On the assumption that people will be living on earth for some time, Musk is cooking up plans for something he calls the Hyperloop. He won’t share specifics but says it’s some sort of tube capable of taking someone from downtown San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes. He calls it a “fifth mode of transportation”—the previous four being train, plane, automobile, and boat. “What you want is something that never crashes, that’s at least twice as fast as a plane, that’s solar powered and that leaves right when you arrive, so there is no waiting for a specific departure time,” Musk says. His friends claim he’s had a Hyperloop technological breakthrough over the summer. “I’d like to talk to the governor and president about it,” Musk continues. “Because the $60 billion bullet train they’re proposing in California would be the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile. They’re going for records in all the wrong ways.” The cost of the SF-LA Hyperloop would be in the $6 billion range, he says.
The estimated cost projections for the bullet train project keep getting bigger. I've seen estimates as high as $68 billion: and that is for construction alone (not including maintenance, etc). If Elon Musk can come up with a better idea, I hope we can remove enough of the red tape (that incidentally makes endeavors like this so expensive) to at least let him try.
The California "high speed" rail project is depressing.
In theory, I'm a huge fan of high speed rail. But the California project is going to end up costing over $100 billion, and everyone knows it. It's going to take decades to complete. If, indeed, it's ever completed. It's routed to go places no one wants to go. And, as Mr. Musk says, it' not actually going to be very fast. It's pretty much a classic textbook boondoggle.
I wish they'd cancel it and start over again from scratch in 10 years. It could still be finished faster.
The Minneapolis light rail uses the same equipment as Houston's light rail. The big difference is that the Minneapolis light rail goes between the airport, downtown, and the Mall of America. People can immediately see its value. Houston's light rail doesn't go to either of Houston's airports, even though it's sorely needed.
Note, though that the Houston light rail line connects two of the three big parts of Houston: Downtown and the Medical Center (+ the Museum district). I don't disagree that airport service is sorely needed, and the Galleria would be nice too, but it could be worse.
If the light rail went to the airports, then many, many more people would understand the value of it. The part of the populace that occasionally goes to the airport and would much rather not have to drive is much, much larger than the one that has to go between Downtown and the Medical Center and would much rather not have to drive.
Basically, light rail to the airports means game over to the opponents of light rail. Short of that, there's still a chance to convince a majority of people that it's only a boondoggle.
The estimated cost projections for the bullet train project keep getting bigger. I've seen estimates as high as $68 billion
Wait until it starts, it will at least double the initial projections. It sure makes you wonder if it's just payback to certain groups or spending to create (very expensive) jobs for a while.
Given Mars' weak gravitational field, extremely low atmospheric pressure, lack of breathable oxygen, deathly cold temperatures, and weak magnetic field (leading to high levels of radiation), he may well get his wish. Many others will likely get this wish against their will.
If he would like to get a taste of realistic Martian colonization here on Earth, may I suggest living underground in a windowless tank, surrounded by a partial vacuum, next to a nuclear reactor.
> Given Mars' weak gravitational field, extremely low atmospheric pressure, lack of breathable oxygen, deathly cold temperatures, and weak magnetic field (leading to high levels of radiation), he may well get his wish. Many others will likely get this wish against their will.
Who is sending folks to Mars against their will? More to the point, how do I provoke someone to do it to me?
The self sustaining communities in the middle of the sahara give me enormous hope for these types of projects. The self contained undersea habitats as well.
Actually, that's a big plus. Single Stage to Orbit and the simplified logistics would make access to the rest of the Solar System much, much easier. Heck, we could even build a Space Elevator on Mars with today's technology, if we really wanted to.
> If he would like to get a taste of realistic Martian colonization here on Earth, may I suggest living underground in a windowless tank, surrounded by a partial vacuum, next to a nuclear reactor.
Where's the sense of adventure and romance in that?
Lots of explorers of yore could have met with the similar arguments. Some people can stay behind and man/woman? the home front, others can go off to explore and expand our existence. Not that there's no cost to it, but let's hope, that overall, it's a net plus.
As a species we have wanderlust built-in, perhaps.
When I was young and was reading a lot of pulp science fiction books, I was in love with Mars. But those books are fiction. The reality of Mars is not a great cosmic adventure. Mars is a shithole.
Don't get me wrong--Mars should be explored, and we will find some truly breathtaking things. And if we find life on Mars, the scientific paydirt will be huge.
