>>11972076He is not anti-Moon.
He is against the idea that it makes sense to go to the Moon to set up a gas station to go to Mars, and he's right.
It LITERALLY takes LESS propellant to go all the way to Mars' surface than it takes to go to low Lunar orbit. The reason is it only takes a little bit of extra delta V to get on a Mars intercept vs a Moon intercept, ie only a bit more propellant to approach Mars vs Moon, but at the Moon you need to use MORE propellant in order to slow down, whereas on Mars you can just hit the atmosphere and use aerodynamic pressure to decelerate. In fact, at Mars you can scrub off over 99% of the velocity you arrive with using nothing but air drag, and the remaining 1% is your terminal velocity which you get rid of using rockets (for big vehicles anyway, too big for chutes).
Therefore, Mars missions are NOT limited by our actual rocket propulsion technology; a rocket that can get to the Moon is pretty much exactly as capable of going to Mars. The thing we're limited by is life support tech for a much longer trip (though having a big vehicle lets you brute-force most of the problems) and the fact that while landing on Mars is easier in terms of delta V, it is yet a more complex and tricky thing to actually do, since you need to worry about aerodynamics and shit whereas on the Moon you could land totally blind as long as you had a stop watch and knew your vehicle's thrust to weight ratio and retrograde vector. Landing in a vacuum is as easy as point rocket backwards and start slowing down, and time it so that you reach zero velocity at zero altitude.
Of course, SpaceX already has tons of experience propulsively landing rocket stages in a much thicker atmosphere than on Mars, and on a target that moves way more than the surface of Mars does (the ocean).
