Elon Musk: “We’re going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.”
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Warsomedad
Smack-Fu Master, in training
Ask him, why the need for so much speculation, hes vocal and has the balls to explain his comment.
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We don't need to make it work.
That's correct. I'm saying it isn't a must. Getting resources from Earth is a thing. Getting local resources is eventually a thing. We don't need a closed life support system. It's not a requirement. Stop trying to claim this is all doomed consequence of our inability to create such an unnecessary thing.
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Mars has nothing for us that we don't have here on Earth, but if someone must go, let it be Musk.
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Can anyone name a single technological achievement we made 56 years ago that we still can’t replicate today?
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
Hearing that the company is run by an asshole is the side effect of following a company run by an asshole, so I’m not sure what you were expecting.
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Ceteris paribus, having the ability to push off to other planets to do your own thing (whether you're a toxic slimeball like Musk, or a normal person that wants to start over with like minded others), is a good thing.
Well, would be a good thing, given the biomedical, cultural, and other challenges/obstacles that we're facing to make the above a reality.
Other than obscure peculiarities like F1 engines?
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NASA wants to go to the Moon. Elon wants to go to Mars. MAGA doesn't care where Elon goes, as long as he goes away.
As for me, I hope he goes away too, but he's welcome to leave SpaceX behind. It's in good hands without him.
As for me, I hope he goes away too, but he's welcome to leave SpaceX behind. It's in good hands without him.
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There is no need of such a strong economic interest, because it is orders of magnitudes easier to be in Antarctica or on the ISS than on Mars or the Moon.
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Benjamin Franklin had a standard response to those types of "what is the use of it?" questions in regard to various forms of scientific research. It's just as good today as it was then.
"What is the use of a newborn child?"
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Interesting. What money has he taken that is not based on contract obligations being fulfilled?
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The issue is that it is the same boring conversation in every article. It goes something like this.
Musk Haters (MH): Musk is an asshole.
Almost everyone else on here (All): We agree.
MH: Therefore everything he has ever done or is doing is either bad or else not really his doing. He's a con artist who has kept none of his promises, except all those he did keep, which remember are actually somebody else's achievements by my decree.
All: Attempts nuanced discussion...
MH: YOU'RE ALL ELONSTANS WHO ARE [somehow?] SUPPORTING HIM BY DARING TO NOT AGREE WITH EVERYTHING I SAY WHILST ON MY SOAP BOX!
All: You are the one who insists on doing nothing but talk about the guy, whether the article is on point or merely tangentially related to him. Have you considered you are just giving him oxygen?
MH: FASCIST SPACE NERDS, YOUR FUHRER WILL NEVER BUY YOU A PONY!*
Rinse, repeat. These conversations don't bring anything new to the table from a practical, political or technical perspective. It's all just pretty much noise. I personally agree that Musk was pretty much always an ass hat, and now he's fallen down the right wing rabbit hole and is digging himself ever deeper. At least for now the companies that he started are still a net positive for civilization, whether he will manage to screw that all up is still an open question in my mind. You may not agree with that, but you don't change minds with endless strings of ad hominems, unsupported assertions, and misleading to downright false facts. I'm all for civil debate supported by facts, I don't come on here to just hear from people who agree with me and have the same knowledge, what would be the point? Bring something novel and interesting to the table is all I ask.
*Incidentally the amount of implied pony hate on here is pretty disturbing, did you all learn nothing from Seinfeld?
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The first human flight to Mars needs to have Elmo, and only Elmo, on board. If the flight never returns because it was built to the same manufacturing standards as the Cybertruck, oh well, lesson learned.
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No. We should send along his trusty sidekick Donald Trump, too.
Maybe Steve Bannon to help shovel coal into the engines on the way there.
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Occupying Mars is merely an engineering problem. Humans are excellent engineers, but any discussion of colonization doesn't include an analysis of colonialism is incomplete, presumably deliberately so. History is very clear. When they are no indigenous people to oppress, the first colonists assume that role. There is always greed, exploitation, rebellion, and death. The mistakes made often go on killing for centuries.
The Martian Constitution should be written, analyzed, and ratified by all parties involved before the first ship leaves Earth. Humanity has proved over and over again that without just structure, humans can't colonize a potato field without killing each other. Consider that neither Elon Musk nor any of his ilk can run a company sanely and fairly. Imagine them in charge of a distant planet, a colony where the only rights possessed by the colonists are those assigned by CEOs. Imagine Musk and his henchpersons in charge of your right to breathe.
The predator parasite class despise their employees, customers, and fellow humans. Their only real goal in life is to be Massah in the Big House, and there's nothing and no one they won't exploit and brutalize to that end. These people should not be in charge of exploring anything beyond their own navels.
The Martian Constitution should be written, analyzed, and ratified by all parties involved before the first ship leaves Earth. Humanity has proved over and over again that without just structure, humans can't colonize a potato field without killing each other. Consider that neither Elon Musk nor any of his ilk can run a company sanely and fairly. Imagine them in charge of a distant planet, a colony where the only rights possessed by the colonists are those assigned by CEOs. Imagine Musk and his henchpersons in charge of your right to breathe.
The predator parasite class despise their employees, customers, and fellow humans. Their only real goal in life is to be Massah in the Big House, and there's nothing and no one they won't exploit and brutalize to that end. These people should not be in charge of exploring anything beyond their own navels.
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Where in history do we actually have record of that happening? Humans spread across the world before written history, and usually even before oral history. The first colonists are often oppressed, but always alongside the aborigines.
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He totally missed a trick with that one. He should have gone with Kakos Maximus. (For those who don't speak Ancient Greek, Κακός means sick/bad. The Romans loved Greek loanwords, so using a Greek first name would be fine.)
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'Cacus Maximus'* would have worked as well, being from the same Ancient Greek root, but in Latin. Anyways, it's really funny how the modern fascists mangle up the classical Latin or Greek while drawing their supposed ideological inspiration from it. Or perhaps just sad, them thinking they "got it right". After all, if all your historical 'inspiration' is a total chattel slavery city state like Sparta, where even the other Greek city states still practicing slavery (!) criticised Sparta for going "a bit over the top" in the slavery department, you got some problems...
* Translated into modern English, basically meaning "a big turd around 1 on the Bristol poop scale"...
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The absolute irony of you posting this while you built a nice strawman of your own. And what is good for the goose is good for the gander.
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CharredVan
Smack-Fu Master, in training
Earth, as a planet, has limited material resources.
NASA, as an organization, has limited budgetary resources.
US public, as a society, has limited attention spans.
When Moon and Mars "projects" are competing for either, it absolutely becomes a zero-sum game. Pretending like we can simply have both, as long as we just try hard enough, is dishonest.
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
I read a modest proposal suggesting the use is primarily food.
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You're right about the D-He3 reaction being harder to ignite than D-T.
And for each kilogram of lunar He3 about 71,000t (metric tons) of lunar regolith would have to be mined and then processed.
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Musk has never considered his SpaceX goals a secret. A human settlement on Mars.
Working with NASA to launch NASA astronauts, equipment, and satellites help pay for R&D on the Mars project.
Elon's goals have not changed. Yes he is developing parts of the "Return to the Moon" NASA initiative, but his company SpaceX will earn a profit on that work that will be used to finance the Mars goal.
Starship and the Heavy Booster needs to be developed regardless of what NASA needs as they are core components of the Mars project. If NASA is willing to fund part of that R&D by using Starship as parts of the Artemis project, that's great. LEO operations will be critical for Earth-Mars transports. Artemis is paying the a part of the cost of creating the infrastructure that will be needed by NASA for Lunar missions & SpaceX for Mars missions
Musk is stating his personal goals and aspirations when he says the Moon is a distraction, but he will be in a position to kill the SLS and related space pork in favour of SpaceX. He might even cut the net cost and time required in the process
For the Mars project, Luna is a distraction. For Musk who is relying on commercial income to build a base on Mars and the infrastructure to support it, NASA's Return to the Moon could only be improved by redirecting the goal to Mars. Regardless of the outcome of that effort, NASA is going to be footing the bill for large parts of the Earth and LEO infrastructure required for Mars by submitting winning bids for NASA operations contracts.
SpaceX R&D will continue. Development of a deep space capable Starship will continue. All paid for by SpaceX customers. NASA just happens to be a prominent customer
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Probably about individuals.
But Elon's focus is on humanity in general and survival of the human race and human consciousness. So, I don't think he spends much of his time worrying about individual humans who are not blood relatives.
As for yourself, I suppose that some humans exist about whom you don't give one single fuck. Me, for instance? But I'm not losing any sleep over that.
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I would say it's an order of magnitude more expensive to run a Mars mission than the ISS. The Station is really freaking expensive.
And with the return that we might find life on Mars vs. ??? (what have we found in LEO?), the cost is absolutely worth the potential to find off-world life.
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It's only a straw man if it isn't true, and did I ascribe the rhetoric in my little playlet to any specific poster (yourself included)? No. But the problem I was dramatizing is real and serious enough to prompt a content moderation policy change on this site. This is the comment I was replying to:
I don't know how you interpret that, but to me it basically reads like a promise to spam these articles comment until they are unreadable. Which is what is happening, what else did we expect indeed. The space nerds epithet has been thrown around a couple of times in this comment section at least, and although I didn't see the one about Elon not buying you a pony in this one I've seen it a more than few times before. There was even someone one here saying that since right likes to lie we might as well do it (throw to the strike zone the ump is calling was I believe the phrase). I invite you to go through my comment history and find where I am engaging in ad hominem attacks.
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No it isn't. He just uses that dime store philosophy to justify his abuses of peoples and systems that exist today. He's not building rockets because he genuinely, deeply believes that humanity must eventually become a multi-plant species to survive. He's building them because he's a science fiction fanboy. If he were genuinely into long-term thinking he wouldn't rush to make sure all these things happen on his watch, and in the process create businesses that become squalid hellholes of abuse and bigotry. He wouldn't be cavalier with the lives and safety of his workers. After all, what if one of them eventually produced a descendant that turned out to be the future savior of humanity? The more parsimonious explanation is that he rationalizes his selfish decisions by pretending they are necessary to bring about the techno-utopia in the far distant future, and that this end justifies nearly any means he can use.
Something roboticist Rodney Brooks pointed out in his 2003 book Flesh and Machines is that all the big-name transhumanist boosters of his day kept making predictions that The Singularity which was going to make life an indescribably wondrous techno-utopia of immortal cyborg bodies and self-adapting labor robots plotted out nicely to about the time these individuals turned 75 years old, indicating that their primary motivating faith in amazing technological progress was more personal than big-picture.
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The government doesn't and never has subsidized the Mars dream.
The government pays a for profit space launch and services company (SpaceX) for completion of work done. The profits from the sale of services to others (Musk's share of Starlink's profits included) is what is subsidising the Mars dream.
Musk competes directly with the incumbents in the business of supporting NASA, the US military, and any other USG approved customer willing to pay SpaceX for the service provided. The big difference that has politicians running scared is that he does it at fixed cost and with minimal delays (compared to the industry standard) with no effort to spread the pork as widely as possible.
This failure to spend as much as possible, in as many congressional districts as possible, over the longest possible timespan defeats the basic purpose of the US space program
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That's a lot of words that can't explain why SpaceX started developing Starship on their own dime long before NASA gave them any money. It's a rocket platform that doesn't make any sense except to land 100 tonnes of material on Mars.
Or, perhaps, Elon is a rocket nerd and he truly wants to establish the first colony off the earth. I don't see why those that consider Elon a melomaniac would argue that he truly believe that he can be the one to make such a thing happen.
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As has been observed upthread, NASA is almost certain to tag along once it's certain that SpaceX is sending a fleet one way or another. There would be too much egg on NASA's face to not be involved.The government doesn't and never has subsidized the Mars dream.
The government pays a for profit space launch and services company (SpaceX) for completion of work done. The profits from the sale of services to others (Musk's share of Starlink's profits included) is what is subsidising the Mars dream.
Musk competes directly with the incumbents in the business of supporting NASA, the US military, and any other USG approved customer willing to pay SpaceX for the service provided. The big difference that has politicians running scared is that he does it at fixed cost and with minimal delays (compared to the industry standard) with no effort to spread the pork as widely as possible.
This failure to spend as much as possible, in as many congressional districts as possible, over the longest possible timespan defeats the basic purpose of the US space program
That doesn't mean Musk vision is being underwritten. It's just that Musk is pursuing a political agenda that appears might work. It's certainly not the worst of his political agendas.
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He has no plans to. He DOES plan to use the profits from the companies he owns.
He does not want government subsidies that come with Congressional overseers to advise him on "How to do it right". He has the history of the US space program between the last Apollo and the first SpaceX contract for NASA to demonstrate the expertise of US government overseers.
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The cost is a big open question about the whole thing. Right now the state of the art for mass soft landed on Mars is half a billion for max one tonne. If that kind of cost was ever going to be politically feasible, it probably would have by now. SpaceX is hoping to up the maximum by at least a couple orders of magnitude while dropping the cost for the mission by maybe another order of magnitude. The fact that SpaceX is more than able to pick up the tab for what they've got going on in Boca Chica is encouraging on that front. If they can manage it then a lot of the assumptions about how one would go about a Mars mission go out the window.
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Nope NASA will continue to focus on the Moon and Musk will continue to focus on Mars. He will allow his paid managers to focus on the details of paying for the Mars work by selling services to anyone that needs them and can get US government approval to pay SpaceX to do the work.
Actually Musk's share of SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, Boring Company, and any other businesses he owns or collects dividends from are paying for the Mars project. NASA work is a distraction that pays for Musk's real goal. Wherever the work required benefits both Mars and a customer Musk scores a subsidy on the Mars work because the customer is buying the service on a one off basis, not the equipment needed or the rights to sell the service. Musk retains all the technology developed by Musk companies and used for the commercial services offered by Musk companies.
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Won't ever happen. He's in the history books now due to SpaceX
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One of the principle reasons I no longer visit here daily is the tendency of Berger and the “SpaceX is perfect” crowd to play the worst games of modern journalism.
Headlines and behavior like this are bullshit, and they were long before the internet. But Eric’s job is to repeat and amplify Elon’s mania because he’s “just asking questions” that were answered by actual scientists long ago.
Headlines and behavior like this are bullshit, and they were long before the internet. But Eric’s job is to repeat and amplify Elon’s mania because he’s “just asking questions” that were answered by actual scientists long ago.
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