However, the great finds and exploration of Mars will be done by robots. Sending humans to Mars (or colonizing Mars) is a lot like sending humans to the Sahara desert. Colonize the Sahara? But it's so... dull. And not fun. That's not very romantic. Ultimately that is the reality of 99.9% of Mars.
If people are going to die on Mars, they should know that they are not doing it in the name of science and exploration--that task is best left to the robots--but rather in the name of vanity and human tourism. Until Mars can be terraformed to the point where it has 100% of Earth's gravity (I don't even want to contemplate the effects of 1/3 of Earth's gravity on a developing fetus, for example), and a breathable atmosphere, it will be visited only by tourists and robots.
There are a lot of things that humans can do that robots can't. Adaptability/flexibility/decision-making are the biggest areas in which robots are very deficient. When the RTT is over a year, flexibility of the payload is a pretty big deal. We're also ultimately not just doing this for scientific knowledge, but also knowledge about how to best become an interplanetary species, and those kinds of questions are usually best answered with humans acting as willing test subjects/participants.
Have you ready the Red / Green / Blue mars trilogy? It might change your mind. Also, not that it's possible, but why would you want to increase martian gravity? 1/3G would be awesome for sport.
I loved those books to death, but the parent is right. Mars is a rustier version of the moon with slightly better scenery.
Imagine a life where you as a native Martian never get to go outside, never get to feel fresh air, never get to meet a stranger, never get to storm off, never get the chance to live truly alone, never get to punch a wall, and never get a chance to see another world. No streams, no swimming, no oceans, no forests, nothing.
The footprints you make will still be there a hundred million years later. Mars is a one-way trip to a terribly cold and lonely place.
I think the disconnect here is that there are in fact people who have considered such things and still want to go. It's the pioneer spirit. Hardship is part of the appeal.
Absolutely. I really admire the human spirit and how it's gotten us so far, so fast. People will absolutely be willing to sacrifice their lives for Mars, and some people will go to Mars not expecting to die, but will anyway.
However, I think these people should know that they might actually be dying in vain, because only a smattering of people will actually end up living on Mars, IMHO. Mars has a reputation as being a real planet but really it's a barren rock that's not practically habitable. Not excited about living on the Moon? Than likely you won't be excited about living on Mars.
There is a good argument to be made that humans should live on Mars if only as insurance against some apocalypse on Earth. IMHO, we'd be better off investing in spinning colonies in space (a.k.a. Ringworld) where it's easier to construct something that provides artificial gravity, sunlight, and radiation shielding via artificial iron cores, perhaps mined from asteroids.
Why would you never get to go outside? A pressure suit would be fine. Also, if colonization was an ongoing thing, there'd probably be new colonists to meet in waves.
The foetus basically develops in a zero g environment anyway- being suspended in liquid- its on the adult that the major effects would occur.
And I would put my money on the body adapting very well to a reduced gravity environment if it was born into it. I have no proof for this apart from the adaptability of genetics and development.
.... I want us to go to mars. I want us to become an interplanetary species. I want us to travel to the stars, hollow out asteroids, wack nuclear engines on them, and get them up to relativistic speeds.
Because if we don't, what is the point of.... All of this?
Anyway I'm a dreamer, but I'm also a scientist, and I suppose the two go together fairly often.
Being suspended in a liquid and zero-g are not at all the same thing. Gravity still pulls, e.g., you will still feel what is up and down.
Experiments with rats indicate that zero-g is not a good environment to have babies, but also that it is possible. In any case we could just create artificial gravity.
My best hope for humanity is transhuman: to adapt ourselves to our environment. Think the ousters in Hyperion.
Many others will likely get this wish against their will.
Really? I suspect that if you offered a million one way tickets to mars and advertised it as almost certain death, they would sell out in less than an hour.
"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success."
The estimated price tag for a good shot at implementing SENS and demonstrating robust reversal of aging in mice is $1B: $10M/year for ten years in each of seven research programs, plus some padding.
I'm not a billionaire (yet), but that's why 100% of my charitable donations go to the SENS foundation. Every marginal dollar has a much higher expected utility there than anywhere else that I've found.
Industrial Progress is a very important and practical cause, and this group has a very effective leader who is actually having some effect at persuading people (particularly people in industry) and providing them with better ideas. And it's cheap. SENS needs a billion. A few hundred thousand would be huge here.
