Out of Pod Experience

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-april-9-2012/exclusive---elon-musk-extended-interview-pt--1?xrs=share_copy

This is so cool, this guy is a hero of all humanity! What a boss!

I'd honestly give it another few decades before space even becomes truly commercialized. As it is now, there's not much reason to go as far as we currently are able to into space other than for energy purposes.

Past that, it's pretty much guaranteed that multiplanetary travel would have to be viable in order for commercial interests to go any further, and the difficulties that come with doing this is extraordinarily difficult. A lot of people think that technology is some magical fairy that just upgrades every few years automatically because it has to, but interplanetary travel comes with risks that there honestly is no real solution to at this point, people just have no idea (such as cosmic radiation or space junk, or even truly self sustaining life support).

This is all assuming that there's even an industrial complex that still exists by then to exploit other planets and the ionosphere. As of right now, with the way humanity is using up resources and damaging the environment, it's pretty much a well agreed upon point that another economic collapse on the scale of or greater than the great depression by 2030.

Will be interesting to see how it plays out, hope I still have a job.

The reason why the private sector don't really care about space is because of the lack of profit there. If you can somehow make it profitable to go into space, I'm sure companies will drive the space industry forward with their private fatwallets.

You've been reading too many science fiction novels. Getting a significant percentage of the population into space isn't going to be possible in the foreseeable future thanks to pesky little details like having to build rockets that obey the laws of physics. Even if you gave the entire US budget to NASA you're not going to build that kind of launch capacity, so it's absolutely laughable to think that private industry is going to do any better.

In reality, private space travel is going to be all about the rich having fun, possibly with a side of profit-focused industry that will be run exactly like industry back on earth.

there is a german scientist which if his theories end up correct we will have .5 light speed drives in 30-50 years. this means traveling to mars in minutes. it won't mean we can go to other solar systems for vacation but mars, maybe moons around jupiter or saturn could be viable for trade.


also for profit? your kidding, china is already moving to mine helium 3 off the moon, after spending a trillion dollars they will have enough helium to make fuel cells for 70 years... and by that time we will have nuclear fusion.

Well, for certain definitions of "travel" that don't require your physical body to get there intact. Sign me up for the months-long Mars trip that doesn't have acceleration forces that turn you into a red puddle for the cleaning crew to hose out of the rocket.

(Also, I have to laugh at the fact that you're quoting top speeds in space travel. Perhaps you need a review of basic physics before you start making predictions?)

So they've solved the tiny little problem that a space elevator requires materials with a greater tensile strength than anything we can manufacture in sufficient quantities?

PS: even the space elevator advocates say that the Japanese claim was nothing more than a publicity stunt, just like Bush's "plan" to have a manned Mars mission by 2020: http://www.spaceelevator.com/2012/02/obayashi-and-the-space-elevator---a-story-of-hype.html#more



Sorry, but that's just stupid. Of "everything we know about physics", the vast majority of it is things we knew 50 years ago.

The limit on launch capacity is just basic newtonian mechanics. Seriously, go look up the birth rate and calculate how many Saturn V launches per day you'd have to make just to reach zero population growth. Now add on the extra mass you have to launch per person in food/fuel/etc. Even if you ignore all engineering limits and build a rocket using the best theoretical engine you can imagine, the cost of getting all of that mass into space is FAR beyond the resources of any private organization.

Bolded the important part.

Nanotubes are awesome, but we aren't even close to being able to produce them on the scale that a space elevator would require.

Simple solutions work best... use what we have but just make it thicker \/

You really are stupid.

1) Scaled Composites are the people who won the X Prize with the air-launched rocket. Space X is a traditional ground-launched rocket using the exact same fundamental technology as every other successful rocket company. They've made some progress in bringing costs down )and profits up) but it's hardly a revolution in technology that will allow cheap private space travel.

2) Scaled Composites has only done suborbital flights (which are nice if you're a rich guy who wants to go to "space", but useless for anything else). It takes a lot more energy to break out of earth's gravity and get to another planet, which means the mass of your ship goes way up. Forget a 747, I doubt you could even build an airplane large enough to carry a spacecraft capable of making it to Mars with ten passengers.

3) Launching from the air has nothing to do with fuel, unless you're trying to win the X Prize with a minimal suborbital design. The reason air launches are useful is because you can launch from any position on the earth (making fuel requirements for certain orbits much lower), and you can avoid weather problems that might make you miss a narrow launch window.



That's nice. I can make pretty pictures too, but that doesn't make the engineering problems magically disappear.



Wrong again. Even if we round a bit in your favor (first flight was more than 100 years ago), nobody had any doubts that we could fly. There was a long history of various attempts before 1903, and we'd already succeeded in building gliders and lighter than air designs. The only question was when we'd develop an engine with a good enough power to weight ratio to make powered flight possible, and that was just a matter of improving the efficiency of the engines that had already been invented.



Sorry, but you aren't going to make basic laws of physics suddenly disappear. You can whine and cry about "you can't know everything" all you want, but that won't change anything.



Actually they could have. Video games had already been invented by the 1970s, so anyone with a little imagination could have figured out that technology would improve and allow more and more complex games. They might not have been able to predict the exact story/gameplay/etc of EVE, but that's just a trivial detail.