He lives life at the edge of risk / danger, and has come close to failure several times. See also What has Elon Musk failed at? The early SpaceX launch failures could have ended the company if it had failed a fourth time after three previous failures. He went personally broke in 2008. Billionaire Elon Musk calls 2008 ‘worst year’ of his life
He has a good record of pulling his companies out of difficulties that come from this risk taking approach - but a record that is also based on luck, as if that fourth SpaceX launch had failed, then the company would not exist today.
You could say it is "solid" in the sense that he doesn't give up easily in situations that would have stopped most people. And so far, luck has been with him.
HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT
SpaceX I think is now here to stay. But I'm not sure that he will definitely achieve human spaceflight. It's another risk. Human spaceflight is far more difficult to achieve than unmanned spaceflight. He is doing it in unconventional ways. His plans seem good but there have been issues. Particularly, failure of launch of a Falcon rocket due to failure of a component that passed quality tests but was not up to the mark. Of course he has addressed that issue - and that particular failure would not have killed the crew - as they would have been able to escape in a system that was not included on that unmanned launch.
But the underlying issue is relevant. Yes, his quality assurance is good enough for unmanned flights which can sustain a failure every few launches. But is it good enough for crewed flights? Is his plan to re-use the boosters also one that is acceptable- how reliable will the reused boosters be? Are there any safety issues in reusing the boosters?
The biggest issue with human spaceflight is that each test flight is so expensive. You can't do many flights with test pilots before you need to send paying customers to pay back the development costs.
He does have advantages there, that he is using unmanned flights to test many systems for human spaceflight; even using the same module the crew would fly in for unmanned spaceflights to the ISS. And experts say his design is good.
But even including those, it will still be numerically not that many flights before the first paying human spaceflight. It will certainly not be as reliable as a plane or a car. Will it be as reliable as the Soyuz TMA? Or will it only be as reliable as the Space Shuttle, which everyone thought was very reliable until it crashed; and same happened twice; each time the general public had high perceptions of reliability of the Space Shuttle - more than it actually had.
He does have interesting ideas for a Mars landing - supersonic retropropulsion without parachutes. If it works it could increase the payload that can be delivered to the surface quite a lot. But again he hasn't tested it yet; this is for the future. The Mars surface is probably the toughest place to land in the inner solar system out of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Earth, our Moon, and the asteroids and the moons of Mars.
(Just a note there about Venus: surviving after landing is hard, but landing is technically easy as you can use parachutes, if you go to the surface,. While "landing" in the upper atmosphere of Venus for a floating balloon or aerostat or "cloud colony" outpost is probably one of the easiest landings in our solar system with no hard surface to land on, and takes you to a place with conditions in some ways closest to Earth of anywhere in the solar system),
This also is a risk, though his ideas seem good ones.
As for his ideas for a 100 people at a time in a Mars colonial transporter, this is not yet a concrete plan - so nobody can comment on it until he unveils it this autumn. And his plan for a city of a million on Mars by 2100 seems very ambitious.
It's because he is tackling something tremendously challenging of course. I wish him well! But I think you can't say that it will work.
It's a high stakes thing he is doing. He is someone who lives on the edge and goes into things where stakes are high and there is a definite possibility of failure.
When an enterpreneur goes right to the edge of what is possible, failure is something that can happen. So I'm not criticising him at all here. Just saying that this is the situation.
COLONIZING MARS
In the case of Mars colonization also, I think the very idea of colonizing is mistaken.
We don't colonize the sea floor or even floating sea cities, far easier to build than space colonies.
Indeed the only places we colonize in a self sufficient way, or nearly so, are all places that could have been colonized with stone age technology - and indeed, most of them previously were inhabited by humans using stone age technology.
We have outposts in places like Antarctica that stone age man couldn't possibly have survived in. But they are supported by a many to one ratio of people in more easily inhabited places who build the machines for them, grow their food, mine things, get their education, bring children to maturity etc. Even hospitals are built in other places - not in Antarctica. If you had some major medical issue you would be flown out.
So, I just don't see it, space colonies. Not until our technology is so advanced that you can build a floating sea city that sustains itself using just the atmosphere, the sea water and a few rocks, probably most of that automated, with a large population (say 10,000) who don't need much of anything except what the city provides for them from the sea and the air. That's surely technologically feasible at some point in the future but we aren't there yet. And that would be much easier to do than a similarly self sustaining space colony anywhere outside of Earth in our solar system.
It is possible in the near future, I think, to have a "materially self sustaining" outpost - one that produces most of its own fuel, and food, and gets all its oxygen from food. This is a big advantage over a space station that can't do this.
But - first the target of producing all its own air - that's not really so impressive when you think in terms of colonization, since outposts on Earth don't need to do this at all. And producing all your own food - yes that's a significant milestone. But there is a lot more to it than that. Because you would be living in a high technology environment difficult to maintain.
