>>12221379The energy costs of getting stuff to other planets isn't actually all the much; the methane & LOX for a full Starship + Superheavy stack is only like $900k; even figuring in the ~7 refuel launches you would need to top off a Starship in LEO the total fuel cost to put 100+ tons on Mars is less than $10 million.
The real cost is in building the equipment; and it turns out that if you do stuff in house and don't have to farm parts out to every congressional district you can massively cut cost there. For example, the Raptor engines going into Starship already cost less than $2 million a unit to make; meanwhile NASA is paying Rocketdyne $146 million an engine for the SLS. As absurd as it sounds, Starships will probably cost less to build than commercial airliners or military cargo aircraft. And IF you have a rocket like that, you might as well send people.
Note of course, that is a big IF. Starship will be fucking awesome if it works anywhere near as well as planned, and development seems to be going smoothly, but unknown issues could also crop up.