I second this recommendation, CIP has been doing an amazing job at showing how and why industrial progress is amazingly beneficial to human prosperity, while dispelling the common critiques the "green" movement uses to dispel this idea.
Both SENS and CIP are hugely important ventures that people should look into in my book.
Jobs was never a cool guy in my book. For me, Steve Jobs was an egocentric and self-centered. Elon is a visionary, just read this quote:
“I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”
Steve isn't even near to the impact of what Elon will have on humanity.
And unlike Jobs, Elon is behind much of the engineering and research his companies work on.
And also unlike Jobs, you can sense a certain humility in how Elon talks both about himself and about others.
When Neil Armstrong spoke against private space companies, Elon didn't come out and demonize him, I remember watching him cry on camera when asked about it, and said he wished he'd come to Space X to see the work they were doing.
You don't see Elon going "thermonuclear" on his competition and trying to bury them, even when they are huge mega-corporations like Boeing that used all their government connections and lobbying to try to bury him.
Well, you're comparing two visionary entrepreneurs at different stages right now. Jobs wasn't quite as arrogant after he fell from the throne and had to start from scratch (Pixar, NeXT). That's about where I'd put Elon right now, even though the circumstances of his departure from PayPal was of course entirely different. I'd like to see him once SpaceX or Tesla becomes a megacorporation like Apple - the judgement is still out on that. You can't compare the way SpaceX acts towards Boeing with Apple towards its competitors - one is an underdog that has nothing to loose, one is a goliath with the world to loose.
But Jobs wasn't as humble and polite even when Apple was an underdog and was competing in the world of IBM. Weren't those interviews where he calls out Microsoft as "they have bad taste" the same time period?
It was 1996 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upzKj-1HaKw). No, Jobs was certainly never as humble as Musk and I never said that, they definitely have different characters. My point was that we still have to wait on Musk, this man and his companies are far away from their goals and it remains to be seen whether they can afford to keep being idealistic.
And don't get me wrong, I'm a space freak, I root for that guy as much as anyone.
What you can surmise from that is that they've both probably taken some acid in their lifetimes. If Jobs were alive and younger, he too would probably have been at Burning Man, place of many a revelation to the technologically inclined.
I think the value of that should not be misunderstood. Imagine the reverse: it would be quite damaging if something made you think that your ideas were less profound or worthwhile than usual.
(I am saying this as someone who has never taken LSD, so take my take on it with a grain of salt I guess.)
In Star Trek IV, Kirk says to a marine biologist that Spock is strange because he did a little too much "LDS." This was paricularly amusing to viewers who grew up in Utah.
I respect Elon's ambition and the perspective he shares in that quote but both Space X and Tesla only continue to exist by feeding at the government trough.
Personal and mobile computing have lead to massive productivity increases that affect almost everything that we do on this planet.
I'd also argue that the desire to improve space and ground transportation aren't the result of an enlightened human consciousness that discovered the right questions to ask. Using less energy to move around isn't going to improve the persistent suffering humanity experiences.
Jobs appears to have understood this fact but was unfortunately resigned to it rather than determined to fight it:
What's the biggest surprise this technology will deliver?
The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't.
That's going to break people's hearts.
I'm sorry, it's true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much - if at all.
one man's "feeding at the government trough" is another man's "putting taxpayer's money to good, productive use in projects too long-term for the perennially distracted market to care about them"
The market is the best way to gauge how useful people find things. The fact that they can't make a profit within the market is a sign that they're spending more wealth than they are creating.
What I personally like about Elon - he has demonstrated that he gambles with his own money. This makes him fairly unique among serial entrepreneurs who love to raise massive rounds for their next projects even after a prior successful "exit", using lame excuses about discipline, supervision, reality checks, second opinion, etc.
I don't know if "gambles" is he right word - he's not a complete idiot after all. He puts his money where his mouth is, because he really think his projects are that important. He's taken every chance to prove that he believes in his visions, which is truly inspiring.
I appreciate this sentiment, but it makes me think of "The queen is dead. Long live the queen."
"Visionaries" and "cool people" are in many ways good and bad, flawed and gifted, like you and me. It does not serve any good purpose to hold either Jobs or Elon up to the spotlight as if they are any sort of savior.
If anything good comes in the next 10-20 years, it will be because of not only Elon, but people like the rest of us that choose to do something, not wait on others to do something great for us. That said, there is nothing wrong (to say the least) with someone who can drum up the troops.
