Why Going to Mars Would Be Bad for Your Health

moribvndvs

> Elon Musk has recently stated that SpaceX will, at least right now, no longer be focusing on traveling to Mars Wait you mean Elon has been full of shit all this time???

nick49488171

About as dangerous as climbing Everest. So we definitely shouldn't do that either, in case these pearl clutching anti-progress journalists experience emotional discomfort.

jmyeet

Colonizing Mars never made any sense. Mars has the worst of both worlds when it comes to atmosphere: too little to ever be useful, but enough to be really super annoying (eg by covering your equipment with razor-sharp dust because obviously there's been no water recently to erode those sharp edges). Gravity is still pretty low. There's no radiation protection. So yeah, you were going to be living underground. But you can do that on the Moon without all the atmosphere annoyances and the Moon alreaedy has documented lava tubes so you don't need to excavate. Remember when Elon said the Moon was a "distraction" and they were going "straight to Mars" [1]? That was only a year ago. At the time my guess was that a) Starship is just badly designed for being a lunar landing vehicle and b) the project is way behind anyway so this was just a way of kicking the can down the street. So what changed? It's NASA's overhaul of the Artemis and SLS programs (IMHO) [2]. NASA wants to improve these programs by launching them more often and that, in Elon's mind, turns them into more of a competitor and takes money away from SpaceX. It's as simple as that. I stand by my criticism of Starship: I think history will show it to be the Cybertruck of SpaceX. It's a poorly designed platform and it's beiggest problem is going to be that it has to compete with Falcon 9. It's going to be fantastically expensive to develop. It's still many years away from its promise (eg in-orbit refuelling) and there simply isn't the demand to get payloads that large into LEO or geostationary orbit. [1]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1875023335891026324?lang=en [2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-artemis-moon-program-overh...

the_duke

Musk is actually a brilliant marketer. He built his companies around a "vision", used it to attract high quality talent and push that talent to give their best. For Tesla it was "electrify transport to end dependence on fossil fuels and save the planet", for SpaceX it was "save humanity by becoming a multi-planetary species". With how much he talked about it, he did probably actually believe in Mars. But now both of these ideals have come into conflict with his newfound political affiliations, so they have to be dropped.

sgt

It's typical fear mongering "this isn't possible because of reasons X, Y, Z". We haven't even tried it yet, or much space travel at all. It's way to soon to jump to conclusions.

ticulatedspline

Perhaps a tad overly-curmudgeonly but still a good argument against Mars is "A City on Mars"[1] by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (the SMBC[2] guy) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_on_Mars [2]: https://www.smbc-comics.com/