I agree with you, as things stand.

But if we can drop the for-profit model, by wholescale adoption of solar backed by hydrogen (which comes with side effects of filtrating and circulating drinking water, and even creation of food - see "Solein"), and a corresponding UBI, there will be a new hydrogen ecology with virtually unlimited funds for everything investors are currently interested in.

The time taken to get to that will be only one or two years, after the outstanding UBI is issued, since this will lead further development, scaling with it until completion, all communities carrying out the work of their local installations in parallel.

With that, we will quickly move from fossil fueled engines in all things to fuel cells and conversion of ICE engines including rockets, to hydrogen, which burns with no pollution.

Then maybe we will be in with a chance to start developing space technology for real, reviving some old profit cancelled classics like concorde and the space shuttle, to take up where we left off with those.

Otherwise, articles like Tom's here will not age well, on top of starting off badly by trying to defend Elon's profit driven efforts as something progressive, when actually all they are doing is reusing 60+ years old rocket technology, and similarly cutting corners everywhere corners can be cut, to launch the odd sportscar, and shrapnel pretending to be comms satellites, and giant fireworks that blow up in the first few minutes.

For now, Elon worshiping is still in vogue as we can see :)