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CNet:
The first aren't even built yet, but [Elon Musk] already has big plans for his company's spacecraft, which includes turning humans into an interplanetary species with a presence on Mars. He crunched some of the numbers he has in mind on Twitter on Thursday.
Musk doesn't just want to launch a few intrepid souls to Mars, he wants to send a whole new nation. He tossed out a goal of building 100 Starships per year to send about 100,000 people from Earth to Mars every time the planets' orbits line up favorably.
A Twitter user ran the figures and checked if Musk planned to land a million humans on Mars by 2050. "Yes," . The SpaceX CEO has suggested this sort of . This new round of tweets give us some more insight into how it could be done, though "ambitious" doesn't do that timeline justice. Miraculous might be a more fitting description.
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fans, rejoice. there will be plenty of jobs on Mars. When asked how people would be selected for the Red Planet move, , "Needs to be such that anyone can go if they want, with loans available for those who don't have money." So perhaps you could pay off your SpaceX loans with a sweet terraforming gig.
Terraforming the planet should be easy if Quaid can get past Cohagen and start the reactor.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday January 19 2020, @04:29PM
I have to find the right links, but no, you can theoretically do this with just chemical rockets like Starship. Musk was already anticipating 30-day (one-way) trips back during the ITS days:
Powerful rocket missions to Mars in 30 days one way and fast mission to other solar system destinations [nextbigfuture.com]
The big difference between Starship and conventional chemical rockets is that you can get the Starship into low-Earth orbit or even higher, and fill it right back up with propellant using in-orbit refueling. As if it was sitting on the pad fully fueled, except in space. This is a major advantage that could allow you to slash the travel time to Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, etc. If each Starship costs about $2 million to launch, it doesn't matter if you have to launch 10+ Starships to deliver diminishing amounts of propellant to the Mars-bound ship.
The estimate assumes an optimized launch date to take advantage of the Earth-Mars synodic period. So there would be a 26-month gap between waves of launches.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]