Elon Musk is being criticized for what Marcie Bianco, editorial and communications manager at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research, is calling a sexist approach to the space race.

Musk, you may remember, recently launched a Tesla Roadster into orbit around the sun aboard a SpaceX rocket developed in a program intended to put humans on Mars.

Bianco, in a Feb. 21 NBC News article titled "The patriarchal race to colonize Mars is just another example of male entitlement," takes aim squarely at Musk, though fellow billionaire rocket-men Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Richard Branson of Virgin get stirred into the same testosterone-flavored stew.

"These men, particularly Musk, are not only heavily invested in who can get their rocket into space first, but in colonizing Mars," writes Bianco, who holds an array of degrees from prestigious universities including Harvard and Oxford.

"The desire to colonize - to have unquestioned, unchallenged and automatic access to something, to any type of body, and to use it at will - is a patriarchal one."

Bianco credits Musk and the other two with believing that they're working to "save humanity," but finds their motivations unsound, even Trumpian.

"It is the same instinctual and cultural force that teaches men that everything - and everyone - in their line of vision is theirs for the taking," she writes.

"You know, just like walking up to a woman and grabbing her by the (expletive)."

Although Musk's high-profile electric-vehicle and space-rocket startups have made him one of America's most prominent entrepreneurs, the colonizing-Mars business, which Bianco describes as "Columbusing," is not about the "American spirit of invention or forward-thinking entrepreneurship," she asserts.

Instead, it derives from "entitlement to power, control, domination and ownership" as well as "the presumed right to use and abuse something and then walk away to conquer and colonize something new."

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment, or to make Musk available for an interview. But certainly Musk, whose Palo Alto company Tesla makes solar panels and electric cars, could be expected to dispute her claim that his extraterrestrial ambitions are "the direct result of men giving up on the planet they have all but destroyed."

Bianco ends her article by conjuring up an image of the Roadster floating through space with a mannequin at the wheel, leaving behind the "man-made garbage fires" of our planet.

"Houston," she writes, "we have a problem. And it's the patriarchy."