`Blankenship, who used to work a few doors down from Jobs, credits Musk with hiring experts and letting them work without too much oversight. “This is the first place I’ve worked that’s going to change the world,” he says.`
I liked this quote where the dude who worked for apple say he's finally working somewhere that's going to change the world... I like Elon better than Jobs(I've never really liked Jobs tbh, except for some genius quotes)
I started looking at jobs two weeks ago after Neil Armstrong died out of curiosity. I have a job at a place I love doing astrophysics, and I can't complain much about that, but I need to update my resume anyway.
I recently discovered who Elon Musk was and I'm always astonished to read about him, and realize that he seems to have all the dreams that I have; plus the money, the wisdom and the experience to accomplish them.
I never had a model or a 'hero' in my life, but I find it hard to deny Elon this role. He's kind of imposing himself to me.
For some parts, he pisses me off. He doing it removes me the feeling that my dreams were mine. On the other sides, my pride motivates me to accept his theft as a challenge to try at surpassing him.
Now I'm only 25, so I guess I still have the time required to get on par, if I keep working hard enough.
Well, right now I'm still doing my undergrad and they (SpaceX) only take US citizens or permanent residents for internships and COOP terms (I assume because of the legal complications given the nature of their work).
But I know your company does take interns and you guys are at a 5 mins walk from my campus. So on a short term side, I'm focused on building my skill set for an internship in your shop! (Sorry for the cheap plug!)
> I assume because of the legal complications given the nature of their work.
Unfortunately, yes. Google "ITAR aerospace" for why :\
Still, the American aerospace industry has a long and illustrious tradition of bringing in experts from around the world and getting them citizenship. Get an internship somewhere that isn't ITAR-restricted and get yourself on the fast track for a green card.
Enough of the hero worship. If Musk gets on one of his rockets in 15 years and launches it towards Mars, he will certainly die. Long before he reaches Mars.
Yes, he's a great, fascinating man. I enjoy observing this stuff as much as the next guy. But Good God - stop slobbering on yourselves. This is marketing fluff of the highest order.
Exactly the opposite. It's the grand marketing of an even grander vision - the ultimate vaporware.
Where people with can dream up supersonic aircraft that are massively more efficient than the highly refined subsonic craft that have been built by thousands of very smart people over decades.
Where magic tubes will transport people near the speed of sound whenever they want for a mere $6B.
Where the realities of space flight are to be ignored because, well, the leader of the venture is a really good business man and has a lot of charisma.
Is this not the same hacker news where people get bent out of shape when Apple bends the truth on their iPhone marketing copy?
Is this not the same hacker news where people get bent out of shape when Apple bends the truth on their iPhone marketing copy?
Er, no, it really isn't.
The implication here is that he is actually working on these things, having had a "breakthrough" over the summer. It could be absolute crap, yes. But he has a number of previous successes that indicate he is capable of delivering. The overall point is that he isn't just dreaming, he is clearly spending a lot of money on doing as well.
And finally, the results have been fucking great. The Tesla Roadster is absolutely unbelievable, it's more fun than most roller coasters. According to the reviews in car magazine, the Model S is similarly unbelievable in similar and other ways (fantastic ride/handling, absurd acceleration, great cargo capacity, seating for 5 comfortably, 7 with kids). And SpaceX is demolishing the other space launch companies in their space in terms of price to fulfill a launch. He's got way more license to dream up crazy things without being called out than pretty much anyone else alive.
Musk's reality distortion field puts Jobs' to shame.
He said he's going to send people to Mars in 15 years. Here is one question. How often do you get a chance to launch a rocket to Mars? (Hint: it's not often). How many opportunities to send test missions and support gear will there be in the next 15 years? How long will it take to build all that stuff? A year? Two years? More? You just lost another mission.
Have they figured out how to get food there? Have they figured out how to breathe there? Have they even designed the vehicle or even the thermal system (for one example out of many) required to keep a human at a survivable temperature for the trip? Have they done anything to solve the incredibly difficult problems that we face in this area? The results here are not 'fucking great', they're non-existant.
And the claim of a VTOL supersonic jet that is a breakthrough in efficiency over traditional jets? Where are the results? There are none. zero. It's fantasy.
The results have been great for Paypal, impressive for Tesla, and SpaceX has proven a great contribution to the existing aerospace industry. Great for Musk - he has accomplished much and history will remember him as an influential industrialist and visionary. But BS is BS, no matter who spews it.
