I'm not being ironic or obtuse. This company is barely a year old, I suspect the improvements alluded to will take many decades to perfect. Starting with the ex

I'm not being ironic or obtuse. This company is barely a year old, I suspect the improvements alluded to will take many decades to perfect. Starting with the existing state of the art and attempting to become a profitable earthbound venture is not an absurd opening strategy for meeting this goal. Musk has stated: "I do think getting good at digging tunnels could be really helpful for Mars. For sure there's going to be a lot of ice mining on Mars, and mining in general to get raw materials. You can build a tremendous amount underground with the right boring technology on Mars. So I do think there is some overlap in that technology development arena."