Humpty Dumpty Part 2: Musk's Further Fallacies

I hinted (not so subtly) in my last post that Elon Musk likes to brag about solving the impossible problem of achieving cheap space flight because he wants to boast of being a totally awesome dude who is smarter than all the rest of us.  I also mentioned that Elon Musk's company SpaceX developed fully reusable orbital launch vehicles in the 2010's.  

However, on further examination I found that this is not true.  SpaceX has not, I repeat, has not developed the world's first fully reusable orbital launch rocket.  In fact, no one has.  It turns out that Musk has merely promised that SpaceX is on the verge of developing the world's first fully reusable rocket.  In an article by Stephen Kuper published in SpaceConnect Magazine in November 2025 titled "‘Next year’ Musk predicts ‘full reusability’ rocket imminent", Musk himself admits that his company has not achieved full reusability yet.  At best, his rockets are only partially reusable.  Also, there is an interesting piece also published in 2025 in Intereconomics Review of European Economic Policy titled, "The Missing Rocket: An Economic and Engineering Analysis of the Reusability Dilemma in the European Space Sector".  This article provides a further examination of the economic viability of reusable orbital launch systems like the SpaceX rockets, and discovers that these rockets have certain unaddressed economic liabilities.  

Lastly, it must be mentioned once again that SpaceX is a money-losing business despite its frequent rocket launches.  It may be that at least part of SpaceX's losses are due to a company policy of predatory pricing in an attempt to drive competitors out of business.

Humpty Dumpty's Orbital Wall

A month ago I wrote that a Chinese friend of mine who is an English-Mandarin practice buddy with me mentioned that Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire.  I pointed out that many rich and powerful people in the West (particularly in the U.S.) have skillfully constructed a set of larger-than-life myths and narratives around their own supposed awesomeness, and that too many people in the rest of the world have fallen for these myths and narratives.  I'd like to suggest that the reality of both Musk and of his notional wealth is far less impressive than the myth.  Musk is a major mouthpiece of aspirational propaganda, boasting that he is a self-made man who earned his wealth solely by means of his own vast capabilities and intelligence.  (Oh, if only you imitate and emulate his "atomic habits", you too can become just as rich!  Or maybe not...)

But the actual foundation of Musk's wealth rests on five less than praiseworthy pillars, namely:

• Wealth inherited from a family that got rich and made itself great by exploiting defenseless human beings;
• Monopolistic and monopoly-building practices;
• Corrupt and misanthropic friends in high places (such as his former BFF Donald Grump);
• Corporate welfare obtained via those friends in high places;
• And taking credit for technologies he did not himself invent.  (See also "Tesla Existed Before Elon Musk: Founders On How They Pitched The Idea," Green Car Reports, February 2021.)

One of those technologies is spaceflight, specifically spaceflight via reusable rockets.  It is not surprising that Musk would seek to take credit for this achievement, as doing so would boost his prestige as a supposedly brilliant man who is able to solve problems that no one else can solve.  But the reality of things is very different.  Indeed, anyone with a functioning memory who was born in 1970 or who knows how to read a history book will remember the Space Shuttle developed by the United States in the 1970's, and which first flew in 1981.  It should be noted that all of the components of the Space Shuttle were fully reusable except for the main fuel tank for the liquid-fueled engines on the orbiter portion of the Shuttle launch vehicle.  In addition, the Soviet Union developed its own mostly reusable shuttle, named the Буран (Buran) which flew one mission in 1988.  It is true that SpaceX and other private companies developed fully reusable orbital launch vehicles in the 2010's.  However, please note that for a given payload mass launched into orbit, a fully reusable launch vehicle saves only the expense of the launch vehicle.  A fully reusable launch vehicle which launches a given mass into orbit will actually use more fuel than a fully or partially expendable launch vehicle launching the same mass.  So there is a certain unavoidable price to be paid for spaceflight even when using fully reusable launch vehicles.

