Space Meow Boys

Sections of this long post:

1) Space Cadets
2) Space Meow Boys
3) Tom Murphy
4) James Nicoll
5) Charlie Stross
6) Opening A New Frontier Is Doable

Space Cadets

We are confined to a small, fragile planet. Being limited to a finite body of resources mean logistic growth. And we're rapidly approaching the ceiling to our logistic growth.

Opening a vast new frontier would allow growth for centuries or even thousands of years. Breaking free of Cradle Earth would be the most dramatic turning point in human history. If it’s possible then this goal is well worth pursuing.

But can we open the solar system to settlement and economic use? This is an open question in my opinion.

Some say space settlement is impractical. Be content with our limits, we’re told. Trying to push past our boundaries is a waste of time and we shouldn’t even try.

Civil, rational arguments are worth listening to. But some discussions are long on vitriol and short on math and physics.

Tarring With A Wide Brush

One dirty technique is tarring with a wide brush -- First find weak members in a group. Then hold up these members up as representative of the entire group. Give them a label.

Physics professor Tom Murphy does this. He holds up his clueless students as examples of space enthusiasts and tars us all with the label space cadets. Judging by the stories he tells, his students are some of the stupidest people on the planet. I suspect he teaches Astronomy 101 for Liberal Arts Majors.

Science fiction writer Charles Stross and book reviewer James Nicoll also like to use the label space cadet. They point to folks from Usenet who are long on wishful thinking and short on math skills. Their flavor of space cadet tends to be white and Libertarian.

Wrestling With A Pig

Friends tell me “Don’t wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”  What they don’t realize is that I too am a pig. I love to wrestle in the mud!

I don't mind their dirty tricks. I'll do the same.

First I'll find nay sayers clueless in math and science. My label will be Space Meow Boys.

Space Meow Boys

Tom Murphy, James Nicoll and Charlie Stross are my examples of space meow boys.

Tom Murphy

Let's look at Murphy’s blog post Stranded Resources.

Murphy correctly puts a big emphasis on delta V and Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation. But he sucks at calculating delta V. From his blog:

The next plot puts this in perspective, albeit only in simplified, approximate terms. The bottom of the plot represents the Earth’s ground. It takes 7.7 km/s of velocity to get to LEO (actually, it takes the equivalent of about 9.5 km/s because much effort is expended just climbing out, in addition to establishing the orbital speed). At 11.2 km/s, we’re free to take on the solar system.  The plot is based on minimum-energy Hohmann transfer orbits.

Each planet is represented by three dots: the top one being outside the planet’s grip in an identical solar orbit, the next one down at low-planet orbit (akin to LEO), and the lowest represents being at rest on the surface. For Saturn and Jupiter, these surface points are off the chart—so taxing is this requirement. And for these two, there’s no “there” there anyway to land on. Crudely speaking, we must have the means to accomplish all vertical traverses in order to make a trip. For instance, landing on Mars from Earth requires about 17 km/s of climb, followed by a controlled 5 km/s of deceleration for the descent. Thus it takes something like 20 km/s of capability to land on Mars, . . .

I bolded Murphy’s discussion of the Earth to Mars trip. Let’s look at his delta V.

He takes Earths 11.2 km/s escape velocity and adds in the ~6 km/s difference between Earth’s and Mars’  heliocentric orbits and then adds in Mars 5 km/s escape velocity. Which gives 22 km/s. Then Murphy leaves us with the impression he‘s being generous when he rounds down to 20 km/s

A first year aerospace student would cringe at Murphy’s bungled math. You don’t simply add Vescape and Vinfinity.

To get velocity of the hyperbolic orbit needed for TMI (Trans Mars Injection):

Vhyperbola = sqrt(Vescape² + Vinfinity²)

A memory device is to think of Vescape and Vinfinity as the legs of a right triangle. Velocity of a hyperbolic orbit would be the hypotenuse.

