Musk and Mars....???

Today's 'Question Everything' is: "Has this guy had a good clear look at Mars?"

Forget imaginative 'artist's conceptions' and daydreams of playing God on an unclaimed planet. There are some hard cold facts to consider. Like no breathable atmosphere, and very little of any other kind except toxic gases. No magnetic field for navigation purposes. No fresh water as we would define it. No climate, no vegetation, no arable land as we know it, no food supplies, and no source of help or rescue closer than Earth, six to eight months away. And it costs over a million dollars per pound to land anything there, including people, in case any are crazy enough to try it. 

If that isn't enough of a deterrent, it's out on the bitter edge of the habitable zone around our sun, and even if it had air and water, those would be frozen most of the time. And as I've said before, we're probably not looking at a complete planet these days. We're probably looking at what's left of one after it got hit by a large meteoroid billions of years ago, and had its crust punctured by that impact. Can you imagine the kind of explosion that would create inside its molten core, and what that kind of blast would do to the planet as a whole? Apparently, not enough consideration has been given to the results of that event. There are probably significant parts of Mars now missing as a result of that impact and its aftermath, among them, its surface waters and atmosphere. The bulk of the atmosphere probably got burned off during the explosion when that meteoroid hit the molten magma of the planet's core. And that impact also would explain why Mars now has no magnetic field like Earth.

Based on our present knowledge of Mars, it seems more sensible to leave its exploration to robotic rovers of the kind already deployed for that purpose.