Science Surpassing Science Fiction, Again

In The Martian, Andy Weir wrote that the two Ares III rovers each used a heavy, bulky lithium battery that stored 9,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity. (That was based off of early-2000s new-generation moon rovers built for testing by NASA.)

Nine years after he wrote that book, we're putting that kind of battery in... an electric motorcycle.

And we're still a few years short of when Ares I would have launched (assuming they sent rovers up for that, and assuming no upgrades by Ares III).

The future. We are living in it.

Comments

[RainbowDoubleDash]

If this is the future, where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars!

[Kris Overstreet]

5523086 We get flying cars the day after we abolish idiotic drivers.

Don't hold your breath.

[Neece]

5523086
5523087
Reinforcing what Kris said, imagine your average weekend driver. Now tell me how long it'd take for one of them, instead of just hitting as mail box, hit a gaggle of children in someone's backyard.

Now, self-guided drones with people-carrying capacity? Those we might see in somewhat widespread use in the next twenty years or so. Might.

[RainbowDoubleDash]

5523092
I was making a reference to something from the distant future year of 2000.

[Neece]

5523096
I grew up with that promise too

[Southpaw]

5523087

We get flying cars the day after we abolish idiotic drivers.

Yeah this is science fiction, not fantasy!

[Scratchpad]

5523086
You can get a self-driving car... Provided you're looking over its shoulder.

[Sharp Quill]

Uh… I hate to be that guy, but you’re off by a factor of a thousand. That article says it’s only 9 kilowatt-hours.

[Misplaced Mage]

5523087 5523190
There’s an error, misunderstanding, or under/over-estimation here, somewhere, but I’m not sure where it lies. Cut and pasted from an ebook edition of The Martian, chapter 7:

“Our mission had a 10-kilometer operational radius. Knowing we wouldn’t take straight-line paths, NASA designed the rovers to go 35 kilometers on a full charge. That presumes flat, reasonable terrain. Each rover has a 9000-watt-hour battery.” (emphasis mine)

9,000-watt-hours equals 9 kWh, so it would appear that Kris misread or misremembered Watney’s statement. However!

The 100 kWh battery also increases range substantially to an estimated 315 miles on the EPA cycle and 613 km on the NEDC cycle, making it (the Tesla Model S P100D) the first to go beyond 300 miles and the longest range production electric vehicle by far. (emphasis mine, again)

Weir began writing The Martian as a serial on his blog in 2009. Tesla’s first production car was its original Roadster in 2008 with a 53 kWh battery pack (this was right about the time SpaceX was attempting to put the Falcon 1 into orbit for the first time — Elon was a busy man) and shipped in very small numbers, so it’s entirely possible Weir wasn’t aware of it at the time. But by 2014, the publication date of the first hardcover edition of The Martian, one could order a Model S with a 60 kWh or 85 kWh battery (a 40 kWh option was available at launch in 2012, but would be discontinued the next year due to extremely low demand). The quote above is taken directly from Tesla’s 2016 press release introducing the 100 kWh battery option (and Ludicrous mode!).

I’m inclined to believe that Weir screwed up his power calculations or — more likely, in my opinion — made a typo that his less scientifically inclined editor didn’t catch. Yes, Weir put the Ares Mars rovers’ range at only 35 km over “flat, reasonable terrain”. But we’re talking about Mars! “Flat, reasonable terrain” there consists of everything from deep, loose regolith (R.I.P., Spirit), to rubble interspersed with cemented regolith and larger boulders — and that’s just what the (successful) landers and rovers sent have seen to date. Weir’s rover also had a small, pressurized habitat, so it also needed to power a heater, CO₂ sequestration or removal, communications, lights, etc. The heater we can ignore, but only because Watney installed the Ares III MAV propellant plant’s RTG for heating and a few hundred more watts of additional power (at best). Then there’s the trailer he made from the wreck of the second rover to tow the Hab’s solar farm panels and the second rover’s battery pack, all the water he could carry to fuel the Ares IV MAV full to bursting, the oxygenator (which also required power)… All that added a substantial amount of mass that the rover motors needed to accelerate, keep moving, and decelerate.

I’ll say it outright; a 9,000-watt-hour (9 kWh) battery in a Mars rover like Weir described is woefully too small for what he intended it to power and move. A 90,000-watt-hour (90 kWh) battery, on the other hand, might be big enough and would be in line with the rechargeable battery technology state-of-the-art at the time of publication. Add twenty more years to get the mass down by the time of The Martian’s setting in 2035 (the Tesla 100 kWh automotive battery pack masses ~550 kg¹!), and et voilà! — a physically smaller, lightweight/low-mass, man-portable, 90 kWh rechargeable battery.

¹ This is highest possible mass estimate, because the Tesla battery pack is a structural component of the car’s floor and chassis, is reinforced for crash and fire resistance, has integrated liquid cooling/heating loops because LiIon batteries don’t like to get too hot or too cold, etc. Take away all that, and you’re still looking at something that masses several hundred kilograms, enough to give even an astronaut in Mars’ ~0.38g gravity pause in moving or lifting it. All that, to store the equivalent of the useful mechanical energy that can be extracted from the controlled combustion of just ~8.25 kg (3 gallons) of gasoline in ambient oxygen. Any wonder it’s taken so long for electric cars to catch on?

[Misplaced Mage]

5523087
And from the “Life Imitating Art” file:
cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/ZP968mmUHunWASh3Y8f4oQ-1024-80.jpg.webp
'The Martian' Author Andy Weir Takes a Spin on NASA's Electric Rover

[Misplaced Mage]

5523096
I’ve always loved that ad! Avery Brooks’ indignation sells it!

[RustDust]

Call me spoiled, but the future is kinda underwhelming...

