Fuel factory.  Definitely going to need permanent fuel installation(s).  The Mars Direct-style "nuclear golf cart robot ISRU module" ain't going to refill a Starship for the trip home.


Now, OTOH, I don't see us building some kind of colony on Mars....for a long while.  At best, you'll get a small base (or series of base camps, as the science guys explore the planet on different expeditions).  Even if we wanted to, and the money was there...the TMI windows only opening every couple of years is a definite choke on Mars activity.

The Moon (and cislunar space in general) is where it's gonna be happening for the next couple of decades.  

Hell, I think we'll see kids born on Mercury before Mars.

Probably not. Getting to Mercury is harder than going to the outer solar system.

Yeah, the "rolling downhill while trying to parallel park" bit of the orbital mechanics is tricky, and would likely require NTR (for hooman-crewed trips).  But once you're there......Mercury has a lot to recommend it.

Martian-scale gravity.
ALL the metals.
ALL the solar power.
Significant (we think) quantities of water ice.
No atmosphere (tradeoff, with some drawbacks, but would enable us to launch stuff from the surface with a mass driver).





My bet is that Mercury will end up occupying the niche that Scifi typically gives to Mars.

Mercury is donor mass for future Dyson structure construction.

Yes, but dismantling a planet. Even a small one is going to take time no matter what technology you use. Even if Mercury is ultimately completely dismantled (along with much of the rest of the solar system) it could still sustain life or at least various pieces of sophisticated infrastructure for thousands of years.

Turning the solar system into megastructures is the biggest example of how the future is not going to look like how most people envision it. To most people such a thing could never happen and if it did then it would be the work of godlike alien entities who probably spend at least part of their time as entities of pure energy.

I believe we have the seeds to accomplish this right now. Although I do believe that we will need corresponding leaps in human wisdom, not just technical knowledge to accomplish this.

You'll be waiting a while on that report from Fish & Wildlife....

Steel and concrete.

Steel and concrete are what Mega structures are made of.  Our technical knowledge is sufficient to design and build these things.  What needs to expand is our resource gathering, utilization, and economy to support such things.

Asteroid mining... will be the first step to get there.  
The first few will probably be cut up and de-orbited to Earth for processing... but then I think we'd switch to the Moon for processing.  Simply because it close... and then...
we either build rotating orbital processing stations... or go to Mars to set up processing there.

Processing needs "gravity"  So Moon, Mars, or a rotating station.  

The Moon has advantages and disadvantages.  Inherent radiation shielding from having a large mass block half of space for you.  No cares about what you vent out onto its surface... But also no atmo to help slow down the asteroid you de-orbit onto it.  But then no atmo to get in the way when launching... It's close to us when we're trying things out for the first time... and there's a fair number of near Earth asteroids we can start with. Can be self sustaining for life from local resources once the required bio mass from Earth is brought there.

Mars has advantages and disadvantages.   Inherent radiation shielding from having a large mass block half of space for you.  No cares about what you vent out onto its surface... in fact most byproducts from processing would help thicken the atmo for terraforming.  It's got a very thin atmo... not so little that it can be ignored and not so much that it really is a big help when de-orbiting asteroids... still it does help a little and will increasingly help more as more and more asteroids get processed.  Lighter gravity helps get stuff back up into space after processing too.  It's closer to the asteroid belt which is where we'll need to go once we run out of near Earth asteroids.  Can be self sustaining for life from local resources once the required bio mass from Earth is brought there.

A rotating station... Can't be built until one of the other two places is functioning... but once a large enough one is built it may enable the others to be abandoned.  It has advantages and disadvantages.  Large amounts of Mass will need to used to surround living areas for radiation protection.  Waste gasses from processing will have to be captured and not simply vented as Venting them will change the position of the station.  No need to get stuff back up out of a gravity well.  You can move the station anywhere you need it and build stuff from the processed goods in situ. I'm not sure how self sustaining a station can be...  new reassures will need to be brought in and waste removed.  I don't think anything can ever be perfectly 100% recyclable...  Not even the Earth is perfectly self sustaining. but then neither would the Moon or Mars be... Point is I'm unsure how self sustaining a station can be as compared to the Moon or Mars.  Certainly some amount... but how much?

The most interesting thing about space industry, to me, is "what do you do with the heat?" If you have a moon base or a rotating space station where you're processing ore and smelting it into alloys, how do you cool it off? No atmosphere means no convection. Conduction isn't good because you'll eventually melt your space station. That just leaves radiation. How small will batches have to be, or how large and thin will sheets of metals have to be, to radiate heat in a timely manner?
Mars' skimpy atmosphere starts sounding like a super handy thing to have for industrial work.

ETA: The ISS has over 15,000 (edited because there are 10 radiators and I thought there were only 6) square feet of radiator surface to keep a volume approximately the size of a 747 habitable. And there's no heavy industry going on there. Just the basics of living life.

If you can harvest and redirect the heat it would be handy for smelting metals.  Mining is one of the big goals of space industry.

On the Moon or Mars you could dump the excess heat into the ground... or atmo for Mars... But ground would be more efficient for the time being.  Essentially reverse Geothermal... Pump hot water/steam through pipes into the ground and get back cool water.

A station though... yeah after getting as creative as you can with moving the heat around to warm things... you are left with either radiators... or... You could use the heat to super heat a waste fluid... and "vent" that through an Engine bell to use it for propelling your station... Or maintaining spin...  The fluid would take the heat you put into it away with it.

Thermal reservoirs (molten salt?) would possibly be a decent way to store power through the Lunar nights.

Well if you dump a bunch of heat into smelting nickle-iron you can vent the liquid metal into space to cool.  Isn't there a theory about making excellent bearing balls in microgravity?

