Good grief. Zubrin always has to ruin it. SpaceX is the only organization capable of doing the job, but let me strawman Musk’s arguments for colonization into “deserting the Earth” for a reason “so morally repulsive that its embrace would doom any program so foolish as to adopt it. Coated with ideological skunk essence, its protagonists would appear more like the selfish characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” dancing in a castle while everyone outside dies in an epidemic…”
And/or it’s possible the US could become even more totalitarian- or just continue the current habit of doing the very stupid things for a much longer prolonged period of time.
This is vl;sr (very long, still reading) but Dr. Zubrin fails to make a strong case for why NASA should lead a colonization attempt for Mars. It’s only track record is Apollo and that was only good for 6 surface missions (not counting Apollo 13’s aborted attempt). That’s a far, far cry from establishing a lunar base. That NASA is just now, 52 years later, contemplating attempting to establish a lunar base in a totally brain dead manner speaks volumes as to why the government should step aside, supply maybe advice and lab support but in general stay the hell out of the way of SpaceX and whoever else wants to come along for the ride. The “failure of imagination” among the Boomer scientific generation is staggering.
Even leaving aside the libelous mischaracterization of Elon’s motives in pursuing his Mars settlement efforts, Zubrin simply offers the Nth in a long series of attempted justifications for making dinky and claustrophobic vehicles with equally mingy crew complements the centerpieces of his “exploration” architectures.
Contra Mr. Spain’s special pleading, Zubrin’s long-standing obvious discomfort with space exploration efforts of any significant scale – and utter lack of enthusiasm for actual settlement – is not generational but personal. I’m a Boomer myself and am firmly of the belief that there is no such thing as too much when it comes to actually settling the solar system – as opposed to just sending out a handful of manual pickaxe-based missions that hark back to the solo-prospector-with-trusty-mule era of “exploration” in the Old West. Zubrin is barely superior, in this sense, to the worthies at JPL and the Planetary Society who would be happiest if even human “explorers” – never mind grubby “meat-bag” settlers – ever set foot on Mars or any other piece of extra-terrestrial real estate.
The rapid Westward expansion of the United States didn’t occur because of some federal initiative directed by non-participants in DC. It happened when sizable groups of people in trains of Conestoga wagons – not single ones – banded together and pushed into the wilderness. Mars will be a tougher place to pioneer than was the Trans-Mississippi. But, then, the Old West pioneers didn’t have Optimus robots to help out.
Elon, in short, will “git ‘er done.” The last few decades of NASA efforts pretty clearly indicate that NASA won’t. There is no point in indulging fantasies of restoring NASA to useful competence. SpaceX already has the required enthusiasm and competence – and will soon have a larger payroll than NASA in any case. The non-useful/capable parts of NASA should simply be shut down – most especially its DC HQ.
Zubrin should know Elon’s true motives. If he doesn’t, given his reputed degree of sophistication, he’s incredibly incompetent. The only other options are dishonesty or a combination of the two. There are literally no other viable explanations.
I think it’s his daily TDS rants that are driving him to this end. He knows better and he is deliberately slandering Elon to that end.
Elon needs to take up Aleta’s NFE list, Bob has sold his soul.
“But the organization as a whole is brain dead. It is a body without a spirit. If it is to be brought back to life it must be inspired, literally — it must have its spirit put back into it.”
Why is NASA brain dead?
The Shuttle program and ISS program. And promising to send crew to Mars over last few decades.
The Shuttle program was suppose to make a reusable rocket, and NASA pretended to was. And ISS was some kind of weird program to make a space station with the Russians. And NASA never did anything about Microgravity effect upon crew- it needed to test artificial gravity and/or determine what effect of lower gravity effects on humans was- what effects of Lunar and/or Mars gravity was human beings over longer duration of time.
It seems to me, the idea of exploring lunar poles and then exploring Mars, was a good direction which should be continued.
One advantage of exploring to the Moon was to provide some degree of confidence, that NASA was capable of exploring Mars. And so far, NASA is failing in that regard.
One part of this failure, is NASA seems to want to continue to fail to explore the Moon for many decades, and not explore the Moon AND then explore Mars.
But there are other reasons to explore the lunar polar regions, and another aspect is a lot countries want join with NASA in exploring our Moon. And NASA with these other countries, would continue to explore the Moon, but after ISS program ends, NASA should put more of it’s effort on Mars crew exploration.
And NASA is failing so badly, that ISS might even end, before NASA can land crew on the Moon.
But we got Trump now, and it seems NASA might be made to move faster in terms of lunar exploration. And then the Mars exploration.
