Elon Musk’s Plan to Send a Million Colonists to Mars by 2050 Is Pure Delusion

Please first consider testing this in Death Valley or some other low resource desert maybe in Texas near SpaceX. Better yet, make that the proving grounds. After a person passes their extensive psychological evaluation and sign all their legal waivers then they spend one year in the desert in a space suit. If at any point they take their suit off outside of the environmentally controlled pod they are out of the program. If anyone damages a pod everyone in that pod not in their suit is out of the program.

I assume SpaceX must have reviewed all the previous biodome / biosphere [1] experiments and learned from all their lessons, failures and successes. [2][3]

Consider also using the participants psychological evaluations and personality tests to group people together correctly so that they inter-operate well together in most aspects. Team up with the DoD and find some marines or army special forces that want to earn some special duty hazard pay.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 # see additional links at the bottom of the page.

[2] - https://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/articles/biosphere-2-wha...

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yAcD3wuY2Q [video]

They'll figure out the food, air, and bathroom situation when they get there. I'm sure it will be glorious.

Elon Musk is in several businesses where hype and showmanship are part of the job. His competitors in those businesses also create unrealistic narratives around their products and their companies' intentions and capabilities. So, for example, calling out hypocrisy about government contracts and subsidies is particularly useless. Everybody does it.

This means it is hard to tell where sensible strategies, like Elons tweets providing real value in the form of zero ad spend at Tesla, ends and delusion begins.

I am not a space-colonization optimist. I agree with the article author that humans will not live off Earth for more than a few months in space stations or maybe on the Moon until they are post-human. But can Elon put humans back on the Moon? Maybe. And maybe that's enough to get enough government contracts for his rockets.

Closer to home, Musk is taking full advantage of the fact that customers, at least in the US, hate their ISPs with a hot passion, often for good reasons, and want to believe in a literal deus ex machina. Does he have a viable business model? So far, it only has to be viable enough to appeal to investors with stars in their eyes.

Or, maybe, like entrepreneurial showmen before Musk have often done, he gets the idea that "enlarging the problem" can scale-up to any size and not fail.

28 years to go. So starting today it is only 35 thousand a year...

And with the launch window being 26 month apart... Some people will have fun sitting in orbit for quite a while waiting for their go ahead... I hope they get chance to reconsider after first week.

Don't care about mars. Astroid mining is the key to saving earth.

Unlimited metals. Unlimited batteries for storage. Hell, make and charge the batteries in space than then drop them to earth

To me, if there's one thing Elon must succeed in it's Space-X. They have the people, the technology, the theory and most importantly the reality of refuellable, reusable rockets going to space. With an in-orbit delta-v budget to make it realistically to Mars, even considering shielding. And the plan to source Methane on Mars to get back is also scientifically backed, as far as I can judge that.

If there's one hope to make it to another planet in my lifetime, it's Space-X.

So could we dump the hate on other stuff he does, but still admire the Mars goal?