Re: Musk and Mars - because that's his founding reason for SpaceX. His original idea was just "I have a lot of money, what's something absurd I can do?" and the answer was he wanted to land a greenhouse on Mars - then got jerked around trying to buy Russian rockets to do it and then realized he could just make his own rocket company.
Elon is slightly crazy as most billionaires are, he's just crazy in a very specific direction: some people buy mega yachts, he wants a SpaceX rocket to be landing humans on Mars.
Now in reality...SpaceX can't privately fund a manned mission anywhere. That's got to be a NASA/international thing - if only because the core competencies are so incredibly broad-ranging (SpaceX do rockets - and rockets are already a "here's 50 fields you can contribute a Ph.D to, we need all of them to make this work"). But if your goal is to go to Mars, then you talk about, and build towards, going to Mars and wait for NASA to say "hey we'd like to get the moonbase going".
Which is pretty much what has happened: I have no doubt that in the next 20 years we're going to see a manned mission to the Moon, and I'm very sure that it's going to be a Starship that takes it there.
I seriously doubt it. While China's made a lot of progress, there's no possible way the US government isn't suddenly going to discover a priority if there's a risk China gets another man on the moon first this century.
Elon is slightly crazy as most billionaires are, he's just crazy in a very specific direction: some people buy mega yachts, he wants a SpaceX rocket to be landing humans on Mars.
Now in reality...SpaceX can't privately fund a manned mission anywhere. That's got to be a NASA/international thing - if only because the core competencies are so incredibly broad-ranging (SpaceX do rockets - and rockets are already a "here's 50 fields you can contribute a Ph.D to, we need all of them to make this work"). But if your goal is to go to Mars, then you talk about, and build towards, going to Mars and wait for NASA to say "hey we'd like to get the moonbase going".
Which is pretty much what has happened: I have no doubt that in the next 20 years we're going to see a manned mission to the Moon, and I'm very sure that it's going to be a Starship that takes it there.