It seems like when you start considering the hardest of science fiction scenarios, managing heat becomes your biggest problem. Even if you aren't in space, if you have an enormous industrialized civilization most of your industrial wastes can eventually be used for other things. But there's no getting around the generation of waste heat.



I do like the magnetic plasma radiator concept brought up near the end of this video. I don't know how efficient it would be since I don't think anyone has built functional hardware using this tech yet. But damn if it doesn't look cool.

My favorite heat managment concept in outer space though has to be the Matrioshka Brain. But even if you could get around the concept that would basically be humanity building an entity of god like power. It would be another one of those things that even if we started aggressively building it now. It would take centuries, probably millennia until it was completed.

Sometimes also referred to as Thermal Capacitors.


CMOS

Elon Musk will speak virtually at #IAC2023 on Oct. 5, with IAF president @ClayMowry interviewing the SpaceX CEO.

This year's International Astronautical Congress is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan. pic.twitter.com/c7nq2kFQKd

Michael Sheetz  (@thesheetztweetz) September 28, 2023

How wide those windows are is dependent on how much delta-V you are able and willing to spend.

Yep

Mmmmmm, porkchops.

True, but what is on Mars that we're going to be concentrating on yuge reactor-driven MTVs (whether NTR or VASIMR/etc) to shave off time between sorties and length of Mars Transit, While we are developing cislunar space.


Mars isn't as easy to live on as scifi would have us believe (the sheer toxicity of the regolith is an "unresolved engineering problem"), and it (unlike NEOs and the Moon) has zero economic value in any near-to-mid-term.

We'll go, sure.  Science & Discovery & all that sort of thing......but I don't see Mars Trilogy-style efforts for a long, long time.  A few small expeditions over the 2030s and 2040s.  Hell, even Zubrin will tell you that it'll take a decade or more of missions (so, 4 or 5 missions) just to characterize the planet sufficiently that we know a good place to put a permanent/semi-permanent base (mostly affected by water-ice availability to a site, along with things like lava tubes for shelter, etc).



Luna and resource ops at the NEOs will be the primary action scenes for the next 3 decades, I'm guessing.

Also time between resupply was approximately the same for the first colonies in America.  Travel times between Europe and America was about the same as travel times are between Earth and Mars.  And time between those trips to gather people, resources, and investors was about the same as the time between transfer windows is for Mars.

Humans have dealt with these issues before and can do so again.

Getting local resource utilization and manufacturing up and running as quickly as possible will be the key to making Mars bases and colonies viable.

We can do this.  We have the technical know-how to do it.  Soon ... with Elon driving the cost to get to space way down... we'll have the economic power to do it.  So long as the Dems don't usher us into a new dark age of Mass Death... we will do it.

We have a short window to get off this rock.

And body heat.

Starship stacked at Starbase ahead of flight, team continues to work with the FAA on a launch license pic.twitter.com/OfGDuGbZ0c

SpaceX  (@SpaceX) September 30, 2023

Starship, especially in its early variants without too many heat tiles has been accused of looking very much like something out of early 50s sci fi.



I can see the resemblance.

Starship is ready for flight 2! https://t.co/VkIFerosZL

Elon Musk  (@elonmusk) October 1, 2023

FULL SEND

I don't actually about Mars at all. Or the Moon.

What I care about is the technology, and more importantly *economy* to let people try all the things which need to be tried to figure out what works. And that is exactly what Musk is building.

Titan's already got liquid fuel on its surface, waiting to be filtered and used.

Epic Sunrise Starship Photo from Sean Doherty (@SeanKD_Photos) pic.twitter.com/Bw4IrJGzKp

Chris Bergin - NSF  (@NASASpaceflight) October 3, 2023

Tesla Cybertruck towed a raptor vac around starbase tonight. pic.twitter.com/6AR5SbeGpF

— Sean Doherty (@SeanKD_Photos) October 4, 2023

Actually, that's VERY cool!

I think it could be more cool if they mounted a double barrel Lazer turret on top of the cybertruck.

Can I change my Cybertruck reservation to the Raptor package?

Musk should enter that truck into a Baja 1000. Let him do as many mods as he wants. It'll be a test for Mars.

Someone completed it a few years ago with a stock Raptor.

How many charging stations along the way ?

About as many as gas stations...

Edited. Let him put more batteries in it. It doesn't have to win, just finish. It would be a good test for Mars.

Either 0 gallons per mile or a ton per second

Maybe pulling a trailer with a couple of fast swapping batteries with QD's and whatnot.

"How long does it take to charge a Tesla Cybertruck?

Charging is done using a Type 2 connector and the on-board charger has a maximum power of 11 kW. This charges a fully depleted battery back to full in around 10 hours 45 minutes."

Type 2? Why not use a DC fast charger?

A trailer is a no-go in any off-road race. They are allowed to pit. From here :

"A Baja 1000 can require up to 22 pit stops, roughly 60 miles apart. Each pit provides services to an average of 50 teams over the course of a race, and the pits contain an assortment of spare parts and maintenance items, as well as fuel."

I seriously doubt a gas engine would run in the martian atmosphere either.  You would have to carry your own oxidizer and get rid of a lot of heat.  At least an EV could drag it's own solar panels around.  

I'm sure electric truck could do the race, but it'd need to be modified to allow quickly swapping in pre-charged batteries instead of spending the time to recharge the batteries in the truck.

I don't really keep up but they have been running various electric race vehicles in the big offroad races for a long time now. Last year or two there was Dakar coverage with a team.

https://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/news/a4375/this-all-electric-baja-racer-is-running-the-norra-mexican-1000/


Audi Dakar team trying range extenders so I guess that makes them hybrids.
https://www.wired.com/story/audi-ev-dakar-rally-car/

couple more pics