But I’m not naive in thinking it will be easy, or soon, that we finally send humans to Mars. If Starship can’t solve its heat shield problem that could be a showstopper. I have to believe they are going to get it done though. I’ll start to really believe it, and so will you guys, when unmanned Starships start landing on Mars with supplies.

And what better place to land than Korolev crater? Located in the northern lowlands of Mars, it is an 82-kilometer (51-mile) wide impact crater packed with a permanent, 1.8-kilometer (1.1-mile) thick mound of water ice that never melts.

And it looks like one heckuva ski slope on that left ridge!

Step 1: Leaving Earth. How can we possibly launch everything we need on ONE spacecraft? We can’t, DUH. We launch dozens of Starships, maybe even hundreds, and preposition hundreds or thousands of tons of food, medicine, equipment, supplies, habitats, everything we can imagine. Space suits, vehicles, science labs, etc etc etc. And we do all this several years before humans are even launched there. This is in fact the plan Space X has advocated.

Step 2: Crossing the Interplanetary Void. Radiation from solar flares with no possible way to avoid it, like maybe a safe control room with lead or water shielding? Microgravity, which if only we had a couple of decades of experience on a space station dealing with it? And confinement issues. Yes another completely insurmountable problem humans have never faced in our history on this planet?

Step 3: Landing on Mars. Yes another “first” we will have to accomplish with a human crew. Maybe if we loop back to Step 1 and see that having landed dozens of unmanned Starships on Mars already we might have learned how to do it safely? Maybe tested those rocket landing thrusters that work so well on earth in a lower gravity environment?

Step 4: Surviving on Mars. “…they would need a pressurized habitat, suits, air and water recycling systems, reliable energy sources, and sufficient food for months, if not years. ” Yes! And? Oh but the “staggering cost” of transporting all that. Still working on the old cost-per-pound-to-space models pre the reusable first stage era? Starship, if it achieves close to its goals, reduces launch costs to a couple thousand dollars per pound. Hardly a showstopper for a trillionaire. But how do they get home? Gee no one ever thought about that! Not like a few dozen Starships sitting on Mars could be any help with that? And reentering Earth’s atmosphere! Impossible! No way they will ever figure that one out. If there was a problem with the heat shield on the return Starship no way they could dock in orbit with a station or another spacecraft to bring the astronauts home?

Step 5: It’s all a scam. Just like a pyramid scam to bilk suckers out of their money. Well, if that’s the case I would say it’s high time for Muskfinger to cash out and head to the Bahamas. If $1.4T isn’t enough already then maybe it might not be a scam after all?

Conclusion: The Unavoidable Verdict is the article is written by someone who, like so many others, thinks the money spent on human space exploration would solve all the worlds problems if it was spent on earth. Which of course it is spent right here on earth.

This is yet another myopic view by a person who would have humanity claw at the dirt for the rest of our existence as a species, rather than reach for the stars.

(posted here and on Daily Kos)