I posted a comment on YouTube today and Donald Brent asked me to explain why I believe Musk has set space exploration back a decade. I have explained this a couple dozen times on popular space blog forums in previous years, before I was banned from all of them. The story starts in 2008 with the Chandrayaan 1 lunar mission.
By 2010 data was released that strongly indicated ice on the Moon. This was a pretty big deal and should have pointed the space agency straight back at that prize we never should have taken our eyes off of. Unfortunately, a campaign contribution by a certain entrepreneur made his hobby rocket the priority and talk about the Moon was verboten. The President gave his infamous “we’ve been there” speech and that was it for almost a decade. Slowly, year after year, the evidence for ice and other factors such as radiation made it clear we were not going to Mars anytime soon and the Moon was the best destination. It has also become clear that nearly a half a century of LEO space stations have been a tremendous waste of time and resources.
The ISS had been scheduled to be decommissioned in 2016 but because it was the NewSpace cash cow and essentially the piggy bank for SpaceX, it is still going in circles up there, going nowhere, at 4 billion dollars a year. The best course would have been to decommission the space station to nowhere a couple years early and build Sidemount as a lunar Heavy Lift Vehicle. It broke my heart when they killed it. On the wings of maybe, downing birds of prey. The worst wrong turn NASA ever made was buying into the scam that is NewSpace. The first flight of Sidemount would have been in 2013 and 6 a year means roughly 36 heavy lift missions would have been flown by now. If those missions had been dedicated to a lunar return we might be getting ready to land people and move into a Moon base about now. Of course that probably would have depended on abandoning LEO- which is the only place the SpaceX Falcon could go. See how that works?
Not content with having his own satellite launch company handed to him by the taxpayer, Musk has never done a thing to dissuade or denounce his rabid fan club posting, literally, libraries of death-to-SLS propaganda over the years. He promised a cheap astronaut ride to the ISS years ago and we have yet to see it. His next boondoggle is the space-junk-horror-movie that is Starlink. 12,000 refrigerator size smallsats and now a possible 30,000 more. NewSpace has been pushing their scam for over a decade now and the effect has been to program those who were teenagers a decade ago to be true believers today. Tens of thousands of people who are interested in space, perhaps several hundred thousand, are followers of Musk and believe his whole Mars-as-a-second-home-for-humankind con.
In the 1970’s the true prophet of space colonization, Gerard K. O’Neill, early on eliminated Mars and other natural bodies as possible colony sites because of the requirement for Earth gravity. Humans thrive in 1G and nothing indicates lower gravity does anything but harm. A million years of evolution is not going to be undone because Mars happens to be a convenient P.R. theme. Mars is too far away, without enough solar energy, and with too much gravity to make landing easy and not enough to keep humans healthy. Mars, like Low Earth Orbit, is a complete dead end. The future is the Bernal Sphere built with lunar resources and space solar energy powering Earth as the economic engine financing space colonization. No other plan has even a small chance of succeeding. Humankind will never create off-world colonies courtesy of billionaire hobbyists. Only state-funded public works projects on the scale of Hoover Dam or the Panama Canal will create the infrastructure required to start up factories on the Moon and begin to build the necessary industrial base.
Ice on the Moon 