Human mission to Mars by 2024 ?

[Mon0Zer0]

Christine referred to the purchase order made by the US government that is used up. That has nothing to do with the valuation of a company, but whether that company fulfilled the order at the budget set, or is close.

Which purchase order and what do you mean by "used up"? Are you saying they're not going to deliver?

I mentioned the value of SpaceX to mean that a company can't get out of delivering goods ordered because the money invested is used up in development. They have to obtain funds elsewhere, declare themselves bankrupt or the buyer has to cancel the project and write off the losses. What I mean is SpaceX has significant capital resources to meet their obligations.

That isn't how it works. Musk's wealth is in shares. If he sold some of those shares (as he does when he wants to buy a social media company, or an election), those shares don't go away, they just change ownership. The company's books don't change in anyway, just who gets invited to the shareholder meeting.

If he sells a large number of his shares all at once it affects the share value. When Musk sold his shares to buy twitter Tesla's share price fell by $125 billion the next day. It falls partly because of supply / demand, partly because it can be seen as a lack of confidence in the company, and partly because Musk is Tesla as far as the market is concerned and his diminished ownership affects the company direction. Who is invited to the shareholder meeting matters for the market.

And your misunderstanding is part of why there is such a problem with wealth in the world - most of the wealthiest people own nothing more than a share of a company that now has a high market value due to speculation. You can have a company like Theranos that has no actual proprietary knowledge or manufacturing capacity, but a lot of market enthusiasm. Or you can have a company like Boeing which has enormous manufacturing capacity and world beating technologies, but whose stock is in the toilet. Or you can have Bitcoin, which is not anything at all, but has a very high speculated value.

I get the point about tech being overheated and overinflated, and the "Theranos problem". That isn't as much a Musk issue as a weakness of institutional investors to perform due diligence and the mania of FOMO.

Theranos and SpaceX aren't really comparable, though. We've seen the goods with SpaceX. They've put satellites in space, taken astronauts to the space station, stepped in when Starship wasn't able to meet it's obligations, developed reusable rockets and so on. They're a company that are producing the goods.

Boeing's stock is in the toilet because of recent high profile failures which are ultimately seen as failures of management. Stock price reflects confidence in management (amongst other things). If it's undervalued there will be a correction at some point, that's how the market works.

I'm no Bitcoin enthusiast, but Bitcoin isn't "nothing at all", it's as much something as money is something - a consensus mechanism for exchange and account. Is it a good one? Right now, no. But Deutsche Bank think it might be.

Maybe there is value in having a bunch of people all reaching for a pointless goal, but the last time we played this game we didn't get the extensive orbital infrastructure that moonshot enthusiasm was supposed to pay for. We got one worn out ISS out of the Space Shuttle program.

What do you mean by last time? Do you think the ISS was a failure? Are you saying moonshots always lead to failure?

So let's not fool ourselves that going to Mars once (or not, if it kills the crew) is going to be the first triumphant step in our mastery of the solar system. It's just another man in a barrel going over Niagara Falls.

We don't know for sure, that's the point. It's not a binary of remain on earth / master the solar system. There are applications for local space that are as valuable (at least the Chinese think so enough to want to build a base on the moon). The realworld application of reusable rockets is they reduce the cost of launches significantly.

Elon Musk is something like the Bitcoin of people. Like Sam Bankman-Fried, Musk's sociopathy strikes other high-rollers as audacious and visionary - but maybe that's just because broken people fool our empathy because you can't actually flaunt the societal norms you neither have nor understand. Asperger's is a disability, no matter how sexy someone wants to package it.

This seems to be more about Musk's deficiencies as a person than his ability to deliver. A deeply flawed person can still produce the goods.

He isn't like SBF. SBF, and Holmes and the WeWork guy are the simulacra of Musk and Jobs, before him. They're the appearance with none of the substance. Musk is definitely a carny figure but he has at least some substance. Every time I see him announce a new product it makes me cringe but underneath the showmanship, regular Teslas (not the cybertruck) are still selling well.

I don't think Musk has vision. He just had enough seed money left over to make a splash with his little boy enthusiasm for stuff that the uninformed think of as future-duper. But Mars is a low value asset. All of the hardship, none of the benefits. The interesting places in the solar system don't have any 19th century novels written about them, so there we are.

