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Comment by housemusicfan | Hacker News Reader

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> let's abandon Mars

The idea that Musk’s plan with SpaceX is to help humanity colonize Mars is nothing but PR hogwash. The sole purpose of that messaging is to get ordinary members of the public to defend them when they break the rules for their own financial gain. It appears, at least in your case, to have worked.

Can you explain why you believe it is "PR hogwash"? It seems like they are putting a lot of capital and effort into making their stated vision a reality.

I'm not denying that SpaceX, like any other company, pulls PR strings and does greedy corporate things, but that doesn't mean they are flat out lying about Mars.

It’s quite simple: they haven’t shown they’re actually serious about it. Musk has made claims about launching manned missions to Mars, but he’s made similar claims about self driving cars and hyperloops, all of which were bullshit. The only claims he’s made that have come to any fruition are the ones with an immediate profit, a profile that colonizing Mars doesn’t fit. On top of all this, they haven’t even made it look like they’re serious about tackling the challenges of sending people on a long haul trip through space.

He also made claims about reusable rockets and electric cars. "Mars man bad" only makes sense when you cherry pick Elon quotes.

You can say Elon is an asshole. You can say he exaggerates. You can say he lies. You can say he makes the world worse. But you can't say he isn't trying for Mars or self driving. The fact that the $1B+ he has directed towards a Mars-oriented vehicle hasn't gone to Mars _yet_ doesn't mean he isn't working towards it. Similar story with the $1B+ spent on self-driving.

Maybe it will fail, but saying its all BS is self-delusion.

Many of the design decisions they’ve taken don’t make sense otherwise. The rocket appears to be designed for reusability in Mars.

They could have followed traditional designs and saved a lot of money.

I’ll believe this when they’ve shown that they’re working on solving the problem of life support on Mars rather than a glorified taxi cab to certain death.

I think the life support problem on Mars is a supply/demand problem. We haven't been able to make it yet, so why worry about developing life support systems?

The initial proposals I have seen is to send robotic missions first to prove out the land/launch capability. Even if it's not SpaceX, someone else will probably follow this pattern.

If they don’t intend to fly to Mars why they are spending immense capital on the Super Heavy?

The Falcon 9 (+Heavy) is an immensity profitable rocket good enough for almost anything we want to place on Earth orbit AFAIK. If they do not intend to do anything else but be a profitable business, I don’t understand why the heck they would bother with the Super Heavy and Starship.

> If they don’t intend to fly to Mars why they are spending immense capital on the Super Heavy?

Because they think it’ll be more profitable than what they have now.

Why invest so much? Profitable how? In what way? It’s a gigantic expenditure of company capital, and afaik there is no obvious need for it.

I don’t have the answers, but it’s a for profit company. Until they can show otherwise, there’s no reason to believe it’s anything but PR. They currently can’t show anything except transit. Nothing for life support for a human to survive a trip to Mars orbit let alone a colonization mission. They haven’t shown their claims to be viable at all. Musk’s claims to using SpaceX to colonize Mars have as much evidence backing them as his claims to using The Boring Company to build a hyperloop: none.

It took SpaceX 6 years from conception to its first successful launch, then another couple of years to start regular launches of the falcon platform. Now, I pretty much can watch Spacex rockets launch pretty much every week from my backyard.

Your argument that a for profit company would only do this for PR is odd. SpaceX doesn’t need to spend this capital for PR. What PR does the company actually need? Right now they are then only western space platform capable of reliably delivering passengers and supplies to and from the ISS.

Right now what’s being shared is little more than a conspiracy theory

“SpaceX is building Super Heavy for PR” has as much credence as UFO kidnappings. OP wants it to be that way so it must be that way. That’s the only way I can read this insistence and the lack of evidence pointing towards it. If OP was saying “Starship is being build to carry the Roswell alien bodies back to the dark side of the moon” the amount of evidence indicating this would be similar, but no one would take OP seriously

In the early part of the last century, people said Tesla was a charlatan, an insane madman whose claims weren't viable at all.

In the early part of the last century, they weren't exactly wrong.

The writers better be vegan if they're worried about wildlife impact from the launch.

Idk dude. To me crabs are vastly more precious and interesting than Mars. It's a rock. They are life. Weird devils advocate argument, I know, but just saying. Lots of rocks out there.

No one said they eradicated every crab on planet Earth. They lost a few crabs. There's plenty more of them. And there are many restaurants in SF that serve them up every which way.

Is it an environmental disaster every time you step on an insect?

Lol, good point. I concede.

The choice isn't between crabs and Mars. It's between doing things badly without considering the externalities and doing things slightly better.

The fact you think Musk has to do things badly, that he can't do better, speaks volumes. Maybe you're right.

They launch rockets at a scale they are not legally allowed to, adjacent to multiple wild life reserves home to many critically endangered species, and this is not close to the first time they've burned down the wildlife. Turtles and cats are a bigger concern to than the crabs imho.

Side note, and not that it matters much to this topic, but whether someone thinks Martian colonization is plausible or not seems to be a decent litmus test to their reasonability in general.

> but whether someone thinks Martian colonization is plausible or not seems to be a decent litmus test to their reasonability in general

Agree! to be pedantic, you should probably add a "within the next X years" qualifier

Frequent satellite launches helping usher in affordable broadband across the globe > turtles and cats.

We can live without wifi on the ocean, but we basically can't live without sea turtles.

It's obviously not possible with existing technology but future developments in biotechnology might lead to breakthroughs in terraforming planets like Mars for human habitation. In any event, fewer rockets is not going to prevent the 6th mass extinction. The biosphere is degrading and fossil fuel consumption is still going up because the economists have decided that higher GDP is better than a habitable planet. Musk is a favorite scapegoat but he is not the problem. Modern civilization is toxic and will continue to generate toxic byproducts as long as the human population is increasing.

> Oh no, we lost a few crabs? Yeah let's abandon Mars it just doesn't seem worth it.

Do you think a private for-profit company should get a free pass for the damage they cause to the environment just because you like their business?

Losing a few crabs is part of the opportunity cost for space exploration.

Do you not eat seafood? Crab legs are delicious!

I'm surprised they didn't count the number of anthills that were knocked over during the launch and include that in the article too.

The opportunity cost isn’t space exploration, it’s SpaceX’s bottom line.

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