>>12776523>weird how it's such a small segment of Mars they are looking atOk so basically anywhere that is blue, green, or yellow-green has enough atmosphere for Starship to be effective as a cargo transport (otherwise the air is so thin that it needs to go lighter on cargo in order to slow down enough through aerobraking to be able to land propulsively). That eliminates pretty much the entire southern hemisphere except Hellas.
Point 2, pretty much everywhere except for the northern hemisphere basin it too rough in terrain to land Starship safely, due to the Martian dichotomy (the northern hemisphere is probably so smooth because it's a giant impact crater and also had a shallow ocean in it for over a billion years to erode most primordial crater evidence).
Point 3, there's a pretty wide band centered on Mars' equator that seems to be poor in terms of shallow ice deposits, and ice is vital for Starship transport architecture. Hence going too far north in the northern basin is not good either.
This pretty much leaves three boxes where a good landing site can be picked from, all at around the same latitude, where the blue area extends south closer to the equator. Why did they pick that center patch near the Elysium region? I'd say it's because the local geology is more interesting. The other area to the west seems extremely flat and is likely boring ancient seabed, and the patch to the east looks very scoured by ancient flood waters and is also not that interesting from a volcanism perspective.
Obv. I'm justifying after the fact but it does seem like a good region to pick for downselecting a pinpoint landing site for a Mars base.
