So... Elon Musk May Find... There Are Some Rides He CANNOT Just "Buy." Heh.

As irony would have it, this three part sci-fi book I'm just now finishing makes a main character (set in the late stages of the 21^st Century) out of an ultra-rich guy who is Hell-bent on terraforming Mars. . . a very soft-echo of one Elon Musk (except that he's Russian). And the guy looks more and more to be. . . a baddy, as the second of the trilogy gets underway. [Very much like. . . the real one.] I am sure it is all just. . . coincidental, though (cough!).

Meanwhile with the Tangerine 2.0 honeymoon already falling apart between them, the real life story is looking more and more like he'll never get to Mars, at all -- let alone be green-lit to. . . terraform it. Here is this rather snarky Politico item, and a bit:

. . .Trump confidant Elon Musk wants NASA to drop its ambitious plans to return to the moon and instead head straight to Mars. Congress is ready to put up a fight.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who control NASA’s purse strings, want Americans to return to the lunar surface in 2027 — and they’re not willing to abandon that mission despite Musk’s obsession with skipping the moon for Mars. . . .

The SpaceX founder dreams of a Mars mission that would preserve human life beyond Earth, even if it costs hundreds of billions of dollars and poses extreme risks to those involved. He’s called colonization of the planet “life insurance for life.”

“We’re going straight to Mars,” Musk posted recently, adding that the moon focus was a “distraction.”

The Mars-first strategy, though, would likely find little support on Capitol Hill. . . .

Despite the more prosaic political lens in the above pull quote, in point of fact. . . crew safety would be a primary reason. NASA has admitted that the cancer risks from that duration of time in space -- outside our protective magnetosphere. . . will be daunting. And we collectively have not solved the "in capsule" shielding tech challenge. Not even remotely.

So it goes -- and life (again) is imitating art -- or is it. . . the other way around?

I dunno.

Grin.

नमस्ते