On Musk's plans for a settlement on Mars: do present space orbiters have water generating devices, as water is very...

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heavy, and Mars is a waterless red desert.

Guess Musk hasn't thought it completely through...sorta like his DOGE plan, and also his rapid unplanned/unscheduled disassembly spaceship mishaps.

[VMA131Marine]

1. Mars definitely has lots of water

The stuff we know about is largely locked into the polar ice caps. But there is also subsurface ice as well as evidence of underground reservoirs of liquid water. There is enough water on Mars to cover its surface to a depth of 30 meters (100 feet). Humans would not have to bring their own water to Mars.

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3. Thanks for the info on Mars water. That's verified?

[haele]

7. Mars also has a lot of arsenic in the soil pretty much everywhere they've explored...

And is also highly radioactive, as there's not much of a magnetosphere to protect the surface from solar radiation.
Not trusting the water on Mars that much.
It's much more cost effective and doable to colonize the Moon, first. Being 3 days away in an emergency situation is far better than being 6 or more months away depending on the distance
between Mars and the Earth in relation to the solar orbit of both planets.

At least we know the Moon will always be a certain distance away, will inherit some radiation protection from the earth, and it's easy to shorten the distance if need be with orbital stations.

[VMA131Marine]

10. Water itself is not radioactive,

Unless it’s made with tritium, which is very rare. The soil on Mars is not inherently radioactive but it is blasted with cosmic rays that don’t reach the ground on Earth due to our magnetic field.

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16. Thanks. Good reasoning.

[republianmushroom]

2. ...thought it completely through... back to the drawing boards.

[Liberal In Texas]

4. There is no nice Van Allen belt around Mars.

He and his colonists will die of radiation diseases in months.

[SheltieLover]

6. Can we please fast forward to that part?

[VMA131Marine]

12. No, they won't.

Any Martian habitat will have radiation shielding and humans on the planet’s surface will be less exposed to radiation than on the trip to Mars. We have astronauts who have been in orbit on the ISS for over a year without major issues from radiation too.

Alpha particles can be stopped by a sheet of paper. Beta particles don’t require much shielding either. Neutron radiation would be a concern but there isn’t much of that coming from space. The main worry would be high energy gamma rays.

[Liberal In Texas]

20. They would have to figure a way to live underground.

Over the course of about 18 months, the Mars Odyssey probe detected ongoing radiation levels which are 2.5 times higher than what astronauts experience on the International Space Station – 22 millirads per day, which works out to 8000 millirads (8 rads) per year. The spacecraft also detected 2 solar proton events, where radiation levels peaked at about 2,000 millirads in a day, and a few other events that got up to about 100 millirads.

For comparison, human beings in developed nations are exposed to (on average) 0.62 rads per year. And while studies have shown that the human body can withstand a dose of up to 200 rads without permanent damage, prolonged exposure to the kinds of levels detected on Mars could lead to all kinds of health problems – like acute radiation sickness, increased risk of cancer, genetic damage, and even death.

https://phys.org/news/2016-11-bad-mars.html

I think I'd prefer staying on Earth.

[LastDemocratInSC]

22. Some active astronauts have been blocked from future

flights because their lifetime radiation exposure has been reached over earlier flights.

Life on Mars will not be kind to human beings.

[highplainsdem]

5. See this: "Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars"

https://defector.com/neither-elon-musk-nor-anybody-else-will-ever-colonize-mars

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9. Thank you. What a great read. I love the last sentence and a half. "... before any individual life got advanced enough..

to think something as silly as "Hey, let's go live on Mars."

[edhopper]

8. Humans will die from radiation on Mars

cheaper and more efficient to send robots.
For one tenth of what it would cost for a manned space mission to Mars (not colonization, just a single mission) we could have a fleet of super advanced robots all over the surface.

[Ping Tung]

11. Elon should hop in his cyber--truck and take a look himself.

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14. The Martians would laugh him back to Earth when they got a look at that insanely ugly and poorly designed cybertruck.

Musk designed it himself. At times some stainless steel panels fall off, and RUST btw.

The purpose of stainless steel is it doesn't rust...all except Musk's version of it I guess.

[Ping Tung]

19. Martians are sensitive about an earthling flashing his navel at them.

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21. Heehee. And his chainsaw and drug habit.

[Cheezoholic]

13. Eloon's plans have always been, well, a bit exaggerated to say the least BUT a human outpost there is quite doable

if not required due to the time it takes to get there. First, people anyway, can only go during a short window every 2 years when Mars is closest to us. Even then, the travel time is roughly 6 month 1 way. But before people could legitimately go there would probably be around 5 years of launches of unmanned rockets containing everything explorers would need to survive at least a few months if not 2 years for the orbits to re-align for a return trip.

The science is proven in order to survive on Mars once there. There are verified sources of water. But just because there is water doesn't mean Mars is a great place to be. Its atmosphere of mostly toxic (to us) CO2 is about as dense as the atmosphere on Earth... @ 100k feet. It is absolutely freezing cold, never getting above 0 in temperature and average around 100 below 0. It is directly exposed to the suns radiation as its magnetic generator at its core stopped spinning billions of years ago (which was probably why Mars died and Earth didn't besides it being much smaller). That being said, it is still doable.

But the timelines and to the extent that Eloon is trying to sell are fantasies for the near or even mid future when you look at it from a scientific standpoint. When he first started building his "Starship" he was saying we'd be there in 2028. His Starship has yet to even orbit (his Mars concept requires nearly 100 of these), our return to the moon, which comes first, isn't even close yet and mostly he alone can't do this on his own by any stretch. It took 15 nations to gather the will and the money for our first human space outpost, the ISS, 300 miles away. A human self sustaining colony on Mars, the kind Eloon is proposing, that could survive on it's own if we burnt the Earth to a crisp, IMO, is at least 300-500 years away and at the rate we're reproducing it'll be too late.

So should we just say screw it? Hell no. While engineering challenges have been pretty much worked out, on PC and paper anyway, the proof of concept stares us in the face nearly every evening. The Moon. That's where the focus should be in the short term (the next generation). It's 2 days away (consider in the 1400's the "New World" was weeks to months away), we've already proven we can get there, and if one wants to build design and prove concepts for off world survivability...AS SAFE AS POSSIBLE.. we should, as a planet, endeavor for a permanent moon base.

I've always been of the opinion that the Moon is the Gateway to the Solar System.

[ProfessorGAC]

17. On The Bright Side...

...there are no real windstorms!
With an air density of 1/160th of earth, a Martian tornado would only have an effective wind mass of 1 or 2 mph!
So, there's that plus.

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18. Thanks for a very thoughtful read. The moon is it then.

[MineralMan]

15. The more pressing question is where do they get a breathable atmosphere?

Mars doesn't have that, and if you can't breathe, you can't live.