I unfortunately agree. Years ago I realized the Mars talk was just talk when I noticed that Musk and SpaceX were not funding any of the other stuff you’d need to fund if you wanted to “make life multiplanetary.”
Continuing to iterate on self contained biospheres and long term closed cycle life support? (Not a solved problem!) Working on construction techniques for the Moon or Mars? Studies on the dose response curve for gravity, like sponsoring a spin lab for the ISS to at least see if mice can reproduce in 0.3g? Self contained industrial infrastructure leaning heavily on 3D printers? Psychological research on the best way to build interiors and run social units?
Musk could personally fund all of that with little impact on his net worth.
It’s also decades of work. Some of what I listed is harder than the rockets. Better get started if you want to have a settlement on Mars this century.
Nope. Nothing. Just rockets, the a satellite network that is clearly “dual use.” Then Trump 2.0 and lots of “golden dome” (Star Wars 2.0) talk.
It’s not to go to Mars.
I love space and I hugely admire the engineering achievement, but it’s disappointing to learn for this and many other reasons that the people behind it were not the visionaries they pretended to be. They’re just more territorial apes obsessed with ape tribal stuff like race and nationalism and fighting over dirt at the bottom of a gravity well. Small minds with big toys.
Really interesting. I remember scratching my head a little about stainless steel. It’s durable but heavy, cuts into payload fraction, and probably not what you would pick if the goal was to shoot interplanetary. At least not for the upper stage. Maybe for the big chunky reusable booster, but there aluminum probably makes more sense. Falcon is aluminum so it’s already the devil they know anyway.
I recall talk about transpiration cooling. My guess is it died due to complexity or that it would use fuel as coolant which further eats mass. There was a bunch of original work on composites which would make way more sense if you want to hit high energy orbits.
You could still, AFAIK, use Starship to put a bunch of components into LEO and assemble something to go interplanetary. Or at least its booster.
I have wondered if we won’t see interplanetary on a big scale (beyond Apollo scale) until we have fusion or beamed power. You could put up a beamed power constellation with this architecture I guess.
But it makes a lot more sense as is for LEO military applications. I can see that.
The weird Musk-Russia links, if that is real, are odd given this thesis. If we are building Golden Dome or whatever it’s called now then who is the adversary? If not Russia than who?
China isn’t expansionist beyond Taiwan and it’d be way cheaper to build our own domestic TSMC than to fight that proxy war.
North Korea and maybe Iran are the only other credible threats with an interest in attacking the US, and they are kind of a joke compared to Russia and China when it comes to long range capacity.
Without discounting the possibility of him being fully russia-psyopped, always keep in mind that elon MUST put forward some nonzero pro-Russia face because he is a diplomatic point of contact in an increasingly tenuous diplomatic situation between the US and Russia on account of his company lifts Russian cosmonauts to the ISS on the regular
[−]actionfromafar · 2026-11-15 Sun 09:50 UTC ·
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Why do you think there is a country interested in attacking the US? I don't think there is a single country interested in doing so.
> If not Russia than who?
then*
[−]somenameforme · 2026-11-15 Sun 02:55 UTC ·
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First off, I think this is all conspiratorial nonsense. But as for Golden Dome - it's more about offense than defense. The reason MAD works is because if you destroy another country then they also destroy you. But if you can negate the latter part, then you're simply left with 'you can destroy another country.' In other words if you can negate an enemy's ability to retaliate, then you can nuke or invade whoever you want, without concern about retaliation.
The geographic location of the US would make this basically a godmode type 'weapon' because a conventional invasion of the US is practically impossible since you'd need to bring mass number of forces across an ocean and those ships would simply get popped. Even coming through South America wouldn't really work because the Isthmus of Panama could just be hyper-fortified. And even then you still have to get to South America! But the US' chosen enemies are somehow half-way around the world, and we have plenty of proxy armies we can throw against them. And when our victims retaliate against our proxies then we'll support them with a powerful army of flags, emojis, and slogans on social media.
