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Comment by ajay-b | Hacker News Reader

This mission is an orbital science mission studying Mars' atmosphere, not the same objective as SpaceX's long-term goal of sending large cargo and eventually humans to Mars. So I think the title might be taking the piss just a smidge.

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I don't assume "Mars mission" to necessarily mean cargo for settlement or humans. In fact, that all seems quite distant at this point, so I ignore it entirely unless specific concrete actions occur.

So for many people like myself, the title is perfectly reasonable. The world does not revolve around SpaceX and its purported plans.

By that logic the Russians won the space race pretty completely.

They did. It was the Soviets winning the space race that caused the USA to sink everything into the Apollo mission, to prove they could go bigger.

Russia were first to almost every other milestone, first orbit, first man in orbit, first woman in orbit, first EVA, first moon orbit, first (unmanned) moon landing, and many others.

Edited "Russians" to Soviets because lot was done by non-Russian parts of the union, my original reply just mirrored the OP use of Russians.

The Russians got to the Soyuz in the 1960s, so yeah, they won the race.

To be fair to the original commenter though... the actual title of the TechCrunch article is:

"NASA picks Eric Schmidt’s rocket company for Mars mission, setting up a race with SpaceX"

That title establishes a context in which looking at their relative goals is completely valid.

I mean one would assume / hope that even SpaceX plans to send firstly just craft to Mars, and/or cargo, before large cargo/humans.

only if you squint at it while slightly tilting your head and really want it to be acrimonious.

"NASA picks Eric Schmidt's rocket company for Mars mission" comes no where close to implying it was a manned mission while absolutely being accurate in it's a rocket company being selected for a mission going to Mars. You're reading into it a manned mission.

Why?

Not everything is about Elon’s wacky plan to settle Mars.

SpaceX is incredibly sensitive about this after they've been beaten to Mars orbit by ... it's quite a list: NASA/JPL, the Soviet/Lavochkin Mars program, ESA, ISRO, ESA+Roscosmos, the UAE Space Agency/MBRSC + JAXA (Japan), and China’s CNSA. And Blue Origin: it launched NASA’s ESCAPADE probes. And while they are still en route and are expected to enter Mars orbit in 2027, orbital dynamics means it's not possible to beat them. Oh and adding these up you might think SpaceX has been beaten to Mars 7 times, but that's not correct. They've been beaten 17 times to Mars orbit in total, and that number will inevitably rise to 18 even if they launched a Mars mission tomorrow. It's over 30 if you count individual vehicles that launched on one rocket separately.

(yes, I'm a bit disappointed, I worked on a canceled European Mars mission long ago. Unfortunately, the financial math on why the entire company was canned was entirely correct, and yes I'm a bit angry that SpaceX gets such incredible funding, with a financial plan that, while better than the one we used, still isn't good enough)

Doubly so now it has been made clear that Falcon 9 is a failure. Reusable rockets are, as an innovation, in fact not good enough for a company to profitably sell access to earth orbit, as it turns out (but was extensively predicted)

(note: this is because starlink is of course using SpaceX funds, and is making a big loss doing it. In other words: the market for falcon9 launches is not big enough to sustain SpaceX, without artificial tricks that look good in the short term but unless something changes, increase the losses in the long term)

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/nov/13/jeff-bezos-b...

>It's not the delusional attempt to send people to mars, it's just the pratical application of science. Lets not get confused guys!

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