At some point, maybe, we can build big city domes and Stanford torus type habitats in space. Maybe they can be made self sustaining. If so we can also build similar habitats on the Earth.
And - it could be that research into this in space leads us to technology to do the same on Earth, so reducing impact here, for humans living on Earth.
I'm all for researching into this, but I think it is far too soon to say "yes we know how to do this" and to set off on a big project based on the assumption that we can already do it or will definitely be able to do it x years into the future.
PLANETARY PROTECTION
There are also issues of planetary protection for Mars. We want to find out about life there, whether there was a separate origin, or whether it evolved differently there, or whether perhaps it didn't evolve there at all. It is easy to find life in habitable places if you bring it yourself. The issue arises with Mars because of recent discoveries of potentially habitable places there. Just a few seeps of liquid, but even so, if these exist and are habitable, what we find from any lifeforms that may live in them could revolutionize biology - and potentially that means implications also for medicine, nanotechnology, even new industrial materials based on non Earth biology. That's what I call a "Super positive" outcome. We don't know how likely that is but we shouldn't do things that could impact on something so positive on the basis of just not knowing if there is anything there to harm with our introduced Earth microbes.
Introducing microbes to Mars would create anew geological era there, of a Mars with Earth life on it. This could also interfere with other plans for the future if we decide to transform Mars. E.g. perhaps you do want to transform Mars in some way (not necessarily terraforming) but your plans involve introducing oxygen producing cyanobacteria first. Then previous microbes introduced as ~"hitchhikers" without a plan could make these new plans impossible to achieve.
E.g. aerobes that eat the oxygen, or methanogens that produce methane instead, or secondary producers that eat the cyanobacteria - all of those could make those plans impossible to implement. The thing is that microbes can form very resistant long lived spores or resting states. So as well as any microbes that find a habitat that they can reproduce in, you'd also have these spores which could survive even millions of years if they get into some sheltered place like a cave on Mars. So after a human landing, these would be present on Mars, and can also be spread in the global duststorms - and seems unlikely it would ever be practical to remove undesired microbial spores from an entire planet.
Could be many other issues.We just don't know what the effect would be of introducing Earth microbes to another planet -have never done it before. And we don't have lots of Mars planets to experiment with. If there are others like Mars in our galaxy - there may well be - they orbit other stars light years way and are not places we can visit easily.
CASE FOR MOON
I think we should use a more measured and open discovery based approach. And the Moon is the obvious next destination, not Mars, for humans.It's turned out to be much more interesting, both for science, and for human resources, than ever suspected in the 1960s and 1970s.
It could even be of commercial value for Earth or at least for spacecraft in LEO, something an outpost on Mars is never likely to achieve. And a place where we can learn what the role is for humans in space, and what we can do and what robots do better, in a place where you can get back to Earth or resupply from Earth within two days in an emergency.
Sending spacecraft to Mars is like setting off on a six month voyage in a ship with no lifeboats, and worse than that, as it is a minimum of two years (for most trajectories), at very minimum, 500 days, to get back, if you get something go wrong perhaps just on the first leg as you are leaving Earth. So it's like setting out on a long sea voyage,without a lifeboat, and where you are immediately 50o days of voyage away from land as soon as you get out of the harbour, as you wave goodbye to home. And a voyage where you can't breathe the air but have to bring all your air with you.
It's possible in principle. But it's so risky, we have to demonstrate these capabilities closer to Earth I think, and do so in long duration multi-year missions. Elon Musk so far is only addressing the payload problem, not the human factors and closed system problem.
Then once we either have faster spacecraft or a lot more experience with long duration space missions closer to Earth - humans in Mars orbit, exploring it via telepresence as this has no planetary protection issues if done carefully.
But not just Mars. It's a big solar system. Jupiter's Callisto. Larger asteroids Ceres and Vesta. Mercury. Venus clouds. Creating habitats in free space using materials from the asteroid belt.
Why just "Mars Mars Mars"? Mars is of great interest. But it is only rather superficially like Earth. It's got almost no atmosphere for a starter, can't breathe the air, and far colder. It would be a completely ice covered body like Antarctica if it wasn't that it also has hardly any water - the apparent Earth desert like landscape is because of extreme aridity.
It gets so cold at night, even in equatorial regions, that dry ice sublimes out of the atmosphere for 200 days of the year (combined with ice - this subliming dry ice is what creates the morning frosts on Mars in equatorial regions).
It is nowhere near what most people would call habitable. You certainly wouldn't call such a place habitable if it was somewhere on Earth, say at the top of a very high mountain or plateau, far higher than Mount Everest. Stone-age man wouldn't last long enough to take a breath, on Mars.
For more on this
Case for Moon - New Positive Future for Humans in Space with Planetary Protection at its Heart
Which I've also made into a kindle booklet
Also, see the facebook group: Case for Moon - Open Ended with Planetary Protection at its Core
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