Former NASA Astronaut Says Elon Musk Has No Idea What He's Talking About

SpaceX Elon Musk is adamant that his space company will eventually make humanity interplanetary by establishing a permanent presence on Mars. It's an extremely ambitious plan, and one that intimately involves the company's massive Starship rocket. If his characteristically unrealistic timelines are anything to go by, the first crewed trip to the Red Planet could take place "as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely," he asserted in a March 15 tweet. But not everybody would agree with that assessment. "We’re a good 15 years away from going to Mars, not five years as Elon Musk alludes to," former NASA astronaut José Hernández told The Hill. To Hernández, who traveled to space in 2009 onboard NASA's Space Shuttle, there's vastly more work required before we're ready to send the first crew to the planet some 140 million miles away. "As I’ve always said... space travel is not trivial, and so what we need to do next is, we’re going to retire the International Space Station, invest t ... Read full article.