Is Musk the messiah for the overpopulated people looking for homes ? Or Bezos the man?

**tipirneni** · 11-03-2018, 08:32 PM

Mars Society president Zubrin's Moon Direct plan solution for overpopulated places in India, Bangladesh & Pakistan ? Does it help the Indian SUbcontinent ?

The Moon Direct plan calls for using existing launch vehicles — specifically, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets — to help send equipment and eventually people directly to the lunar surface.

Uncrewed cargo missions could make use of the Falcon Heavy, while crewed missions would start with a Falcon 9 launch to the International Space Station or some other yet-to-be-built outpost in low Earth orbit.

The plan requires at least one puzzle piece that’s still missing: a Lunar Excursion Vehicle, or LEV, capable of landing two tons of payload onto the lunar surface. The LEV is what astronauts would ride from the Earth-orbiting platform to the lunar surface, and if the right infrastructure is in place, it could be refueled on the moon for making the return trip or traveling between sites on the moon.

Zubrin estimates the cost of the initial missions to get things started at $1.5 billion, followed by a yearly cost of $420 million to keep things going. “The point is, the heavy-lift vehicles are only needed in the initial stages,” he said.

That compares favorably with the outlook for NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket, which isn’t expected to start flying until 2020 at the earliest and may cost $1.5 billion or more per liftoff.

If moon missions can truly be done at lower cost, that would leave more money (and more willingness on the part of policymakers) to push onward to Mars. “The moon program does not have to be a tar baby that prevents you from doing anything else,” Zubrin said.

There’s a chance that Zubrin’s campaign for Moon Direct will make him, once again, a voice crying in the wilderness. But there’s an added reason for hope that didn’t exist in the 1990s. The gap in human spaceflight has “created an opening for the entrepreneurial space companies,” including SpaceX as well as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, Zubrin said.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has talked about using his company’s yet-to-be-built Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, to support the development of a “Moonbase Alpha” as well as a city on Mars. “We should have a lunar base by now. What the hell is going on?” Musk said last year at a space conference in Australia.

Bezos has a similar vision for a city on the moon, facilitated by Blue Origin’s yet-to-be-built New Glenn and New Armstrong rockets plus its Blue Moon lander. “Today, we must go back to the moon, and this time to stay,” Bezos told me at a Los Angeles space conference in May.

If sending humans to Mars is a race, which team is favored to win? Bookies give the nod to Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin venture, but it’ll be years before any bet pays off.

David Strauss, an analyst and oddsmaker at MyBookie, says NASA is the underdog and Musk is the favorite.

“Bezos may have the discipline, but Musk has the infrastructure and just the right amount of craziness to make a successful mission happen,” he said today in a news release. “The days of government organizations staging trips to another planet are behind us. I would be surprised if NASA truly makes it back to the moon.”

MyBookie’s betting line gives SpaceX a 75 percent chance of sending humans to Mars first. Technically speaking, the odds are -300, which means bettors would have to lay down $300 to get their money back with an additional $100 if the bet pays off.