Why Musk’s Mars mission is troubled before take-off
Extraplanetary spacefaring has a hoary history in science fiction. A book he acknowledges as foundational to his outlook is Robert Heinlein’s Hugo Award-winner, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, about an insurrection of the moon’s penal colony against the Earth-based Lunar Authority. Among the questions not yet being asked is whether his Marsism—a neologism coined by Thomas Michaud in a 2020 research paper—is self-created, or whether it is one of the many ideas he has appropriated in his hyper-corporatism without giving credit. Themes have included building starship, establishing and sustaining colonies, hyper-finance, return boosters, orbital fuelling, terra-forming, bio-adaptation, containing contamination from Earth, and iconoclastic politics, among a host of others that Musk might have read. Astrophysicist Erika Nesvold was being cautionary when she said, “ you think it’s our destiny to go out and reproduce as much as possible, or grab as many resources as possible, that’s going to affect how we treat the places that we go to and how we treat each other.
Elon Musk is already talking about moving to Mars. But how close are we to that, really?
Dear Elon Musk: Your dazzling Mars plan overlooks some big nontechnical hurdles
Elon Musk wants to go well beyond Mars with the Interplanetary Transport System
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