We take off our hats to Elon Musk. Thanks to him, we have PayPal, Solar City and Tesla Motors. His other ideas, even more ambitious, have yet to earn our respect. Take his latest plan - to send people to Mars. While the details remain a bit vague, the key idea is to sell tickets to Mars at a modest $ 200,000 by 2024.
Of course, Musk's plan implies that someone is willing to invest $ 10 billion or more to pay for all the sensations and infrastructure that Musk talked about at the International Astronautics Congress. It also follows that 10 billion is enough, but more on that below. When SpaceX first started, Musk promised that his rockets would be 10 times cheaper, 10 times more reliable and 10 times faster than existing rockets - in fact, this is a 1000-fold improvement that has not yet become true and may never be. Musk's ambitions rely on the magical thinking of old Silicon Valley, according to which an exponential growth curve suggests space will be cheaper and cheaper. But it doesn't offer enough technological improvements or proof of demand to organize $ 200,000 flights. Musk comes from Moore's Law for the world of computers and cars. But Mars doesn't obey Moore's Law.
In terms of technology, there are two types of problems: engineering problems that can be solved, and physical problems that cannot be solved, you just have to accept. Solving engineering problems typically includes a key performance parameter that embodies the essence of the solution. This is Moore's Law. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noted that the total computing power of computers - the number of transistors on a processor chip of the same value - increased every two years or so. Thus Moore's Law was born with an amazing S-curve of constant exponential growth that guarantees technological diversity in the future.
The growth curve of the Murovskaya type requires an infinite number of intermediate stages of improvement. Every year, processors, aircraft or cars are getting a little better than they were last year. The economy scales, costs go down, and the market grows.
Unlike computers and cars, which Musk is certainly familiar with, rockets cannot be systematically improved. Specific impulse - a measure of the kilograms of thrust produced per kilogram of propellant propellant, fuel - is a key parameter that can lead to a significant reduction in the cost of access to space. Technological solutions to improve specific impulse include building lighter rockets or finding better fuel. Rocket builders, in principle, have long calculated their capabilities in optimizing both. The physical problem remains: mass versus gravity. The only way to solve it is to scale the economy, lowering operating costs by increasing the launch rate.
But the problem with scaling the economy is that it depends on demand. The current pace of SpaceX launches owes much to commercial satellite launches. Information is the largest market for space services. One would have hoped that the growth in satellite communications would lead to increased demand and thereby lower prices, but … But this opportunity, oddly enough, was taken away by Moore's Law - which allowed satellites to transmit more information. Communication satellites have not greatly increased the demand for launching mass into orbit.
To bring manned space travel in line with our demand and keep costs down, we need to move from the Wright Brothers to the Concords with no milestones. There are several "islands of stability" - separate heights for manned missions - a boundary of 100 kilometers for tourists, low Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars. Likewise, there was an X-Prize for flying at an altitude of 100 kilometers, but not for 200. However, the difference between them is colossal in terms of costs. No one remembers the first astronaut to fly halfway to the moon because no one cares what is there. There is nothing between Neil Armstrong's small step for man and his giant leap for humanity. The very nature of the cosmos makes incremental steps dubious.
One of the fundamental problems with big visionary projects like sending humans to Mars is that they don’t do anything to solve the basic problems of physics, the laws of thermodynamics and, most importantly, how to pay for it. Musk ignores the fact that NASA and other agencies have been sketching similar plans to capture Mars for over fifty years. It sweeps aside the risks and technical limitations of existing technology, making the plan reliable, cheap, and secure, as if it followed Moore's Law. He shies away from discussing the infrastructure and work required to get it all up. Thus, leaving room for speculation.
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Moore's Law is a product of Silicon Valley, as is the propensity to waste and exaggeration. In 2013, Time magazine posted a story on the front page with the headline "Can Google Solve Death?" But people continue to die. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced a $ 3 billion event to "end most diseases by the end of the century." While the annual budget for the National Institutes of Health is more than $ 30 billion and does not make any promises. Musk estimates the trip to Mars will cost him $ 10 billion. Whenever NASA considers the possibility of a manned mission to another planet, its numbers exceed 150 billion (give or take) that was spent on the Apollo program. Not every problem is solved by good engineers.
A vision without funding is a hallucination. The problem of Mars is not how, but why. I'm afraid I'll have to cool down a bit. After all, Wernher von Braun also dreamed of flying to Mars fifty years ago, and what, and where?
ILYA KHEL
