To the editor: Columnist Michael Hiltzik rightly dismantles Elon Musk’s fixation on sending humans to Mars, but he could have been more thorough.
Musk claims to want to save humankind from extinction by creating a colony of 1 million earthlings on the red planet. His plan hastens the destruction of a livable Earth through accelerated global warming, one of the threats for which, Musk believes, we need a Martian escape hatch.
According to Space.com, each launch of his company SpaceX’s Starship rocket burns super-cooled methane, generating the equivalent of more than 76,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s like driving more than 15,000 gas-powered sedans 12,000 miles — the very sort of auto Tesla is supposedly trying to get off our roads and out of our environment.
While applauding the cost-saving reusable SpaceX rockets, advances in engine design and the Dragon capsule, we should recognize the expensive but less visible mitigation costs from frequent launches of Starship, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
Carl Selkin, Pasadena
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To the editor: Hiltzik writes that Musk’s desire to colonize Mars is a “whim” because Musk hasn’t “soberly pondered the obstacles.” In fact, Musk has spent the last 20 years pondering those obstacles and overcoming them, making him the richest person in the world.
NASA pioneered space flight, but it never gave thought to making it profitable. As missions grew in expense and complexity, public support for the Apollo and space shuttle programs waned.
From the founding of SpaceX, Musk understood he needed to make the economics work as well as the engineering. His determination to recycle boosters slashed payload costs dramatically and improved the carbon footprints of his rockets.
His engineering and financial successes have never caused Musk to lose sight of his Mars dream. From the founding of SpaceX, Musk insisted on methane fuel rather than the industry standard of kerosene, because methane could be made from hydrogen on Mars and thus harnessed to fuel return trips.
Robert Helbing, Monrovia