I tend to think scientific research deserves public funding. What musk advocates is not for scientific research, it's basically an extremely weird and expensive real estate project. And I don't think real estate deserves public funding, no matter how exotic it is.

And even if I did not think scientific research deserves public funding, that would not matter, for a wrong should not justify an other wrong.

I'd expect NASA to buy enough slots to found an Institute of Martian Studies pretty quickly.

Not a million of them. And if its purpose was scientific it wouldn't have to be "self-sufficient". Science is not Musk's goal. He wants to put people there for the sake of it.

Remember, we're only talking about the portion of the mission funded by tax dollars here. Not all of the funding is going to come from that source.

It would if the experiment is to test whether or not a self-sufficient human settlement beyond Earth is possible.

There's always scientific value in everything we do. It's just a matter of cashing in on that value.

https://dissention.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/the-business-mod...