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With the current Starship that seems unlikely to be viable. But with iterative improvements similar to those between the first Falcon 9 and the Falcon 9 flying

With the current Starship that seems unlikely to be viable. But with iterative improvements similar to those between the first Falcon 9 and the Falcon 9 flying today it might be. I could see SpaceX sending one or two Starships every launch window (so every two years) by 2035, and human landings by 2050. Around that time you would start massive cargo deliveries for a colony, provided SpaceX can get the funds for that somehow (presumably that's what Starlink tries to do). That timeline is still ambitious, but I believe Musk is genuine when he says he does SpaceX mostly to drive Mars exploration. And time for him will eventually run out. He doesn't have another 50 years.

esotericimpl 2y ago
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JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> could see SpaceX sending one or two Starships every launch window (so every two years) by 2035 I could see this by the 2026 window. Unmanned, granted, but there is a lot we need to learn about Mars, and Starship upgrades us from a horse to a train. (I’d also move up human landings to the 2030s. This is hard, but not unfathomably hard.) Where I think you’re off is colonisation in the 2050s. City on Mars is a good summary, but in short, we have a lot of problems to solve before permanent settlement (versus a permanent base with a rotating crew à la the ISS) is in reach. (For starters, we have zero trauma medicine for low gravity, we don’t know how to build closed-loop environmental systems, the Martian surface is essentially a planetwide superfund site, et cetera.)