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Reality bites Elon Musk

Elon Musk is, in my honest opinion, a snake-oil merchant.

He's the kind of guy who I'd expect to find behind the ads on YouTube that promise that simple home remedies can cure everything from diabetes to dementia. He'd tell you that "this simple seven-second ritual can cure..." because it would appear that the words "honesty" and "ethics" seem to have been burned from his personality.

Some may say that I'm being harsh and unreasonable. They would claim that people like me confuse Elon's "aspirational" claims with his actual plans.

Yeah, right!

However, eventually the harsh reality of things ends up derailing his plans, be they categorised as aspirational, ignorant or just fraudulent.

This month it happened again.

Elon's SpaceX corporation has been sucking huge sums from the teat of the US taxpayer on the promise that his technology would see man set foot on Mars by 2024 and fully colonise it shortly afterwards.

The cornerstone of these bold claims was his Starship, the world's largest rocket which was going to be able to haul incredible amounts of payload into orbit and beyond.

Well here we are, it's 2026 and the best the Starship has managed is to crash a banana into the Indian Ocean after a sub-orbital hop.

In the face of Starship falling woefully short of the claims that were made for it and the timeline projected for it, even Elon had to recognise that it was time to pivot.

The result?

Well for now, Mars is off the agenda. Elon's going to build cities on the moon instead!

His X feed has been filled with AI-generated visions of these lunar cities, showing children in spacesuits frolocking on the lunar moon's surface while cybertrucks ferry folk around from place to place.

To the ignorant this may be plausible but to anyone who actually paid attention in high school science classes, it is nothing more than another ridiculous folly on the part of the snake-oil merchant.

His timeframe is "less than 10 years", something that can't possibly happen.

Just like his plans to colonise Mars, these moon cities are predicated on getting the Starship to work "as advertised". Remember that it still hasn't done a single orbital flight and in order to make it to the Moon it'll have to be refueled in orbit by a series of other Starship flights and by an as-yet unproven fuel-transfer technology.

Even if it was possible to get a suitably high cadence of launches and trips to the moon, the cost would be enormous -- who's going to pay?

Another problem with building cities on the moon are the environmental issues. For a start, the moon spends 75 percent of its time outside the protection of Earth's magnetosphere. This means that those living on a lunar city would be exposed to the solar wind and a much higher level of cosmic radiation than is healthy.

A few days outside the earth's magnetosphere, as the Apollo astronauts experienced, is one thing. Spending months or years in such an environment is going to significantly shorten your lifespan.

Musk is also relying heavily on his Optimis humanoid robots to do a lot of the construction and maintenance work in the creation of such a city. The reality is that Optimus is, at this stage, just a puppet -- operated remotely by a human and incapable of any significant autonomy. Without that autonomy this robot would be pretty near useless for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the significant transit time of commands and video to/from the moon (around 1.25 seconds).

This latency makes the realtime operation of a remotely controlled puppet incredibly difficult and would hugely slow down any operations it attempted to perform.

My prediction?

In 10 year's time there will not be a lunar city (or even a permanently manned lunar base) built by Elon Musk and he'll have come up with some other way to pivot and divert the attention of a population that is becoming increasingly dumbed-down by swiping TikTok videos.

Carpe Diem folks!

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