I think that is a bad joke rather than a legitimate plan to pressurize the vehicle. The fact that it is coming from Elon's Twitter and not Tesla's is a big indicator in my opinion. Either way, it isn't a great sign that we can't tell for sure.
I think it will be partly true. Assuming Elon's Mars missions happen, it seems reasonable they'll need a vehicle at some point and I expect that vehicle will use some elements from the CyberTruck design.
I just can't imagine them needing this type of vehicle anytime soon. The first car on the moon was unpressurized because the only real benefit to pressurizing the vehicle is if the astronauts don't need to be wearing pressurized suits inside. That would either mean that there are car sized airlocks to travel between or that the astronauts will be traveling long enough distances in the car that it provides a real comfort benefit for them to take off some of their suits. Neither of those is likely to happen on the first trips to Mars.
Even then, this truck doesn't appear particularly light compared to your average vehicle. It also has a ton of added weight from things that would be wasted on Mars like huge acceleration, unnecessary top speed, and the ability to withstand vehicular accidents that would never occur on Mars. Maybe Tesla tries to preserve the look of this car for whatever they may or may not eventually put on Mars, but I doubt it is going to be close to being this car.
Why would a car-size airlock be required? A simple airtight hatch for the car to dock to (similar to a suitport) would work fine.
The first car on the moon was unpressurized because the program was a once-cancelled afterthought designed to fit into a spare cargo bay and unfold, with tight mass constraints. MOLAB was impractical because of the upmass required, not because pressurization wouldn't have been useful.
>Why would a car-size airlock be required? A simple airtight hatch for the car to dock to (similar to a suitport) would work fine.
Fair point. I don't see how that would work on this specific vehicle, but it is certainly works in general.
>The first car on the moon was unpressurized because the program was a once-cancelled afterthought designed to fit into a spare cargo bay and unfold, with tight mass constraints. MOLAB was impractical because of the upmass required, not because pressurization wouldn't have been useful.
A lot of those requirements still stand regarding mass. It isn't a question of whether a pressurized vehicle would be useful on Mars, it is a question of whether its usefulness is enough to justify its weight and this vehicle appears to have a lot of extra weight that would need justification.
This vehicle is probably pretty light if you source the steel and the battery pack from a starship that has landed on mars. Starships have both. The plan isn't to return all of the initial starships because the steel is more useful on mars, and the energy to return them back would be really expensive.
>Neither of those is likely to happen on the first trips to Mars.
It doesn't have to happen on the first trip. They could send the truck to Mars on one of the current rockets and just have it sit there until they're ready to use it. It's an electric vehicle. There's plenty of solar exposure on Mars, they can charge it over the course of weeks if they needed to, even though they don't, and the durability would guarantee that it could serve up there for years. It could literally just sit there and do nothing for the 3-5 years it takes them to build out a basic hab and a dock for it.
If we are ruling it out on the first few trips, then we are probably ruling it out for at least a decade or probably longer. I would bet the Earth version of this truck isn't going to go a decade plus without being redesigned by Tesla.
All your points about the benefits of an electric vehicle apply just as well to something lighter that is specifically and only designed for travel to and on Mars.
What? What makes you say that? SpaceX literally shot Elon Musk's car into space to do nothing but float towards Mars. The entire point is prove that their rockets can shoot something that weighs a metric ton out to Mars safely. They don't want to send something lighter that's only designed for travel to and on Mars. They want to send something from Earth to Mars that proves they can send out the materials and supplies to colonize the planet quickly.
Most of the mass that goes with that acceleration is the battery, which also extends the range, and that you do need because superchargers are scarce on Mars. It's also nice to have a rugged vehicle when you don't have body shops.
In general, Musk treats engineering as a scarce resource. If he can use a Tesla vehicle instead of designing a special rover, he will, even if it weighs a little more. Starship can handle more than 100 tons of payload and its successor will do four times that.
Designing stuff is really expensive, using things made for Earth with minimal modifications really makes a lot of sense.
The steel is cheap on mars too (initially), since you ship it there anyways as part of the cargo starships, which aren't return to earth (since the energy to make fuel is initially really expensive on mars). Manufacture it in Mars and your basically just talking about shipping the batteries, motors, and a small amount of electronics (and machinery you will need anyways).
Don't get me wrong, I hope that little to no consideration was given to mars in the design. But if we happen to get to mars on Elon's most aggressive time tables (2025 iirc) it would make sense to base the vehicles on mars after this rather than designing from scratch. And it would make sense to keep the modifications reasonably minimal if possible.
