>>11673443>You continue recouping your costs by continuing to provide a service when not en routeA station doesn't provide any service, though.
>There's no need for a Mars ferry to compete with a Starship doing Moon runsBut there is a need for the cost of fabricating, launching, and assembling the big ship to result in a lower ticket price than that of a transfer via Starship, and Starship has at least three other uses besides Mars missions wherein it can be rapidly reused and make enough money to offset its own construction costs into oblivion.
>The only job a Mars ferry would do is the most expensive one a Starship will ever doThere's no reason sending a Starship to Mars would need to be any more expensive than sending a Starship to LEO, because the Mars-bound Starship can pay for itself by doing LEO trips or Moon trips beforehand in short order.
>To be clear, I already explained I would've modified anon's original suggestion as an NTRSure, however that comes with its own problems. For one thing, NTR can't be reused very much, because the fuel elements become saturated with long lived neutron poisons (fission products which absorb neutrons far more readily than the fuel), and they also physically degrade. A nuclear thermal engine is one of those things that looks nice on paper but in reality has a lot of problems in the fine print. You could possibly, maybe get 24 hours of operation out of each NTR you installed, after which it'd be too degraded and the reactor wouldn't be producing enough thermal power to remain competitive with chemical engine Isp anymore. Chemical engines would be able to outlast any nuclear thermal engine in operational lifetime, and if you're going to Mars you can do it with big payloads using chemical anyway, so why even bother with nuclear thermal?
