| This isn't just rationalizing away possible costs. I'd argue that we are more fully prepared for a human Mars mission now than we were for Apollo when Kennedy made his speech. We have decades of operational experience operating robotics on the planet and decades of on-orbit human spaceflight experience with durations of the same order of magnitude as a Mars mission. In contrast, the US had just shot someone on a suborbital flight into space by the time JFK gave his speech, and we had next to no understanding of the Moon's surface or long-duration human spaceflight. I've thought intensely about Mars. I think a human Mars surface mission is easily within reach if the right architectural approach is used. SpaceX has a particularly good architectural approach. Using a reusable upper stage also as a tanker and a lander is a game-changer. Scaling that up to a sustainable mass settlement initiative, on the other hand, is absolutely full of unknowns, as you say. That remains a crazy proposition without guarantee of success. The first human mission is primarily about launch, entry/reentry, and logistics. SpaceX has a good handle on those and has retired a lot of risk by demonstrating supersonic retropropulsion (in a portion of the atmosphere approximating Martian conditions) and landing almost two dozen times, and I think SpaceX has a good plan to mitigate the rest of the risk. EDIT:Another thing: SpaceX is building the lander and the rocket anyway and plan to pay for it just by switching over all their services from Falcon 9, Heavy, and Dragon. BFR is also big enough to serve as the transit hab and surface hab. So by just consolidating F9, FH, and Dragon to the BFR vehicle, they'll have 95% of the Mars architecture already built and paid for. The lone additional thing they need is ISRU: the mining equipment, the power production (primarily solar as it'll be cheapest), and the chemical plant. Chemical plant and solar are well-understood as both have been tested at small scale either on Mars or on ISS or similar, but the mining equipment only has some not-terribly-representative testing by scientific sample handling on the various landers and rovers of Mars. That is a question the first uncrewed mission will need to address. |