In terms of Mars exploration, it seems we could have more players, than just SpaceX. Though Musk says he in hurry to put Starships on Mars.
But it should noted that Starships are not ready, yet.
And in terms SpaceX and NASA, it seems a focus should be on, removing any governmental delays, on SpaceX’s Gigabay at Florida launch site.
It seems one purpose of NASA is streamline governmental processes related to space activity- but it tends to fail to do this and we have very stupid things like federal Fish and Game getting in involved with rocket launches.
“And the criticism of Mars for permanent colonies? ”
Well, Zubrin doesn’t think we will have Mars city of 1 million within a couple decades.
I have my doubts.
I think a problem is, understanding Starship.
It seems the Raptor 3 engine is “ready” but SpaceX is not building a lot of them and has hundreds of Raptor 2 engines it’s using.
And a main theme which makes Starship understandable, is Starship is still a boilerplate rocket and trying to get to point where the rocket can be “further refined” and then have Starship version which more operational than being a test version.
But in terms Zubrin, SpaceX has the Falcon-9 and it’s launching hundred times per year and as a result, SpaceX has thousands of Starlink satellites, and Starlink is going gross +10 billion dollars this year.
And according to Musk, Starlink is suppose to be important in terms of having his future city on Mars.
Also:
“Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$436 billion as of January 22, 2025, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $426 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership stakes in Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX.”
Wiki
Also his employees might have a fair amount stock value. And it seems Elon is on friendly terms many other billionaires.
And I like Bezo’s New Glenn rocket, and I think it’s big enough, but perhaps Blue Origin will make even larger rockets at some point in the future.
In person, Zubrin never impressed me. Then again, lots of us write better than we are. That said, since a long time, his main reaction to new developments in space exploration is to reiterate his own antiquated ideas. They seemed outstanding in the early 1980s.
Well, whenever things look like they may be focusing a bit too much on developing lunar strategies, one thing he can be counted on is to throw a “But Mars!!!” monkey-wrench in the works.
Some of us embrace the power of “and.” Once Mars is built up sufficiently, it makes an excellent jumping-off point for main-belt asteroids. But there is no need to wait. If Bezos could get out of the way of his own graditem, he could do for the Moon and asteroids what Musk is doing for Mars.
We’re talking decades gone by. Until just now, embracing the power of “and” said you weren’t serious enough. Now, I dunno, me. My 1991 novel involved bringing a NEO to high earth-orbit. I may have had some influence over NASA thinking (i.e., ARM), but probably not. I’m a forgotten man, just not forgotten enough, it seems.
As P.J. O’Rourke wrote about the US Dept of Agriculture: take it behind the barn and put it out of its misery.
As far as aeronautics goes all I see from NASA is recycled ideas from 30 to 40 years ago which get “reinvented”. No loss.
There can’t be any good pro space people still working at NASA, the good ones are at SpaceX.
The US government sponsored the Lewis and Clarke expedition AFAIK but the west was settled by people who had little to do with the US government. Some of them were likely getting as far away from it as possible.
I’ve read a few of his books but avoid his tweets and other work. Zubrin is very passionate and creative but makes things out to be easier than they are. He is however, a great idea generator.
He would be the perfect person to ask if you wanted thirty different ways to do something.
When Zubrin came up with Mars Direct, there was no alternative to a purely gov-led program.
I think he might be angry that he pushed MD for so long and never saw it happen. Now along comes this smartass foreign college dropout who has a better-than-Mars-Direct and is actually making it happen with his own obscenely large fortune.
NASA might say, it can explore Mars for 100 billion dollars.
And it seems Musk thinks he can send a lot people to Mars for 100 billion dollar. And a lot is something like, thousands of people- though I don’t think Musk will pay for thousands of people coming back to Earth, whereas NASA tends to think, it must bring any/all of crew/people back to Earth.
I don’t think Musk wants NASA to go away, and it seems a lot exploration of Mars is needed, though a +1000 people sent to Mars will certainly tend to do a lot of Mars exploration.
Good grief. Zubrin always has to ruin it. SpaceX is the only organization capable of doing the job, but let me strawman Musk’s arguments for colonization into “deserting the Earth” for a reason “so morally repulsive that its embrace would doom any program so foolish as to adopt it. Coated with ideological skunk essence, its protagonists would appear more like the selfish characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” dancing in a castle while everyone outside dies in an epidemic…”
What the hell?
