>>12041721Maybe not science rooms on colonization ships, but hydrophonics is all but guaranteed. It's 3 month journey one way. You can't store enough food into the cargo hull of a Starship for ~100 people for 3 months.
An average male needs 3.7 liters of water a day and an average female needs 2.7 liters of water a day. If you send 100 people to Mars, you need to store: 6.4L for 2 people x 60 days (as you'd recycle this water for nearly everything). You'd get the next 30 days through recycling and the supply would then see benefit on the colony for its duration as an extra buffer.
So 6.4L x 50 (x2) x 60 gets you: 19,200 liters of water. 1 ton = 24,000 liters. So arguably, 1 ton of water is sufficient for 100 people to Mars on Starship. SpaceX would probably load the ship with 2 tons, so that there's enough water for drinking, showering, cleaning, etc. Additionally, most of the waste produced by humans would be dehydrated to extract maximum amount of water, and what can be used will be used (physical waste) on the hydrophonics, while the rest will likely be either jetissoned into space or stored as waste in some compartment to be then used on the colony for whatever purpose or simple discard before reentry so that it burns up in Martina atmosphere.
>>12041726NASA does very conservative designs for ships; as a result, their projection for landing a man or woman on Mars isn't expected until 2050, with more than 100 people on Mars being present no later than 2100. Most NASA and Boeing and Lockheed Martin crew vessels to anywhere in the Solar System are simply incapable of going any further than the Moon.
A part of me hopes that China will make a manned attempt at the Moon in the next 10 years, independent of Starship. The moment Chinese boots touch on the Moon, the US military will go full bull in a china shop, and demand a 500Bn budget for NASA and space to counter the threat. Then overnight, you'll get Starship class vessels into LEO.
NatSec et all.
