[ricardobeat]

Starship is supposed to carry a couple hundred passengers. That would be a few hundred ships all launching at once; while I share the enthusiasm I’m not sure that’s realistic due to the [lack of] economic incentives involved.

[whatislovecraft]

> That would be a few hundred ships all launching at once

Yes, that's the plan as described by Elon! Maybe not "all at once" but over the course of some days/weeks, yes.

> I’m not sure that’s realistic due to the [lack of] economic incentives involved

Every Mars thread someone pops in to say this, but it simply isn't true. There are major economic incentives to go to Mars, and selling tickets is #1 of hundreds. There are basically infinite ways of making money by going to Mars and I'm really upset that the HN crowd is so dedicated to the line that there's no money on Mars. There's trillions of dollars on Mars.

With tickets priced at $200,000 or so as Elon has described, each Starship should have launch-day revenues of $40,000,000 if each ones carries 200 people. Wowza that's solid, no? And it's just tickets so far we're talking about, no science research or other goods or services or plans or anything at all, just consumer tickets.

There's plenty of money to be made.

----

Edit: I guess I've been banned? I'm no longer allowed to post on HN this morning. Here's my response to the post below.

I think we are on different pages here. I'm not talking about tourism, I'm talking about people who will build libraries, write books, dig for oil or whatever, innovate new solar panels, build houses, create industries, make movies, build new spaceships to the stars, go to the poles and think about philosophy, create new electronics, work on particle physics, etc.

Not tourism!!

> (a) people who can afford 200k and (b) people willing to risk a possible one-way trip.

Yes? There ought to be tens of millions of such people in 20-50 years. Why wouldn't there be? Elon gave us half a century notice to save our money. We're doing it. If they build it, we'll be ready to come.

> curious to hear examples

Okay. The Mars Colony seems like the first stepping stone into future solar system exploration. There will be significant opportunities there to build new products and drive new frontiers. I'll come back and write some specific examples soon, but I see it as far more economically interesting than Europe coming to North America in the long run: the possibilities are seriously endless, given the resources available, the lack of commercial claim to them, and the incredible rarity and quantity of those resources can change our ideas about what can be reasonably built by humans/robots in our lifetimes.

[lucideer]

You may be right that there are many ways to make money beyond tickets (I don’t know—curious to hear examples), but I don’t think your ticket math quite adds up.

200k might be an ok ticket price for some, but you’re talking about the overlap of: (a) people who can afford 200k and (b) people willing to risk a possible one-way trip.

You’re talking about tickets as if this is space tourism: space tourism is a loop around the moon. We’re not going to have Mars “tourism” in the near future. These proposed hundreds of passengers are in for high-risk exploration.

[speeq]

"Musk thinks the ticket price could eventually dip below $100,000, cheap enough that "most people in advanced economies could sell their home on Earth and move to Mars if they want."

[ricardobeat]

And have the 24hr equivalent of a coal miner’s job.

[tigershark]

Ok, Falcon 9 costs 62M$ just to bring something on earth orbit. Why you would ever think that 40M$ worth of tickets to bring a BFR on Mars would be profitable?

[whatislovecraft]

> Ok, Falcon 9 costs 62M$ just to bring something on earth orbit.

That is false. Where are you getting your info? Falcon 9 costs a lot less than that to deliver cargo to LEO! And the price is dropping every day.

> Why you would ever think that 40M$ worth of tickets to bring a BFR on Mars would be profitable?

There's no need to be condescending. First, I did not state at any point that $40M per launch would be profitable! Please don't make things up and say I said them. I merely stated a large source of revenue. I said there would be other sources as well, I made a big point about that!

Elon has stated many times that the Starship/BFR would cost less to launch than the Falcon 1, amortized over many reusable launches. Falcon 1, not even Falcon 9. So the cost of launching a Starship would be dramatically lower than your made-up numbers.

[tigershark]

Ok it’s 50m now, still speaking about earth orbit

[whatislovecraft]

Source!? Falcon 9 cost is not even public is it? Your number is wayyyy too high to match with current SpaceX economics I think.

[tigershark]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9 If you have a better source feel free to update the page. However I think that it will be much more costly a travel of more than 50M km rather than less that 50K.

[mr_toad]

https://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

[leesec]

Also worth mentioning is that 200k is much less when considering you'd be able to sell your house/car/everything to do so.

[netsec_burn]

Why would you be banned?