Again, we're arguing about Musk than about the technological challenges. The article makes that very point - that Musk's approach to technological questions is to distract and make people argue about his character. Which we are doing.

> The author essentially dismissed SpaceX...

The article also makes the point that keeping people alive in space for years is a very different and unsolved and underestimated challenge than is building rockets. SpaceX builds rockets. It does not do the other thing.

We’re talking past each other.

I’m arguing we shouldn’t be arguing about Musk. I don’t know how much he is personally involved in the engineering decisions, but it doesn’t really matter because SpaceX has proved it can solve the vast array of problems that need to be solved to:

- Launch a rocket into to orbit

- Land and recover the first stage of that rocket (which had never been done before)

- Build a spacecraft that can be launched into orbit, dock with the ISS, deorbit, and be recovered

- Make that spacecraft support human life, and launch humans on it to the ISS, and bring them back alive (which also had never been done by a commercial entity)

I wouldn’t bet against SpaceX being able to do the engineering required to keep humans alive on spacecraft for years once it becomes a priority for them. At this point it’s premature.

Ok, fair point. I do agree with the article that the challenges involved are probably greatly underestimated. Although we imagine that they are familiar, akin to known problems like deep-sea diving or mountain climbing or airplane travel or arctic exploration or even space station inhabitation, the challenges are actually wildly outside of current human knowledge.

I am a pretty big SpaceX fan, but so far, they've been tackling challenges that lend themselves to a rapid iteration if given sufficient capital.

Rapidly iterating on the incredible engineering difficulties inherent in building a reusable rocket does not mean you can do the same thing with an interplanetary mission that involves at least ~5 months of travel one way.

They need a whole other class of scientists and engineers to solve the "keeping a human alive for years in spacecraft/colony" problem. It just seems like a fundamentally different class of problem to me, and that SpaceX's strength of rapid iteration may be hardly applicable to this problem.

I still thing a lot of it transfers over, especially if Starship works as intended - send Starships to Mars often with proof of concept tech and any customer payloads & have part of it pressurized with prototype life support system. If it works fine after the trips on multiple occasions, you can be reasonably sure it will work with a crew as well.

Possibly more sure than the "classic" testing (and paperwork) heavy model that usually does very few actuall test flights due to costs.

No, it will just make it - marginally - cheaper. But the basic challenges remain just as strong.

Well, SpaceX does build manned space capsules and runs a global satellite internet constellation. It also heards cows: https://www.vice.com/en/article/78xe5e/the-real-reason-space...

nonono, it's the TFA that lays down the weird unnecessary jokes like the "useless billion dollar shit dehydrator", and then brings up the name and launches into full blown ad hominem.

There are people out there doing real things, perhaps blundering along the way. If the articles author disagrees with their approach, they can just say "some well-publicized people think that cheap reusable rockets are a step 1 to any successful space endeavor, but I personally emphatically disagree with that, because a better way than cheap rockets is..." - instead that author launches a mud fight at that point.