Now let's zoom in on a particular example of the use of spaceflight technology: namely, the launching of swarms (or "constellations") of satellites into low Earth orbit (or LEO, for those who like acronyms).  Some of the purposes of launching such swarms include accurate mapping and building of geographic information system (GIS) models, military spying, weather mapping and forecasting, and telecommunications.  Elon Musk's company SpaceX has for several years been building its own proprietary swarm of satellites in low-earth orbit.  Its swarm is, of course, the Starlink "constellation".  But we must note once again that Musk is not the first person to come up with this idea, nor is his company the first to try to implement it.  The first telecommunications satellite constellation was actually conceived by Motorola in 1987 and launched into low Earth orbit from 1993 to 1998 by rockets commissioned by Motorola.  This network is known as the Iridium network, and it is still operational. The only innovation which Musk has brought to the field of launching swarms of LEO satellites is the attempt to use such privately-owned swarms as a tool of monopoly-building.  Toward this goal, Starlink currently has 10,413 satellites in orbit, with plans to increase the number of satellites in its swarm to 42,000 satellites, with the ostensible goal of providing "fast internet service anywhere on earth."

There are just a few problems with Starlink, however.  One such problem is the obvious fact that in order for satellite operators to get along peacefully with each other, there must be rules and approvals to determine the altitudes at which satellite swarms can operate.  The Starlink swarms operate in two shells, one at altitudes of between 525 and 614 kilometers (326 to 332 miles), and a lower shell altitude of between 340 and 360 kilometers (210 to 220 miles) above earth.  With so many Starlink-owned satellites operating in these altitude bands, other satellite operators are increasingly being squeezed out.  Thus Musk is constructing the first space-based monopoly.

Is his monopoly sustainable?  I would argue that in the long run, it is not.  Why?  First, because spaceflight in its present state of development is inherently unsustainable.  This is especially true of chemically-powered spaceflight.  Every launch of a launch vehicle represents the consumption of a certain quantity of nonrenewable resources.  This consumption includes the propellants used in chemical rockets as well as the dry mass of rocket and satellite structures that are eventually launched into orbit.  If the satellite is launched into a high enough orbit (or worse yet, into an escape trajectory), in most cases both it and the final stage of the rocket that launched it are never coming back to earth.  If on the other hand the satellite is launched into LEO, sooner or later the materials of which the satellite is made will be turned into a thin cloud of gaseous metal oxides when the satellite's orbit degrades due to atmospheric drag and the satellite burns up in the earth's atmosphere.  This means that most satellites can never be recycled.  If moving to a circular economy is the key to building a sustainable industrial society of the future, then commercial LEO satellite swarms like Starlink are like a hole in a bag of sugar carried outdoors during a rainstorm - a leakage of something precious, a leakage which can never be recovered.

This is true especially because the materials used to make satellites include rare, high-value strategic minerals which are also sought after by nations who want to use these materials to develop other advanced technologies.  As commercial operators of LEO satellite swarms gobble up increasing amounts of these minerals, they will find themselves in increasingly direct conflict with other actors who also want to use these minerals for their own purposes.  They will also face worsening shortages.  I have mentioned that when a LEO satellite burns up in atmospheric re-entry, its materials are turned into unrecoverable smoke.  Because Starlink satellites operate at such low altitudes, they don't last long in orbit.  (See "Decay time estimate for LEO spacecraft", Niccolai and Mengali, Acta Astronautica, December 2024, and "Starlink Constellation: Deployment, Configuration, and Dynamics", Ali, et al, arXiv, March 2026.)    According to at least one source, one to two Starlink satellites burn up each day.  These satellites must be replaced with new ones in order to maintain the desired number of satellites in the swarm.  This replacement represents yet more consumption of nonrenewable rare strategic resources.