No, it really wouldn’t. The base requirements differ so greatly that starting from scratch would be both cheaper and more practical. They are not different takes on the same vehicle, they are two fundamentally different automotives with extremely different terrain, durability, maintainability, and optimization goals. From the very start it is virtually impossible to go from a unibody design like this cyber truck to a true all-terrain body-on-frame construction and everything else depends on that.
And trying to design an optimal vehicle for mars is how you bloat the costs of your rover program by many many millions of dollars. Downmass is expensive, engineering is more expensive. The result of that is to take advantage of the fact that "mass cures a lot of sins" (Paul Wooster, SpaceX Principal Mars Development Engineer at Mars Society Convention 2019).
> true all-terrain body-on-frame construction
Why would you prefer this? It's just a form of construction that requires more materials, and results in a weak body that can be damaged. Furthermore, we get all the materials for the unibody design (lots of stainless steel) free from starships that won't return, and the material is easy to work with.
Mar's terrain is pretty simple. Rocks, and sand. We almost certainly will choose not to land on sand, so we only really need to deal with rocks. Cybertruck, really any earth vehicle with a reasonable clearance, should be able to deal with that well enough, maybe with some custom tires.
Thermal management, and problems relating to pressurization, are the only things that jump out as me as real difficulties. Neither sounds like it needs fundamental reworks though.
The SEC should have a chat with Elon about that. He already put one of his cars in space, and owns a company trying to get to Mars. That puts it at about 80% joke in my mind.
I’m not so sure. As Elon said “We’re going to be using the same alloy in the Starship rocket and in the Cybertruck”. The Tesla truck itself might be a way to subsidize the SpaceX rocket development (or vice versa). It sounds like technology between the two entities is being shared already.
So, the idea is to use a presurized Cybertruck as a, I assume manned, rover on mars in 2025. So there will be a manned mission to mars in 2025 supposedly conducted by SpaceX. Otherwise the economics of using something as large and heavy as a Cybertruck is just not feasible.
With Tesla's work on autodriving capabilities, I'm kind of hoping this might be Musk's personal R/C car on Mars as an unmanned rover concept before humans get there.
One thing that puzzles me, and that is also a big reason for me being sceptical towards Musk, is that almost of his ideas are stuff I phantasized about in my teens because they were "cool". But with all cool things from your teens, they turn ridiculous when you grow up. And unprofessional in the industries SpaceX and Tesla are in. A remote controlled Cybertruck on Mars? Technically already now feasible but expensive and pointless to get there. Not sure what Musk being able to finance all that is good thing.
If something is both immaturely "cool", and immensely practical/ecofriendly/a good choice, we can all fulfill our childhood dreams while being responsible adults. Fart mode in the Tesla is a good example. Hilarious, stupid, and in some of the best and eco-friendliest cars ever.
And stuff like that just so kills Tesla for me. All that late stuff that came after, say, Model S or at least Model 3 looks more like Musks version of buying a Porsche convertible aged 45.
And you're probably the wrong demographic. I'm 18 and taking delivery of my Model S on Monday, because I can't afford the roadster and it's not out yet. Tesla is simply the future, and it's on a roll right now.
Tesla does: https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-wildfires-bioweapon-defe.... It's an optional upgrade. I ordered it for my Model S because, at the time, Hawaii was experiencing really bad VOG, which my girlfriend was extremely sensitive to. On bad days, she could retreat to the Tesla, activate BioWeapon Defense mode, and experience some relief.
I mean... a good respirator is like $30-40. Significant savings over a Model S, and you're not stuck in the car. But I suppose wearing a mask can be uncomfortable.
You can take any car to a racetrack and drive as fast as you like for a couple of hundred dollars per event. You can even get professional instruction.
those events do not let you go as fast as you like.
there ARE some events that do but its a really bad idea in a car with no cage and safety equipment.
I've found that my stomach for speed is inversely proportional to how fast I'm allowed to go. I'm not sure I have the stones to go fast enough to need a roll cage on a race track.
Same goes for off-roading. Luckily I live like an hour away from a big parc in Germany so my 1982 Range Rover can enjoy his natural environment at least a couple of times! Logically totally useless, but hell of fun!
"Tesla Cybertruck (pressurized edition) will be official truck of Mars"
They have designed it to drive on Mars.