For some reason completely unrelated to the rest of the post, this classic science fiction story came to mind

"The Marching Morons" by Cyril M. Kornbluth is a 1951 story about a con man who suckers gullible people into a doomed flight to another planet.

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For the weekend, three videos from the Common Sense Skeptic.


I assume everyone still remembers Mars One, the widely reported plan to use a reality show to finance a permanent Martian colony. The Gateway SpacePort is also a plan for establishing a privately funded foothold in space, but it's not as reputable or well thought-out.

Running track in @SpaceX BF Spaceship will look something like this pic.twitter.com/563upTfV58

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 8, 2018

The 2001 tweet was one of those reminders that Elon Musk doesn't have a grasp of even the basics of manned space travel. We discussed some of the issues here but this video (also by the Common Sense Skeptic) explains the problems better and in much greater detail.




Even if the orbital hotels and the artificial gravity don't work out, space travel can still be luxurious.

Elon Musk, whose firm SpaceX is building a rocket that could transport up to 100 people in space at once, has a vision for future space activities. On Wednesday, the CEO shared an image with his 31 million Twitter followers envisioning a musical performance in a ship above the Earth.

"Starship Concerto in Zero G," Musk wrote alongside the image, referring to the name of the stainless steel rocket currently in the prototype phase. It wouldn't be the first musical performance in space – Chris Hadfield famously covered David Bowie's "Space Oddity" on board the International Space Station – but the Starship could represent an opportunity for more artists than ever to be inspired by the amidst the stars.
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Those passengers would have plenty of room to stretch out and get creative. The Starship is expected to offer 100 cubic meters of pressurized cabin space, similar to an Airbus A380 or the International Space Station. Musk noted at a September 2019 event that, thanks to zero gravity, space could be used much more efficiently as users would be able to take advantage of every corner of a room.