The OP made the point (amongst many more dubious claims) that SpaceX was one of the few established launch providers that hadn't sent a payload to Mars. This is true (it says more about Mars not actually being a priority for SpaceX than it does about their technical capability, but that in itself is interesting). Another person suggested that we should count the Tesla roadster as a Mars mission; I pointed out that it shouldn't count as a Mars mission because it wasn't a Mars mission (and injecting a meme into a random deep space orbit isn't a more impressive display of technical prowess than deploying an actual mission payload to an L2 staging orbit; the whole point of the Roadster stunt was they didn't particularly care if the payload survived never mind where it ended up). It's not rocket science! Most stuff a Falcon 9 launches reaches its final orbit with its own propulsion; it still gets credited with the launch.
And I’d certainly credit BO with launching this payload to orbit. But saying they sent a payload to Mars doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s like saying a taxi took me to Europe, because they took me to the airport. A critical part of the journey, certainly, but only part.
Well if no launch provider gets credit for launching Mars missions unless they're also supplying the payload/propulsion this whole argument is moot (just leaves SpaceX behind Berkeley/Rocketlab and ISRO rather than Blue Origin and ISRO in the Mars race...)
If we're doing analogies to holidays, the Starman Tesla Roadster definitely hasn't proven its worth for visiting London, even though it's gone beyond it (and SpaceX could have made it hit London if they'd really wanted to, just ask Werner von Braun :-)
Quibbling about whether parties involved in conveying tourists to actually visit London receive undue credit for their segment of the journey, or whether the London Underground is more important than Gatwick flights which don't even reach City boundaries seems like pointless pedantry on the other hand, particularly if deployed in defence of the claim that flying away from London at escape velocity counts as a London visit.
And also pretty clear that if Mars colonization was as imminent and important as an typical Elon comment on the subject suggests, they would have bothered with a probe by now...
