It's an interesting statement because technological advancements are virtually assured to keep increasing the average lifespan (especially in industrialized and wealthy countries, excuse the recent dip due to obesity) and they're also virtually assured to keep making space travel a more viable reality.

Combine that with increased global cooperation (possibly deteriorating right now) and increased private competition and I think it's feasible.

I'm 24. I have a feeling I'll more than certainly see humans on Mars barring any unfortunate calamity to myself. I've also been saying I'd live until I was three or four hundred years old since I was a ten years old. So call me an optimist in a variety of ways.

Everything I've said is totally from a layman's perspective and I truly have not given the question much thought besides an initial excitement at the prospect upon reading this headline and checking out the news.

I'm fairly confident that I'll see humans on Mars before I die. I just don't believe NASA will be behind the effort.

As NASA is the best funded space agency for the richest and most technologically advanced nation on Earth, I'll believe the odds are stacked in their favor that they'll be behind the first astronauts there.

Of course, if our politicians don't stop bumbling around we may very soon not be the most advanced nation on Earth which would be unfortunate.

When it was a race, NASA did good! Hopefully other countries will join in and spur us on. Even Republicans might be able to get around to the idea of showing off American exceptionalism (I think it's bullshit, American exceptionalism has been predicated off a very rich country investing lots of money into research. But call it what you will, it is what it is.).

I happen to disagree with his analysis, however, because he's not taking non-government entities like SpaceX into account.

As a side note. I'm willing to bet they will be the first (with collaboration between the other space agencies as they often do).

Edit: Plus, I don't know of any other deep space crew carrier that currently exists. It sounds to me like they have a head start since they already have one in their possession, albeit untested.

i.e. non-NASA entities have a better chance than NASA

Edit: I see he has other replies that clarify that this is exactly what he's thinking. "I'm fairly confident that I'll see humans on Mars before I die. I just don't believe NASA will be behind the effort." I still maintain that this is not indicated in the original comment, but that starts to become unimportant.

If Senators and Congressmen believe that a $5B mission to study lunar cheese via sub-orbital flight would drive that money into their constituents' areas, they'll support it.

It has nothing to do with what the public at large thinks about NASA; it's merely a bullet point they can trot out at the next election: see, through my work in Congress I brought jobs to your area, re-elect me.

And THAT is why I doubt NASA can pull this off, because it's clowns like that who control the purse-strings. It's why we junked Apollo capsules for the Shuttle. It's why we have an Orion capsule in development now to replace the Shuttle. It's why the target for HSF went from the Moon to low Earth orbit, languished there for decades, paused briefly on the absurd notion of an asteroid interception mission as being viable, and is now back at Mars.

My pessimism in NASA's manned program is well-founded.

They have the ideas and the know-how, but their plans are at the mercy of self-serving, science-ignorant politicians.

I think NASA shouldn't send a manned mission to mars.

Say you diverted NASAs 18.4 billion yearly budget. What can you do with 18.4 billion dollars? To give you contrast of how little that is relative to other American financial concerns, the GM bailout of 2008 was 51 billion.

Why not have Mars missions if the US can give car companies tens of billions?

But lets pretend that doesn't matter. Musk makes a solid ~1.1 billion a year off of various investments, and has ~11.7 billion in assets. Even if he dumped all that in SpaceX, you'd sill be ~6billion short of NASA's budget. Implying those assests could be quickly liquidated.

Even if we assume SpaceX has more/better talent then NASA. Your still working with at least an order of magnitude lower budget. Which is massive, especially when we are talking about the difference between $1bil/yr and $10 billion/yr

Pluto flyby mid next july...

Roughly, the tech needed is:

1. heavy-lift

2. Mars EDL

3. artificial g for the trip and return

4. in-situ fuel production

5. methane rockets

SpaceX has been developing heavy-lift at a profit, so that takes care of #1. They are also working on #5, although I'm not sure off-hand who their customers are. (Methane has volume advantages over LH/LOX that might make it better for smaller missions.)

There are still some other pieces of the pie that need assembled. Rockets are surely a part of #2, but Musk is essentially building a company that will sell him a trip to Mars.

Also hydrogen + O2 = water. So basically you ship the astronauts with nothing but hydrogen and live off the land. Or this is what the Mars Society was calling for.

I was just trying to figure out how SpaceX could fund its development of methane rockets before that, through domestic use of methane rockets.

Elon also hasn't just blown money senselessly on longshots or unsustainable one-offs, like a private Mars mission would be. SpaceX and Tesla both have some innovative concepts and have advanced their respective fields, but both are also perfectly ordinary businesses in most regards, with very reasonable plans for revenue. I don't see any potential for revenue in travelling to Mars.

Those are two areas where NASA certainly could learn something.

NASA has propulsively landed many things (on other planets!). The fundamentals have been around for a while.

What I'm trying to get at is that SpaceX is currently not the go to place for rocket science. I do think they are making mark in rocket building science which is exactly what we pay them to do.