Life isn't like novels. I understand the annoyance of mythologising, but I think your distaste for Musk, the man, clouds your judgement with how well his companies have performed or their potential to deliver a mars mission. If you were arguing they're severely overvalued, I'd agree with you. If you're saying their failures because they haven't delivered what they promised, I'd argue that they've developed revolutionary technology that is worthwhile.

Musk's talent is really in marketing the future. In that sense, I think he has a vision, even if it's not HIS vision but that of sci-fi of his youth.

People like Musk and Fried and Zuckerberg are a product of our time - a time where people that believe in reality and admit uncertainty have been demoted as authority figures. We don't believe scientists, economists, epidemiologists or scholars. Instead we believe in the people that act like all the other idiots on Facebook, but show that their insistence in promoting nonsense can make someone successful. If one knucklehead can become a billionaire on pure gumption, golly we all can!

I don't think it's helpful to see Musk as a generalised symbol of some other phenomenon or lay it at his door. The crisis of experts is complicated and not something we should get into in a thread about Mars (or probs on this forum).

 

[Mon0Zer0]

I'm surprised that you can't see where he has failed to deliver on the government space contracts. Its quite clear that targets are not even close to being met.

Can you be specific? Which contracts? Which targets?

It is, of course, ironic that he will soon be in charge of a government function (childishly named DOGE) that will be looking at value in gov spending. I bet he doesn't discover any problems with his own consumption of public dollars.

He's awful, agreed.

When I say 'the money is largely gone' I'm not referring to Space X market cap. I'm referring to the money given to Space X by the taxpayer.

How is it gone unless the company is bankrupt? Depending on the contract, the money is paid to the company in return for a promise to deliver "goods / services". If the cost of delivering exceeds the value paid he's not released from an obligation to fulfil the contract unless the company goes bankrupt or the govt agrees to cancel it. This is different from money paid to a govt department where the money IS earmarked and can be used up.

BTW, did you know that the public servant who awarded the multi billion dollar contract to Space X was hired by, er, Space X immediately after.

It happens a lot. Was there any investigation into the tendering procedure or any hints it was improper?

The solar panel business that you mention was being run by Musk's brother. It was in a bad way. He purchased it using Tesla, which was good for his brother but bad for Tesla. This lack of fiduciary duty to shareholders became the basis of a court case.

He is awful.

Yes, it has become standard practice these days to lie about products and technology. To say, for example, that you are going to Mars in a few years when you are certainly not. To say (in 2016) that you have "self driving" technology (alread better than a human dont you know) when, in 2024, you certainly do not. To say you have Saudi money to take your company private at an inflated valuation when you certainly do not. These things are not victimless. I could go on and on and on and on but this is at huge risk of becoming boring. And, yes, Musk is certainly not the only one who has discovered the depth of public gullability and the means to milk it for all it is worth.

Elizabeth Holmes must be watching all this from her jail cell and shaking her head in disbelief.

There are lies, promises and there are dreams. The lines between them aren't always clear. There is a difference between "we have self driving technology already" which might be a lie (depending on how you define self driving technology), and "we're going to Mars in 2025" which is a dream. Most people understand that the latter is a goal, not a promise.

Musk does lie, but he also produces the goods. Supporters might overlook his tendency to lie for the things he does produce.

Holmes' claims about Theranos were definitely a lie and were always a lie and she made no attempt to make them reality. That's what I mean by her being a simulacrum of Steve Jobs.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Yes, I think it's perhaps better to veer away from discussing divisive individuals,. I think that we are all on the same hymn sheet, just to differing degrees.

Put simply, the only way to attwmpt a 'Mars shot' is to go back to the Moon. Several times. Enough so that human space travel becomes the norm rather than the exception. Then to build habitable structures there.

The US has a choice. It can either go to the Moon in its own rockets, or aboard Chinese/Japanese/Russian/Indian ones. It can buuld its own structures on the Moon, or it can live in Chinese/Japanese/Russian/Indian ones. It can attempt to send a manned mission to Mars, or it can sit back and watch others make the attempt.

NASA on its own doesn't seem either capable or willing. I'm not sure whether it's one or the other or both. It needs (and indeed has) commercial partners who will be the driving force.

I don't think that the USA want to be left behind in this venture, and I'm pretty sure that the new President won't.

