You're not an engineer and everyone here knows it. Those of us who are engineers can see it easily and I tried to open your eyes as to just how easy that is to see. Any of those with science training can see it as well.

You compared Musk To Zubrin not Zubrin to Musk's engineers. You appear entirely clueless as to how much Musk was inspired by Zubrin and how much suppport both have provided each other. Musk is a frequent keynote speaker at Mars Society conventions and generally echoes many of Zubrin's key points. He was a major donor to the Mars Society before he ever hired a single engineer for SpaceX. Nothing he is doing is in opposition to Zubrin. In case you missed the title of the article HE DREAMS OF COLONIZING Mars.

You can hand waive away Zubrin's contributions all you want. Real engineers use numbers. If you want to make a technically sound claim something is wrong with Zubrin's numbers list the numbers you or someone disagree with and the numbers you think are better as well as the assumptions and calculations used to arrive at those numers. The key numbers that matter are 6 vs 4. The difference in crew size. I agree NASA's numbers are designed to provide a higher margin of safety, but I do not agree that a crewmember dedicated solely to medicine is an obvious undebatable requirement as I have discussed many times before.

As usual you list many issues that sound plausible yet provide no quantitative values to provide the basis for a rational debate.

Regards,
Mark