2025.06.25 | Occupying Mars: A critical look at Elon Musk’s visionary plan to make human civilisation multi-planetary

On The Space Show for Wednesday, 25 June 2025:

Space Show News:

The explosion of Starship 36 on the test stand at Starbase, Texas.

(Insert courtesy NSF)

Turn Back Time:

NASA’s Scout small satellite launcher program

(Feature courtesy The Space Story, NASA 1989)

Is Elon Musk's plan to settle Mars a visionary dream, or a nightmare folly?

* Elon Musk outlines his plan for using Starships to put a human settlement on Mars

* Reactions to that plan by the Planetary Society's Bill Nye and the Mars Society’s founder and president, Robert Zubrin.

(Inserts courtesy SpaceX and Humans to the Moon & Mars Summit)

Listen to the late David Willson, Research and Development Engineer, Space Science and Astrobiology Division, NASA Ames Research Center and Vice President of the Mars Society Australia talk about SpaceX Red Dragon — a collaboration between SpaceX and NASA.

(Recorded by The Space Show in Melbourne, Australia at a joint meeting of the Mars Society Australia and the Space Association of Australia in 2016. Note: Red Dragon was cancelled in July 2017).

See Dr Robert Zubrin’s full presentation, “How to Make the Mars Initiative Successful”, at the 2025 Humans to the Moon and Mars Summit.