>>14312084>Which means they have to build an interplanetary capable vessel Which is what Starship is meant to be, yes.
>which costs shitloads of money Nah Elon says each Mars Starship will be well under $100 million to build, including all systems of the vehicle.
>that they will never see againNo they'll use Starships either by having them perform a bunch of useful launches to get them to pay for themselves first then send them to MArs, or they'll send them to Mars first and after they get back retire them from interplanetary flights to do a bunch of cargo missions, whichever way makes more sense. Three years round trip is eons for SpaceX vehicle development, so anything sent to Mars is going to be out of date by the time it gets back to Earth anyway.
>because there is no commercial incentive to develop it The vehicles will do non-Mars-transfer missions to pay off their construction cost before leaving, and tickets from people actually going to Mars will pay for the mission to Mars (though SpaceX could just self finance using Starlink profits, which is why Starlink is a thing to begin with).
>before DST A useless piece of hardware that will never be used to send any human on an interplanetary mission, ever, because it's far too slow compared to a chemical propulsion Hohmann transfer orbit to Mars.
>which NASA was simply handed 20B to build no strings attached.And this is not an argument for why SpaceX should wait for DST. NASA is told to build a SEP module and put it in lunar orbit, okay so what? It's no benefit to any mission architecture that uses Starship.
