Yep, and in addition to both of these, Starship is also designed:

* to be fueled / ignited such that it can be refueled in-situ on Mars & then launched back to Earth, without advanced rocket fuels or the TEA-TEB chemical igniter.

* to be able to refuel from another Starship in-orbit

The combination of all of this, if they pull it off, will be the ability to send truly massive payloads to Mars, faster and cheaper than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago.

To me it does really show the benefit of taking a systematic approach, working backwards from the goal "get to Mars and stay" in a resource-constrained environment. They've very strategically targeted the technology/engineering required to bring the costs down to something reasonable, while NASA's approach for 50 years has basically been versions of "can you give us one trillion dollars?" (or "we can put a couple humans on Mars for 3 days for $100 billion")

Today's Starship hop is getting very near the nail in the coffin for SLS. I still have some concerns about their crazy re-entry flip, but the speed SpaceX is moving is leaving everyone else in the dust.

Also, since its mostly made from steel, it will be fairly simple (as far as rockets go) to conduct repairs, you just need a welding rod or two. This is important for early stage bases where you don't have the equipment/materials to make carbon fiber or exotic aluminum alloy replacement parts.

Given how much difficulty they've had with welds and materials to date, is it really feasible to conduct in-situ repairs without a ton of advanced equipment?

It probably depends on what needs repairs. Repairs around the fuel tanks will be difficult as they would not readily have the equipment to purge the tanks of the fuel/oxidizer. Anything that is bulk structural is likely to be repairable to some extent.

I would not be surprised if part of the reason for building these in a tent is so they can gain experience for building/repairing these rockets with as little infrastructure as possible.

I feel the same way. Likely not to start but over time I think they would build up capability. I wonder how lesser gravity on Mars would help/hurt their efforts. Easier to heft heavy gear up high?

I'm also thinking on the flip side, say a Starship somehow gets irreparably damaged getting to Mars (but successfully gets there). With some basic gear they should be able to part it out and re-use the steel.

Like for a new door on all the Cybertrucks rollin' around up there. /s

The idea of using parts of the landing unit for materials to build local structures and machines is not new. Probably, with proper planning and construction of the lander unit parts, it can be facilitated.

But you have to plan for another mission to pick up the crew, unless you're on the Moon where you could use an electromagnetic catapult to achieve orbit, and then slowly ascend to the rocket that would take you home.

I didn't know that. Sure, it doesn't sound like a revolutionary idea, and I'm not surprised at all its been thought of. I was basing it on the assumption there are people there already who aren't leaving. With a colony on Mars/Moon it surely becomes more useful to have a vast amount of steel to reuse than some crazy alloy.

Electromagnetic catapult, huh. Sounds fun as hell.

The difficulty is making it light and strong. If you're doing an emergency patch repair on a small area you could sacrifice some cargo and use much thicker material and more welds to be sure it will hold. It wouldn't be easy but is much easier than the initial build.

The difficulty is making a weld that doesn't weaken or anneal the parent metal through heat induced material changes.

Welding thick to thin is nontrivial because of the different heat input required in each substrate. You tend to burn through the thin part.

Patching may be possible but thick patches don't make things any easier.

Most importantly, you mostly need it light to escape Earth's atmosphere. (And somewhat to have enough fuel.)

On Mars, Moon or in space this constraint is reduced.

That's what I was thinking. At the very least, they'll either have to come up with some very fancy welding rod matrials, or train their welders in some interesting techniques. Reminds me of the difficulties in welding aluminum.

Still it's much easier to work with, compared to titamium, to say nothing of carbon fiber composites or silica-fiber tiles like the Space Shuttles used.

That is, something you can have a fair chance of fixing while in orbit or on Moon or Mars.

I wish I could invest into SpaceX. Such a slam-dunk rarely presents itself, and an opportunity to change the world for the better _while also making money_ is rarer still.

It seems you could buy a stake in a number of publicly traded companies and funds that themselves own a stake. Seems like Google and Fidelity each own about 4% of SpaceX, maybe Fidelity is offering it as a component of some fund?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Ownership,_funding_and_...

Google at least is a bad option. You won't actually get any value representation, any exposure, due to their extreme market cap.

Most likely close to 0% of the SpaceX ownership stake is represented in Google's stock. Let's assume though for the sake of argument that some large part is, say $1.3 billion of the stake is represented (3% of $44 billion). That's equal to about 1.3% of Google's market cap (~$1t).

