BOB ZUBRIN IS A SMART GUY, BUT HE JUST HAS DIFFERENT PRIORITIES THAN ELON: SpaceX Mars Mission Comes Under Fire From The World’s Top Mars Scholar.

SpaceX now has an extraordinary chance to launch a fantastic robotic mission in 2028, Dr. Zubrin tells me, that could set out to uncover secrets of Mars that scientists have long wondered about, including whether life ever took hold there, and might still survive in underground refugia.

“It should not just land an Optimus,” Zubrin says.

“Landing a large payload on Mars is a chance to do a super Mars exploration expedition,” he says, “with platoons of rovers and helicopters bringing samples to a well-equipped lab in the lander.”

“Let’s land some helicopters that can have 50 kilograms of science instruments on them,” he told me in an earlier interview, during a live-streamed roundtable with space journalists and scholars hosted by Red Planet Live and its erudite anchor Ashton Zeth, who is also director of the Mars Society’s Ambassador Program.

“Life detection experiments,” Zubrin adds, could be processed in “a well-instrumented lab in the lander itself,” with the findings constantly beamed back to NASA, and to its partner scholars, via the Mars Relay Network.

These ground-based and aerial robots “can collect hundreds, thousands of samples from far away, bring them back to the Starship … and subject them to all the scientific investigations.”

If this massive, robot-augmented expedition to Mars, the greatest science mission ever conducted on another planet, were linked up with the coalition of space savants across academic centers and NASA outposts under the visionary plan outlined by Dr. Zubrin, that would place SpaceX at the center of the world’s foremost web of Mars exploration.

All worthy stuff, but does it advance Mars settlement, or does it advance the careers of earthbound scientists?