All that said, this still doesn't work. Nuclear fallout would affect the globe, with a Russia-US conflict estimated at driving some 5 billion deaths from climatic effects alone. [1] Missile defense will likely always lag behind offense simply because offense is akin to shooting a bullet at a giant stationary target, whereas defense is akin to shooting a bullet at a bullet. It requires a massive technology disparity to be effective. And there are also other forms of nuclear strikes than missiles - such as nuclear created radioactive (and super sized) tsunamis. And if a country really wants the flashing red button, then a salted nuke could likely kill off most of all of humanity (and everything else on Earth), let alone any given country.
[−]MetaWhirledPeas · 2026-11-14 Sat 23:06 UTC ·
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Oh I doubt very much he has given up on that. He's smart enough to know that the delivery time is going to be extremely variable, and that most of the other problems involve figuring out how to make the place palatable to humans, which is just too far in the future right now. Don't bite off more than you can chew.
How much time is needed to do the required research? Like, how long it would take to learn how to create an artificial biosphere on a small scale, so you can have a farm on the Moon or Mars? 10 years? 20 years? Maybe 50 years? Isn't now is the good time to start the research?
[−]MetaWhirledPeas · 2026-11-15 Sun 03:35 UTC ·
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No because they aren't a government funded research team, they are actually trying to make money along the way. So the appropriate time to do that kind of work is sometime closer to actually needing it.
The silver lining is that if Elon had continued pushing for Mars, to not let it happen organically, Mars would become a company town, with all the bad connotations that ever had, with paying for air added on top of it.
> a spin lab for the ISS to at least see if mice can reproduce in 0.3g?
That was done and the results were published a few months ago, but the study did not have any relationship with SpaceX.
The results were rather pessimistic for the long-term missions on Moon or Mars.
In my opinion, even if it is possible that humans might support a somewhat lower gravity than mice, the conclusion is that for interplanetary travel humans must use only spaceships that create artificial gravity by rotation.
The results of the study were that mice require a gravity of at least 2/3 of that of Earth to stay in perfect health and of at least 1/3 of that of Earth to avoid extremely severe health damage.
This means that even on Mars the gravity is not sufficient for long-term human life. In an underground Mars base, one could make a part with increased gravity by rotation, where the crew should spend most of the time, but that would increase a lot the complexity of building and maintaining such a base.
Or by constant thrust at 1/3g, or a mix of thrust and rotation that achieves sufficient acceleration, though spinning + thrust means precession which I’m glad isn’t my job to zero out.
Unless someone invents the Epstein drive we aren’t going to have astronauts experiencing acceleration for months rather than minutes of the trip. And the more constant the acceleration the shorter the trip anyway.
If the results hold then it’s another thing that counts toward settling space, not another planet.
It’s where I’ve been leaning for a while. If we want to go beyond Earth build huge rotating stations or spacecraft. Don’t just go down another gravity well.
Build your own spin stations and dial in the exact gravity and everything else you want. Mine asteroids, which are super easy to access. You can launch mass off an asteroid by throwing it really hard.
I don’t think is right at all. It’s just Musk focusing on the fundamentals of ‘what is stopping us making significantly (100x or 1000x) more progress on space exploration. And the answer to that is that it’s just too expensive to launch mass off the earth.
If you make it much cheaper, then everything else flows from that. You no longer have to spend years engineering everything at the cutting edge of your mass budget. You can use off the shelf parts, you can have redundancy.
The gains will come when these flights become commonplace.
Biosphere stuff is more fundamental than just mass. We had several closed ecosystem projects built on the ground out of concrete, with no mass limits, and all of them failed.
A habitat on Mars would certainly not be closed ecosystem, especially not in the beginning. The biggest issue at biosphere IIRC was CO2 poisoning. You can crack the air in a mars habitat with power and in the worst case find Martian resources that will do some advantageous chemistries
The ISS is taking regular deliveries of food, water, and air. Is very much not self-sufficient or closed-cycle. It's also pretty small in volume and really close to home, with evacuation readily available.
