I don't think even Musk, master of the dubious marketing promise, has claimed that; the first ones would be one-way jobs AIUI.

Correct, only the crew mission would return, the rest would be several one-way cargo missions

Pretty sure Musk said the crew mission would not return

He did not. This is a common myth with Mars missions that was started by a company called Mars One. This company was the first to announce a mission to Mars, but they never had a single piece of flight hardware, and only had fancy 3d animations. They did however have a lot of 'applications' for becoming an astronaut while the applicants had to pay money to apply. While I'm sure the founders of Mars One had good intentions, it resulted in eventually being a scam.

This unfortunately resulted in people thinking Mars is a 'one way' mission. Elon Musk has repeated that to make live on Mars sustainable, you need roundtrips. You can't keep making new rockets, eventually you need them back. Otherwise it would become too expensive.

Info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One

Nope. The whole point of developing the Raptor Engine was (A) to be able to reuse it and (B) to refuel on mars (using the Sabatier reaction with atmospheric CO2) for a return mission.

From Dr. Zubrin's Reddit AMA:

> for Mars Ascent and Earth return, SpaceX should develop a mini Starship, sized to be an upper stage of an F9. This would create a fully reusable medium lift booster, and reduce Mars propellant making requirements by a factor of 5. A Starsip could lift one of these to LEO fully fueled, after which it could fly to Mars, and return. any full sized Starships that land on Mars should stay on Mars. SpaceX will make plenty of Starships, it won't need any back that go to Mars. A Starship on Mars is much more valuable than one on Earth.

https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/hgy64k/ask_me_anyth...

Which seems to make sense, but I don't think SpaceX wants to develop another vehicle. That's extremely expensive. The goal of Starship is to do both, and it can do both.

It also gets debunked by replies. This will never happen.

I believe those people would have accumulated enormous radiation dosages over the duration of the flight, they might not have a long life left and a return voyage would shorten that even more. Might as well stay put for the remaining time on Earth, err, Mars, stay in deep lava tubes and help build that colony.

> those people would have accumulated enormous radiation dosages over the duration of the flight

What is this based on? One of the chief contributors to the mass of a Mars voyage is shielding.

You can't really shield against galactic cosmic rays (too high energy, would require far too much mass), which make up approximately 95% of the dose.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/340/6136/1080.abstrac...

*Edit - but the comment higher up isn't right either, that most Mars-bound astronauts will have decreased lives. The paper linked above estimates 3% of astronauts to die from cancer caused by the trip (assuming no exposure on the surface of Mars, meaning they're in the ground).

And if the worst thing that happens to early Mars astronauts is "a 3% increase in the chance of dying from cancer someday", they will ecstatic. The list of more pressing risks is long.

NASA studies indicate a two year round trip to Mars (with roughly a year of surface time) would increase cancer rates by only 4%.

I don't think you can call him Musk "master of the dubious marketing promise" anymore now that Tesla is meeting production goals, SpaceX is landing boosters, re-supplying the ISS, and has brought astronauts to the ISS.

His promises are far more reliable than most at this point.

Yeah, you definitely can.

1) Tesla driving fully autonomously from LA to NY by the end of 2017 [1][and many others]

2) Tesla producing 10,000 cars per week by the end of 2018 [2][3]

3) "Funding secured" [4]

4) All Teslas produced after Oct 2016 have all the hardware necessary for full self driving [5]. This was apparently before Tesla realized they needed/wanted to design a custom ASIC for full self driving.

Many more.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-two-years-car-20285...

[2] https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/tesla-ceo-musk-th...

[3] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1117526382563643392

[4] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776

[5] https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

Like the comments earlier mentioned - he got electric cars to the consumer market, in bulk, in less than 10 years. That alone brings a ton of respect.

Now, if I were an investor, I would be inclined to agree with you.

I do see that I am "moving goalposts" and should have specified what I meant in my initial post.

All were done on time, in Mars years, the calendar of his home planet.

1) It's again that time of the year... although this time he merely promised FSD to be feature complete by the end of the year. I think same will happen 2021, 2022, etc.

2) That they did achieve pretty much that, just a bit late.

3) Head scratcher, but some speculation it was to fend off a hostile takeover attempt. A bit fishy indeed.

4) They do replace all HW 2 & 2.5 computers for free, if the owner got FSD package.

2) Pretty sure Tesla is still not producing 10k cars per week. Their Q2 2020 update shows max quarterly production was ~105k in Q42019, which is ~8k per week. I can't find anything suggesting they have ever peaked over 10k per week.

4) Replacing old hardware is obviously not the same as shipping all the necessary hardware in 2016.

Currently listening to the biography on Musk, he jokingly accepts that his timelines are all off, but he doesn't feel too bad about it because he eventually hits the goals. When asked about comments that a timeline for an electric car took a couple years longer than he had predicted (like a 1 year prediction, and it took 3.5 years, or something like that) he said roughly "Oh yeah, that's crazy. But I didn't know that yet, I'd never done this. We got it done eventually, but that's an unrealistic timeline".

He says he makes timelines based off what he knows, and as he gets more data, he gets more realistic with the timelines. I agree he is getting better with the timelines. And he generally builds everything he talks about eventually.

You can try doing the same thing in your job and see how that will end. The mere fact that he doesn't just get away with it, but also gets funding every singel time, and has a huge cult following, makes all of my BS whistle ring.

Maybe the trick is to be your own boss, risk your own personal wealth, and not try “getting away” with stuff at your job.

Which I am now. In which case you have to get away with missed deadlines with your customers, banks and, if there are any investors. Good luck with that.

As long as you don't ask him about Neuralink (-:

I don't see any problems with that since he isn't using public funds or selling anything:

"By July 2019, it had received $158 million in funding (of which $100 million was from Musk)"

(from Wikipedia)

I was responding to the enormity of his claims, not the question of ethics.

That's some deliberate misreading.

"people who get brain surgery from him" - the tweet doesn't say from him.

"since Elon Musk told Jay Clayton of the SEC to" - he didn't say it to Jay Clayton.

"since Elon Musk promised to get rid of most possessions" - he didn't promise anything.

"since Elon Musk promised to produce ventilators at the SpaceX factory" - saying SpaceX is 'working on venitilators' is not any such promise.

"Elon Musk assured parents that" - there is no context about "assuring parents", he was justifying a previous prediction.

"since Elon Musk advised consumers that Teslas can safely function as a boat for short periods of time" - the Tweet doesn't say "safely" it came with a video on escaping a sinking car by rolling down the window, and he's saying the electronics are water-sealed and it won't lose power to a blocked air intake (like an ICE vehicle).

"since Elon Musk offered a chance to fly to Mars and work off the price of the ticket with a Mars job" - nope, since Elon Musk said "the goal needs to be such that anyone can go, with loans available" in the context of "how will people be chosen to go to Mars".

What an awful website. As if there isn't enough real strange stuff he's said without making shit up and then linking directly to the Tweets which don't say what it claims they say.

I'm pretty sure you can do that more now than ever, after courts in more and more countries are shutting down their "Autopilot" marketing.

> now that Tesla is meeting production goals

Where's the magic cross-country self-driving car that was meant to show up in 2016? And just how 'self driving ready' are those Model 3s?

> SpaceX is landing boosters

A mere decade or so after promised.

I think both of these are examples of dubious marketing promises, though the Tesla one is more egregious (the SpaceX one is merely extremely late). But either way, I wouldn't depend on any of their timelines going forward.

I don't think learning a problem is harder than you thought and then still solving it is a detriment. If anything this community should be the ones that understand that the full scope of a problem often becomes apparent once you're 80% into it.

How many startups are "guaranteed to revolutionize the world in 2 years", take 4 years to get a minimum viable product, and are gone in 6?

You solve the problem, you get my credit. Fully self driving cars though I think should have been more obvious that it wasn't going to happen anytime soon.. not just to Musk but to everyone working on it. It'll get there eventually too, but it's still early days.

> Fully self driving cars though I think should have been more obvious that it wasn't going to happen anytime soon.. not just to Musk but to everyone working on it

Well, yes, this is my point. He _must_ have known that his cross-country no-driver car wasn't practical when he was promoting it. If he didn't know himself, any expert in the field would tell him, and presumably did.

He never promised to land boosters in 2007, the Falcon 9 hadnt even flown yet. In fact their original reusability plans were based around parachute recovery.

Where are my flying cars? Where is my fusion reactor?

Neither were promised to you by Airbus under a specific contract.

I mean, if you're saying that Musk's claims are less extravagant than those of newspaper columnists playing at futurology, then, yes, that's true. But it's the lowest of low bars.

A lot of us knew the self-driving car industry was bullshit. Tesla wasn't piling it any higher or deeper than everyone else. Within this iteration of the discipline, there was something approaching consensus (ie all of the loudest voices agree with each other). Outside of that bubble, some of the rest of us had very strong convictions that they were nucking futs.

Some of us know, as sure as we know the sun will rise tomorrow, that AI and fusion are going to arrive within five years of each other. Which is to say, "don't make any life plans around either".

But you have to be a scholar or of a certain age to have a grasp of 1) how many times and with how little evidence we've been promised both and 2) the painfully vivid ways in which this series of events has resembled Charlie Brown and that football. She's lying to you Charlie. She is always lying to you.

> is expected to cost billions

I'm annoyed by this innumerical journalistic habit where imprecise large numbers are only given as "millions", "billions" or "trillions".

A decade long development for a never before attempted interstellar cargo ship... I'm sure that "billions" is as precise as anyone can be about the cost right now.

I agree about general journalistic innumeracy, but in this case it may well be the best estimate available. It's no different from the order of magnitude estimates highly numerate people make for good reason all the time.

>I'm 99% sure that if SpaceX's starship takes off, it will fly to Mars and back within a few years.

Define "a few years" and I'll bet you it won't, with whatever odds you want.

2031 is when the Sample Return Mission is supposed to return the samples back to Earth. Keep in mind slips happen in ALL sorts of space projects, not just SpaceX. I’ll take your bet.

I want 2:1 odds:

SpaceX returns a vehicle from Mars by the end of 2035 (UTC), and before the NASA-ESA sample return mission has returned its samples. I’ll buy you a beer/beverage (value not to exceed $10) if you win, and you’ll buy me 2 beers/beverages (value not to exceed $20 total) if I win.

Well, I'm not sure 15 years qualifies as "a few years", but the price is right, so you're on I guess!

Okay! Let’s put it in here, with a bunch of other SpaceX-related beer bets. If you make an account there, I’ll be able to message you. The site is pretty old and more active than ever, so it’ll probably still be around by the time this has been decided: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35196.0

Maybe put it on http://longbets.org

Why not https://www.reddit.com/r/HighStakesSpaceX/

Is that something returning from Mars _orbit_, or returning samples from the surface?

Exactly. Returning from orbit is "easy", you just go into a free-return trajectory and don't even do much of a burn at Mars, if any at all.

Getting a sample from the surface basically means you need to do a deceleration burn to get into orbit, and then the reverse after grabbing the sample (which itself must be accelerated to orbital speed). No small thing.

A free-return trajectory doesn't enter orbit around a body, indeed its appeal is that if your propulsion fails while on such a course, you'll coast home "for free" rather than enter orbit around your target or drift into deep space.

Entering orbit almost always requires an orbital insertion burn, and in the case of an Earth-Mars Hohmann transfer definitely does.

Your point stands though: returning from a fly-by (including a free-return) requires much less fuel than returning from orbit, and even that's much easier than returning from the surface.

For fun, take a look at rotovators (AKA "momentum exchange tethers") that could make orbital capture/departure—and even landing/launch—"free" on bodies with minimal atmosphere.

Correct, I misspoke: My first use of "orbit", I should have said "the area up around the planet, not down on the surface.

The difference in difficulty (mainly, fuel requirements) between a flyby and an orbit is a crucial distinction often overlooked.

SpaceX isn’t planning to enter orbit around Mars but instead do direct entry.

How do you retrieve a surface sample on a direct-entry mission?

You land on Mars. Refuel. And launch again direct to Earth.

A SpaceX vehicle returning from the surface of Mars.

You're saying the vehicle will bring all the fuel needed for a return flight to Earth down to the surface of Mars and then back up again? Do you have a link with a description of how they're going to do this?

No. It will make the fuel from Martian resources like water ice and the CO2 atmosphere. Using solar power. First to split the water to oxygen and hydrogen using electrolysis, then use the hydrogen with CO2 to make methane (& some water which is cycled back to the electrolysis step) using the Sabatier reaction. This is done on the International space Station today, by the way. The methane on ISS is simply vented (as the point on ISS is to recover the oxygen from the CO2, which is most of CO2’s mass). It takes a lot of energy, so there will need to be very large solar arrays on Mars, but it’s possible.

This page describes the process: https://medium.com/spaceinmylifetime/how-spacex-will-refuel-...

Call me overly cynical, but I don't see Musk getting this done in time to be back in 2031 and win the race.

Well, he’s competing against a gov entity, so his schedule slips are going to be much less than theirs.

Don't know about the person you replied to, but none of the dates you mention qualify as what I would call "a few years."

I think 10 (+/- 2) years is a fair estimate but I would start counting from when Starship reaches orbit. It would be close enough to their historical development timeline of the Falcon which went from Falcon 1 reaching orbit in 2008 to a crewed Falcon 9 mission to the ISS in 2020, with a propulsive landing of the first stage to boot. I would expect a number of missions within that timeframe that could possibly satisfy the condition of "fly to Mars and back" but I think they will be able to do a full surface of Earth to surface of Mars and back to surface of Earth crewed mission at the end of that period. Call me an optimist but I'm pretty sure that's what they're aiming for.

> I'm 99% sure that if SpaceX's starship takes off, it will fly to Mars and back within a few years.

I'm 99% sure that's wrong.