I don't believe Mr. Musk can do more than satellite launches. He's a money man and his Mars plans will prove too expensive.
Which is why he's already planning retiring the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and to go with BFR and Starship. He and the rest of SpaceX are rather focused and also upfront about their future plans.
Nothing was forced on NASA. Going to the moon was proof of concept. And even though establishing a moon base was planned decades ago, nothing. There will be no movement to Mars as far as manned missions. All future missions will be robotic. Cheaper, effective.
NASA prior to the 1962 Kennedy Lunar goal speech was planning a steady built up of Apollo capability with initial work in Earth orbit, (along with an Earth orbital space station) to a Lunar circumnavitgation by the early 1970s and a landing sometime in the late 70s to early 80s. The Apollo program we know was focused solely and specifically on landing on the Moon and coming back to the Earth with a brute force approach and little applicabity beyond that goal. (Granted it was a bit LESS brute-force than the Direct Landing Mode and using the NOVA booster but not all that much once you look at it closely) The focus reached the point pretty early on where study of or planning for anything beyond the Lunar goal was set aside or shelved, often not to be re-visited until decades later if at all.
Going to the Moon by Saturn V was THE most expensive and complex way of doing the mission and this was quite well known and understood and it was also understood that once the Saturn V was flying then there would be a lot of incentive to continue using it despite it being cost ineffective which turned out to be the case. And yet this is the exact plan we are now using to go back to the Moon despite the obviouls flaws. Worse due to how the Apollo program was run and its legacy NASA found it extremly difficult to transition into being both a lower priority and lower funded government program which greatly showed in the Shuttle program and has continued to plauge NASA planning and operations to this day.
Robotics are in fact cheaper and more effective but the truth is that people are more interesting and can be more easily connected to by people so despite that people will eventually go again and go further but it remains to be seen if the funding and public support will be there to do so.
Randy
