I think he needed a new talking point. I don't think most people believe he will have Starship preparing a base on Mars in 2022 anymore.
Starship hasn't even achieved orbital speed yet, and that was despite trying without a payload.
Elon musk is high on drugs and himself, and has completely lost it.
They cut off the engines a couple of seconds before reaching orbital speed for safety. Until they prove they can control the ship on orbit they can’t risk having a 16 floor tall 125 ton steel tower coming down in a random location. This is unrelated to any of Elon’s shenanigans.
There is nobody who knows even the slightest bit about space flight that doubts Starship can reach orbit.
SpaceX has many things to get done to make Starship the fully reusable rocket they want it to be, but picking orbital speed is just about the weakest argument against it.
Ah OK, I just heard they didn't, and thought it was because they couldn't.
Still considering he claimed they'd be to Mars 2 years ago, and have manned flights to Mars this year, it's obvious he hasn't got a very solid plan for how or when to actually do it.
Going to Mars hasn't been intangible since the 90s. The only thing holding it back is the cost. NASA could absolutely go if they had a $200B budget... mostly because they don't spend their money wisely and waste shitloads on contracts with Boeing. They SHOULD be able to go to Mars with a $50B/year budget (current budget is in the $25B range), but government contracts are horrific.
A private company should be able to do it with $100B total price. But who wants to spend all that money?
Yes, they are spending a lot of money on space, but they haven't dumped the necessary money to go to Mars (yet). Bezos spends about $1B of his own money every year on Blue Origin, which is a far cry from $100B. Musk has probably spent a few billion of his own money total, because he has a ton of contracts to actually make money that is being put back into SpaceX. And their entire program (Starlink, Falcon, etc) is around $78B, as opposed to $100B for just Mars. Branson has stated publicly he is no longer spending more money on Virgin Galactic.