Correctly patching conics get us 17 km/s from Earth surface to Mars surface

What About The Atmosphere?

Murphy points to a penalty imposed by Earth’s atmosphere:

It takes 7.7 km/s of velocity to get to LEO (actually, it takes the equivalent of about 9.5 km/s because much effort is expended just climbing out, in addition to establishing the orbital speed).

Yes, we suffer a loss of around 2 km/s to climb above the earth's atmosphere. There's some atmospheric friction as well as gravity loss during ascent. We'll give Murphy this 2 km/s. So our delta v budget goes up to 19 km/s.

But an atmosphere also offers the possibility of aerobraking. Is it possible Murphy hasn't heard of aerobraking? Or is he dishonestly focusing on the delta V penalties of an atmosphere while ignoring the benefits? The charitable judgement here is that Murphy is horribly clueless.

Aerobraking at the Mars end of an Earth to Mars trip can shave 6 km/s off the delta V budget. This takes our delta V budget down to 13 km/s. This is less than what it takes to park a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, something we routinely do.

Aerobraking at the Earth end of a Mars to Earth trip can shave 11 km/s off the delta V budget. This leaves a delta V budget of around 6 km/s for the Earth to Mars trip.

Grab That Asteroid!

Asteroid retrieval is a notion entertained by John S. Lewis, Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries and others. If not retrieval of an entire asteroid, then retrieval of commodities from an asteroid.

Murphy argues against this using a ridiculous straw man scenario:

The asteroid belt is over 20 km/s away in terms of velocity impulse. If the goal is to use the raw materials for production on Earth or in Earth orbit, we have to supply about 10 km/s of impulse. We would probably try to get lucky and find a nickel-metal asteroid in an unusual orbit requiring substantially less energy to reel it in. So let’s say we can find something requiring only 5 km/s of delta-v. Our imagined prize will be a cube 1 km on a side, having a mass around 1013 kg. This is very small for an asteroid, but we need to moderate our ambitions. From a resource point of view, it’s still a lot. 

To get this asteroid moving at 5 km/s with conventional rocket fuel (or any “fuel” that involves spitting the mass elements/ions out at high speed) would require a mass of fuel approximately twice that of the asteroid. As an example, using methane and oxygen, (4 kg of O2 for every 1 kg of CH4), we would require two years’ of global natural gas production to be delivered to the asteroid (now multiply this by a large factor for the fuel to actually deliver it from Earth’s potential well). The point is that we would be crazy to elect to push the asteroid our way with conventional rockets.

Four things wrong this picture.

1) Murphy hasn't heard of NEAs? There are NEAs (Near Earth Asteroids) much closer to the Earth-Moon system. The Keck Report talks about NEAs that could be parked in a loose lunar orbit for as little as .17 km/s. 2006 RH120 was temporarily captured to the earth moon system with no delta V.

2) Murphy wants to use methane/oxygen bipropellant. This has an exhaust velocity of around 4 km/s in a vacuum. The Keck folks propose using xenon and Hall Thrusters. Exhaust velocity for this sort of ion engine can easily be 30 km/s.

3) A kilometer asteroid is far too large for practical rockets to retrieve. It would also be insanely dangerous. The Tunguska event likely came from an object between 60 and 200 meters in diameter. The Chixculub impact which wiped out the dinosaurs was thought to have been 10 to 15 kilometers. Perhaps a misdirected rock 1 kilometer in diameter wouldn't be an extinction level event. But it'd certainly cost trillions in property damage. The Keck folks talk about safety considerations at the bottom of page 15 of their report. They look at retrieving a 5 meter rock. Should a 5 meter rock fall earthward, it'd burn up harmlessly in the upper atmosphere.

4) Murphy assumes a metal rich asteroid. He could spend a few minutes Googling and find that water is the first commodity asteroid miners hope to exploit. Propellant not at the bottom of an 11.2 km/s gravity well would be a game changer that would reduce the cost of spaceflight. And cheaper spaceflight is a prerequisite to profitably exploiting asteroidal metals.