EDIT: This thread has gotten lots of downvotes, but not one substantive comment on what Musk has done that would indicate that these stories are anything but puffery aimed at gaining publicity for his much more mundane (but still rather impressive) efforts. When is the first Mars launch again? What will be the payload? Tick tock - that deadline will be here before you know it. The time has past for vision - the timetable Musk has outlined requires action now. Action that is conspicuously absent.
The fact that you're getting downvoted aggressively for being a cynic on one of the most cynical sites should be an indicator that your cynicism is a bit out of control.
Just because Musk talks about early ideas that are extremely unlikely (like the VTOL jet) and may not pan out does not mean he's automatically a crackpot spewing marketing fluff. He's earned the right to espouse bold ideas.
I doubt people automatically assume that he's correct about being on Mars in 15 years, but if he's saying it, maybe he's got a reasonable plan/timeline for it. Musk is an engineer, and from what I've seen of him, he seems like less of a bullshitter than the average businessperson. Combined with his consistent delivery of results, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt.
As for launch windows, the energy required is at a minimum every 26 months, and there's a global min twice every ~17 years, the next two being in 12 and 14 years, so you'd have the easiest time then. [1] If they have a non-marginal plan, then maybe one of the relative minima would be sufficient.
What makes you say that action is absent? My impression is that SpaceX has actually been tackling a very aggressive timetable in general. I believe they're working on the Falcon Heavy and crew modules right now and they're proposing a launch for a Dragon capsule to Mars in 2018.
People thought he wouldn't be able to put together a car company.
People thought there was No way in hell private industry (despite NASA help) would be able to achieve the worlds lowest launch costs and get something up to the iss docking within 10 years from beginning.
Ps. You can launch to mars as often as you like, it's just going to cost more fuel. Even if it takes 30 years, that's still soon.
But he did.
Why can't we do anything we put our minds to? And he has a brilliant mind and that industrial spirit that you see in all the great industrialists through history. Enough of the circle jerk.
The big problem with Jupiter is its particularly intense magnetic field and Van Allen radiation belt. It is going to be too dangerous to approach without a breakthrough in radiation shielding for a long time yet. On the other hand, once we get fusion, its containment is likely to be magnetic, which may be adaptable to shielding.
I have always told myself that ending my days on another planet will be an absolute definition of success for myself no matter what else I don't manage to accomplish. It's a sufficient but not necessary condition. In ten years I hope to be working in a business related to space exploration.
I love what Musk is doing, but both of his current engineering successes---Space X and Tesla---involve building well-understood vehicles, just faster and at less cost than competitors. Doing entirely novel projects like a manned mission to Mars or some new kind of mass transportation system are orders of magnitude more difficult and uncertain, and I think he's grossly underestimating the time and cost for either of his more ambitious new goals. I'd like to see him make plain vanilla space transportation and electric cars into business successes comparable to PayPal before he moves on to Mars and Hyperloop.
I also hope he'll be making lots of money on Tesla and SpaceX. I don't know whether he'll be able to make going to Mars pay, but the money he'll spend will do the market some good.
I would like to see him do both. Even if the Mars stuff doesn't work out perfectly on his ambitious timeline SpaceX devoting resources to pushing the boundaries as well as refining the well known processes is going to create more innovation in the long run.
I would too, but in terms of immediate impact Tesla will have a greater social and economic significance for the planet than the Mars mission, and the company is really only getting started. I would hate to see Musk get bored with it and move on to a new toy while Tesla fails for lack of leadership.
Re: “Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.”
I respect what the guy has done. But a vertical liftoff supersonic jet is going to be more difficult than anything he had encountered, including rockets.
His entire life seems to have been spent doing progressively harder things. I would be surprised if he decided what he is currently doing is as hard as it is going to get.
Old things should go away after some time and make space for new things. Dieing is the prefered way. As long as we have limited space and resources. ;o) Otherwise there will be no real development. We will more or less stuck in where we are.
Saying it that way makes it sound like a new retirement community. Why not say he would like to live on Mars? Maybe because it's a dead planet and not very livable.
I think the point is that he knows while he still has many years of his life ahead of him, eventually he'll be faced with mortality, and when that time comes, he would like to have pushed humankind's ability to reach Mars to the point where he could step foot there, live for awhile, and eventually be buried there.
> Why not say he would like to live on Mars? Maybe because it's a dead planet and not very livable.