Lastly there is the ever-increasing risk of collisions between satellites when a multitude of satellites has to operate in a very narrow altitude range close to the Earth.  Please note that a collision between satellites moving at a relative velocity of thousands of miles per hour with respect to each other is not the same as a collision between two cars driven by a couple of impatient boneheads on the 605 freeway in Los Angeles County.  In the case of the road-bound speedsters, the collision debris will be spread over an area of perhaps a few dozen square yards at the very worst.  But a collision between satellites can produce tens of thousands of small fragments, each of which is traveling at orbital velocity, and each of which is in turn able to destroy or seriously damage other satellites which have been placed into the same orbital zone.  These small collision fragments can stay in orbit for much longer periods than the original satellites involved in the collision.  And as these fragments strike other satellites, they can in turn produce an increasing number of high-speed clouds of debris whose fragments strike still more satellites, in a chain reaction that eventually renders LEO unusable for satellites and unsafe for manned space flight that operates in the LEO altitude region.  Such a scenario is known as a Kessler syndrome.  Should the world experience a Kessler syndrome, either gradually or suddenly, it would be game over for Starlink.

The only reason why Starlink is valuable is because it has built a near-monopoly on satellite internet service.  According to one source, SpaceX (the parent company of Starlink) loses money every time it launches a rocket.  Musk's status as a trillionaire is built largely on a foundation of attempted monopolization of space in order to deliver a service to people who have been tricked into believing that they need this service.  We have seen that this foundation itself rests on some rather shaky ground.  What we can do is to give a bit of a shove to this foundation - namely, by learning not to need Elon Musk.  This should be a key strategic objective of strategic nonviolent resistance - namely, the destruction of monopolists by learning ways to stop needing their monopolies.  Once a sufficiently large number of people figures out how to make that happen, the monopolists will fall.  Then all the king's horses and all the king's men won't be able to put them back together again.

Megaprojects And The Curse of Babel

Today's post will be short.  I am zealously trying to guard my schedule because my business has three projects that are due within the next four weeks or so.  (This isn't much fun right now - I long to be an author of fiction sometimes, as I see pictures of authors with relaxed contemplative faces lounging at uncluttered desks...)  But I want to discuss the theme of last week's post a little more and offer a road map for further exploration.  

Last week's post discussed Elon Musk and his boasts that he will establish a colony on Mars.  That post described the physical challenges of trying to get to Mars via rockets whose thrust comes from chemical combustion.  Today I want to mention various estimates of the cost of such a venture.  According to a 2017 report by the Institute for Defense Analysis, the total cost of developing a manned mission to Mars is $120.6 billion in 2017 dollars.  According to former U.S. astronaut and ISS mission commander Steve Swanson, those costs would run from $100 billion to $500 billion.  Elon Musk is purportedly worth $195.6 billion at present.  He seems to have lost another $100 billion between the start of 2022 and now.  If he were to try to send even one mission to Mars out of his own pocket, I think it's safe to say that he would no longer be a high-flying celebrity afterward.  He might wind up needing to take a job as a shopping cart jockey or shelf stocker at a local supermarket.  (The Winco near my house is hiring, by the way.)

In other words, I don't think Musk has so much as a snowball's chance on Venus of sending anyone to Mars.  So why the hype about Musk and SpaceX, then?  That is a question whose answer will require a fair amount of research.  But its beginnings can be traced to the decision by the administration of George W. Bush to begin to privatize delivery of rocket-launched payloads into low Earth orbit.  Due to Musk's friendship with former NASA chief Michael Griffin, Musk's company was awarded the contract for the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program to develop commercial resupply rockets for the International Space Station in 2006, even though Musk's company "had never flown a rocket" before, according to Wikipedia.  This award is even more surprising, given that twenty well-established aerospace companies had also bid on the project.  