Plugging Murphy's 5 km/s delta V budget and 4 km/s exhaust velocity into the rocket equations tells use that we'd need more than two tonnes of propellant for every tonne of asteroid.

Plugging in .17 km/s delta V and 30 km/s exhaust velocity gives 6 kilograms of propellant needed to park a one tonne asteroid.

The fellow on the left is Tom Murphy. To the right is a self portrait.

Sometimes Murphy tries to excuse himself by pointing to his waffle words and furiously waving his hands. He seems to think words like "approximately" or "roughly" salvage his questionable claims.

Only 3 orders of magnitude off.

Refuel In Space?

The lunar cold traps are thought to have rich deposits of water ice as well as other volatile ices. These potential propellant sources are about 2.5 km/s from EML1 and EML2.

Here's some delta V maps focusing on EML1 and EML2:

There are also asteroid folks who hope to mine water from NEAs. See this Planetary Resources video or this Deep Space Industries video. Some NEAs are up to 40% water by mass and are only a small delta V nudge from being parked in lunar orbit. A water rich asteroid parked in lunar orbit would be even closer to EML1 and EML2.

What is Murphy's argument against refueling in space?

He tells us it'd take a lot of delta V to get propellant from Jupiter or Titan.

Since the large delta-v’s required to get around the solar system require a lot of fuel, and we have to work hard to lift all that fuel from the Earth’s surface, could we just grab hydrocarbons from Jupiter or Titan and be on our way? 

Let’s say you arrived in Jupiter orbit running on fumes, relying on the gassy giant to restock your coffers. In order to get close enough to Jupiter, you’ll be skimming the cloud-tops at a minimum of 42 km/s. Getting 1 kg of fuel on board will require you to accelerate the fuel to the speed of your spacecraft, at a kinetic energy cost of 885 MJ. The energy content of methane is 13 kcal/g, or 54 MJ/kg. Oops. Not even enough to pay for itself, energetically. Get used to Jupiter. And I have completely ignored the fact that you need marry two O2 molecules to each molecule of methane, meaning you actually get only 11 MJ per kilogram of total fuel. Utterly hopeless.

No shit, Sherlock. Knock yourself out beating up this straw man.

Tom Murphy's argument is perhaps the stupidest straw man ever.

Momentum Exchange Tethers

In the comments section for Stranded Resources, Monte Davis writes:

At the level of fundamental elegance, you can’t beat tethers: instead of throwing away momentum in exhaust, you just keep re-using it as payloads are slung around — assuming tethers at all sources/destinations and an abundance of payloads. Before that, make-up energy could be supplied by spinning up tethers slowly with a low-thrust solar-electric or nuclear-electric drive.

Murphy replies to Davis:

I don’t follow the first point about not throwing away momentum in the form of exhaust in a tether system. Without throwing away momentum, you can gain none (and go nowhere). If stranded on a frictionless lake on a sled piled with bricks, the only way off is to hurl bricks away. If the bricks are tethered to you, you may be able to move about as mass is redistributed, but the center of mass will be in the same place always.

Momentum isn't thrown away. It's exchanged.

An orbital tether would not sit motionless like a brick on a frozen lake. It would drop after catching a payload from a lower orbit. It would also drop when throwing a payload to a higher orbit.

However an orbital tether would rise after dropping a payload to a lower orbit. It would also rise when catching a payload from a higher orbit.

With two way traffic an orbital tether could balance momentum draining maneuvers with momentum boosting maneuvers and thus maintain an orbit without huge amounts of propellant.

Also as Davis mentions, a tether can use ion engines. Ion engines can easily have 30 km/s exhaust velocities while the best chemical is around 4.4 km/s. This is a much more efficient way to restore momentum. With low thrust engines it would take a long time to build momentum but that would be okay if there were weeks between tether maneuvers.

