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NASA's annual revenue is 73% SpaceX's market cap.

But lets pretend that doesn't matter. Musk makes a solid ~1.1 billion a year off of various investments, and has ~11.7 billion in assets. Even if he dumped all that in SpaceX, you'd sill be ~6billion short of NASA's budget. Implying those assests could be quickly liquidated.

Even if we assume SpaceX has more/better talent then NASA. Your still working with at least an order of magnitude lower budget. Which is massive, especially when we are talking about the difference between $1bil/yr and $10 billion/yr




NASA does a lot of things, only some of which are related to any journey to Mars. Of course, they might suddenly drop everything and work towards sending humans.


As an example of a lot of things, New Horizons is coming out of hibernation this Saturday. It sends a periodic "ok" beacon every couple weeks or whatever since launch in the 00s, but its booting up for real this Saturday.

Pluto flyby mid next july...


The estimate in 1996 was ~30 billion for a trip to Mars. SpaceX has been accumulating the needed rocket technologies.

Roughly, the tech needed is:

1. heavy-lift

2. Mars EDL

3. artificial g for the trip and return

4. in-situ fuel production

5. methane rockets

SpaceX has been developing heavy-lift at a profit, so that takes care of #1. They are also working on #5, although I'm not sure off-hand who their customers are. (Methane has volume advantages over LH/LOX that might make it better for smaller missions.)

There are still some other pieces of the pie that need assembled. Rockets are surely a part of #2, but Musk is essentially building a company that will sell him a trip to Mars.


The advantage of methane is that it can be produced natively out of the martian atmosphere. Heat + Metal Catalyst + C02 + H2 = Methane + O2

Also hydrogen + O2 = water. So basically you ship the astronauts with nothing but hydrogen and live off the land. Or this is what the Mars Society was calling for.


89% (by mass) of hydrogen/oxygen fuel can also be produced from Martian atmosphere, since Oxygen has an atomic mass 16 times that of hydrogen. I think Methane has advantages other than a slightly larger portion producible from Martian air.


Yes, any launch from Mars is very likely to be methane.

I was just trying to figure out how SpaceX could fund its development of methane rockets before that, through domestic use of methane rockets.




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