So it seems that from the start, SpaceX has been a beneficiary of corporate welfare.  And as a beneficiary of corporate welfare, SpaceX may well become a poster child of the effects of privatization on the ability of societies to engage in large-scale, transformative projects.  I'd like to suggest that privatized societies dominated by hyper-capitalists lose this ability over time.  I'd like to suggest further that societies which want to advance in substantive, paradigm-shifting ways need to learn to engage in megaprojects.  These megaprojects cannot be left entirely to the private sector.  Neither can they be entirely the province of governments.  Rather, both government and the private sector must learn to negotiate a healthy balance.  Where this balance is unhealthy, graft and corruption appear and megaprojects do not deliver on their promises.  Crony capitalism is a state of unbalance, and turning free market ideology into a fetish tends to turn societies into crony capitalist states dominated by large players with contradictory self-interests.  

The corrosive effect of crony capitalism on a society's ability to undertake large-scale projects is most clearly seen when a crony capitalist society is hit by a sudden challenge, test, or shock.  One example of this is the botched response of the Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina.  Another possible example may well be the botched response of the Japanese government and private industry to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  (Author Haruki Murakami offers a surprisingly insightful criticism of the response to Fukushima in his book Novelist as a Vocation.)  For an example of the damage which a self-inflicted shock can cause to the systems of a crony capitalist society, we need look no farther than the failure of Russian military hardware and supplies during Russia's attempt to conquer Ukraine.  By the way, that failure is a fine example of the propagation of the outworkings of damnation in a society that ought to be damned.  Putin has reaped what he has sown - and he is not enjoying the reaping.  My hope is that things become even more unpleasant for him and for the Russian military. 

If crony capitalism has extended even to space exploration, I imagine that space itself will inflict yet another unexpected shock.  Lives will be lost.  Because Musk seems to want to portray himself as a doer of megaprojects, the rest of us must ask whether he represents a case of healthy balance between the public and private sector, or whether he is actually a case of crony capitalism.

It would be instructive to delve in more detail into the subject of megaprojects, their role in societal development, and the potential for forfeiting this development by means of privatization and crony capitalism.  But I'm out of time today...

You Won't Get To Mars That Way

Making predictions is hard - especially about the future.

- Ancient Internet Saying

Elon Musk has been much in the news lately.  Elon is purported to be the richest man on earth, and his corps of public-relations spin doctors present him as a man whose wealth is largely self-made.  Like Stephen Wolfram, Musk talks much about his supposed "genius."  Not only does Musk appear to be a "cerebral narcissist," but he also appears to be a "somatic narcissist" as well, based on the fact that he posted pictures of himself fighting a sumo wrestler and that he challenged Vladimir Putin to a fight.  When people make such grandiose claims as his, it's only natural for objective observers to want to put such claims to the test.  I'd like to consider myself such an objective observer (although some may disagree).  Today's post will examine the claims of Musk through my particular lens, and will try to show Musk as a typical case of a certain symptom of late capitalism.  Note: I am not interested in Musk's claim to be a bad sumo-wrestling dude.  Maybe he can sort that out with other contestants on some American "reality TV" show.

First, let's consider Musk the late-capitalism phenomenon.  To me he seems to represent the kind of "hero" who would have been quite at home in an Ayn Rand novel such as Atlas Shrugged.  That is to say, he is a poster child for the assertion by many of the wealthiest members of the Right that transcendent projects of human endeavor are best handled by heroes who have enormous wealth and not by governments or the collective efforts of societies.  Such assertions are the basis for claims that privatizing of government services leads to better service for the citizens who depend on those services.  Of course, the actual track record of privatization is horrible, and includes people whose houses have burned down because they could not afford the services of privatized fire departments.  Other notable side effects of privatization include the monstrous expansion of the private prison industry as well as the creation of professional mercenary corporations like Blackwater.  