Whatever you do never buy a stock on that kind of premise. Risking the other 98.7% of your capital to get a meaningless piece of something else (which is already a big something else at a $44b market cap). If SpaceX doubles in value, you'll never notice it (you put $1,473 into Google, SpaceX doubles, max scenario you might make $20). It may be one of the worst reasons to ever buy a giant like Google. People commonly make this mistake when buying Berkshire Hathaway or certain other conglomerates, thinking they're getting a 1-to-1 direct exposure to the Berkshire portfolio (among their equity holdings, only a few matter at all, as with the Apple holding at $110b). I often see it pitched as a form of bonus diversification. Cash and equity holdings on the balance sheets of public companies are essentially never represented at full value in the market cap. The larger the company and the smaller the asset in question, the more likely it is to have something more toward zero representation.

I don't get the Berkshire Hathaway analogy. If you buy that stock, in what way are you not getting "1-to-1 direct exposure to the Berkshire portfolio"? You're owning the same investments Warren Buffet owns, in the same proportions, to within a rounding error.

It would be a mistake to invest in BH because, say, you're really bullish on Dairy Queen, but that doesn't seem like the mistake you're describing.

Math check -- I think Google's SpaceX ownership stake would be closer to 0.13% of Google's value, not 1.3%. Is that what you meant?

To be fair to NASA, they would never have been allowed to pursue a Starship-like strategy. Look at the Space Shuttle, which had all kinds of requirements ladled on top of the program, such as DoD requirements.

Remember, NASA was the one that added the DOD requirements. To increase their budget, they lobbied congress to cancel the Air Force space program to make it a captive customer of the Shuttle.

> * (or "we can put a couple humans on Mars for 3 days for $100 billion")*

Is there actually a NASA proposal like that? As far as I know, orbital dynamics don't allow for this. One has to wait for a Hohmann transfer orbit window to return home.

There is a "short stay" option, where you return on the same synod. This requires a higher-energy transfer, involving Venus on at least one leg, to get there early enough to hit the return window and also have enough time to actually do something on the surface. Apparently you can get up to 90 days in some situations, but 30 is more likely, out of a total elapsed mission time of 400-650 days.

https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/mars/marsprof.html

Of course, this in in the "resource-constrained" mode of thinking. If you allow for giant vehicles with on-orbit refilling, SpaceX-style, you just spend a bunch of energy to get there fast instead of monkeying around with Venus.

There are faster transfer opportunities, but not 3 days. But I think he way saying 3 days of surface ops. Which is still an exaggeration. I think the NASA reference mission is 30 days?

I had a peek at the Mars Design Reference Architecture 5.0 [1], and under "trajectory options" they talk about two classes of missions.

"Opposition class missions" stay on the surface for 30 to 90 days. "Conjunction class missions" stay for 500 days or more.

That confirms the 30 days that you mentioned as a reasonable minimum.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/373665main_NASA-SP-2009-566.pdf

This is a very key point.

The Falcon 9 isn’t cheap because of reuse (yet). It’s cheap because of mass manufacturing. The Rs-25 engine costs over $100m each, Ariansoace Vulcains around $20M, typical large rocket engines over $10M.

SoaceX Merlin costs about $200,000 each to make. The Raptor will be close to that. Thats why SpaceX can pursue the large number of redundant smaller engines design strategy so successfully.

Reuse has lowered Falcon 9 costs internally, and increased its private discounts, but not it’s public pricing. When the cost benefits of reuse finally cascade through public pricing and through the entire stack with Starship, you have a SuperHeavy launch system putting 150 tons in orbit even cheaper than a single Falcon 9 launch.

For comparison, the Shuttle was over $40,000 per pound to Orbit. The SLS will be around $10,000/lb to orbit if you don’t count developmental costs at least 3x that.

The Falcon 9 is $1,500/lb to orbit, and Falcon Heavy $1,100/lb to orbit. Starship will lift more payload to orbit than the SLS, and 4x as much as the Shuttle, for between $100 and $300 per pound.

> Reuse has lowered Falcon 9 costs internally, and increased its private discounts, but not it’s public pricing

It's not just a discount - it is the reversed equivalent of banks charging interest for a loan due to failure risk. Private customers getting discounts accept the increased risk that some re-used part fails. Essentially SpaceX has managed to have their r&d subsidized by paying customers instead of having to borrow money, launch dummy payloads and pay the money back.

You write that as if it is a done deal. Mars' atmosphere is roughly .5% of that of Earth and almost exclusively CO2. Temperature ranges are well out of what they are on Earth. It is hard for technology to survive there, it is impossible for people to survive there until there has been an unbelievable investment in infrastructure.