Monte Davis is a science writer and editor who's worked for Omni, Discover, Psychology Today and other publications. He's got a chemistry degree from Princeton. In space forums Davis usually plays the devil's advocate against would be space colonizers.

Murphy could have invested 4 or 5 minutes Googling momentum exchange tethers. But he blows off Monte Davis as if he's one of his clueless students in Astronomy 101 for Liberal Arts Majors.

James Nicoll

James Nicoll reviews science fiction. An old Heinlein chestnut is "If you can get your ship into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere." Nicoll attempts to play with this notion at More Words Deeper Hole.

Apparently the subject line I was going to use is offensive so I will go with "halfway to anywhere" 

james_nicoll
april 1st, 2012 

Suppose it's the future and further suppose that space tourism actually takes off enough that there are excursions to the Moon akin to what we see in Antarctica. Although probably not the 37,000 people a year you see headed to Antarctica because going to the Moon is going to a crapton more expensive. 

Further, suppose
it occurs to someone whose life centers on ferrying rich bastards back and forth to the Moon that the delta vee to go from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) is about 8 km/s. It's the same the other way, assuming no aerobraking at the Earth end (No aerobraking at the Earth end means big mass ratios or some kind of fuel depot in LLO). That's considerably more delta vee than it takes to to Mars from the Moon and it further occurs to them it might be fun on the next trip home to leave the tourists on the Moon and take an unsheduled excursion to Mars.

How would you go about adapting a vehicle designed to do the LEO-LLO trip to a LLO-Mars trip? 

The first big issue is going to be air. Assuming a dozen passengers and three crew, and about a week to the Moon and back, the ship probably doesn't have more than 105 person-days of O2. Fast but still reasonably delta-vee conservative orbit to Mars is about 180 days. 

I suppose, this being fiction, you could do it the other way: the would-be Marsnaut needs 180 person-days, therefore the LEO-LLO transfer ship carries a couple of dozen passengers and some crew. That will at least get the Marsnaut to Mars alive.

Delta V

Let's start with James' delta V budget.

it occurs to someone whose life centers on ferrying rich bastards back and forth to the Moon that the delta vee to go from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) is about 8 km/s.

According to the Wikipedia delta V chart James snagged, it's 4.1 km/s from LEO to L4/5 and then .7 km/s to lunar orbit.

4.1 + .7 = 4.8, not 8.

A direct route from LEO to LLO would be more like 4 km/s.

For hard SF folks, 8 km/s from LEO to LLO is a glaring error. But it's no biggie for the English Lit types that participate in James' forum. They don't even notice.

Aerobraking

James stipulates

It's the same the other way, assuming no aerobraking at the Earth end (No aerobraking at the Earth end means big mass ratios or some kind of fuel depot in LLO). That's considerably more delta vee than it takes to to Mars from the Moon and it further occurs to them it might be fun on the next trip home to leave the tourists on the Moon and take an unsheduled excursion to Mars.

Why on earth would James stipulate no aerobraking? This is a very standard technique. Is this because his premise rests on LLO to Mars taking less delta V than LLO to LEO?

Maybe he's heard Mars folks say LEO to Mars is less delta V than LEO to the moon. Which is true enough if aerobraking is used. With no aerobraking we'd need to do any where from .7 km/s for Mars capture to a 6 km/s burn for a soft landing. Or else we'd sail right past Mars back into a heliocentric orbit.

Hohmann Launch windows

Here's the biggest howler:

and it further occurs to them it might be fun on the next trip home to leave the tourists on the Moon and take an unsheduled excursion to Mars.

An unscheduled excursion?! Unless James’ ferry guys have a huge delta V budget, the ship's doing a Hohmann transfer. Windows for Earth to Mars Hohmann open once each 2.14 years. Lots of pre-planning is needed to take advantage of these rare windows. A trip to Mars isn't something you do at the drop of a hat.

As usually happens, James post stimulates a lively conversation. Most of the participants don't notice the howlers. The biggest concern seems to be sufficient air and food for the long trip.