Those who promote the benefits of privatization claim that it saves public funds.  Yet these are often the recipients of massive corporate welfare payments to rich people, also known as government subsidies.  In this, Elon Musk is no exception.  Musk started life with massive advantages already in place, as he is the wealthy son of a white South African family which built its wealth by means of the apartheid regime during its existence in South Africa.  And the companies which Musk has founded since he came to the United States have all been the recipients of corporate welfare, as documented in the following articles:

• "Elon Musk, Welfare King!" - Reason Magazine, March 2021
• "After Elon Musk criticized Bernie Sanders' brand of socialism, Sanders took him to task for taking billions of dollars in government support" - Business Insider, August 2020
• "'Total Hypocrisy': Elon Musk Rebuked for Hit on EV Subsidies After Building Empire With Billions in Taxpayer Funds" - Common Dreams, December 2021
• "Elon Musk's Growing Empire Is Fueled by $4.9 Billion in Government Subsidies" - Los Angeles Times, May 2015

It is an open question whether most of Musk's business ventures would have survived without subsidies and other corporate welfare.  This is particularly true of Tesla.

Now among the claims which Musk has made, one of his most spectacular is that he will boldly take mankind where no man has gone before.  This claim also includes the claim that he, a private individual with enormous wealth, will manage this feat even though the space agencies of various governments have not managed to do this.  Therefore his claim goes beyond merely putting people into space.  It also transcends merely going to the moon.  Nay, it reaches even to the planet Mars.  It is this particular claim which I'd like to examine in more detail.

First, a bit of background about space travel.  To send a spacecraft from Earth to anywhere else, one must provide that spacecraft with a certain amount of kinetic energy.  That kinetic energy is given by the equation 

Kinetic Energy = 0.5 x (spacecraft mass) x (spacecraft velocity squared)

At a minimum, this amount of kinetic energy must be greater than the potential energy represented by the distance from your target to the surface of the Earth (and to a much lesser extent, the surface of the Sun since the sun is much farther away).  Potential energy represents the energy you must supply to an object to raise it a certain distance above the surface of a body that produces a gravitational field.  If Mars was stationary with respect to the Earth, then in order to reach Mars you would need to supply only the minimum kinetic energy required to equal the difference in potential energy of the gravitational field of the Earth and Sun at the position of Mars relative to the Earth's surface.  But it would take you a really long time to get to Mars!  

However, Mars is not stationary, but moving in its own orbit around the sun.  So your spacecraft must have additional velocity in order to catch up with Mars and enter into orbit around it.  Supplying the energy to move from a moving Earth to a moving Mars is an expensive proposition.  If we therefore wanted to supply only the minimum energy required for such a trip, we'd need to inject our spacecraft into what is known as a Hohmann transfer orbit.  A trip from Earth to Mars using a Hohmann orbit would take 259 days, according to the NASA source in the preceding link.  So a manned mission to Mars would require a spacecraft capable of keeping at least four people alive for nearly ten months - unless you wanted to bring those people alive and safe back to Earth again after their mission to Mars was completed, in which case your mission would require another 259 days, plus the time required for the Earth and Mars to align in such a way that a Hohmann transfer from Mars to Earth would be successful.  We're talking about a mission that could last over three and a half years.

That's a lot of time, and thus a manned spacecraft would require extensive life-support systems on the same order of magnitude as the systems on the International Space Station.  But there are two further wrinkles: first, the effects of prolonged weightlessness on human bodies, and second, the fact that astronauts would need to be shielded from lethal radiation from both cosmic rays and solar storms.  It is well-known by now that prolonged weightlessness produces harmful changes in human bodies (see this, this, and this, for instance), so missions that use Hohmann transfers might need some means of exposing humans to near-Earth gravity on a daily basis.  This would require centrifuges, which would add mass to the spacecraft.  Radiation shielding would also add mass.