[−]somenameforme · 2026-11-15 Sun 13:25 UTC ·
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Mars early on will also not be closed cycle. It's going to be prepping for a 2 year journey (probably ideally 4 if possible, for when things inevitably go wrong) and gradually consuming those supplies. Unlike the ISS there are vast usable resources on Mars for things like water, but again I think the goal will be to be fully non-sufficient, to help reduce the chances of the first trip being a one-way journey.
Things to notice: it's undergoing yearly upgrades despite NASA having literally decades of experience in this. They still hold a contingency reserve of 8OOL, despite being hours from the ground and being able to evacuate almost any time.
SpaceX has zero experience managing the water cycle even when it's measured in months, much less years, with spares and help many months away in the very best case. They show zero effort trying to acquire such experience.
Let's be real: at this point, Mars for Musk is about as much of a goal as Hyperloop. If we look at actions, not mere words, his goal looks much more like yeeting more GPUs into orbit as a "biological bootloader" [1] than colonising Mars. That's not even touching the fact that SpaceX is now a public company, has a duty for its shareholders, and colonising Mars is a strictly cash-negative enterprise.
Bad engineering, too many uncontrolled variables and roundabout solutions. Just solve the problems directly. Make the air, scrub the CO2, grow only food. The solution looks like a (light weight) nuclear submarine not a greenhouse.
Biosphere 2 was hippie gobbledygook.
"The Biosphere 2 project was launched in 1984 by businessman and billionaire Ed Bass and systems ecologist John P. Allen, with Bass providing US$150 million in funding until 1991.[15] Bass and Allen had met in the 1970s at the Synergia Ranch, a counterculture community led by Allen, who advocated Buckminster Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" concept and explored the idea of biospheres as a refuge from disasters such as nuclear war.[15] Several other former members of Synergia Ranch also joined the Biosphere 2 project"[0]
"Synergia Ranch is an ecovillage founded in 1969 by John P. Allen"[1]
Ed Bass inherited $2.8 million when he was a teenager from his great uncle who made his money in oil production, he's currently chairman of an investment and venture-capital management firm. In between he hung out with a bunch of hippies.[2] Just your typical nepo-boomer arc.
[−]somenameforme · 2026-11-15 Sun 02:40 UTC ·
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More likely than growing food will be bringing a couple of years of food with you, and having growth be only for proof of concept experiments (well and some freshness if it works out).
I'm looking forward to SpaceX demonstrating good engineering for a life support system that's capable of running for months on a reasonable mass budget. Except they aren't doing that, are they?
Saying how you imagine a solution would look like is cheap, figuring out an actual system is expensive and slow. Hell, just very basic things like extracting water from urine is actually difficult (organic matter forms a tar of sorts and gunks up machinery) and in the past unforeseen problems did pop up (amount of calcium in urine from disintegrating bones was a problem and didn't show up until in-orbit testing).
Musk is observably not doing things that Mars colonisation would require.
Being able to sustain life for months and years is "underwear", not an afterthought. In fact, I won't be surprised if achieving a reasonable level of life support will take much longer than developing propulsion.
Wasn’t that the one Steve Bannon was involved in, of all people?
I wasn’t necessarily thinking of Biosphere 2, just the fact that you won’t be getting a resupply on short notice.
The problem is that Mars is 6-12 months away depending on launch window, at least with current rockets. If something goes wrong you must be able to respond locally and at least survive. The Moon is 3 days away (ish) and LEO is hours away (including time to align and dock).
If you want to send people to Mars you need to build a Mars sim on Earth and actually test your life support systems.
Early mars will likely be robotics, any humans will be going there to die and will volunteer for it. By the time those humans do go, trips to and landing on Mars will be old hat, providing a steady stream of supplies will mean it’s less of a self-reliance biodome situation than some imagine.
While I'm a little more optimistic that the development of Starship will lead to manned missions to the Moon, Mars, and other bodies in the solar system I drew a similar conclusion as you did a few years ago as well.
What I find frustrating about this is that a lot of the biological research needed to make a sustainable colony is stuff that would have direct benefits on Earth for people today.
R&D on bioreactors, genetically engineering organisms, making food production more efficient, techniques to make people more resistant to the cancer causing effects of radiation etc... all of these could have impacts on how we live today.
Continuing to iterate on self contained biospheres and long term closed cycle life support? (Not a solved problem!) Working on construction techniques for the Moon or Mars? Studies on the dose response curve for gravity, like sponsoring a spin lab for the ISS to at least see if mice can reproduce in 0.3g? Self contained industrial infrastructure leaning heavily on 3D printers? Psychological research on the best way to build interiors and run social units?
Musk could personally fund all of that with little impact on his net worth.
It’s also decades of work. Some of what I listed is harder than the rockets. Better get started if you want to have a settlement on Mars this century.
Nope. Nothing. Just rockets, the a satellite network that is clearly “dual use.” Then Trump 2.0 and lots of “golden dome” (Star Wars 2.0) talk.
It’s not to go to Mars.
I love space and I hugely admire the engineering achievement, but it’s disappointing to learn for this and many other reasons that the people behind it were not the visionaries they pretended to be. They’re just more territorial apes obsessed with ape tribal stuff like race and nationalism and fighting over dirt at the bottom of a gravity well. Small minds with big toys.
The origin of SpaceX with Michael D. Griffin and Pete Worden really make it clear though.
https://ioc.exchange/@muskfiles/116333241408716236
I recall talk about transpiration cooling. My guess is it died due to complexity or that it would use fuel as coolant which further eats mass. There was a bunch of original work on composites which would make way more sense if you want to hit high energy orbits.
You could still, AFAIK, use Starship to put a bunch of components into LEO and assemble something to go interplanetary. Or at least its booster.
I have wondered if we won’t see interplanetary on a big scale (beyond Apollo scale) until we have fusion or beamed power. You could put up a beamed power constellation with this architecture I guess.
But it makes a lot more sense as is for LEO military applications. I can see that.
The weird Musk-Russia links, if that is real, are odd given this thesis. If we are building Golden Dome or whatever it’s called now then who is the adversary? If not Russia than who?
China isn’t expansionist beyond Taiwan and it’d be way cheaper to build our own domestic TSMC than to fight that proxy war.
North Korea and maybe Iran are the only other credible threats with an interest in attacking the US, and they are kind of a joke compared to Russia and China when it comes to long range capacity.
Without discounting the possibility of him being fully russia-psyopped, always keep in mind that elon MUST put forward some nonzero pro-Russia face because he is a diplomatic point of contact in an increasingly tenuous diplomatic situation between the US and Russia on account of his company lifts Russian cosmonauts to the ISS on the regular
> If not Russia than who?
then*
The geographic location of the US would make this basically a godmode type 'weapon' because a conventional invasion of the US is practically impossible since you'd need to bring mass number of forces across an ocean and those ships would simply get popped. Even coming through South America wouldn't really work because the Isthmus of Panama could just be hyper-fortified. And even then you still have to get to South America! But the US' chosen enemies are somehow half-way around the world, and we have plenty of proxy armies we can throw against them. And when our victims retaliate against our proxies then we'll support them with a powerful army of flags, emojis, and slogans on social media.
All that said, this still doesn't work. Nuclear fallout would affect the globe, with a Russia-US conflict estimated at driving some 5 billion deaths from climatic effects alone. [1] Missile defense will likely always lag behind offense simply because offense is akin to shooting a bullet at a giant stationary target, whereas defense is akin to shooting a bullet at a bullet. It requires a massive technology disparity to be effective. And there are also other forms of nuclear strikes than missiles - such as nuclear created radioactive (and super sized) tsunamis. And if a country really wants the flashing red button, then a salted nuke could likely kill off most of all of humanity (and everything else on Earth), let alone any given country.
[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0
How much time is needed to do the required research? Like, how long it would take to learn how to create an artificial biosphere on a small scale, so you can have a farm on the Moon or Mars? 10 years? 20 years? Maybe 50 years? Isn't now is the good time to start the research?
That was done and the results were published a few months ago, but the study did not have any relationship with SpaceX.
The results were rather pessimistic for the long-term missions on Moon or Mars.
