Following Apollo, manned space exploration became a managerial system of mission creep focused on bamboozling Congress to keep money flowing without regard to any coherent plan for exploration.
Forget adventure. Without a breakthrough in physics, chemical propulsion can never lead to practical transit to Mars, much less colonization.
But lack of suitable machinery for human transit is actually lucky, because if dipshits like Musk succeed at sending blobs of life from earth to Mars in the infancy of space exploration it will return nothing for today's science and forever pollute Mars for posterity.
Read the thing on Isaacman, then read this guy who's been thinking and commenting on the topic for 20 years, starting with:
A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)
https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm
Synopsis:
Following Apollo, manned space exploration became a managerial system of mission creep focused on bamboozling Congress to keep money flowing without regard to any coherent plan for exploration.
Forget adventure. Without a breakthrough in physics, chemical propulsion can never lead to practical transit to Mars, much less colonization.
But lack of suitable machinery for human transit is actually lucky, because if dipshits like Musk succeed at sending blobs of life from earth to Mars in the infancy of space exploration it will return nothing for today's science and forever pollute Mars for posterity.
Also see:
Why Not Mars (2023)
https://idlewords.com/2023/01/why_not_mars.htm
The Lunacy of Artemis (2024)
https://idlewords.com/2024/05/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
The Shape of a Mars Mission (2025)
https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...