So, I suck at English. My language centers in my brain were rather badly damaged in my early 20s.
There is no vitriol against space. Space is a vacuum, it is inert. I am upset at the cloud-shovelling nerds with their space pseudo-religion earnestly charting out the future of humanity in the galaxy. Guys, Star Trek was fiction. It's just you, me, the Periodic Table of the Elements and the four forces. There are no dilithium crystals, no duranium, no tungsten verteride carbon matrix, no structural integrity fields, no warp drive, no transporters, no replicators, no aliens that look like us, no artificial gravity, no Vulcans, no habitable planets just days away in a magical spaceship that doesn't exist.
You know, the only reason I watched any Star Trek at all is because my brother watched it. Instead I often curled up with a book. Meaty tomes like the "Aero-Hydrodynamics of Sailing" where the type of book I read. If anything infected me with the desire to go to space, it was the Apollo missions I saw on TV as a child. For extra credit for a community college astronomy course I took when I was 12, I learned to solve orbits to pilot a space ship. Why, because I wanted to do it some day. I taught myself Chaos Theory, String Theory, and many other things because I was interested in them. I also learned more down to earth things like photography, painting, and clothing design. Learning programming, and electronics were a means to an end. What did you fill your brain with? What inspires you?
By all means, send all the A-type test pilots in diapers to play guitar badly in the ISS and grow tomato seeds in free fall and call it vitally important science. I chuckle.
"Food, Glorious Food" you obviously don't care about it. I'd guess you've never had to go hungry, nor worked with those who did.
But when you start thinking that Mars is just a hop and a skip away and how simple it all could be if we just listened to you because you read sci-fi, that's where I draw the line.
You make a lot of assumptions about others. That isn't wise to do.
Space is huge. Space is dead. Space is hostile. We are here. We are not going anywhere with kerosene and carbon fiber no matter how good our computers get. Sure sure, some military test pilots bounced on the Moon for a few days after the most powerful nation in history worked at it for an entire decade. So what? They came back after a week.
It's over. The future is here and it ain't in space. If it was as simple as the Space Nutters keep telling us then why didn't it happen when everyone and everything was working towards space 50 years ago? Human curiosity didn't change, did it? They had rich people back then too, right? So why didn't it happen? The same generation that built the Concorde, mind you.
As the saying goes "Can't never did anything." Are you afraid of failure? I've had my share. Some even nearly killed me. I hedge my bets, and then go for it. I much prefer being a can do person. Space is a challenge, a very big challenge. Especially to do it right and survive to tell the tale. Can you say you survived a tire blowout at over 350 kph? I can. I for one would be very willing to go put my footprint on Mars even if I was the 10,000th person to do so. Yeah, I'd make sure my space ship is as safe as reasonable, but I wouldn't let a small possibility of failure stop me. I think you seriously underestimate the capabilities of the designers and engineers. SpaceX is designing their systems to continue to work despite failures. Their own lives may be depending on their workmanship.
As I've said before, the will of the average person wasn't behind space exploration, and the only players that had the money were governments. The tech was there to make a moon colony 50 years ago. There just wasn't the will of the people to pay for it. That's all. Musk is betting there will be an industrial and tourism desire to go to space, and he is paying for the development costs and initial overhead for the transportation service via satellite launches. He doesn't want to make the hotel, or build the town. He's there to provide transportation. His BFR is designed for launching satellites, lunar trips, and Mars trips. It can even do suborbital hops from place to place on earth and take a few hundred people along for the ride. It's pressurized cabin is bigger than the A380's pressurized cabin and 8 stories tall. How would you like to go from NYC to Sydney in less than an hour?
The rich and those with lush expense accounts gladly paid for Concorde flights to get them across the pond faster. I took a few of them myself, but only if I had to get there now and their schedule fit mine. Like the day one of my partners was in an auto accident. I'm sorry to whomever that got bumped that day, but I did need to get to her side ASAP. Thing is the rich tend to be even more tight wads about their money and tax money than the poor or middle classes are. They want tax money spent in ways that will make them money now, or not collected at all. Many can't see spending now for much bigger profits ten or twenty years down the road. Me! Me! Me! Now! Now! Now! is their greedy cry. No planning for the long term future at all. Musk is playing the long game, but he's also being smart and financing it with current income.
Noise canceling headphones made Concorde flights tolerable. I much preferred traveling in ocean crossing biz jets equipped with beds and baths. Sure, a sub 1 hour suborbital flight like Elan Musk's BFR would be able to do would have been nicer, but they weren't offered back then, and I can nearly guarantee they wouldn't have fit my schedule. The 4 hour Concorde flights rarely did, so I rarely used them even though I was traveling back and forth between NYC or Washington DC and France, and later London too every couple weeks. Instead I took 8 to 9 hour over night flights and slept nice and comfortably for most of them.
Why did those jets I flew in have beds and baths? That's because a lady saw a need, and provided the flying hotel rooms to fill it. I'm glad she did. I was her first customer for the service. Within a year her regulars were keeping 3 planes busy. Yeah, a flight in one of them made a Concorde flight look cheap, but you got a nice bed to sleep in, a bath or shower in the morning, and excellent meals prepared from scratch right on the plane so you emerged from the plane nice and refreshed. Last I knew her fleet of charter jets had over thirty in it. All have 1 or 2 double or queen sized beds. When people want to get to and from Mars faster, faster engines will be developed. There are many very realistic designs already on the drawing board. They just lack the funds to create them. Musk's engines will do for now. Especially considering he has upped the efficiency a lot. That allows them to go faster, and or bring more payload. His fuel choice is excellent because the components are plentiful, and cheap and easy to make using a well researched process and can be made at both ends of the trip. Perfect for an automated facility to produce.
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