I still think:

Starship

Moon Base

Orion Pulse Nuclear ships launched from the Moon

Mars Base

Is the winning formula, because the Orion payloads are so huge and the transit time so greatly reduced.

I strongly suspect the chances of Orion-style propulsion happening are close to zero. I think we're much more likely to see fission engines (where the heat from a conventional fission reactor is used to superheat water, which then goes through a conventional nozzle), or something a little more exotic like pulsed fusion (where little capsules of lithium containing deuterium go through a magnetic pinch and fuse, again in a more-or-less conventional nozzle) are more likely. They also have very high ISP but with much lower abuse risks (can you see any government agreeing to have a giant stockpile of nukes in space?)

You are probably correct, but it still remains that fuel exists in stockpiles and it isn't a particularly complicated spaceship design for the phenomenal payload and "extremely high performance".

One starship trip could probably transport enough "fuel" for a midsize orion trip to mars and back (I haven't run the numbers, but 150 tons of fissile nuclear fuel is pretty effing compact.

The "Super Orion" 8 million ton ship uses 3,000ton bombs.... but most of the bomb is the inert propellant that can probably be obtain from regolith.

And the Moon could probably have a nuclear launch cannon pretty easily to reduce the payload or initial acceleration.

Politically it sounds dangerous putting nuke bombs on the moon, but frankly it is safer having them there than on Earth. You know, as long as a mass driver catapult doesn't send them back ....

Oh, but to your point, one of my ideas for Starship is to design an antimatter catcher from the solar wind:

https://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/1107Jac...

So you could probably do the antimatter catalyzed drives a lot more feasibly in space, but its still a lot more complicated than dumb bombs on pusher plates.

Musk held an event earlier this year where he outlined how SpaceX was going to get 1 million people to Mars by the 2050’s. That’s not really being skeptical. The plan he outlined is so ambitious that it is entirely unrealistic to the point of being almost straight fantasy.

The number of Starships needing to be built, the amount of launches necessary to send that many people, and other details don’t line up.

I am not skeptical that SpaceX could do a mission to Mars by the 2050’s, sending a small team to explore the planet and come back. I am skeptical of SpaceX being able to launch hundreds Starships loaded with a hundreds of people and everything they need for building a self sufficient colony, by 2026.

The plan Musk outlined has SpaceX sending people to Mars at the same time they send people to the Moon.

Here is a link to the presentation: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1776669097490776563

It would be significantly less people required to be sent as if enough fertile male-female pairs are sent then childbirth can 4x or more the original number of colonists.

Technically, only 1 male is needed

Musk timelines are always absurd, but SpaceX has eventually done a lot of stuff previously thought to be infeasible. I remember ULA pooh-poohing reusability.

Yes how outlined how it it was possible. He is still sceptical and believes it has a low chance of success. And he knows that if it happens it will most likely take longer.

But the point that matters here is that even if only 0.00001% of this goal is achieved, its fantastic.

So when we evaluate their plan we should evaluate it as 100% success or failure. We should evaluate the chance that they are 0.00001% successful.

And we can still be sceptical of that 0.00001%. Since doing that is hard as fuck and will need not just SpaceX but many others as well.

But what SpaceX is doing, is for the first time making it possible to seriously consider that 0.00001%.