A problem they seem oblivious to is radiation. An 8 month trip would expose the passengers to a lot more GCRs and solar flares than the 4 day LLO to LEO trip. Much more radiation protection would be needed. A few meters of water are often suggested to protect the passengers from GCRs. A few meters of water around the ship exterior would be a lot more massive than the air, food and drinking water James and his friends were obsessing over.

At one time I regarded James was one of the more numerate participants in science fiction forums. But he’s been spending too much time with SJWs and English Lit folks. Not that I dislike social justice or English literature. But if James wants to talk hard SF, he needs to revisit some of his math and physics textbooks.

Charlie Stross

Charlie Stross was one of the participants in the Nicoll post I just fisked. In that forum he goes by the handle autopope.  Nicoll’s lack of math and science savvy was not noticed by Stross or most of those commenting.

Stross was also crowing that physics professor Tom Murphy shared his opinions, as if that validates his views.

But we shouldn’t condemn Stross because of the company he keeps. Instead, let’s look at his High Frontier Redux.

It starts out noting the outer solar system and Alpha Centauri are far away and settling these regions isn’t practical. This is like saying the Americas were out of reach for the early humans in Africa. But the Americas became accessible after humans spread across Asia and reached the Bering Strait.

To show the Kuiper Belt is forever beyond reach, Stross needs to demonstrate intermediate destinations aren’t within reach.

Later he does argue against colonizing neighboring bodies. But starting off with the most difficult, furthest destinations is wasting the reader’s time.

Let’s look at Stross’ argument against developing the moon:

What about our own solar system? 

After contemplating the vastness of interstellar space, our own solar system looks almost comfortingly accessible at first. Exploring our own solar system is a no-brainer: we can do it, we are doing it, and interplanetary exploration is probably going to be seen as one of the great scientific undertakings of the late 20th and early 21st century, when the history books get written. 

But when we start examining the prospects for interplanetary colonization things turn gloomy again. 

Bluntly, we're not going to get there by rocket ship. 

Optimistic projects suggest that it should be possible, with the low cost rockets currently under development, to maintain a Lunar presence for a transportation cost of roughly $15,000 per kilogram. Some extreme projections suggest that if the cost can be cut to roughly triple the cost of fuel and oxidizer (meaning, the spacecraft concerned will be both largely reusable and very cheap) then we might even get as low as $165/kilogram to the lunar surface. At that price, sending a 100Kg astronaut to Moon Base One looks as if it ought to cost not much more than a first-class return air fare from the UK to New Zealand ... except that such a price estimate is hogwash. We primates have certain failure modes, and one of them that must not be underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly malfunction when exposed to climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen. While the amount of oxygen, water, and food a human consumes per day doesn't sound all that serious — it probably totals roughly ten kilograms, if you economize and recycle the washing-up water — the amount of parasitic weight you need to keep the monkey from blowing out is measured in tons. A Russian Orlan-M space suit (which, some would say, is better than anything NASA has come up with over the years — take heed of the pre-breathe time requirements!) weighs 112 kilograms, which pretty much puts a floor on our infrastructure requirements. An actual habitat would need to mass a whole lot more. Even at $165/kilogram, that's going to add up to a very hefty excess baggage charge on that notional first class air fare to New Zealand — and I think the $165/kg figure is in any case highly unrealistic; even the authors of the article I cited thought $2000/kg was a bit more reasonable. 

Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ... 

The moon is about 1.3 light seconds away. If we want to go panning the (metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send teleoperator-controlled robots; it's close enough that we can control them directly, and far enough away that the cost of transporting food and creature comforts for human explorers is astronomical. There probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but only until our robot technologies are somewhat more mature than they are today; Mission Control would be a lot happier with a pair of hands and a high-def camera that doesn't talk back and doesn't need to go to the toilet or take naps.

