Comment by dark_star | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dark_star | Hacker News Reader

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It depends on what you are thinking critically about - what is your frame of mind. You don't see a viable business here.

But SpaceX does see several possibilities. One is supplying a US Moon base and US space stations. Since Starship/Superheavy rockets are so inexpensive to build (about 100M in expendable configuration [1] even doing something like that would be profitable for SpaceX.

For Mars colonization, Elon Musk has said his target for Starship to Mars cost per flight was USD 10M. If it can take 100 people, and they each pay USD 200K per person, that's USD 20M, a 10M profit for SpaceX.

It might also be that a nation state might want to fund something like that to establish a base there.

Again, you may see a viable business in Mars colonization. But SpaceX does. So do other people. It was conventional wisdom that Starlink would not work, but it is now quite profitable. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship

[2] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/billionaire-elon-musks-new-s...

You seemingly ignored the cost of the return ticket, which even with your fantasy numbers would cost many millions of dollars.

Cramming one hundred people into a starship is eerily reminiscent of overloaded slave ships. The assumption is that you will die on the journey or at your destination.

They don't really plan for people coming back from Mars, for most of them its a one way ticket...

> For Mars colonization, Elon Musk has said his target for Starship to Mars cost per flight was USD 10M. If it can take 100 people, and they each pay USD 200K per person, that's USD 20M, a 10M profit for SpaceX.

Musk has lied many times about many things. This one in particular makes less than 0 sense - Starship has nowhere near the capacity to take 100 humans to Mars even just including the provisions needed for the trip, unless you assume that those people will essentially sit in their own little cell for 2 months.

Thank you. I was timed out, but I was going to say there's 0% chance of Starship taking 100 people. Do you have any concept of how much water, oxygen, C02 scrubbing, food, shielding, medicine, and infrastructure you need to support 100 people?! Imagine the device they have on the ISS, multiply it by 20, and then pack all the water it uses in a year in advance onto the ship. Then pack 100 warm bodies in there too?

It's simply not possible in the ship they've designed.

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