alt Hacker NewsI don’t think is right at all. It’s just Musk focusing on the fundamentals of ‘what is stopping us making significantly (100x or 1000x) more progress on space exploration. And the answer to that is that it’s just too expensive to launch mass off the earth.
If you make it much cheaper, then everything else flows from that. You no longer have to spend years engineering everything at the cutting edge of your mass budget. You can use off the shelf parts, you can have redundancy.
The gains will come when these flights become commonplace.
Biosphere stuff is more fundamental than just mass. We had several closed ecosystem projects built on the ground out of concrete, with no mass limits, and all of them failed.