Bob has a way with words…
I must agree. I read Dr Zubrin’s work with great interest, but this is just unnecessary and IMHO doesn’t at all capture Elon’s point about Mars.
He’s not abandoning Earth, just establishing a second outpost. Bad stuff happens! Big rocks often hit Earth.
And/or it’s possible the US could become even more totalitarian- or just continue the current habit of doing the very stupid things for a much longer prolonged period of time.
This is vl;sr (very long, still reading) but Dr. Zubrin fails to make a strong case for why NASA should lead a colonization attempt for Mars. It’s only track record is Apollo and that was only good for 6 surface missions (not counting Apollo 13’s aborted attempt). That’s a far, far cry from establishing a lunar base. That NASA is just now, 52 years later, contemplating attempting to establish a lunar base in a totally brain dead manner speaks volumes as to why the government should step aside, supply maybe advice and lab support but in general stay the hell out of the way of SpaceX and whoever else wants to come along for the ride. The “failure of imagination” among the Boomer scientific generation is staggering.
Even leaving aside the libelous mischaracterization of Elon’s motives in pursuing his Mars settlement efforts, Zubrin simply offers the Nth in a long series of attempted justifications for making dinky and claustrophobic vehicles with equally mingy crew complements the centerpieces of his “exploration” architectures.
Contra Mr. Spain’s special pleading, Zubrin’s long-standing obvious discomfort with space exploration efforts of any significant scale – and utter lack of enthusiasm for actual settlement – is not generational but personal. I’m a Boomer myself and am firmly of the belief that there is no such thing as too much when it comes to actually settling the solar system – as opposed to just sending out a handful of manual pickaxe-based missions that hark back to the solo-prospector-with-trusty-mule era of “exploration” in the Old West. Zubrin is barely superior, in this sense, to the worthies at JPL and the Planetary Society who would be happiest if even human “explorers” – never mind grubby “meat-bag” settlers – ever set foot on Mars or any other piece of extra-terrestrial real estate.
The rapid Westward expansion of the United States didn’t occur because of some federal initiative directed by non-participants in DC. It happened when sizable groups of people in trains of Conestoga wagons – not single ones – banded together and pushed into the wilderness. Mars will be a tougher place to pioneer than was the Trans-Mississippi. But, then, the Old West pioneers didn’t have Optimus robots to help out.
Elon, in short, will “git ‘er done.” The last few decades of NASA efforts pretty clearly indicate that NASA won’t. There is no point in indulging fantasies of restoring NASA to useful competence. SpaceX already has the required enthusiasm and competence – and will soon have a larger payroll than NASA in any case. The non-useful/capable parts of NASA should simply be shut down – most especially its DC HQ.
Zubrin should know Elon’s true motives. If he doesn’t, given his reputed degree of sophistication, he’s incredibly incompetent. The only other options are dishonesty or a combination of the two. There are literally no other viable explanations.
I think it’s his daily TDS rants that are driving him to this end. He knows better and he is deliberately slandering Elon to that end.
Elon needs to take up Aleta’s NFE list, Bob has sold his soul.
“But the organization as a whole is brain dead. It is a body without a spirit. If it is to be brought back to life it must be inspired, literally — it must have its spirit put back into it.”
Why is NASA brain dead?
The Shuttle program and ISS program. And promising to send crew to Mars over last few decades.
The Shuttle program was suppose to make a reusable rocket, and NASA pretended to was. And ISS was some kind of weird program to make a space station with the Russians. And NASA never did anything about Microgravity effect upon crew- it needed to test artificial gravity and/or determine what effect of lower gravity effects on humans was- what effects of Lunar and/or Mars gravity was human beings over longer duration of time.
It seems to me, the idea of exploring lunar poles and then exploring Mars, was a good direction which should be continued.
One advantage of exploring to the Moon was to provide some degree of confidence, that NASA was capable of exploring Mars. And so far, NASA is failing in that regard.
One part of this failure, is NASA seems to want to continue to fail to explore the Moon for many decades, and not explore the Moon AND then explore Mars.
But there are other reasons to explore the lunar polar regions, and another aspect is a lot countries want join with NASA in exploring our Moon. And NASA with these other countries, would continue to explore the Moon, but after ISS program ends, NASA should put more of it’s effort on Mars crew exploration.
And NASA is failing so badly, that ISS might even end, before NASA can land crew on the Moon.
But we got Trump now, and it seems NASA might be made to move faster in terms of lunar exploration. And then the Mars exploration.
In terms of Mars exploration, it seems we could have more players, than just SpaceX. Though Musk says he in hurry to put Starships on Mars.
