The founder of the Mars Society has accused SpaceX CEO Elon Musk of derailing existing plans to explore and visit the Red Planet.
Robert Zubrin, who has coauthored hundreds of papers and laid out several blueprints as to how to settle on Mars, told Agence France-Presse in an interview that Musk is "absolutely instrumental in opening up this opportunity to get humans to Mars, both through the development of Starship and also the inspiration that has caused."
But given the "hubris and arrogance" he has since bred — Zubrin went as far as to compare him to failed European dictator Napoleon Bonaparte — our future efforts to travel to the distant planet over 140 million miles away could be in peril.
For our effort to send humans to Mars "to succeed, it has to go beyond these — this initiative cannot be seen as a Musk hobbyhorse or a Trump hobbyhorse — it must be seen, at a minimum, as America's program, or preferably the Free World's program," Zubrin told AFP.
The publication of the interview comes in the wake of an incredibly messy divorce between Musk and president Donald Trump, though Zubrin made his comments before the relationship disintegrated. The two have been going at each other's throats and even threatening to cut off NASA's access to space.
Musk's dreams of making humanity interplanetary by establishing a city on Mars appear to have slipped significantly on his list of priorities. The mercurial CEO was heavily criticized for abandoning his businesses in favor of overseeing a disastrous gutting of the US federal government, and is now racing to make Tesla investors happy as sales continue to plummet worldwide.
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