[rory096]

Why would a car-size airlock be required? A simple airtight hatch for the car to dock to (similar to a suitport) would work fine.

The first car on the moon was unpressurized because the program was a once-cancelled afterthought designed to fit into a spare cargo bay and unfold, with tight mass constraints. MOLAB was impractical because of the upmass required, not because pressurization wouldn't have been useful.

[slg]

>Why would a car-size airlock be required? A simple airtight hatch for the car to dock to (similar to a suitport) would work fine.

Fair point. I don't see how that would work on this specific vehicle, but it is certainly works in general.

>The first car on the moon was unpressurized because the program was a once-cancelled afterthought designed to fit into a spare cargo bay and unfold, with tight mass constraints. MOLAB was impractical because of the upmass required, not because pressurization wouldn't have been useful.

A lot of those requirements still stand regarding mass. It isn't a question of whether a pressurized vehicle would be useful on Mars, it is a question of whether its usefulness is enough to justify its weight and this vehicle appears to have a lot of extra weight that would need justification.

[gpm]

This vehicle is probably pretty light if you source the steel and the battery pack from a starship that has landed on mars. Starships have both. The plan isn't to return all of the initial starships because the steel is more useful on mars, and the energy to return them back would be really expensive.