> SpaceX is not about "making humanity interplanetary", it is about selling cheap rockets for commercial exploitation of space (and/or it is a DoD weapons "defense" program).

Sure, as an interim step to making humanity interplanetary. Are you suggesting that he could find commercial success without taking those intermediate steps?

> Tesla is a car company, aimed at making and selling cars.

Tesla make solar roofs and grid level energy storage. Like I said, it's portfolio is very clearly geared at climate change solutions.

> Stopping global warming requires more mass transit, and Musk is actively opposed to that.

Maybe he is (I've heard he's a bit of a germaphobe). I suspect he also recognizes that America is a car culture and that that won't change anytime soon.

> Sure, as an interim step to making humanity interplanetary. Are you suggesting that he could find commercial success without taking those intermediate steps?

My point is that the rockets are the easiest part of settling Mars. We already had rockets, and scaling that up was never a huge unknown. The real problems with settling Mars are the things that Musk is spending nothing on - building safe self-sustaining habitats in extreme conditions. Until we have a 10000+ self-sustaining city underground in the Arctic, there is 0 reason to send more than a handful of people to Mars (like we did to the Moon). So, if you actually care about that, you should be investing in the Arctic city, not Mars.

> I suspect he also recognizes that America is a car culture and that that won't change anytime soon.

We can try to guess what he believes, or we can look at his actions and their results - and in the latter case, he has repeatedly spoken and acted against public transport (in most hyper-loop and Boring Company presentations at least).

> We already had rockets, and scaling that up was never a huge unknown.

Then why did NASA never create cost-effective reusable launch vehicles?

> The real problems with settling Mars are the things that Musk is spending nothing on - building safe self-sustaining habitats in extreme conditions.

I'm not sure how this refutes the claim that this is one of his ultimate goals. He's not going to invest in the kind of research you describe until it's necessary or will plausibly create a return. He has to keep a business focus to continue funding these efforts because governments have been seriously falling short.

> We can try to guess what he believes, or we can look at his actions and their results - and in the latter case, he has repeatedly spoken and acted against public transport (in most hyper-loop and Boring Company presentations at least).

OK, I still don't see why that's problem. Public mass transit is not going to save the planet on its own. Personal transport is something like only 20% of global emissions. EVs can get that down to below 5%, and public transit might make another single digit difference over that. It's just not a big change.

> Then why did NASA never create cost-effective reusable launch vehicles?

Because NASA was usually about pushing the limits of science and engineering, not making money on space launches. Also, it has often been severely mismanaged.

> I'm not sure how this refutes the claim that this is one of his ultimate goals. He's not going to invest in the kind of research you describe until it's necessary or will plausibly create a return. He has to keep a business focus to continue funding these efforts because governments have been seriously falling short.

You're the one claiming SpaceX was created to address an existential crisis. I'm telling you SpaceX is not bringing us any closer to being an interplanetary species, and if Musk cared about this goal, he wouldn't have invested in SpaceX to begin with.

>OK, I still don't see why that's problem. Public mass transit is not going to save the planet on its own. Personal transport is something like only 20% of global emissions. EVs can get that down to below 5%, and public transit might make another single digit difference over that. It's just not a big change.

No, they can't. Replacing all ICEs with EVs would basically require doubling the electricity grid in the USA for example, and that is simply not a realistic possibility - especially given that the grid is already far too dirty and we need to replace a huge amount of it with green tech to reach CO2 emissions goals even without the extra pressure from EVs.

So, the realistic goal is to significantly expand the much much more efficient public transport (trains, buses, trams, metro) to significantly reduce the amount of cars (which will also do wonders for reducing congestion), and convert just the remaining cars to EVs, at a rate that can be supported by the grid while also shutting down existing coal, oil and gas power production.

> Because NASA was usually about pushing the limits of science and engineering, not making money on space launches.

Pushing science and engineering requires using money wisely, and creating a reusable launch vehicle is an obvious way to do that. In fact NASA did have multiple efforts that ultimately stalled, and literally none of them looked like what SpaceX did. You simply have no basis upon which to claim that SpaceX's reusable launch vehicles were not innovative.

> You're the one claiming SpaceX was created to address an existential crisis. I'm telling you SpaceX is not bringing us any closer to being an interplanetary species, and if Musk cared about this goal, he wouldn't have invested in SpaceX to begin with.

I honestly have no idea how you can conclude this. We're taking our first baby steps into space and you're saying baby steps are meaningless because they're far from running marathons. This argument is incredibly unconvincing.

> No, they can't. Replacing all ICEs with EVs would basically require doubling the electricity grid in the USA for example, and that is simply not a realistic possibility

The grid needs to expand anyway to handle renewable intermittency. You're also assuming that EVs would be powered from the grid. Tesla has the powerwall and solar roof tiles to address distributed power generation rather than reliance on the grid for everything.

> So, the realistic goal is to significantly expand the much much more efficient public transport (trains, buses, trams, metro) to significantly reduce the amount of cars (which will also do wonders for reducing congestion), and convert just the remaining cars to EVs, at a rate that can be supported by the grid while also shutting down existing coal, oil and gas power production.

What I'm reading here is that Musk's Tesla is addressing the existential risk of climate change, just not in the way you personally think it should be addressed. Seems beside the point frankly.

> You simply have no basis upon which to claim that SpaceX's reusable launch vehicles were not innovative.

I didn't claim that they were not innovative, I claimed that they were not revolutionary - that is a big difference.

