Should We Colonize Other Planets? by Adam Morton

Author:Adam Morton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

Money: SpaceX

A central aim of Elon Musk's company SpaceX is to bring down the costs of establishing a Mars colony. It is hard to get firm figures about this from any source. Current NASA techniques pushed just a little suggest a price tag of $10 billion per colonist, which is clearly an enormous amount for the number of people needed to have a viable colony. Musk's ideas for making the project financially more manageable, especially if it is not publicly funded, involve reusable vehicles that are refuelled in Earth orbit and on Mars, obtaining fuel on Mars, and, most dramatically, sending a large number of colonists using reusable vehicles which make round trips and do not have to be replaced. This does reduce the resource requirements for each vehicle. But there would be a lot of them! It also makes the use of fuel obtained on Mars essential, and we do not yet know how to do this. At the time of writing, Musk proposes that the same equipment can be used for intercontinental rocket travel, thus subsidizing the Mars project. (A plan to increase the capacity to 200 passengers – still 5,000 trips – seems to have been dropped.) He has stated that, if a million colonists are transported, the price can come down to $200,000 each. The vehicles will take “just” 100 passengers, though, so this means 10,000 flights, whose environmental effects obviously have to be investigated. No spacecraft of anything like this capacity have ever been constructed, or even designed. The rockets would be larger than any yet made and would refuel in Earth orbit. The calculations behind these figures have not been made public, and we can imagine that they will change as plans progress.

SpaceX's plans are cautious compared with those of some of its rivals, and the costs are presented as tentative. Still, it is clear that a lot of money is involved. It is hard to put a total cost on plans like this, especially since, given the resupply problem, there are continuing costs. A million people at $200,000 each is $200 billion, and we can expect resupply costs for years after settlement. It is unlikely the costs can be brought down by reducing the numbers, since the low $200,000 figure was obtained as a specific economy of scale. Let us assume that the minimum size of a colony is 1,000 people. (I suspect this is an underestimate. For comparison, the British colony at Jamestown was not viable until it had several hundred people, in a much more hospitable environment where people already lived and flourished, and with much less reliance on technology.) At the old $10 billion per colonist figure, this would come to $10 trillion – rather higher than the Musk figure for a million colonists.

Besides the seriously untested technology, there are factors here that are very hard to balance. The bigger the colony, the greater the resupply problem for items and material that cannot be produced on site. But the bigger the colony, the greater the available range of skills needed to produce and repair things on site.

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