Which is why I think we will see the emergence of technology to drive things forward (the 'chopsticks' being one example). The next decade will, I believe, be a time of incredible growth in manned space flight. I also think it will be an incredibly exciting time for those interested in the topic, as the 1960s and early 'Space Shuttle' years were.

Personally, I don't care what nation reaches to Moon and beyond next. What I hope for is a joint mission to Mars. If the Chinese follow through with sharing technology, we will hopefully see other nations reciptocate.

Perhaps we will discover that they only way to learn how to get to Mars and the planets beyond, is first to learn to cooperate with each other. And whether we then succeed or fail in our quest, we will have learnt a valuable lesson about ourselves; something far more important than setting foot on another planet.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could have Mutually Assured Success?

 

[Toby Frost]

I think there was more of a need to get to the moon first in the 1960s because there was such clear competition between Communism and Capitalism. It was a test of ideologies. Now that the politics of Russia, the US, India and maybe even China are much closer, that feels less important. The answer to "Who gets to Mars first?" may well be "an oligarch".

 

[Swank]

My posts aren't motivated by hate for Elon Musk. I just don't understand what anyone sees as value in the sloppy and short sighted ventures he's associated with. A luxury brand whose whole identity is being electric when every car will be electric soon? Short sighted. A space race to send a handful of tourists to a place with no economic value? Short sighted.

Space has some extremely valuable properties - unlimited solar energy, no weather, no gravity, no drag, no environment to poison. That's the prize - a place that we can shift an immense planetary burden to while building an infrastructure that would make nearly any other space venture relatively easy.

Mars is Lewis and Clark. Near earth infrastructure is the wagon train, and later the transcontinental railroad. Public enthusiasm after a stunt, like the Apollo missions, is always short lived. Public consumption of a beneficial industry has legs.

Let China win the Mars race - it's a booby prize. It won't help them sell more plastic crap to the West or keep their authoritative economy from toppling. Meanwhile, we could be selling clean electric to India and building the kind of structures in orbit that can take solar bombardment without a death sentence to the crew. From there, getting to the other planets would be easy.


There is nothing on Mars of value. Just cancerous radiation and cancerous pulverized stone.

 

[Mon0Zer0]

There is nothing on Mars of value. Just cancerous radiation and cancerous pulverized stone.

There's probably a great deal of value from things that can be learned from being on Mars - geology, biology (if there's any remnants of early life, or a lack of), as well as from the challenge of actually going there. Many of those things that can't be readily tested by machines, alone.

There is symbolic value, too.

 

[Mon0Zer0]

Wouldn't it be nice if we could have Mutually Assured Success?

That's one thing that was good about the ISS, until recently it was symbolic of international co-operation. Would be nice to see that again.

 

[paranoid marvin]

That's one thing that was good about the ISS, until recently it was symbolic of international co-operation. Would be nice to see that again.

Yes, I loved that about the ISS. Whatever **** was going down back on Earth, here everyone could just work for a common goal.

 

[Toby Frost]

Let China win the Mars race - it's a booby prize. It won't help them sell more plastic crap to the West or keep their authoritative economy from toppling. Meanwhile, we could be selling clean electric to India and building the kind of structures in orbit that can take solar bombardment without a death sentence to the crew. From there, getting to the other planets would be easy.

Sadly, this idea sounds way too intelligent to actually happen. I can already hear a cretinous voice droning "They said I couldn't pudda man on Moors, I pudda man on Moors, folks, they said I couldn't..."

But other people probably have more faith in humankind than I do. To my mind, this is the Age of the Moron, and unless something major changes, it's downhill from here on.

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

Sadly, this idea sounds way too intelligent to actually happen. I can already hear a cretinous voice droning "They said I couldn't pudda man on Moors, I pudda man on Moors, folks, they said I couldn't..."

But other people probably have more faith in humankind than I do. To my mind, this is the Age of the Moron, and unless something major changes, it's downhill from here on.

Yes, I've been calling it the Era of Bullsh*t, but I do like "the Age of the Moron" too.

We are entering a period of technological, intellectual and moral stagnation that could easily last 100 years due to its self sustaining/reinforcing nature. As someone who values science, ethical standards, truthfulness and compassionate capitalism, I am in despair.

 

[Toby Frost]

Likewise. I can't really go into details, but there's a faint whiff of Weimar to modern times.

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

Coincidentally this just popped up on Youtube: