Reply to post: But it's a lousy analogy, Elon

But it's a lousy analogy, Elon

"A rough analogy is that we are trying to build the equivalent of the transcontinental railway."

Unless the transcontinental railway was required to transport, on its very first trip, all the infrastructure, tooling, factories and starter material to build *another* railway for the return trip, then no, there is very little similarity. In fact it's an analogy so useless as to be dangerous—which is the mistake people have been making about interplanetary travel since Tsiolkovsky's first wet dream.

The problems of huge distances, utterly hostile and completely unforgiving environment, enormous chemical rocket energies requiring bleeding-edge engineering with limited contingencies, simply monstrous energies required to transport pitifully tiny payloads ... even managing a local bus-stop 240,000 miles to the lo-gee Moon for a few days required the resources of the world's wealthiest nation state. Mars is exponentially harder and much, much more dangerous because of its distance *and* the fact that this varies so much. Rescue is not an option.

I'd love to see proper off-world operations, interplanetary exploration, asteroid mining (Lagrange habitats even), and and all the rest that's needed to get our eggs out of this one fragile basket that we are destroying so fast—but the use of rockets for the heavy lifting seems like such a dead end. Even partly reusable ones.

With a five-year international effort costing (adjusted dollars) less than Apollo, we could launch 20,000 tonne Orion-style nuclear ships and put enough mass and people onto Mars and the Moon to have instant colonies big enough to have a chance of long-term survival and actually be useful. Warheads can be made clean enough that there wouldn't even be any particular fallout risk on Earth. Perhaps instead of faffing about with glorified fireworks, we should be serious, use the technology that's just been lying around, and just Get Out There at last?