But it should noted that Starships are not ready, yet.
And in terms SpaceX and NASA, it seems a focus should be on, removing any governmental delays, on SpaceX’s Gigabay at Florida launch site.
It seems one purpose of NASA is streamline governmental processes related to space activity- but it tends to fail to do this and we have very stupid things like federal Fish and Game getting in involved with rocket launches.
Evidently I went through it too fast, because it seemed to me that Zubrin specifically stated that NASA was not the organization to do Moon/Mars.
And the criticism of Mars for permanent colonies? well, I’ll have to go back to it.
“And the criticism of Mars for permanent colonies? ”
Well, Zubrin doesn’t think we will have Mars city of 1 million within a couple decades.
I have my doubts.
I think a problem is, understanding Starship.
It seems the Raptor 3 engine is “ready” but SpaceX is not building a lot of them and has hundreds of Raptor 2 engines it’s using.
And a main theme which makes Starship understandable, is Starship is still a boilerplate rocket and trying to get to point where the rocket can be “further refined” and then have Starship version which more operational than being a test version.
But in terms Zubrin, SpaceX has the Falcon-9 and it’s launching hundred times per year and as a result, SpaceX has thousands of Starlink satellites, and Starlink is going gross +10 billion dollars this year.
And according to Musk, Starlink is suppose to be important in terms of having his future city on Mars.
Also:
“Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$436 billion as of January 22, 2025, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $426 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership stakes in Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX.”
Wiki
Also his employees might have a fair amount stock value. And it seems Elon is on friendly terms many other billionaires.
And I like Bezo’s New Glenn rocket, and I think it’s big enough, but perhaps Blue Origin will make even larger rockets at some point in the future.
In person, Zubrin never impressed me. Then again, lots of us write better than we are. That said, since a long time, his main reaction to new developments in space exploration is to reiterate his own antiquated ideas. They seemed outstanding in the early 1980s.
Well, whenever things look like they may be focusing a bit too much on developing lunar strategies, one thing he can be counted on is to throw a “But Mars!!!” monkey-wrench in the works.
Of course there are some of us that are not sold on Mars as the premier destination. So many give the moon and asteroids short shrift.
I’ve been an asteroid man since I published “Harvesting the Near-Earthers” in Ad Astra in 1989. But a Mars colony would do me.
Some of us embrace the power of “and.” Once Mars is built up sufficiently, it makes an excellent jumping-off point for main-belt asteroids. But there is no need to wait. If Bezos could get out of the way of his own graditem, he could do for the Moon and asteroids what Musk is doing for Mars.
^^
We’re talking decades gone by. Until just now, embracing the power of “and” said you weren’t serious enough. Now, I dunno, me. My 1991 novel involved bringing a NEO to high earth-orbit. I may have had some influence over NASA thinking (i.e., ARM), but probably not. I’m a forgotten man, just not forgotten enough, it seems.
As P.J. O’Rourke wrote about the US Dept of Agriculture: take it behind the barn and put it out of its misery.
As far as aeronautics goes all I see from NASA is recycled ideas from 30 to 40 years ago which get “reinvented”. No loss.
There can’t be any good pro space people still working at NASA, the good ones are at SpaceX.
The US government sponsored the Lewis and Clarke expedition AFAIK but the west was settled by people who had little to do with the US government. Some of them were likely getting as far away from it as possible.
There has to be at least million people who could work for eiher.
I’ve read a few of his books but avoid his tweets and other work. Zubrin is very passionate and creative but makes things out to be easier than they are. He is however, a great idea generator.
He would be the perfect person to ask if you wanted thirty different ways to do something.
Columbus used government money but it was a privately operated venture.
No reason the USA has to have NASA as the leader.
Hasn’t Zubrin always been a “big-government” type?
When Zubrin came up with Mars Direct, there was no alternative to a purely gov-led program.
I think he might be angry that he pushed MD for so long and never saw it happen. Now along comes this smartass foreign college dropout who has a better-than-Mars-Direct and is actually making it happen with his own obscenely large fortune.
Hell, I’d be mad too!
NASA might say, it can explore Mars for 100 billion dollars.
And it seems Musk thinks he can send a lot people to Mars for 100 billion dollar. And a lot is something like, thousands of people- though I don’t think Musk will pay for thousands of people coming back to Earth, whereas NASA tends to think, it must bring any/all of crew/people back to Earth.
I don’t think Musk wants NASA to go away, and it seems a lot exploration of Mars is needed, though a +1000 people sent to Mars will certainly tend to do a lot of Mars exploration.