You don't have to think you are smarter than him to criticize his ideas or suggest that he hasn't worked through everything. Because clever people are not immune from mistakes.

Clever people make mistakes as easily as anyone else.  History also shows that a team of good advisers doesn't make you immune from mistakes either. And I hope never to see a world where people are afraid of asking challenging questions of someone else because they feel they are not as clever themselves.

SPACE INDUSTRY FAILURES IN PROGRAMS WITH MANY CLEVER PEOPLE ON BOARD

After all, even in the space program, then many very clever people designed and built and serviced the space shuttle, but somehow, between them all, were not able to spot some serious errors that lead to two shuttles crashing.

Russia sent many landers to Mars, in the 60s and 70s and again one more in 1996, + their phobos lander - surely must have used the best and most brilliant minds they had available in Russian space industry - and they all crashed or failed to get there.

The US seems to have been remarkably successful with their landers program, only 1 failure out of 8 missions. But - none of them were guaranteed successes. For instance, look at the last 4 missions by the US, all successes. Suppose it really was a 50 / 50 chance of success each time for those missions. Then chance of getting 4 successes in a row is 6.25% or 1/16. Such odds do happen, not too extraordinary. I think is too soon really to be sure that the US has achieved better than 50/50 reliability for its landers, though most likely it has (especially since with each mission they learn more through telemetry etc).

It is just a tricky business, sending spacecraft into space, so far anyway, and we don't have the numbers of flights and the history to achieve the same reliability we have for cars or for aircraft.

Will SpaceX somehow change all this? I think just too soon to say.

IQ

I don't think myself that cleverness is something you can put on a scale as in "what is my IQ" - mine is more than yours or yours is more than mine so one or other of us is "more clever".

E.g. I'm great at maths and programming, but less than average at arithmetic and poor at human languages, other than English my native language where I'm reasonably good (but not so good at spelling and typos, have to keep checking my writing for both).

What does that say about my IQ? Almost nothing. What does my IQ (and I don't know what it is, never been tested and don't want to be) say about my ability at maths and programming, or at writing easy to read and clear English prose? Almost nothing.

What do any of those say about my likely abilities as a chef, or a sky diver, or a gymnast, or ice skater, or gardener. Again nothing chances are.

If there is any correlation at all between any of those, probably at most a slight variation away from chance.

ELON MUSK AND SPACEX

With Elon Musk, then I don't know about his technology, whether he can achieve it or not, that is his speciality. But he has had failures and explosions of his spacecraft, as have almost all spacecraft developers at some point or other.  It certainly looks promising for unmanned cargo transport for the ISS already used for that. Whether he can achieve the reliability needed for human transport - perhaps  - but I wait to see there. Is hard to beat the Soyuz system with its multiple fail-safes proven over many more flights than any other system.

But whether or not he achieves the reliability needed for human spaceflight -  he doesn't seem to have investigating human factors as a priority for interplanetary missions - and he hasn't said anything about his plans for preventing forward contamination of Mars or how to fit in with Planetary protection.

So - until he says something about those things - this is not saying that I'm more clever than him. Who cares either way about that?

But - what are his plans? They need to be scrutinized by others, especially planetary protection, in case there are flaws in them. The more eyes the better.

PLANETARY PROTECTION

Personally I just don't see how you can land humans on Mars without a risk of a crash landing, and if you crash land, how can you avoid contaminating the planet?

It's no good just saying "Elon Musk is clever so no point in asking that question". I hope we never get to the state where people are afraid of asking someone else challenging questions because they think they are not as clever as them.

That question needs to be answered, if you are serious about landing on Mars. And until someone does answer it, and they do that in a way that is generally agreed to be a solution, then there is a big ? over the whole thing, for anyone who cares about planetary protection (as many do at least).

I watched the recent NASA Humans2Mars - and the speakers there seemed optimistic about finding a solution that permits both human exploration and planetary protection on the surface.
Humans2Mars by National Institute of Aerospace

But how that can work I just can't imagine myself, will believe it when they produce it.  They gave no details, in the talk, just say that they are planning a new study.

Of course it is great that they do plan to keep this as high priority. And everyone is agreed, it seems, on the need for planetary protection for human missions to Mars surface. The question just is, can it be done?

There have been many workshops on this, they have all ended with "needs more research" as the main final message. I expect this one to be similar myself.

After all, how do they protect against a hard landing? What is their target probability of contaminating Mars in event of a human crash landing? Or overall? Presumably higher than the 0.01% target probability for a robot.  How high is acceptable for humans?

E.g. just for example, suppose they calculated it as 1% of contaminating Mars per human mission, and say 10% over all during exploration phase - is that acceptable to other parties to the OST such as ESA, China, Russia, etc.

Will the workshop find that a human base can be reversible - that somehow you can tidy up and remove all the contamination after they leave? Or does it not matter, if not why not?

These, and many other questions need to be answered. And basically, we don't know enough to answer such questions yet, plus is mixed in with other questions that need to be scrutinized on the international level about what are acceptable probabilities of contaminating Mars, would be discussed by COSPAR, not NASA.

I don't see how the process can end any differently from the earlier ones,  myself, as we haven't got that much more information to go on. What info we do have since the earlier studies points towards it being harder to do planetary protection rather than easier, if anything. Best it can do is to outline the areas where more research is needed in some more detail perhaps, is my forecast for what they will do, for what it is worth :).

At any rate, whatever you think about this, it is out of Elon Musk's hands, he can't influence the outcome of those decisions and being clever is no help there.

HUMAN FACTORS

And as for human factors, then - nobody has yet demonstrated long term closed systems in space - and nobody knows what gravity prescription is needed for human health. So again cleverness just doesn't enter into that. Some things you can only find out by experiment, especially things to do with ecosystems and human body. Plants, and humans are far too complex to model on a computer.