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Notes -
Thanks for the response!
This one will take some reading / thinking before I have anything to say.
I thought a bit more about it:
It is very easy to prove Elon Musk wrong, because almost everything he says or hypes up will not happen. Like his plan to build a prototype of Starship and have it 6 month later orbital, ugh, that was not only optimistic, that was hopelessly naive! Same es full driving I guess.
And he always makes the same mistake in taking zero buffer into account for problems or "unknown unknowns". He also primarily focuses on engineering challenges: is something against the laws of physics? No? Then it is possible and can be done super quick … or not, because he missed that there is a slow bureaucracy which has to approve it and permits have to be done and environmental reviews have to be studied etc etc. Musk has a big blind spot for politics and social stuff. If he were more clever, if he were a true evil genius, he would forge relationships and network with the (leftist) political elite. He would rub shoulders and finance AOC. He would charm and disarm his political opponents. Instead he shitposts on twitter when Biden didn't invite Tesla to the electric vehicle summit.
I personally don't believe I will see a Mars city in my lifetime (though hope dies last) and I think his Mars presentations should be seen psychologically as Elons "happy place". His castle in the sky which he can build in his imagination unimpeded by real life constraints. But in real life there will be astronomical hurdles, from the biggest technical challenge humanity has ever seen, to needing the US President being on board, to the UN not outlawing Mars colonization, to avoiding a veto by China, and what about public opinion and anti-billionaire sentiment etc etc.
BUT all this said:
SpaceX is on the cusp of making Starship working (next test flight 4 is planned in a week). Starship will enable a fuel depot in orbit. An orbital fuel depot will slash costs for the coming lunar base (which also sounds like a pipe dream, but will be built in the 2030s).
You linked to Destin from Smarter every day. There is a small cute twist here. Destin is a smart guy and does his homework, I bet he could recite by heart every size and dimension of the Apollo Eagle lander (especially as his grandfather worked for NASA). And he surely saw the graphics of the Starship HLS lander. If pressed he would have freely confessed that HLS is bigger and that this is nice and enables cool missions etc, but it wouldn't change his criticism much. Because this is factual knowledge. It is memorizing a few numbers and facts. This is not understanding.
Look what happens when Destin for the first time sees the mockup of the SpaceX rocket, feels the space, and imagines that this is really going to the Moon:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AiZd5yBWvYY&t=2719
NASA 42:25:
Destin 46:25:
Seeing is believing.
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