If you think there will be a million people colony on Mars in your lifetime than you are not in touch with the physics of this kind of endeavor. All of our GDP for the next 50 years pooled together would likely not be enough to pull off a feat like that. The scale we're talking about here is too large to even contemplate.

10 people in a shitty little dome, maybe. Right up to the moment they die because of some small mishap.

I million people will be very hard.

But the first starship missions will drop 100 tons each to the surface of Mars at a cost of a few hundred million dollars each. And they will send dozens of Starships that first trip, building an camp with over a hundred explorers and scientists the first synod.

They will have thousands of tons of equipment and supplies, and their habitats will have multiple redundancies and be easily repaired.

Mars is far easier to survive on than the Moon, for example. The temperature ranges are far milder, Mars reaches 70 degrees Fahrenheit at its equator during the day. The day is the same length as ours. There is adequate solar for power, tons of water, and a plethora of other easily accessible resources from CO2 to Iron.

Although I’m also not expecting 1 million people on Mars in my lifetime, I think you’re assuming SpaceX never gets close to the Musk price goals.

You might be right to do that — I’m no rocket scientist — but the target price would get a million people there for $200 billion, not your $5 quadrillion.

Yes, I also expect the first few thousand to be in easily damaged domes. I also expect them to bring some of The Boring Company equipment with them, as it is part-owned by SpaceX and the stated raison d'être of TBC being pointless in a future of fully self-driving cars.

The other factor is that Musk has nothing better to spend his money on. With Tesla + SpaceX + Boring + Neuralink he'll likely be a trillionaire by the time Mars colonization is full swing. Even if the price was $2T instead of $200B, Musk might be able to fund most of this himself.

How are tunnels pointless in a future of self driving cars, the opposite is true, tunnels make even more sense when cars drive themselves.

Self driving cars done right will be able to do full speed while literally, not metaphorically, touching bumpers.

Traffic jams with human drivers happen spontaneously when the cars get close enough that overcompensation turns into a negative spiral.

So in the city of the future you gone have 1000s of self driving cars going full speed threw the city? It makes much more sense to open up the city for people and ban cars for the most part. Move the transportation under ground.

Please, millions.

The roads are already there, electric cars are quiet, road trains are even more efficient.

I am no fan of American city design, having half encircled Davis CA on foot, having found the suddenly-terminating sidewalks in Salt Lake City, and having walked the really boring route from San Jose railway station to the hotel in the top left corner of the Apple Maps icon.

(NYC is surprisingly pedestrian friendly though).

In Europe we are already trying to make more space for pedestrians specially around the city center. The value of the land above ground is incredible. Freeing up those spaces from cars makes sense and is incredibly nice.

I know, check my profile ;)

But:

1. Musk doesn’t live in Europe, he set up TBC while stuck in a traffic jam in Los Angeles.

2. Solid car trains moving at full speed (whatever that is for the road, 20 kph for residential or much higher than the current rules for highways) use less land area than any other traffic, so some lanes can become bicycle only or whatever.

3. They can “perfectly” obey traffic lights and give way to pedestrians

4. Raised walkways are cheaper than tunnels

To get a sense of the difficulty, imagine sending a million people to the South Pole to set up a self-sustaining colony. That would be much more than 1000 times easier than establishing such a base on Mars.

I’ve often said the same thing. South Pole and underwater cities would be easier than mars or even moon colony. As much as I want the later to happen- I think 1 million people on Mars or Moon will require something that makes them more appealing than even the worst Earth locations. That has to be something pretty drastic. Elon says motivation will be “it’d be cool”. I don’t think that is enough motivation. Still, I’d rather have the capability developed than not, and hopefully those motivations present themselves without being too dire (like a comet heading our way)

Africa was in Europe's back yard yet when they got the opportunity they colonized the Americas. Colonizing a formerly unexplored place where nobody has yet laid claim has a lot of appeal (and this time we (probably) don't have to kill/displace the natives to do it).

Europeans were kept out of Africa by disease.

I'd rather say the Europeans were kept out of Africa because of nowhere near European levels of valuable resources (think farmland, wood) other than slaves for centuries. Diamonds and uranium are a recent thing.

I always heard it was a logistic issue more than anything else? Getting from Europe to the Americas and then back in a sailing vessel is easier than getting to Africa's East coast and back.

Which explains why Africa was colonized so much more successfully than (checks notes) ... Australia?

A science outpost, specifically as a place to put telescopes, seems the most compelling. The rest of the population would then grow along side the science outpost to service it (food, transportation, etc.) A looong time until a million people, though.

