Mars One finalists refute accusations from one of their own + Making Mars settlement real

The Mars One project is getting hammered on the web by these two articles that include accusations against the project made by one of the entrants who made the cut to the Mars100 group:

However, other Mars1000 finalists respond with a rebuttal to each of the accusations: Current Mars100 Finalists refute Elmo Keep’s Mars One “conspiracy theory.” — Medium.

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As I’ve indicated before, Mars One is essentially an aspirational project. It aspires to create a Mars settlement but it is dependent on others to make a settlement technically feasible at a price that a private effort could conceivably afford. There is nothing in the Mars One plan about developing its own rockets, spacecraft, settlement hardware, etc. Mars One is all about creating a business model that can raise sufficient funds to pay the company (or companies) that supply the rockets, spacecraft, etc. to take a group of private individuals to the Red Planet.

Currently, it is only SpaceX that looks like it could supply affordable transportation to the Red Planet in the next decade or two. Elon Musk has often said, as in the interview at MIT last fall shown in the video below, that Mars settlement is the primary goal of the company:

The long term ambition of SpaceX is to develop the technologies necessary to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars, or civilization on Mars,

Full reusability of rockets and spacecraft is what makes it not crazy to talk about reductions in space transportation costs by factors of 10 to 100:

Well, it is a chicken and egg situation, the reason why there’s low demand for spaceflight is because it’s ridiculously expensive, and so at some point someone has to say, okay, we’re going to make something that’s much more affordable and then see what applications develop. That’s what has to happen.

The situation in rocketry is like if an aircraft – imagine if aircraft were single use, then how many people would fly? The flight rate would be really low. If you buy a 757 it’s like $250M, or maybe $300M, and you need two of them for a round-trip. No-one is paying half-a-billion dollars to fly from Boston to London, and if that were the case there’d be like a very small number of flights for scientific and military purposes and people would say, wow, the market for aircraft is so tiny, people really love going by boat – it’s nonsense.

If we have rockets that are reusable, we could – fully-reusable and can get to a decent flight rate, the potential is there to get a two order of magnitude reduction in the cost of space transport, which is, I think, vital for establishment of a self-sustaining civilization on another planet or even on the Moon or some sort of L5 colony or whatever, but you really need to get the cost down – we need a two order of magnitude improvement, at least, in the cost of transport. In fact, relative to the estimates of what it costs to do a manned Mars mission, I think like some of the lower estimates are at the $100B to $200B level, for a four person mission, we need more like a 10,000 fold reduction. I mean, so people can afford to go.

(As long as NASA ignores reusability and focuses only on a big and stupendously expensive rocket, the agency will never afford to go to Mars even for a simple flag and footprints mission with three or four astronauts.)

Elon is aiming for a price of $500k for a person to move to Mars. He sees that as an amount that many people could raise by cashing out all their assets.

He apparently has had no direct contact with Mars One and has stated that the organization’s emphasis on one-way trips is misguided. It won’t be affordable to go to Mars unless the transports are two-way:

I think there’s plenty of people who will sign up for a one-way trip to Mars. It’d certainly be enough, but I think the question is, is it a one-way mission and then you die, or is it a one-way mission and you get resupplied, that’s a big difference. I think it ends up being a moot point because you want to bring the spaceship back. These spaceships are expensive, okay, they’re hard to build. You can’t just leave them there. So whether or not people want to come back or not, is kind of – like, they can just jump on if they want, but we need the spaceship back. I mean, it’d be kind of weird if there’s this huge collection of spaceships on Mars over time. It’d be like, maybe we should send them back – no, of course we should send them back. Particularly if we want to have a colony of some kind that’s of significant size.

The Mars One graphics typically show Dragon spacecraft converted into habitats on the ground. However, Elon thinks that going to Mars in Dragons makes little sense:

Well, the illustrations that I’ve seen basically has them using a bunch of SpaceX rockets and Dragon spacecraft. I’m like, okay, if they want to buy a bunch of Dragons and Falcon 9 rockets, that’s cool. We’ll certainly sell them. I mean, I don’t think they’ve got anywhere near the funding to buy even one, so I think therefore it’s unrealistic, and I think trying to go to Mars in Dragon is less than ideal. It’s at least – well, if you go real fast it’s maybe a three month journey and normally it would be more like a 6 to 8 month journey. That’s a long time to spend in something with the interior volume of an SUV. I’d recommend waiting for the next generation of technology.

Elon has said that later this year he will describe in more detail the “next generation of technology” that he believes will enable his plan for Mars settlement. If SpaceX makes steady progress over the next few years in implementing that technology, especially reusable rockets, then proposals for Mars settlement will gain increasing credibility and many organizations will emerge to pursue that goal. Mars One may be a leader in that movement or it may have become a footnote; an early group that failed to get off the ground financially but proved that there are plenty of people eager and willing to move to Mars.

Update: Some comments from Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX about Mars travel: SpaceX: No One Laughs Anymore When We Talk About Colonizing Mars – Motherboard

“We’re not shy about talking about Mars, which would be an extraordinary step for humans, to actually have a settlement there,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said Tuesday at the Satellite conference in Washington, DC. “The whole company is geared up on that, everybody’s eye is on the Red Planet.”

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“We’re not interested in one way trips,” she said. “In order to take people there and come back, you can’t toss the rocket when you get there and then wait 30 years until you can build another one on Mars.”

“There is a surprising number of people that want to leave Earth, we believe there is a commercial application for any Mars mission,” she added.

My emphasis.