On Oct/5/2019 at 11:44, Niklas Holsti wrote :
On 19-10-03 19:18 , David Spain wrote:

There are a TON of issues remaining to get crewed Starships to Mars.

Nah, I would say two tons :-)

No matter how you slice it, there is complexity to artificial gravity. I
have the sneaking suspicion that EM thinks this can be short circuited
by routine exercise inside a Starship. If I can compensate for the
deleterious effects using exercise, drugs, or alcohol (lol) well...
'tight is right'. :-)

I agree that this seems to be the SpaceX plan. And it will probably
work, too, at least for the fast and quick transits that SpaceX will
probably start with.

I think that the SpaceX plan is a bit of a if you build it they will
come plan. They want to build a rocket that can bring humans to Mars
cheaply. They figure that if they send a few people to Mars, even if
these few people can't do much on Mars because their spacesuit isn't
optimised for Mars and they are unfit to do work because of bone and
muscle loss, SpaceX still showed that Mars missions can be done. Others
will work on the N tons of details [ choose your value of N, but I agree
with you that one is a small value for N :-) ] that will make Mars
missions interesting and Mars colonisation possible.

Anyway that's my impression. Maybe they are working on all the details
and have solutions. But until now they haven't shown so.

I would have hoped that some people would have started to be vocal about
the needs of Mars travellers by now. I mean there should be some company
somewhere telling SpaceX, we can make great Mars spacesuits, or we have
a great solution for disembarkation and embarkation from a cabin on a
rocket on Mars, or artificial gravity or ... Even NASA and other space
agencies should be calling SpaceX. Maybe there is some of that going on,
but they sure are quiet about it.


Alain Fournier