>>11396224Anybody catch the Zubrin interview a day or two ago? Elon recently gave him a tour of Boca Chica.
Some highlights:
*Musk is more concerned at this point with building a *shipyard* than with StarShip. He expects Boca Chica to expand from ~300 workers to ~3,000 within a year.
*The expected cost of Starship in mass production is... $5 million. Let that sink in for a moment, and remember that this includes 6 Raptors (Zubrin expects it to be more like $20 million, but still...).
*The dramatic drop in costs allows Musk to simply *not care* about things that Zubrin or others care about, like optimizing the mass budget. Notably, rather than wait for a Mars-capable nuclear reactor to be developed, Musk plans to use existing solar panels. When Zubrin pointed out that the energy requirements just to run the Sabatier chemical reactor to refuel a single StarsShip for a return trip by the next launch window would require 5 or 6 football fields' worth of solar panels, Musk replied, "Then that's what we'll ship".
*Likewise, it doesn't matter if the first 3-4 StarShips don't reach orbit; at those prices, SpaceX will simply eat the cost, and make the necessary improvements to the design so that the next half dozen *will*.
*They didn't really talk about the moon much, but Zubrin spent a lot of time in the interview detailing why StarShip can't land on the moon (tl;dr it's too heavy and the moon is too soft, and the thrust needed to land will dig an uneven crater into the surface as it comes down).
*Zubrin still has concerns about the execution of future steps, but he doesn't seem nearly as down on Musk's colonization plans as he used to. I think the sheer magnitude of the drop in cost/labor/materials really made a lot of his disagreements vanish. Zubrin's always focused heavily on managing the mass budget of his concepts, on the safe assumption that mass directly correlated with cost. Break that, and the impossible no longer appears to be so.
