I’m often reminded of a SpaceX render they put up on the 'Tube back when they were still working out the reusability thing. Commenters had a lot of questions about how the particular flight plan impacted on their fuel budget. And so, Elon himself waded in with the answers. Except he was talking about the dollar price it cost to buy the fuel. He was like ‘why are you worried about fuel, it’s not that expensive, guys’ because he didn’t understand the questions. He didn’t understand why the amount of fuel and the mass of the fuel would be significant to anybody. Guys, I think he doesn’t understand the rocket equation. He doesn’t understand the central problem of rocketry. I think the guy might be full of it.

If you check the ‘nerd stuff’, it shows it was posted at 15:13, and updated at 15:16. But there isn’t a UI element to show that at a glance.

Isn’t it more like, a guy who wanted to kill the Queen talked to a chatbot about it, and the chatbot rolled with it cos chatbots will default to rolling with whatever you give them? Just seems the likely scenario to me …

Yep, this BBC article has a couple of the chat logs. If they’re representative, the bot is no more culpable than if he asked a magic 8-ball.

@kavin@feddit.rocks - the bot’s replying to itself again

Most of the weight is fuel/propellant, which is why most Mars mission plans have you manufacture propellant on-site. An empty fuel tank and some engines isn’t that heavy. Especially if, as you say, you’re able to reuse your lander. Anyway, everything you bring has weight. The issue is, how much and can you budget for it?

If your looking for somewhere to save weight, imo start by getting rid of the astronauts and all their associated life support and living space. Bonus - robots don’t even need frivolous luxuries like getting to return home.

I don’t think Mars colonies are realistic, but not for this reason. Mars has about one third the gravity of earth, and a much thinner atmosphere, so you can return on a significantly smaller rocket than you launched with. It’s true that manufacturing a space rocket of any size would require basically an entire civilization, but there’s no reason you couldn’t bring the return vehicle with you, and only require manufacturing fuel or propellant on site.

The top answer to this stackexchange post goes into a lot more detail on the practicalities https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2820/how-big-would-a-manned-ascent-stage-for-mars-need-to-be

Lex Luthor bought a company for 44 dollars then lost 40?

Super secret Nazi numbers for the super secret Nazi club. 14 = 14 words of some tedious slogan that they’re fond of, and 88 = HH = Howdly-doodly Hitlerinos