In my opinion, even if it is possible that humans might support a somewhat lower gravity than mice, the conclusion is that for interplanetary travel humans must use only spaceships that create artificial gravity by rotation.
The results of the study were that mice require a gravity of at least 2/3 of that of Earth to stay in perfect health and of at least 1/3 of that of Earth to avoid extremely severe health damage.
This means that even on Mars the gravity is not sufficient for long-term human life. In an underground Mars base, one could make a part with increased gravity by rotation, where the crew should spend most of the time, but that would increase a lot the complexity of building and maintaining such a base.
Unless someone invents the Epstein drive we aren’t going to have astronauts experiencing acceleration for months rather than minutes of the trip. And the more constant the acceleration the shorter the trip anyway.
If the results hold then it’s another thing that counts toward settling space, not another planet.
It’s where I’ve been leaning for a while. If we want to go beyond Earth build huge rotating stations or spacecraft. Don’t just go down another gravity well.
Build your own spin stations and dial in the exact gravity and everything else you want. Mine asteroids, which are super easy to access. You can launch mass off an asteroid by throwing it really hard.
we can use planets for their resources or industry.
If you make it much cheaper, then everything else flows from that. You no longer have to spend years engineering everything at the cutting edge of your mass budget. You can use off the shelf parts, you can have redundancy.
The gains will come when these flights become commonplace.
Things to notice: it's undergoing yearly upgrades despite NASA having literally decades of experience in this. They still hold a contingency reserve of 8OOL, despite being hours from the ground and being able to evacuate almost any time.
SpaceX has zero experience managing the water cycle even when it's measured in months, much less years, with spares and help many months away in the very best case. They show zero effort trying to acquire such experience.
Let's be real: at this point, Mars for Musk is about as much of a goal as Hyperloop. If we look at actions, not mere words, his goal looks much more like yeeting more GPUs into orbit as a "biological bootloader" [1] than colonising Mars. That's not even touching the fact that SpaceX is now a public company, has a duty for its shareholders, and colonising Mars is a strictly cash-negative enterprise.
[1]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2106906678293606496
Biosphere 2 was hippie gobbledygook.
"The Biosphere 2 project was launched in 1984 by businessman and billionaire Ed Bass and systems ecologist John P. Allen, with Bass providing US$150 million in funding until 1991.[15] Bass and Allen had met in the 1970s at the Synergia Ranch, a counterculture community led by Allen, who advocated Buckminster Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" concept and explored the idea of biospheres as a refuge from disasters such as nuclear war.[15] Several other former members of Synergia Ranch also joined the Biosphere 2 project"[0]
"Synergia Ranch is an ecovillage founded in 1969 by John P. Allen"[1]
Ed Bass inherited $2.8 million when he was a teenager from his great uncle who made his money in oil production, he's currently chairman of an investment and venture-capital management firm. In between he hung out with a bunch of hippies.[2] Just your typical nepo-boomer arc.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergia_Ranch
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Bass
Saying how you imagine a solution would look like is cheap, figuring out an actual system is expensive and slow. Hell, just very basic things like extracting water from urine is actually difficult (organic matter forms a tar of sorts and gunks up machinery) and in the past unforeseen problems did pop up (amount of calcium in urine from disintegrating bones was a problem and didn't show up until in-orbit testing).
Musk is observably not doing things that Mars colonisation would require.
I wasn’t necessarily thinking of Biosphere 2, just the fact that you won’t be getting a resupply on short notice.
The problem is that Mars is 6-12 months away depending on launch window, at least with current rockets. If something goes wrong you must be able to respond locally and at least survive. The Moon is 3 days away (ish) and LEO is hours away (including time to align and dock).
If you want to send people to Mars you need to build a Mars sim on Earth and actually test your life support systems.
What I find frustrating about this is that a lot of the biological research needed to make a sustainable colony is stuff that would have direct benefits on Earth for people today.
R&D on bioreactors, genetically engineering organisms, making food production more efficient, techniques to make people more resistant to the cancer causing effects of radiation etc... all of these could have impacts on how we live today.