So let's talk about mass.  The International Space Station has a mass of 450 tons and can support seven astronauts.  But the ISS is also regularly resupplied from Earth.  Let's optimistically assume that a crew of four astronauts would need a spacecraft with a mass of 200 tons for a Mars mission.  How much fuel would it take to get them to Mars?  The answer to that question is found in the rocket equation, namely

Wet mass (that is, rocket + fuel) = rocket mass x exp((change in velocity)/(exhaust velocity))

So for a rocket that had a 200-ton payload and that needed to change its velocity by an amount needed for a Hohmann orbit, we could calculate the fuel required.  I leave that exercise to you, although I will give you the escape velocity of the earth: 11.2 kilometers (or 7 miles) per second.  I'll also give you another hint: Elon Musk has focused on rockets which burn a mixture of liquid methane and liquid oxygen.  An optimistic exhaust velocity for such a mix is 3,780 meters per second according to one source.  If you do the math (which I don't have time to do now, but which I may get around to in the next week), you will see what a sizable amount of chemical propellant is required to get your spacecraft to Mars.  And we haven't begun to discuss how to get it back to Earth again!  To get a glimpse of how someone else solved the rocket equation, consider Expedition Mars by Martin J.L. Turner.  He calculated that a spacecraft with a mass of 145 tons would need a total fuel mass of 5,000 tons.  That's 10 million pounds of fuel.  And that's just to get to Mars.  It would take another 400 tons of fuel to return to Earth.

Now you can travel faster than the minimum required velocity for a Hohmann transfer, but that will require more fuel, and the fuel requirement increases exponentially the faster you want to go.  If you switch from chemical rockets to rockets powered by nuclear fission, it is possible to save a significant amount of reaction mass.  But worldwide rates of extraction of naturally occurring fission fuel have already peaked, according to the German Energy Watch Group.  Making artificial fission fuel in breeder reactors has never yet been commercially viable, although the process has been used to create small amounts of plutonium.  But breeder reactors don't last long, as they suffer from neutron embrittlement.  Building a fleet of fission-powered manned spacecraft might therefore not have much of a future.  So Musk might barely be able to send a few people to Mars (although he might bankrupt himself in the process), but it appears that neither he nor anyone else has the ability to establish a colony there.  Speaking of colonies, the colonists would likely need to carry soil or expensive chemical processing apparatus from Earth to Mars if they wanted to live there long-term.  The ground on Mars is toxic to Earth-based plants.  So forget about becoming a Martian farmer.  And Mars has no free oxygen or natural shielding from cosmic rays or radiation from solar flares.  It would be a really hard place to try to colonize.

And Musk's boast has been that he will establish a colony there.  Musk's boast about Mars thus appears to be a boast without much basis in fact.  It may be that during the last ten years we have developed the ability to send a 150-ton or 200-ton spacecraft to Mars - but the journey would have been prohibitively expensive even for governments, let alone individuals, which is why no government has done it.  I think putting humans in such a craft and bringing them back again alive is still beyond our capability.  Making such a mission pay benefits that are worth the expense is even farther beyond our capability.  The challenges of such a journey appear to place a limit on the modern myth of the uber-wealthy hyper-capitalist self-made hero.  These challenges demonstrate once again that there are challenges beyond the powers of any individual, challenges which can only be met by the collective response of societies.  Such a conclusion may cause some of Elon's flying monkeys to choke a bit - but such is life.  As for me, I don't think he, much less "we", will be going to Mars anytime soon.  Maybe Musk would be better off wrestling Putin.

P.S. For more information on the life-support challenges of a manned mission to Mars, please see "Red risks for a journey to the red planet: The highest priority human health risks for a mission to Mars," Nature, November 2020.

P.P.S Today's post is an example of the kind of post that I can currently write with only a modest amount of pain and suffering, since I already have a fairly large background knowledge of the subject and therefore I don't need to do as much research.  I still owe readers some posts which I promised over a year ago, but those posts will involve high levels of pain and suffering, due to the large amount of research and analysis involved.  Just saying that I haven't forgotten...  Also, I'm really irked by the way so many websites that present technical information have dumbed down their content over the last several years.  (See this for instance.)  Their coverage of many topics has collapsed into mere titillating "soundbytes" full of cute pictures and sometimes baseless hype, and their web pages are now full of paid ads, which reduces one's ability to take them seriously.  This is a crying shame.