alt Hacker NewsI really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedback. The trip itself takes 7~10 months, adding extra time.
If all of humanity devoted ourselves to setting up a mars base it would take less than 100 years! My timeline was based on NASA with 2-4x the budget, which I think is very reasonable. I think you are being foolish.
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Yes, the quote "a million earthlings will be living on Mars in 20 years", is hilarious. It would require us to start launching hundreds of SpaceX Starship rockets a day every day, now. It's just dumb.
I know that there can be an amazing level of self confidence and denial of current reality required to build a new company from scratch, but this stretches all bounds of credulity. I just don't believe that they believe what they're saying. It's so far beyond marketing hype and "self driving" being available in 2018. At some point, this moves from encouraging hype to pure cult level deceit.
This is a dumb argument. We are doing it now, already, no crazy budget explosions needed. Just some medium expansions of existing projects.
Orion is going to send humans past the moon this year, and could theoretically send humans to mars not much further out than that. It is literally on the Lockheed Martin website that they would like to send humans to mars sometime in the 2030s, provided they can get the funding.
I'm not involved in the project any longer, but this has been the ideal vision of the project since the mid 2010s. Currently the plan is to put people on the moons of mars, as we have no way of getting them back if we actually put people on the surface of mars.
The goal was "get a few humans on Mars". Not the insane goal of "a million in 20 years".
Firstly, there's no reason the trip can't be one-way, or at least, temporarily one-way.
Secondly, there's not a huge need to develop a new rocket. We've delivered lots of one-way cargo to Mars using the Atlas V; something like the SLS could deliver much more, plenty for a couple humans to get there and not die. We've already launched SLS uncrewed around the moon, there's no reason to think it would take decades of dedication to launch one again 1-way to Mars.