That's just more BS from him. He'll just keep kicking the can, resuming the project with some spectacular stunt every time he needs it. Everything Musk does or says is just a performance to manipulate the markets.
A permanent colony seems like the sort of thing he'd get bored with, though.
Solving the technology problem is just the tip of the iceberg.
Agreed, but enabling folks to get there makes it possible.
Musk doesn't have to build the colony to have made it possible, and it seems to be the thing his attention is genuinely invested in.
It doesn't. Getting a few people to Mars alive does not a colony make. And even that sentence is misleading because while getting to Mars orbit is certainly challenging but that's something I can see humanity capable of overcoming with current technology. Although we never kept humans in space for 2-3 years before which is just the travel there so we don't really have any idea what will happen to them but let's pretend.
Landing very fragile humans on Mars, however, is a much, much formidable challenge. The heaviest object we have managed to soft land on Mars, so far, is the 1025kg Perseverance rover. The Apollo Lunar Module carried two people and was 4280kg dry weight. Of course, you don't need to ascend -- getting those people back to Earth is not even considered by anyone sane -- but still, it shows there's a problem here. And that was two people. And you need everything for them to live on the surface, including air and water and that's even more weight that you can't just slam those into surface at the ~20 000 km/h the spacecraft will approach either.
It would be just about infinitely better if he tried to show off with climate change combat projects. If you want to show off, a vast forest would be much better, much easier to achieve and so much cheaper. He could build storage for renewable energy, these are also sufficiently massive to be good for showing off. And so forth. There are easy but significant things one such as him could do. For a more formidable challenge, elevate the Brazilian people so they don't need to burn the Amazon.
We already have a terraformed planet but the climate is changing in a way which is incompatible with the way humanity currently exists. It would be prudent to change both -- while the change is inevitable it could be slowed and humanity could change too. Once we bought time, we can wait until material and other sciences make space elevators possible and then we can send robots to Mars to build a space elevator too and then we can begin to think about colonizing Mars.
You start talking about being able to build propellant depots in Earth orbit, build Aldrin cyclers, send large amounts of supplies (or even a whole station on the slow, efficient route) in advance to Mars, etc.
Recent rover landings happened at what, < 1 M/S ? which is well within the capacity of the human body.
Considering that Mars atmosphere is substantially thinner, and gravity there much weaker, landing there would be different from Earth anyways.
We are not currently employing any of the more cost efficient methods of getting things to orbit in the first place, for large scale missions of epic size, nor are we currently employing the most efficient propulsion types.
The way I see it, the biggest problem is not one actually being discussed which are the longterm effects on the human body of living on a planet without a protective atmosphere, and protective magnetic field [2]. If getting mass to space becomes less of a financial constraint due to more efficient launch mechanisms, then, shielding would much less of an issue because mass in space would be cheaper [3]
I think that much of these problems come down to the huge capital cost, and unsolved problems around low cost launches; the novel technologies that need to be developed & turned into a new space launch system, and no, i am not talking about traditional rockets.
[1] https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/safe-landi...
[2] https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-engineering/radiation-...
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/how-nasa-protects-...
If need be, large countries that have the technology like China, Russia, US could do it. But it would still require gigantic amounts of capital allocation and effort at this stage. So no one will do it. The biggest thing that is happening right now is China and Russia signing an agreement to build a base on the moon. (yes)
Bezos has the right idea, leaning into O'Neil cylinders.
"???"
Keyword: regolith
Mars is at least 10x harder. The path to space settlement is in our own backyard.