The entire mars thing is discredited with NASA budgets and criticism of US government programs, then the criticism is taken as a given, the idea called a cult, and then and only then is private endeavor, the thing thats actually going to go to mars, even brought up. If anything the arguments are good ones, against bureaucracy.
When private endeavor is addressed, of course Musk is mentioned. Then all his marketing hype is mentioned, he's chocked up as a charlatan, the one thing conveniently, conspicuously left out being the fact that SpaceX has delivered on everything it has set out to do so far. Talk about hand wavy.
The entire article is interspersed with unfunny jokes designed to make sure you don't think too much about what you just read. It's a weak "this is a dumb idea" argument after another that does a very good job of hiding the fact that it has almost no arguments of substance. It basically amounts to "we don't know how to recycle shit in a closed loop, the money could be used to send robots, we don't want to contaminate mars with coronavurus" (I can play the lame joke at the end of every important sentence game too).
You don't think people should go to mars? Too bad. People are going to go.
> Musk... [is chalked] up as a charlatan... [leaving out] the fact that SpaceX has delivered on everything it has set out to do so far
There's no contradiction here. Musk has regularly made ludicrous claims about what SpaceX is going to achieve, while SpaceX is much more conservative in its official statements. The entire operating model of SpaceX makes it difficult to claim that they've ever failed -- the fact that they're now on their fourth brand of "interplanetary starship" (MCT, ITS, BFR, Starship) can be chalked up to "iterative development", as can the fact they abandoned their first planned moon flyby, etc. I think this is a reasonable way for SpaceX to operate, but Musk uses it as a kind of "credibility battery".
No, that would still be figurative.
The entire mars thing is discredited with NASA budgets and criticism of US government programs, then the criticism is taken as a given, the idea called a cult, and then and only then is private endeavor, the thing thats actually going to go to mars, even brought up. If anything the arguments are good ones, against bureaucracy.
When private endeavor is addressed, of course Musk is mentioned. Then all his marketing hype is mentioned, he's chocked up as a charlatan, the one thing conveniently, conspicuously left out being the fact that SpaceX has delivered on everything it has set out to do so far. Talk about hand wavy.
The entire article is interspersed with unfunny jokes designed to make sure you don't think too much about what you just read. It's a weak "this is a dumb idea" argument after another that does a very good job of hiding the fact that it has almost no arguments of substance. It basically amounts to "we don't know how to recycle shit in a closed loop, the money could be used to send robots, we don't want to contaminate mars with coronavurus" (I can play the lame joke at the end of every important sentence game too).
You don't think people should go to mars? Too bad. People are going to go.