[Misplaced Mage]

5523551
Let’s see:

• Supercomputer in your pocket? Check.

  • Battery powered? Check.

    • Rechargeable batteries? Check.
  • Color UHD display with HDR, wide color gamut, and ≥120 Hz refresh rate? Check.
  • Multi-touch sensitive screen? Check.
  • Wireless broadband-speed data access? Check.
  • Can locate you on a map almost anywhere in the civilized world within 3 meters? Check, though your results may vary indoors, underground, underwater, or in a war zone.
  • Can tell you the date and time with an accuracy approaching that of an atomic clock, and sets itself automatically? Check (required to make that wireless broadband-speed wireless access and location determination stuff work).

  • Camera? Check.

    • Color camera? Check.
    • Instant color camera? Check.
    • No nasty chemicals required for developing? Check.
    • No practical limit (physical or financial) on the number of pictures one can take? Check.
    • 4K resolution? Check.
    • High dynamic range? Check.
    • Automatic image processing on par with an expert photographer of the past with years of experience in the field and in the darkroom? Check.

    • It shoots motion pictures, too? Check.

      • As video? No film? Check.
      • With sound? Check.
      • Slow motion? Check.
      • Time lapse? Check.
      • High frame rate? Check.
  • Voice recognition? Check (It works most of the time these days…).
  • Facial recognition? Check.
  • Fingerprint recognition? Check.
  • Voice synthesis? Check.

  • Media (music, movies, photos) player? Check.

    • Millions of songs, and tens of thousands of movies and television episodes at your fingertips? Check (if you’re willing to pay for the privilege, that is).
    • Live radio and television programming, as in music, news, sports, etc.? Check (for certain definitions of the words “radio” and “television”).

  • Plays games and runs more serious application programs? Check.

    • Simple installation and management of aforementioned programs? Check.
    • Including a full encyclopedia? Check. (You can download and install a near-complete offline version of Wikipedia, i.e., has pictures, but no video or audio, that occupies about 88 GB. Today. For free. Ask your parents, grandparents, or senior local librarian how much a full printed edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica used to cost [plus the shipping and handling charges — the final print edition weighed 58.5 kg], and don’t forget to adjust for inflation.)
  • That can answer practically any question? Check. (The number of things one can’t Google these days grows ever smaller. The veracity of the answers Google delivers, on the other hand…)
  • Artificially intelligent? Would you settle for various idiot savant programs and artificial general stupidity?
  • And it makes telephone calls, too‽ Check. Video calls, no less!
• World peace? An end to hunger? Equal rights for all? Eh, we’re still working on those; the impossible always takes a little longer.

Yep, you’re spoiled. And that’s just your phone!

[Ciber]

And ofc by the time Ares 1 will have launched, The TechnoKing will be landing entire Starships.

[Misplaced Mage]

5523793
Make no mistake, even Elon hasn’t suggested anything on the scale of Hermes, but give him time. Hermes was the equivalent of bolting a centrifuge wheel, a good-sized nuclear reactor (possibly a modular kilopower descendant), and a multi-megawatt VASIMR engine onto the completed International Space Station and sending the whole shebang to Mars and back not just once, but five or six times. Building Hermes would make financing and constructing the ISS look like mild warmup exercises by comparison.

[TSBrony2014]

5523086
First, everyone would need to get a driver’s license and a pilot’s license. And (as I recall) under FAA regulations a person needs to be at least 17 to get a pilot’s license.

Plus, there would also be the added time and expense of taking both driving and flying lessons (even more time if one is required to become Instrument Rated). I can’t imagine that your average teenager would understand heading indicators, artificial horizon indicators, airspeed indicators, approach charts, ILS approaches, etc. Plus driving on the ground involves good depth perception, good reaction time and a whole other skill set compared to flying.

Also, flying cars would be more expensive. For example, flying cars would need to be equipped with transponders and a TCAS system to avoid mid-air collisions. And wings, control surfaces, and a hydraulic system so it could still glide in the event of an engine failure. In other words, don’t expect to see this for at least a century (and that’s if we don’t become even dumber as a species by then).

I am not a pilot and most likely never will be. Back in the day I used to read some books about flying including Stick and Rudder, and the ABCs of Safe Flying. I also used Microsoft Flight Simulator up to at least the 95 version. I also watch some aviation-related videos on YouTube. From what I’ve heard, becoming a pilot is even more involved than what I describe here. Plus your average teenager would need to do all this while learning the academic and real-life skills to become a functioning adult. In short, don’t expect this to happen any time soon.

[Misplaced Mage]

5525174
I’m not certain there will be any requirement for “…wings, control surfaces, and a hydraulic system so it could still glide in the event of an engine failure,” going forward, similar to the way ETOPS rules have evolved. Most of the activity these days in “flying car” development seems to be around electric multi-copters, since they inherently have fewer points of mechanical failure and built-in redundancy, e.g., each rotor has an independent electric motor and an extremely simple mechanical power train without transmissions, universal joints, swashplates, or variable-pitch propellers. The battery can be split into several physically separate packs to prevent fratricide in event of catastrophic failure that are connected in parallel so that the vehicle could still make an autonomous emergency landing when below a certain altitude if even one pack were operational. Throw in an airframe parachute to handle higher altitudes.

That said, I’m not a fan of the idea of a flying car directly piloted by a human anymore, either. The amount of kinetic energy involved in the crash of one due to not just horizontal speed but altitude makes the idea putting a flying car into the hands of an impaired or inexperienced “driver” troubling, to say the least.

[Changeling404]

And what will charge these things? Hopefully something like this one day...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57512229.amp
I've been following this for a long time...