> We're taking our first baby steps into space and you're saying baby steps are meaningless because they're far from running marathons. This argument is incredibly unconvincing.

We have taken our first baby steps into space a few decades ago, and none of what SpaceX is currently doing is bringing us to any place new - we've already been to the Moon and to Mars, and we've been to plenty more exotic places.

The problem of space colonization is just not the rockets.

> The grid needs to expand anyway to handle renewable intermittency.

The grid needs to expand, but the fewer consumers there are, the less it needs to expand, so the easier it is to close down the big polluters.

> What I'm reading here is that Musk's Tesla is addressing the existential risk of climate change

I am saying that overall EVs are at best close to neutral - they obviously pollute less than ICEs if the grid is green enough, but they will also delay the green-ification of the grid if adopted in enough numbers to matter. Not to mention, Teslas are typically pretty big cars. If Musk cared about climate change and it weren't just an afterthought, there are more important businesses he could have gotten into (such as green power generation directly).

> I didn't claim that they were not innovative, I claimed that they were not revolutionary - that is a big difference.

Sure, but I'm not sure why SpaceX has to be revolutionary in that sense. It was revolutionary in the sense of taking space launches private. Or am I wrong in thinking SpaceX was the first company to successfully commercialize space launch, and the first company to successfully dock a commercially financed and owned vehicle with the ISS?

> We have taken our first baby steps into space a few decades ago, and none of what SpaceX is currently doing is bringing us to any place new

So what? You can't build a skyscraper without the right foundation. SpaceX is still building the foundations for routine space flight. Again, this seems like you complaining that you don't yet have a penthouse when they're still pouring the concrete foundation.

> If Musk cared about climate change and it weren't just an afterthought, there are more important businesses he could have gotten into (such as green power generation directly).

Firstly, the incumbents are too large in that industry to compete with. He was a millionaire when he started Tesla, and you wanted him to focus on building wind turbines or solar cells to compete with huge multinationals like Siemens? Come on. Electric vehicles was completely underserved market by contrast, a clear business opportunity that also serves similar ends.

Secondly, nobody is so altruistic that they'd work as hard as Musk does on something that they weren't passionate about, even if it were good for humanity. Musk clearly likes cars. Humanity arguably needs electric cars. Musk combined a passion for cars with humanity's need. This is what progress under capitalism looks like.

To say he should work slavishly on something he's not passionate about for the betterment of humanity is setting up an ethical bar that nobody would clear. The people who do work on non-profits are passionate about that.

> It was revolutionary in the sense of taking space launches private.

Good for him? I'm not sure why that is something to praise.

> Again, this seems like you complaining that you don't yet have a penthouse when they're still pouring the concrete foundation.

It's the other way around: cheap space flight is the penthouse of planetary colonization. The foundation is the ability to build a self-sufficient colony. Once we were able to colonize the least hospitable places on Earth, only then would it make sense to think about how we move this technology to Mars - 50 or 100 years from now, most likely.

It's also worth noting that we have no reason to assume that a human population can even survive on Mars, as we have no idea if humans can live long term or even reproduce in Martian conditions (especially the very low gravity). Before even thinking about this colonization, we would actually have to establish whether it's possible for mammals to live long term and reproduce in low-G conditions. If it's not, there's a whole new world of technology we would have to discover before attempting it.

SpaceX is to Mars colonization like buying your dream wedding dress not just before finding a boyfriend, but before even knowing if you're gay or straight.

> Firstly, the incumbents are too large in that industry to compete with.

You could say the same for the car industry itself.

> Musk clearly likes cars. Humanity arguably needs electric cars. Musk combined a passion for cars with humanity's need.

Fair enough.

You mean Antarctica, not the Artic. The Arctic refers to regions/countries along the Artic Ocean which includes Canada, USA, and Scandinavia. The reason Antarctica is not developed is because of an series of treaties known as the Antarctic Treaty System [1]. It's an agreed upon 'pristine environment' for research. Development is prohibited and there are extreme measures to maintain its relatively pureness. For one fun example - poop cannot be disposed of on premises. It needs to be bagged up and shipped back home to be disposed of.

Rocketry is a similar story. Rockets, since the 60s, have gradually become less capable and more expensive. For instance Boeing/Lockheed have been granted defacto unlimited taxpayer money to develop a basic functional 'homegrown' rocket system - the SLS. The goal was achieve little more than we did in the 60s. They started work 11 years ago, have received more than $30 billion, and and have yet to manage to get off the ground. Stay tuned for their latest failure - they will [fail to] launch on November 14th! For reference, we went from nothing to putting a man on the moon in 9 years in the 60s.

If it ever manages to be fit for duty, the SLS is estimated to cost an average of $2 billion per flight, and is completely incapable of landing massive-load cargo on Mars, let alone transiting things back. It's completely and absolutely unfit for duty. Most of everything Musk has done with SpaceX was being mocked as literally impossible by Boeing et al (by Tory Bruno) while he was struggling to achieve rapid reuse among various other technologies which have completely revolutionized the industry.

We would not be getting to Mars had SpaceX (or a similar company) not emerged.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System

I was actually referring to the Arctic (North Pole), though I did forget how little land is actually there.

Regardless, a self-sustaining habitat is a research project, and it will not be successful without political/diplomatic agreement.

Note that outer space is anyway in the same situation - you can't just settle outer space and claim it's your own - especially Mars, which is still a pristine environment that could even possibly harbor signs of life.