One could grow plants on Mars. It has close to a 24 hour day-night cycle, and enough sunlight. Growing plants on continental agricultural scales is infeasible with artificial light, but on Earth and Mars, you don't need that. All you need are pressurized greenhouses, and you could have full-blown agriculture on Mars. The industrial processes for creating polymer films from Martian resources on Mars to enable this have already been worked out.
With some genetic engineering, we might not even need the greenhouses.
This is exactly what I tell people and they're surprised. If I was offered the chance to homestead Mars with the caveat that LEO and landing must be reasonable safe so I don't die in the boring parts, I'd sign up right away!
You and a lot of people. I'm sure a big chunk of the seasteaders would jump at the chance to live on a moon city.
So here is the entrepreneurial challenge, believe Elon, in that he will make it possible to go to Mars, and before that it will be a lot easier to send stuff to the Moon. What can you start researching today so that 10 years from now when everyone realizes that this is going to come to pass you'll be way ahead of the game and visionary?
What about early settlement tech. Not only the habitats etc. but procedures a.s.o. for the first years: in what sequence to create stuff, run explorations, have emergency routines etc. all under the tight constraints of an early colony.
Intelligent robotics as assistants and autonomous explorers etc. with a focus on space conditions.
Advanced space medicine (say, transhuman spaceflight), modifications for the body, brain-machine-interfaces etc., there are many non-trivial issues: gravity, temperature, light, acceleration, radiation, ...
I've been thinking about the sequencing question a bit (steps to go from "we're here" to "We're ready to accept visitors".
There are some interesting papers on microwaving the regolith into a concrete like substance. Water generation or acquisition will be key of course so different water strategies are interesting. Water mining robots may be key.
"SolarCity, where Musk is chairman of the board, is a player in the residential and commercial solar markets, with more than 28,000 customers, and is expected to go public imminently at a value of about $1.5 billion."
We're valuing crap, err FB, at $50 billion these days. Why is a company with actually something to offer to society getting valued at only $1.5bn ?
I wonder if the Hyperloop is a maglev propulsion system contained within a vacuum tube? That would essentially be space travel - on earth. It would also allow for efficient use of energy, as long as the vacuum could be easily maintained.
Most people want to die in peace, but when you have to go to another planet to get peace then you just know noise polution has got a little bit out of hand.
McCoy: Don't pander to me, kid. One tiny crack in the hull, and our blood boils in thirteen seconds. Solar flare might crop up, cook us in our seats. And wait till you're sitting pretty with a case of Andorian shingles. See if you're still so relaxed when your eyeballs are bleeding! Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.
Substitute Andorian shingles with just going crazy being cooped up in a tiny ship.
Easy, remember a few years ago when some guys at NASA proposed that the first guys to Mars should be in their early 60s?
That's because getting there is not the problem, the problem are the copious amounts of radiation you would absorb on the way which means that even if you make it back you probably wont live much more.
So what those guys proposed was sending old astronauts on a one-way trip.
I hate to break it to you, but everything NASA builds is built and operated by private companies. SpaceX is an incremental improvement on something that has been done for decades. That is a far cry from Musk's fantastic claims.
Commercially operated: much less so (with exceptions, e.g. shuttle processing was kind-of commercial)
Commercially designed: nope.
The commercial resupply contracts may not quite meet everyone's idea of what "commercial" means (and there certainly was/is a lot of NASA scrutiny of the spacecraft -- rather less of the launch vehicle), but it's still a substantially different model from anything NASA has tried on a major project in the last half century.
This is just not true. NASA outsources pretty much everything to private companies. I designed NASA hardware myself while employed by a private company.
It always astonishes me that not only did Heinlein invent the Segway ("The Road Must Roll"), he also invented the idea of people like Elon Musk (as D.D. Harriman in "Requiem").
Conincidentally, I actually had a rather lucid dream about this a few nights ago. I can see it is possible even with today's technology to get there and stay there. It's just a matter of cost and inclination.
We need to send lots and lots of larger seed probes out there first though - not the limited scope probes and landers we're using now, but general purpose, long life scouting probes with engineering, tooling and life support payloads.
The estimated cost projections for the bullet train project keep getting bigger. I've seen estimates as high as $68 billion: and that is for construction alone (not including maintenance, etc). If Elon Musk can come up with a better idea, I hope we can remove enough of the red tape (that incidentally makes endeavors like this so expensive) to at least let him try.