The underlying serious point of these light-hearted jokes is that Musk's demonstrated approach to technological questions will not solve the challenges of keeping people alive without access to the resources of our biosphere for years at a time. This challenge is arguably more difficult even than building rockets.
You inadvertently proved a point of the article: now we are arguing about Musk and not about the technological challenges of getting to Mars.
The author essentially dismissed SpaceX with ad hominem attacks on Musk, who in his critics minds is simultaneously incompetent and the embodiment of his demonstrably successful companies.
> The author essentially dismissed SpaceX...
The article also makes the point that keeping people alive in space for years is a very different and unsolved and underestimated challenge than is building rockets. SpaceX builds rockets. It does not do the other thing.
I’m arguing we shouldn’t be arguing about Musk. I don’t know how much he is personally involved in the engineering decisions, but it doesn’t really matter because SpaceX has proved it can solve the vast array of problems that need to be solved to:
- Launch a rocket into to orbit
- Land and recover the first stage of that rocket (which had never been done before)
- Build a spacecraft that can be launched into orbit, dock with the ISS, deorbit, and be recovered
- Make that spacecraft support human life, and launch humans on it to the ISS, and bring them back alive (which also had never been done by a commercial entity)
I wouldn’t bet against SpaceX being able to do the engineering required to keep humans alive on spacecraft for years once it becomes a priority for them. At this point it’s premature.
Rapidly iterating on the incredible engineering difficulties inherent in building a reusable rocket does not mean you can do the same thing with an interplanetary mission that involves at least ~5 months of travel one way.
They need a whole other class of scientists and engineers to solve the "keeping a human alive for years in spacecraft/colony" problem. It just seems like a fundamentally different class of problem to me, and that SpaceX's strength of rapid iteration may be hardly applicable to this problem.
Possibly more sure than the "classic" testing (and paperwork) heavy model that usually does very few actuall test flights due to costs.
There are people out there doing real things, perhaps blundering along the way. If the articles author disagrees with their approach, they can just say "some well-publicized people think that cheap reusable rockets are a step 1 to any successful space endeavor, but I personally emphatically disagree with that, because a better way than cheap rockets is..." - instead that author launches a mud fight at that point.
This idea that "life support" is the most difficult aspect is unfounded. The most difficult problem is transportation and reducing the cost of transportation means that you can attempt to solve every other problem by simply throwing more mass at it.
NASA does much of its work through contractors anyway and there are several companies working on independent space stations. I'm confident that the "life support is too hard" argument will be proven false in a few years.
A similar argument is made that "cryogenic fuel transfer has never been demonstrated at scale therefore Starship can't work". But nobody has even seriously attempted this! And the reason is that without reusable rockets every refueling mission is unbelievably expensive and the business case never closed.
It's an unknown. While we have manned rockets, we have never entirely isolated a group of humans from the biosphere for even a year, never mind indefinitely. The times it was tried, it failed. As the article points out, it is not an experiment that can be done piecemeal. All elements must be in place and interacting before the effects are known: lack of gravity, radiation shielding, recyclers, scrubbers, years of time, etc
Gravity and radiation are well understood and we can definitely build machinery that can tolerate them well for many years.
> we have never entirely isolated a group of humans from the biosphere for even a year, never mind indefinitely. The times it was tried, it failed.
Why doesn't the ISS count? It gets resupplied every few months but a Mars base would be resupplied every two years so systems only have to scale to last 10x as long.
Lunar Palace 1 made it to 370 days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuegong-1