Elon Musk Mocked For Failed Vow To Send People To Mars In 2021

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), The Verge, phys.org, and a raft of tech trade publications have recalled the pompous vow of Elon Musk to send people to Mars by 2021 and to ship more than a million earthlings to colonize Mars in a bid to succeed where adventurers of Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” failed.

Photo Insert: The realest of the real talk is that no one knows how much a humans-on-Mars mission costs.

Elizabeth Lopatto of The Verge wrote back on Sept. 27, 2016, in reference to Musk that “talk is cheap; rockets are expensive.”

This week, the WSJ recalled its 2011 interview with Musk when he was still trying to win big deals with NASA, and noted that Musk did not deliver on his promise to bring his colonizers to the red planet.

“In fact, longtime SpaceX watchers know that Musk is not very good with deadlines. We’ll start with his 2011 promise: he told Marketplace that he’d put humans in space in three years.

That same year, Musk told WSJ that his best-case scenario was to put people on Mars by 2021 (his worst case scenario was between 2026 and 2031). Earlier this year, he said he was planning to put people on Mars by 2025,” Lopatto added.

The realest of the real talk is that no one knows how much a humans-on-Mars mission costs. NASA’s robotic programs, which are decidedly cheaper, began around 2000, and have cost about $700 million a year for the last 15 years, Lopatto said.

Old estimates — from 1989 — suggested humans on Mars might cost $450 billion.

In 2015, The Houston Chronicle said the cost would be between $200 billion and $400 billion; Space News pegged that price much higher, at $1.5 trillion. Musk isn’t short on money, but his money isn’t long enough to get him to Mars.

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