vela

7 ms·

1. 1.▲
   Dragon offers ticket to Mars(nature.com)

   1 points by vela 15y ago|0 comments
2. 2.▲
   by vela 15y ago

   Oops, sorry, I read too quickly and thought you meant 140 t to LEO per launch, and three launches for the full mission. (I also had NASA's DRM 5 in my head, which requires three deliveries of roughly that size per mission, rather than Mars
3. 3.▲
   by vela 15y ago

   That's the super-heavy, which they have proposed as a competitor to a shuttle-derived (super-expensive) super-heavy. The Falcon Heavy can throw ~ 53 t into a low-Earth orbit, and its list price is 80–125 M$ ( http://www.spacex.com/falcon_he
4. 4.▲
   by vela 15y ago

   Terraforming is not necessary for settlement. It isn't even obvious to me that Martians will choose to do it down the line. (I feel like I should be using terms like "minimum viable settlement" around here!)
5. 5.▲
   by vela 15y ago

   International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR, https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ITAR ). Many space technologies are listed as munitions in the US, and revealing information about those technologies to foreigners counts as e