
Listening to old space podcast episodes is always interesting because you hear about the hopeful progress that might happen, and discussions on putting people on Mars is always interesting. We're now ten years "in the future" and still working on it (which is awesome).
(Just a coincidence I found out Elon did an update yesterday regarding this stuff.)
https://www.businessinsider.com/astronauts-thoughts-on-mars-one-colony-mission-2014-12

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Would have required three or four presidents to prioritize space-based endeavors over anything else. I know people like ragging on the current administration, but NASA has not gotten the attention it deserves for almost three decades.
Yeah and the world was supposed to end about a thousand times in the last decade. People make lots of predictions, you don’t have to take them all as “things that are supposed to happen”.
Between the need to hype things up and the difficulty of doing difficult things, there’s a lot of reasons for predictions about Mars or Fusion energy to be inaccurate.
If that’s unbearable you could get involved and deliver these promises. Or maybe sue someone for not getting your colony
What a surprise Elon missed another deadline but don’t worry! His new plan will surely succeed he just needs more government tax benefits and grants! He pinky swears this time!
You mean a pathological liar lied about something?
Mars would be such a horrendously inappropriate environment to try to create a sustainable colony on. We aren’t even practicing sustainability on Earth. Earth, which we evolved to live in. We really should focus on clawing back as much as we can here instead of building a slave labor colony for Musk, anyway.
The ambition can outweigh the technology. That’s all that’s being said here.
There is a reason astronauts practice “very simple in complexity” tasks for weeks.
Every repair, space walk, installation of equipment, and day to day activity is practiced countless times before ever going on the actual mission itself.
You can’t just plop people on Mars. The habitat they are going to live in isn’t even built yet.
Even when it is they will have to get one there, it has to be intact, and leave it there for X amount of time to see what even happens.
“Go fast, break stuff”, throw caution to the wind doesn’t work with Space Flight because everything just explodes and everyone dies. That’s what will happen to these “colonists”.. probably when attempting to leave the atmosphere.
It’s hilarious how that article presents Mars One as a real plan to go to mars. It was a total scam and they never had any realistic plan or even the intention to go there.
A lot of futuristic stuff gets predicted. Visions of colonies on Mars and on the Moon were common in the sixties (which were called the “space age” back then). All this wonderful stuff was supposed to be right around the corner. Along with cities under the sea, flying cars, and the mailman delivering mail wearing a jet pack.
Yet people continue to believe this nonsense…
I think people tend to forget the difficulty of leaving the earths atmosphere let alone traveling to another planet for the first time.
Instead, it will be China that achieves these things. Capitalism always looks for ways to cut costs and maximize profits. Often at the expense of innovation and progress. We could have achieved much more if the nation wasn’t controlled by greedy people.
Ok, is this really feasible even if we spared no expense? Mar’s gravity alone is a huge health problem is it not? I never hear anything about what our approach to that problem will be. Are we going to land some people there and see how long their bodies can handle 38% gravity and hope for the best?
Trying to make a Mars colony before even doing a Moonbase is like trying to do an Ironman before you’ve completed your first 5k, the cart is lethally before the horse. Mars is just too hard, and whoever goes there first is very likely going to die there if they don’t already have a mastery of space travel and habitation, which they don’t because nobody does right now (hell, multiple companies and countries have been crashing moon landers in recent years, space is hard, and mars is hard mode+++). Anyone talking about Mars right now is just trying to raise funds and get investors for other stuff.
I would be shocked if we so much as set foot on Mars in my lifetime, and I likely have several decades left in me.
Given the rate at which our earthly problems are compounding upon one another I don’t know that we will ever travel there in person.
In the late ‘60s we were supposed to land on Mars using NERVA rockets in the ‘80s! It’s always 20 years away, even today.
We were SUPPOSED to have a lot of things by now. What happened? Greed, corruption, government incompetence and a society that’s increasingly loathe to venture beyond their personal comfort zones.
“ten years in the future” always assumes that consistent and substantial research is continuing to be performed in the given field, and even then it’s an educated guess, because we never know what the unknown unknowns of the situation might bring for us.
But we got covid instead followed by Russian war and Trump chaos.
We have lost a decade.
These unrealistic benchmarks are what happens when you let literal grifters and con artists into the discussion.
The current face of “we’re going to Mars“ has never delivered on anything his version of a high speed rail in California was a fucking tunnel, and he invented a car without the basic safety feature advances made over the past 50 years.
Dude, we were supposed to have flying cars by 2020, and here we are, 40 years after that promise and no flying cars. Good luck with a Mission to Mars.
They can’t get to the moon, how are they getting to mars?
It’ll be about 30 years i hear. But maybe that was 30 years ago? Anyway, the important thing in mars terms is 30 years. It’s established policy
Mars One was insane. No ship, no plan, just started with a crew selection, which was open to the general public.
We were supposed to have flying cars by 2015… and they’re arguably easier to achieve. This is really not surprising.
A real colony (self sustaining) is a centuries long endeavor.
The marketing of nonsense as science is what gets science funded.
If you told some investor they might not see any return for a couple centuries, they are unlilely to put up any capital.
If you believed this… you were/ are so incredibly naive and gullible. It doesn’t surprise me this country is in the fucking toilet. Too easy to dupe with false promises that have no solid backing.
I mean, I’d just like to see people back on the Moon before the last Apollo astronaut dies.