In Situ Resources

Stross is right that human habitats in space would be massive. But he imagines every kilogram of a lunar habitat would be brought up from earth’s surface. Evidently Stross has never heard of in situ resources. At the lunar poles there are thought to be volatile ices — water ice as well as carbon dioxide ice and nitrogen compounds. Water and air to breathe could be extracted from local resources. Habs could be covered with regolith for radiation protection.

Stross acknowledges that robots could establish infrastructure on the lunar surface. And in fact this is what Spudis and Lavoie advocate.

In Situ Resources and Delta V

Besides building habs and infrastructure to extract life support consumables, robots could also build propellant mines. Stross didn’t bat an eye when Nicoll stated LEO to LLO is 8 km/s. It is likely this science fiction writer has no notion what role delta V plays in the rocket equation.

Mass propellant / mass payload = e^{(delta V/Vexhaust)} - 1.

Exhaust velocity of hydrogen/oxygen bipropellant is about 4.4 km/s. Now 3/4.4 is very close to ln(2).

That means when using oxygen/hydrogen, every 3 km/s added to the delta V budget doubles over all mass.

Starting with 1 tonne rocket dry mass plus payload,
For 3 km/s you’d need 1 tonne propellant.
For 6 km/s you’d need 3 tonnes propellant.
For 9 km/s you’d need 7 tonnes propellant.
And so on.

Overall mass grows exponentially with increasing delta V. The legend of Paal Paysam illustrates the dramatic quantities exponential growth can give. Krishna challenged a king to a game of chess wagering a chess board with 1 grain of rice on the the first square, 2 grains on the second, 4 on the third and doubling each subsequent square. The king calculated the numbers for the first few squares and accepted. Here’s an illustration of Krishna’s wager:

Breaking the rocket equation’s exponent into chunks has a dramatic effect on the amount of propellant used. With each propellent depot, the delta V budget starts over:

We can start back to 1 grain of rice at each propellant depot.

Mount Everest is visible in this version, no longer covered with rice.

Delta V from earth’s surface to LEO is about 9.5 km/s. LEO to lunar surface is about 6 km/s. The additional 6 km/s boosts four fold the mass that needs to be parked in LEO.

If the ship could refuel in LEO, that would cut GLOW (Gross Lift Off Weight) four fold.

Here’s a delta V map focusing on EML2 and LEO. Moon to LEO is about 3 km/s using aerobraking.

But savings on propellent isn’t the chief advantage here. With an extraterrestrial propellant source, inter orbital tankers and ferries could move between orbits without ever suffering the extreme conditions of an 8 km/s re-entry into earth’s atmosphere.

Also with delta V budgets on the order of 4 km/s, inter orbital vehicles can devote a higher mass fraction to structure. Present day upper stages have less mass fraction than an aluminum Coke can. Which makes durable structure and adequate thermal protection very difficult if not impossible.

A racing bike vs a mountain bike.

With a racing bike we want to minimize mass.

But a racing bike is fragile while a mountain bike is durable and rugged.

When an upper stage has a 4% dry mass fraction, durability is not an option.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos seem well on their way to developing economical, reusable booster stages. Bezos wants to help establish lunar propellant mines. If Bezos, Bridenstine et al successfuly export lunar propellant to LEO, upper stages could refuel before re-entry into the atmosphere. Reuse of upper stages is much more plausible if re-entry velocity is 4 km/s or less.

Space Elevators

Stross mentions the possibility of Space Elevators.

Arthur C. Clarke popularized the notion with his novel Fountains of Paradise. Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein were writers from the great generation. They had some physics and tech savvy as well as an optimistic can-do attitude.

Baby boomer SF writers are more about bleak dystopias and cautionary tales. Like main stream pop culture they rely on sex and glorifying substance abuse to sell their product. With a few exceptions, SF writers from my generation tend to suck at math and physics. Hopefully younger science fiction writers will pick up the mantles of Heinlein and Clarke.

