Musk, who’s been steeped since birth in the idea that when the going gets tough, the privileged elite skip out…

One thing I find interesting about Musk's descent into politics is that he's destroying his Mars plans. Even if heavy rocket launches were free, putting people on Mars requires a decade or more of grinding near Earth to develop life support capabilities that simply don't exist.

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) December 20, 2024

Like it or not, the agency that has the institutional knowledge on life support, deep space tracking, and a dozen other technologies needed for Mars is NASA. Not to mention that for reasons of practical politics, a half-trillion dollar Mars landing has to be a national project

The irreducible length (~two years) of a Mars mission is so far out of our experience that it frontloads any landing attempt with multiple two-year testing cycles in far Earth orbit, to work out the life support bugs. There’s just no way around this grind as a prerequisite.

That means that to go to Mars, you have to sustain the support of Congress for a decade or more, as parties come in and out of power. Old Elon was on track to achieve this, his pose was disdaining politics in favor of a good old wailing electric guitar American can-do spirit

He had the cultural capital, the money, and a promising rocket program that put him on track to realizing the Martian dream, and he gave that up to become an ideologue in an administration where such influence has historically had a short shelf life. Talk about a mind virus!

By transforming himself into a hyperpartisan political figure, Musk has made sure that he can’t realize his stated dream of Mars colonization—he can’t even do a Mars landing—because the only way multi-decade megaprojects get done in US politics is by slow institutional capture.

You have to remember that even three years ago, Musk was a politically unaligned memelord whose real passion was robot cars, supertunnels, a kind of techno-optimism rooted in American greatness, exceptionalism, and ability to build shit. And he threw that valuable clout away.

It's not just a money question; you need a long near Earth research program which necessarily means launch permits, and for going to Mars in particular you need enough political clout to ignore COSPAR rules on planetary protection, a matter of international treaty.

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) December 20, 2024

My point is if Mars became a national priority tonight, it would take 15-20 years to get to the landing, with no way to shorten the process. That's a long time to rely on Trump and his political successors to stay in power, and keep liking you.

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) December 20, 2024

For those interested, I wrote the start of a rant last year about what actually makes going to Mars difficult, and why it's a terrible idea to boot. https://t.co/Q8oD7otgqn

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) December 20, 2024

Something to argue about while we’re waiting for the goodies to finish baking, or the (grand)kids to drop off to sleep:

The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun.

The buildup to Mars would not look like Apollo, but a long series of ISS-like flights to nowhere. If your main complaint about the International Space Station is that it’s too exciting and has a distracting view of Earth out the window, then you’ll love watching ISS Jr. drift around doing bone studies in deep space. But if you think rockets, adventure, exploration, and discovery are more fun than counting tumors in mice, then the slow and timorous Mars program will only break your heart.

Sticking a flag in the Martian dust would cost something north of half a trillion dollars, with no realistic prospect of landing before 2050. To borrow a quote from John Young, keeping such a program funded through fifteen consecutive Congresses would require a series “of continuous miracles, interspersed with acts of God”. Like the Space Shuttle and Space Station before it, the Mars program would exist in a state of permanent redesign by budget committee until any logic or sense in the original proposal had been wrung out of it.

When the great moment finally came, and the astronauts had taken their first Martian selfie, strict mission rules meant to prevent contamination and minimize risk would leave the crew dependent on the same robots they’d been sent at enormous cost to replace. Only the microbes that lived in the spacecraft, uninformed of the mission rules, would be free to go wander outside. They would become the real explorers of Mars, and if their luck held, its first colonists.

How long such a program could last is anyone’s guess. But if landing on the Moon taught us anything, it’s that taxpayer enthusiasm for rock collecting has hard limits. At ~$100B per mission, and with launch windows to Mars one election cycle apart, NASA would be playing a form of programmatic Russian roulette. It’s hard to imagine landings going past the single digits before cost or an accident shut the program down. And once the rockets had retired to their museums, humanity would have nothing to show for its Mars adventure except some rocks and a bunch of unspeakably angry astrobiologists. It would in every way be the opposite of exploration…