The flaws in Musk’s Mars mission by Dr. Robert Zubrin
https://unherd.com/2025/04/the-flaws-in-musks-mars-mission/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJZMM5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHYA7SnFDw6jwNIrhqE6gHiqNsNt-EGC35KOJ_pm0Xs2RJUgx2tL3yE5zcw_aem_qfQLnXQqdl2th1bZ2dzbtw
The flaws in Musk’s Mars mission by Dr. Robert Zubrin
https://unherd.com/2025/04/the-flaws-in-musks-mars-mission/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJZMM5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHYA7SnFDw6jwNIrhqE6gHiqNsNt-EGC35KOJ_pm0Xs2RJUgx2tL3yE5zcw_aem_qfQLnXQqdl2th1bZ2dzbtw
14 Comments
I used to think humans would go to Mars. The older I get, the more it seems to me to be an impossible pipe dream. There’s nothing there for humans. The science can be accomplished with improved robotics. Mars is deadly, the trip there and back is potentially deadly and at least very bad for humans.
It costs way more than any political or private endeavor can afford, and for what payoff. Getting people back to the moon is more challenging than people had predicted, and we’ve already been there. Technology isn’t what’s holding us back, it’s the reality that humans aren’t made for more than little jaunts off planet, mostly for flex, but some science as well.
The impending climate crisis, I think, deserves more attention than fantasies about human trips to Mars.
There are billions of people on this planet threatened by ecological collapse, there aren’t any on Mars.
I don’t see how sending a few people to the red planet helps the rest of us here on Earth.
Nine million people will die of hunger this year. 100 million are homeless. Maybe Elon should focus his energy on real issues and lay off the weed.
Musk was **never** interested in going to Mars. Every enterprise was a stepping stone to the real goal, being in charge of Earth through wealth, communications, politics, and disruption. It’s quite sci-fi worthy in its own way.
A brief list of failed deadlines and quietly dropped initiatives really starts to illuminate it, add to the the weird things, like his weird obsession with the rescue diver a few years ago, the endless fathering of children by different women, the emotional disregulation.
Everyone was caught up in the glare of the show, history will do its job.
The real problems of going to and from Mars are going to be issues for a long time.
Humans in space bring unnecessary complexity. The life support system is there to keep humans from not becoming dead weight, so they live useless weight. Robots will explore and exploit space. Humans are here on earth to stay, so we should take care more of earth and less invest in futile endeavors of colonizing Mars.
> It would make far more sense to develop and use a similar but much smaller vehicle — a “Starboat” if you will — to travel between the surface of Mars and its orbit. Starship plus Starboat could enable highly efficient missions to Mars. But this will require a programme leadership capable of speaking truth to power.
Zubrin has always been a fan of elegant, hardware heavy approaches, and as a result has always seemed to have a bit of a blind spot in regards to the cost and risk additional purpose built hardware creates.
He’s claimed he was going to Marz every year and keeps making false promises. It will be 2045 if we are lucky
Zubrin has been one of the most vocal advocates for a manned mission to Mars for decades. I look forward to reading his take.
The problem I have with it is that it is the right solution to the wrong problem.
People are not meant for long term space missions or inhabiting other planets. This is our home and we currently have the tech to fix it. It just doesn’t make anyone any money to do so, so they don’t and they wont until it directly effects them.
Nice bot thread, it’s happening anyway whether you like it or not. Keep screeching. There’s no amount of leverage to shift any of their funding away from the commercial space industry.
It’s THEIR RESOURCES to do what they want with, just like THE GOVERNMENT STEALING OUR RESOURCES TO DO WHATEVER THEY FUCK THEY WANT WITH THEM
The biggest problem with man going to mars and eventually living there is cost, there are so many better ways to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars that it would take to accomplish this.
Attempting to terra form a planet without a magnetosphere is the ultimate folly. This is sci-fi fantasy that inspired a child who was neglected by his wholly inadequate parents.
He missed the point that if you drop 1 million people on Mars, there will be enough people to eat and turn into clothes until they can live off the land or resupply via Earth.