A space elevator was a good idea in the time of Clarke. Since then we’ve massive amounts of junk into Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Here is a panel from the Hubble telescope that spent 14 years in LEO:

See this Space Stack Exchange discussion on orbital debris.

The extreme height of a space elevator gives it enormous cross sectional area. Much more cross section than the panel pictured above. So even if we could manufacture long strands of Bucky tubes with insanely high tensile strength, the elevator would be severed by impacts.

However full blown Clarke towers have smaller cousins: orbital tethers. Being a lazy baby boomer writer, Stross seems content to rehash tired 1970s SF ideas. It is possible Stross has never heard of orbital tethers.

Orbital tethers can be placed in orbits relatively free of debris. They would be much shorter than a full blown Clarke Tower and would suffer much less stress. They could be made from existing materials like Zylon. I talk about orbital tethers at Trans Cislunar Railroad. Given two way traffic, a tether could harvest up momentum from higher orbits and trade it with the down momentum of lower orbits. Thus with two way traffic a tether could impart delta V with little expenditure of energy and propellant.

Orbital tethers could also be anchored on Phobos and Deimos.

Given tethers of modest mass, payloads can be exchanged between Phobos and Deimos via a Zero Relative Velocity Transfer Orbit (ZRVTO).

Given a somewhat more substantial tether, a Phobos tether could throw payloads down to a 1 A.U. perihelion (in other words, a transfer orbit to earth) or to a 3 A.U. aphelion (in other words a transfer orbit to the Main Belt).

An upper Phobos tether capable of launching payloads to various regions of our solar system needn't be that massive.

A Phobos tether extending to Mars upper atmosphere would drop payloads into Mars atmosphere at .6 km/s. About mach two, the Concorde Jet would routinely do this through a much thicker atmosphere. This about 1/10 the velocity landers from earth normally enter Mars' atmosphere. A Phobos tether descending to Mars' upper atmosphere isn’t practical using Zylon but would certainly be doable if they manage to manufacture long lengths of Bucky tubes.

Summary of Stross' Errors

Stross gives us numbers assuming all propellant and hab mass comes from earth's surface.

Using in situ resources most of the hab mass can be made from materials at hand.

More importantly there's the possibility of in situ propellant. This can drastically cut delta V budgets. Which cuts propellant and energy needed. It also makes robust, reusable vehicles possible.

Momentum exchange tethers are doable. This would further reduce energy and propellant needed to travel between space destinations.

Opening A New Frontier Is Doable

It is possible to establish infrastructure that would greatly reduce the cost of traveling about in space.

Yes, it would be expensive but it is doable. Dennis Wingo's book Moonrush documents several examples of government/private enterprise partnerships establishing massive transportation and communication infrastructure. The trans continental railroad was such a collaboration.

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has expressed his desire to work with SpaceX and Blue Origin to establish lunar and cislunar infrastructure. It is possible this could come to pass.

But the effort would have better prospects for adequate funding if the public perceived it as possible. The space meow boys have used bad math and silly straw man arguments to strengthen the public perception that this is pie in the sky.

The first steps towards opening the space frontier would be establishing infrastructure on other bodies. Semi-autonomous tele-robots are dropping in price while becoming more capable. British Petroleum has used R.O.V.s to build oil wells on the sea floor. It is possible to build the initial space infrastructure without a human presence.

Once robots have established infrastructure to extract propellant and keep humans alive, the cost of human presence plummets.

Why does Murphy argue so vehemently against a new frontier? He's worried that we'd be okay with trashing the earth if we had the option to move.  Bill Maher makes the same argument.

Maher and Murphy are giving us a false dichotomy. We can do both. We need to work to preserve our home as well as open new frontiers. Space advocates are more aware than the average person that our precious planet is finite and fragile.

For example Musk is also working on solar energy and electric cars in addition to his rockets. Bezos is advocating moving destructive mining and manufacturing out of our ecosphere.

Musk and Bezos are doing more for a sustainable future than a million space meow boys.