>>14119658My post is by definition not baseless speculation because I'm basing it off of SpaceX's stated intent with Starship.
About 10,000 tons of cargo to Mars per 2.5 years implies 100 Starships each carrying maximum payload. 100 Starships each require ~10 refueling launches per Mars trip, which could require anywhere between one Tanker per refueling mission (ie expendable tanker launches) to one tanker in total (10,000 flights on one vehicle is very infeasible and would take too long anyway). I'll instead argue that one tanker per Starship-to-Mars is reasonable, so ten flights per Tanker and 100 Tankers total. I'll also say that one launch complex serving up to ten tankers at a time on a rotting schedule is reasonable. So, ten launch sites, 100 Starships, and 100 Tankers. 10100 launches in total across 2.5 years is about 11 launches per day, or a little more than one launch per launch site.
A reasonable estimate for the cost of a single Starship can be rounded to $100 million, and a Tanker around $50 million. For the Starships headed to Mars, 95% probably never return. That's immediately a $9.5 billion investment over 2.5 years. There's also the cost of the 100 Tankers, another $5B. Then there's the launch operations costs which are likely $2 million each, so overall total 2.5 year cycle transport cost is $34.7 billion, or round up to $14B/year. That's 62% of NASA's current budget. Expensive, not impossible.
10,000,000 kg every 2.5 years is a serious mass budget. Devote 25% of that strictly to solar power generation and you are growing your energy supply in increments of >25 MW increments, as an extremely unrealistic conservative estimate and still have 7500 tons of capacity to fill. That's dozens of skidsteers, diggers, trucks, bulldozers, rock crushers, vibrating sorting conveyors, sifters, smelters, mobile cranes, press forges, pile drivers, whatever else you can think of. If you think any of this is wildly delusional, please explain why.
