Dude, my best friend's dad was one of two project managers on the SSC. I probably know more about it than you do.

I think it's naive of you to presume that a completely unbuilt and untested high-mach system can be modeled using the data we already have. Modeling is where you extend a known body of knowledge into a tiny corner of the unknown so that you can be assured of success when you test it. How many car crashes have there been in the world? How robust is that model? Yet safety boards all over the world still require crash testing of every new model. And those are just cars, not hypersonic vacuum tunnels shooting transport quantities of superconductors into space.

Andy Weir is charming, but he's a computer scientist. He has less space training than you. He has less space training than I. And he's a year behind on trash-talking Mars One.

That doesn't mean Elon Musk doesn't want to go there. There's a poster of Mars at SpaceX. He's on Colbert talking about terraforming it (using a technique I first read about in Analog back in '88 - nothing new here). And SpaceX was formed primarily because no one would take Elon's ideas to Mars so he built himself a space launch company.

I appreciate your opinions, but stop trying to block my facts with them.