QuarkFly wrote:=The desire to push boundaries and live in space is understandable, but people ignore the day-to-day realities and human nature...Mars would be a lousy place to live and work -- and after the novelty of getting there wears off, people will dislike it and want to leave. Humans first walked on the Moon almost 50 years ago...how many humans live there now? Same for Mars and other planets. They will stay devoid of permanent human settlement, Nobody wants to live, struggling to survive, on a boring dead planet for no good reason...
Why did humanity explore the ocean? Because it is what we do, explore and expand. We found land, and primitive peoples, and at first, nothing much actually worth the risk. Dangerous voyage, cold, death, starvation, hostile indigenous peoples. No profit. Just pride, being able to say they expanded their territory. And people kept going, knowing there was risk of not even making it there. No one wants to failure, but failure is always an option. No one is willing to risk in lives any more, but that is the one resource we have in an over abundance.
This is a world of bubble wrapped special snowflakes and old school corporations extracting money from the world to line the pockets of the ultra wealthy. Life is hard, and the millennials have never seen struggle. They got consultation prizes when they failed and protected when 'bullys' say mean things. Are we going to send safe spaces with them to Mars?
Then you have the corporations. Why innovate and make your product cheaper and more accessible when you can over engineer the same thing and extract more and more money from the government? ULA just dropped launch prices from $164M to under $100M because they have to compete now (so the last 70 launch contract cost an extra $4.5B). But SpaceX is already at $64M per launch... that is $100M less than ULA a few years ago. And when SpaceX can start regularly reusing rockets... should drop to around $42M. So it is very well within the US Governments interest to fund SpaceX. Even if you roll in the money he got from federal and state sources for all his ventures (about $4.9B), that is just the extra cream off the top for what ULA was charging. Even with the $64m per launch saved by ULA dropping prices, using SpaceX still saves the government $36M per launch. So for the US in the future, cost of launching satellites will have dropped 61%. Sounds like money well spent to me. And dont think that Boeing and Lockheed funded the development of the Delta V from their own pockets.
Musk dreams big, and has a good track record of making it happen. Have you looked at his phase 1 plan for tesla from 10 years ago? He posted it 10 years ago, and made it happen. He has phase 2 posted. He is not hiding anything, he just isnt playing by the old rules, and that is scary for old school people. People joke... oh Elon is out learning to dig holes... yeah so he can do it efficiently and in a cost effective manner so he can bury the hyperloop because going above ground would be too expensive. might cost more now, and there will be bumps, but in the future it will make things cheaper. He could contract out for batteries... or invest in his own, and sell batteries to everyone else.
Yes I am a fan of Musk, because he does things the way I want to. Dont do something that way because that is how it was always done... that kills innovation. Be creative, do things different, change the world for the better, make money. All those statements are 100% true.