Most of this is written from a US perspective, which ignores an important fact: it looks like it is going to be the Chinese that get boots back on the moon first and they might also move their eyes towards Mars soon. And they are not going to ask US congress for permission either. There's a new space race on with China. Mars is a prestigious target to nail that will vastly expand what's possible technically for whomever gets there first. It's going to be China unless the US stops navel gazing and gets its act together.
And love him or hate him but Elon Musk has built a pretty nice Starship that might help getting that mission done. The traditional route of slinging trillions at the likes of Boeing is indeed going to take decades. We know that because that's the past 50 years. It doesn't work. But Starship is nearly ready for operations and might cut that time frame short. And its a bar gain in comparison.
There was no point in going to the moon either in the late nineteen sixties. But it was preferable for the US to get there before the Russians. The moon program was really expensive and yielded a lot of indirect return on investment. Lots of fat government checks that went straight into the US economy. In the end, all it took was Kennedy telling people that we were going. Only took eight years or so from there. The Saturn 5 was way bigger than it needed to be because the people behind it were already looking at Mars. The Mars capable successor was already being developed until it was cancelled by Nixon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_C-5N
Anyway, Starship was designed for Mars, is going to the moon first, and might be flying there soonish. A bit over eight years from merely being a crazy idea. Sounds familiar? Only this time it won't be a one off. This thing is reusable and there might be quite few "flight-proven" ones flying towards the end of the decade. It will be very tempting to use one for what it was designed for.
This begs the question of the whole essay, doesn't it? So what if China gets "boots on Mars" first? They'll waste hundreds of billions of dollars (and likely many lives) doing it, and be no better off. If we're really worried, we can just counter them by sending killer robots to Mars.
I hope China doesn't land on Mars because of the fragility of the Martian environment, but I see no geopolitical threat in them wasting a lot of money trying.
(Obligatory: Elon Musk did not build a Starship. SpaceX is building it.)
Who would the hardest person at SpaceX to replace be if they left?
Saying it's Shotwell or Musk isn't indefensible. No one is irreplaceable anymore then any one person (as opposed to SpaceX as a whole) is building Starship but it isn't sycophancy to say that some people are more integral to the process.
And love him or hate him but Elon Musk has built a pretty nice Starship that might help getting that mission done. The traditional route of slinging trillions at the likes of Boeing is indeed going to take decades. We know that because that's the past 50 years. It doesn't work. But Starship is nearly ready for operations and might cut that time frame short. And its a bar gain in comparison.
There was no point in going to the moon either in the late nineteen sixties. But it was preferable for the US to get there before the Russians. The moon program was really expensive and yielded a lot of indirect return on investment. Lots of fat government checks that went straight into the US economy. In the end, all it took was Kennedy telling people that we were going. Only took eight years or so from there. The Saturn 5 was way bigger than it needed to be because the people behind it were already looking at Mars. The Mars capable successor was already being developed until it was cancelled by Nixon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_C-5N
Anyway, Starship was designed for Mars, is going to the moon first, and might be flying there soonish. A bit over eight years from merely being a crazy idea. Sounds familiar? Only this time it won't be a one off. This thing is reusable and there might be quite few "flight-proven" ones flying towards the end of the decade. It will be very tempting to use one for what it was designed for.