Why would you put a telescope in a gravity well though?

Would it not be easier to build large structures in orbit or at one of the Lagrange points?

There's been some really interesting ideas for a new generation of telescopes that Starship's cargo capacity could enable. Telescopes on the far side of the moon are the classic example. They'd be shielded from the sun for 14 days out of 28, permanently shielded from Earth, and still have all the advantages of being in a vacuum. Gravitational-wave telescopes on the geologically-stable lunar surface are another interesting idea.

But I think my favourite idea is infrared scopes in the polar craters, some of the coldest places in the solar system. You don't need a complicated JWST-style extendable sun shield or limited helium supply. You are limited in terms of direction, but that's not a bad tradeoff.

I'm interested in living on Mars. I'm not interested in living in Antarctica.

Massive domes to act as greenhouses, melting a couple miles of ice cover. Fossils and untapped resources. Antarctica could be a lot of fun to colonize.

True, but I'm not sure difficulty is as relevant if the motivation is there. You can't terraform the South Pole. Mars reopens the frontier whereas the South Pole is a dead end

The South Pole starts out way more terraformed than Mars can ever be. It has air, water, gravity, and is warmer. You can just put up domes and it's already way better than Mars. Mineral wealth is only a mile down, under the ice.

Under the sea starts out way more terraformed than Mars can ever be. It has water, gravity, and is warmer. Mineral wealth is right at hand.

The cloud tops of Venus start out way more terraformed than Mars can ever be. It has air pressure, gravity, water, carbon, sulfur, and shirtsleeve temperature.

What motivation does Mars provide that those don't?

If your goal is to be a multi-planet civilisation, neither Antarctica nor the oceans of Earth would work; also the layer of Venusian atmosphere that you’re describing is way too cold for there to be useful quantities of metals you could extract from the rain (unlike the lower layers, where mountain tops are frosted with metal: https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a11506/hea...).

The other option is the Moon, which has even less atmosphere and even bigger temperature swings than Mars.

Planets are for extreme primitives, anyway.

But the point was, if you haven't even proven you can settle a mildly challenging environment, your odds on an actually difficult one don't look good.

We know by demonstrations that we can make settlements in Antarctica and underwater, we just don’t have any reason to do more than science and military.

Venus, you could only settle by bringing in everything from outside unless and until you can convert the atmosphere in a large way into building materials — Mars at least you only need to convert it into fuel, because you can do at least some of your construction from rocks.

All the settlements on Antarctica are utterly dependent on enormous support frequently airlifted from outside. There have been no settlements underwater at all; little more than camping trips have been essayed.

On Venus, plastics, carbon fiber, water, buoyancy gas, and breathing air (I repeat myself) can be made directly from the air and clouds. Plastic and carbon fiber gives you building materials. Robots can gather minerals from the surface and deliver them by balloon to the cloud tops. Insolation provides abundant power, moreso than here; or, a lightweight, unshielded nuke plant may be suspended a mile or more below industrial plant, supported on its own balloon.

Mars will be much more unpleasant than Antarctica. We don't even know whether people can live for long in Mars gravity. We know that long weightlessness is quite harmful.

If you’re going to use that standard against nuclear submarines and deep-sea oil drilling, it is unreasonable to also say we can make those things from Venusian air. Yes, in a lab, sure — that’s proof of concept, far less than a camping trip, and roughly the same level as extraction of oxygen from rocks.

Easier is a downside.

It would be smart to demonstrate ability to do thing A before attempting thing B that is 1000 times harder.

With any luck, things you learn actually doing A, and then A' that is 10 times harder, and then A'' that is 100 times harder, will all turn out to be useful, even necessary, in tackling B. Failure is always an option, but there is no point in choosing it at the outset.

Maybe SpaceX should practice colonizing in Antarctica. They could fly all their gear in on Starships and do a dress rehearsal.

TBM FTW.

> mass manufactured at a relatively low cost.

... which also explains Tesla, mass production of Earth-faring machines is one way to prepare for mass production of space-faring machines (and battery tech is going to be important for living in space). When you look at Musk's ventures, they really all end at Mars.

The Boring company. Develop tech to drill deep tunnels on Mars? Electric cars and batteries cause you will need that on Mars? Even the Cybertruck looks like something destined for Mars.

And a Starlink network would mean an instant global Martian internet.

Can you recommend resources for reading more about the long term plans of Starship?

Not the parent poster, but there is

[0] Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species / Elon's original presentation from IAC 2016 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8

[1] Starship Update / 2019 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOpMrVnjYeY