Elon Musk and Bob Smith

[Kennethdio]

Coincidence?

[DicheBach]

Wow, Elon's hair growth products have done wonders.

[BoogieMan]

12 hours ago, DicheBach said:

Wow, Elon's hair growth products have done wonders.

 

Totally. Dude looks 15 years older in that picture than he does today.

[Whatever]

Fun fact: Elon Musk just launched a brand new line of portable flamethrowers!

 

He seems to be enjoying himself a little bit too much...

 

[DicheBach]

The dude is hard to read. I'm guessing he actually believes his own hype.

 

The lithium battery powered car thing, I suspect there are hidden ecological/recycling costs there that no one (least of all Tesla) have even bothered to consider. That could turn into a real problem if they actually expand their market share as much as they obviously want, but at present, he strikes me as a relatively harmless visionary. Heck, he HAS managed to get a few loads of cargo up to the ISS for cheap!

 

Of course, the whole idea of trying to get to Mars in our lifetimes instead of devoting those time and energies into developing a business plan for a PERMANENT space station where off-Earth agriculture, and human health studies could be mastered strikes me as naive in the extreme.

 

SpaceX's general business model so far has admittedly been brilliant: get to orbit cheaply.

 

I cannot detract from him and his endeavours in that regard. Getting to orbit cheaply IS the number one problem and it was wise to develop a firm that focused on that.

 

But now that they have made considerably strides in that respect, he and/or his advisors seem to feel it is appropriate to SKIP all the intermediary steps between getting to orbit more cheaply and getting a human expedition safely to Mars and home in relative health!

 

Rather than all his Mars or bust nonsense I'd suggest an alternate business model:

 

develop a full business plan for a private-owned, semi-autonomous space station with agriculture and at least some artificial gravity (which can house X number of astronauts for Y number of days and with Z months of self-sufficiency, etc., etc.) and most importantly: a design which is extensible and can thus provide the initial core of an eventual space port that truly is 95% self-sufficient, can serve as a way station on the way to the moon, and provides an artificial living/working environment for a sufficiently large crew/passengers that it can actually function as the initial outpost in humanities ascent to spacefaring species status . . .

 

As far as I can tell, the corner-cutting get to Mars on the cheap expedition does NOTHING to address the real problem of how do we get the space rush GOING in the first place. For that, we need a space station where people can stay in relative health and comfort for months or years at a time and with sufficient on site resource reclamation and growth that it can go for months or years without a resupply mission from the surface. We lack that to this day and until we have that, we are severely handicapped n all of our manned space flight aspirations, as far as I can tell.

 

The other completely separate objective I could see as taking precedence over a seemingly useless private landing of a spacecraft on the moon would be an actual plan for how to prospect an optimum asteroid/comet, grab it and put it close enough to the Earth-moon locale that it is useful as a resource base for either lunar or orbital enterprises.