NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

Mars is entirely within reach if we wanted to dedicate the resources to it. If we can get to the moon over 50 years ago, Mars is nothing today. I don't necessarily think it would be worth it given the cost, but it is totally possible if it was a priority.

This is a vastly oversimplified take; Mars will be a monumental effort, far beyond what it takes to get to/from the moon.

To what end ?.

Mars is a total boondoggle - a colony would require constant supply runs from Earth to support a double-digit population - who is going to field the cost and what are they going to do there ?.

"The Martian" was work of fiction.

A lunar colony is cheaper and way more feasible.

I don't understand your response. I clearly said it's not worth it right now.

Their point (I believe) is “why do we want to go there over the moon?” What is there that makes the effort worth it at all now or later (until we can truly move a large population there permanently/for very long stretches)?

If the point is a colony, then we should just do it on the moon. If the point is for the advances in technology it will bring, we don’t have to go to Mars to explore those things. We could just keep practicing on the moon.

Obviously it’s not exactly the same but idk, most of why I’d be interested in our going to mars can be answered with “it’s easier, more feasible, and generally just as useful to do it on the moon instead.” It’s still low gravity, no oxygen/breathable atmosphere, a hostile desert essentially, etc. but far closer. We can respond to emergencies more easily. We know for a fact we are currently capable of getting there and back safely.

TL;DR: we will likely get a lot more out of dumping our resources into trips to and from the moon and building something there than trying to go to mars for a very long time.

> To what end ?

Funnelling a lot of government money into the pockets of the best candidate for the world's first trillionare.

Mars is out of the gravity well only to fall into another, albert slightly shallower. It's just dumb.

Space and the moon were so important that we famously put black female mathematicians on the job in the waning years of Jim Crow. The current admin is dismantling not just so-called DEI, but decades of civil rights protections that ultimately allowed things like SGI's 3D rendering pipeline to exist. This is just one of the myriad ways that America is not in any way serious about a task as monumental as reaching Mars with actual, human astronauts. It would require an intense and extreme dedication to facing factual reality, which we do not seem currently capable of. Rockets do not run on truthiness, they explode on it.

Even a Venusian colony would be significantly more viable than mars.

Mars sucks. The moon sucks too. We need rotating space habitats. With gravity and hookers.

I'm not sure 500⁰C and 100x earth pressure is in any range of viable...

Because the protections get abused. See college admissions.

Elevation.

No, the surface sucks. The clouds are where its at.

You'll need to launch more mass to get there but the technology isn't really any more complicated. It's also a more hospitable environment (reasonable gravity, day/night cycle, some atmosphere, water, etc.)

The clouds are even less viable, every resource would have to be imported from space.

Mars is infinitely more viable than anywhere in Venus for the simple fact that you are on solid ground with resources all around you.

I haven't seen any evidence we could actually harness the resources on mars without tech that doesn't exist. E.g. fusion power.

Without orbital infrastructure shipping supplies in neither are viable.

You don't need fusion power to melt ice, to move regolith over habitats for shielding, or to melt rocks to extract and process metals. I have absolutely no idea where you get the notion that it meeds fusion power? Solar power or things like kilopower reactors are a great option for Mars, especially for bootstrapping.

You'll need to sustain the astronauts for much longer and they'll be subject to a lot more radiation. That's not exactly easy.

Legacy admissions.

It's a significant feat to even get a robot safely to Mars. We've never gotten one back to earth. I think you are underestimating the complexity.

Racial quotas pertain to all people of a group. Legacies pertain to a select amount of people of a group. If a black kid in the heart of Chicago attends a bad elementary school, bad middle school, and bad high school, then the system that failed them is that one, not universities that ideally should measure people by their abilities. Disclaimer: I also dislike legacies.

Legacy admissions policies account for a larger number of admissions and a greater boost than affirmative action policies (which are not racial quotas, which have been illegal since 1978) did. You're clearing space on your hard drive by going after midi files instead of mp4s. AA policies (again, not racial quotas, which haven't existed for half-a-century) had little effect on the admissions of straight white and Asian men (essentially the only demographics not covered under them). They're also currently illegal in college admissions themselves, so there seems to be no good-faith point in harping on them as something that gets "abused" (because they don't, because they literally can't be employed in any sense).

Use your non-sockpuppet, please.

Minority enrollment at MIT for the incoming class dropped from 31 percent to just 16, and black students were particularly affected: https://thetech.com/2025/10/03/college-compact-mit

People like you make no sense to me. I am a minority, and don't turn my head from this reality.

The article misrepresents the data, and you're misrepresenting both MIT's policies and the degree to which they reflect on college admissions (even those of top schools) in general.

You're suggesting that the drop reveals a quota, but it really only shows a slight drop from the norm for black students from the period pre-Pandemic (from ~8% to 5%) and a slightly larger drop for Hispanic/Latino students (from ~17% to 11%). Most of the change across the larger timescale has been fewer white students and more Asian students.

Your "abuse" was a handful of years of slightly increased consideration of qualified black applicants post-George Floyd protests, after decades of racial considerations boosting black enrollment by maybe 2% or 3% compared to the most current incoming class's proportion. This boost is slightly higher for Hispanic/Latino applicants, but still not much to consider (insofar as it's roughly equal to the boost in proportion of Asian students).

We'll not talk about the fact that affirmative action is still alive and well in the admissions process, as gender is still a valid consideration.

This is specifically at MIT, which chooses its class from a pool of qualified applicants (which means that, even with the demographic changes, everyone who was there was someone who deserved to be there), without recognition of sports, legacy, and international student interests. This is decidedly not the case elsewhere, where racial consideration had little effect on class composition when compared to the aforementioned.

In short: your grievance is not serious. It's shallow and formed from misconceptions. If you cared about abuse in college admissions, you would accept that legacy and moneyed interests are more of a drag than racial consideration as a remedy to decades of discrimination. The protections were not only valid, but not even given serious consideration until after our most recent reckoning with America's structural racism, and just as quickly torn up at the first opportunity.

https://ir.mit.edu/projects/demographic-dashboard/

https://web.archive.org/web/20240829012444/https://mitadmiss...

https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/profile/

https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/diversity-or-merit/