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Comment by dundarious | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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