> so they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights.
Mars. Their reason (and market) for Starship is Mars.
Mars. Their reason (and market) for Starship is Mars.
Purpose is purely subjective. You could have said the same thing about the ISS before it was built but it has been invaluable.
Secondly and more importantly, we don't have the robotics knowledge to do arbitrary construction projects in this way. Digging through frozen rocky terrain in the extreme conditions of Mars is not easy, and we don't even do that autonomous here on Earth. The Mars Rovers are at the forefront of technology in this area, and they can just about move over the rocky terrain.
And of course, sending people there to operate the machines without first having a shelter is not an option, they will likely die of radiation poisoning long before they finish the project - the thin metal walls of a rocket are not a good radiation insulator.
Will an inn called Mars do? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Twardowski#Legend
I think we see it time and time again, the steam engine, the internet, when you create something that enables radically new possibilities, people find ways to put them to profitable uses. The people inventing them have vision, they have ideas about what they could be used for, but ultimately nobody can predict how things will be used. We will probably be pleasantly surprised by the ways people are going to use mass scale space travel.
And a few dozen people living in a high tech cave is not a market.
If this seems crazy to you, well you’re just not in the target market.
2. Trips will be two-way with an included but unscheduled return ticket. Orbital dynamics make this not expensive to do. People who take advantage of that and who got part of their trip out on credit would find themselves deeply burdened in debt, but survivable. The gamble being made (and hedged with insurance) is that most colonists would stay.
3. “and die on Mars” can be literally interpreted as old age, but given the aggressive responses in this thread the underlying assumption I believed was that they’d die from lack of food/water/air, too much radiation, life support failure, etc. in other words the “mars is harder than you think and the colonists will die” tired assumption. In reality ISS research has demonstrated what is required to keep humans alive and healthy, and literal decades of preparation has been done on designs for early bases that exploit local resources to reduce external dependency.
If you’re actually interested in this, Zubrin’s The Case for Space is a good introduction.
When life was hard and the prospect of getting to new land on a frontier to potentially improve your (and most of the time your family's) life, it gave people very potential tangible benefits to go there against the risks.
Going to Mars, a deserted place where living a bare life is only ever possible if a lot of life support infrastructure in small pods is running 24/7 without a hitch. Where there is no direct benefit in terms of human accumulation, not at least for a few generations.
Which millionaire living a good life on Earth would consciously choose living in a cramped pod with strangers for the rest of their life, to look out onto a Red Desert of nothingness every day?
The novelty of doing a short walk around will disappear fast, the motivation of "let's build a city here" would be 100% dependent on the provisions sent by Earth, and there would be no end in sight for your life in little pods while you toil away Martian soil, lose muscles, have to consume a diet of potatoes, while at any time if your life support systems fail you and everyone else you might bonded with are done.
Explorers without much to lose on Earth might embark on this, millionaires living a cushy life not so much.
You are attacking an argument I didn't make, my argument is that the people who possess enough to be the ones paying for a one-ticket to Mars are much less inclined to go live under those conditions. You are going to need a lot of people if you want to transform a barren planet.
And however this may be achieved, it definitely doesn't require humans living on Mars to do it. In fact, it is almost certainly going to only be possible if you don't have people there already, with life support systems adapted to the old status quo.
I don't see how you expect it to be accomplished remotely though, without people on-site to build things, repair things, and most importantly create and expand local infrastructure so as to not need imports from Earth.
It's not "well studied", there are a few studies on how it might be accomplished but all of it is unproven and untested, no one has ever done anything close to terraforming a planet, reality has a pesky way of getting in the way of untested proposals.
Even if we somehow fixed Mars' atmosphere (extremely difficult, but there are at least some ideas), we won't fix anything else. Mars is much farther away from the Sun, so it's always going to be much colder, whatever else happens to it. And it's covered in toxic dust and barren rock, that there is no realistic way to convert to livable useful soil. We should probably first "terraform" the deserts of Earth, as it will have much more value, and would be a good test. And of course, Mars has nowhere near enough water to sustain a significant human population + industry (the whole quantity of water ice is estimated to be similar to the great lakes). And most likely there is no natural water cycle that works at a human scale, due to the distinct lack of massive oceans.
And related to the remote part: robots.
I don’t get mad that there are companies targeting niches that don’t involve me. But when SpaceX does it…
The exact same phenomenon is happening with Mars. People like the idea of it, it's a wonderful fantasy. The new frontier, exploration, etc. None of them truly understand the hardships and ugliness of a life on Mars. It's not a life of exploration, it's a life of living in a small basement and obsessively checking a hundred different life support systems that will kill you if even one fails.
Also, every time one of these Mars fandoms went beyond posting on forums and meeting and speaking about it, they showed just how silly their ideas are. They have no idea of logistics, of limitations of construction equipment, of the difficulty of operating it even in good conditions, of how many things break down with dust, of how much water construction needs, of economics and fundraising for such a project, and so many other problems that are already known - not even discussing the unknowns.
If anyone truly planned to have a colony on Mars, they would obviously start with a colony project somewhere in the Arctic/Antarctic, importing the digging equipment, importing all the needed water, using exclusively solar energy and so on. They could use the experience as training, but, much more importantly, to actually estimate the required equipment and materials. They would start a relationship with regulatory agencies and suppliers, they would get a taste of the type of fundraising they need to do. If they succeeded, they would also have excellent proof that they know what they're doing, of a realistic time-line, and so on.
The fact that no one is even talking about starting something like this is 100% clear proof to me that there is no serious thought being put into this Mars colony fantasy.