Hey HN. There’s not much reliable / unbiased analysis of SpaceX’s mission statement of making humanity multiplanetary. So, what are the chances? I’ve been following spacex for a while and, ignoring all the elon shenanigans old and new, they do incredible stuff. Docking with the space station, humans on the space station, reusable rockets launching more than weekly… it’s insane. The progress they’ve made in the last 15 years is unheard of, only rivaled by the Apollo program.

But a self sustaining civilization on Mars? I’m skeptical. Yes, it’s physically possible. And spacex seems to be heading in the right direction. But the sheer difficulty of the problem I think is sometimes understated.

Elon’s rough estimates on what it’ll take to create a self sustaining civilization vary from interview to interview. One quote:

“Roughly 800 to 1000 per year. That’s about what’s needed over ten years to create the fleet to build a self-sustaining city on Mars”

More than 3 launches per day for 10 years? That’s where the impossibility of it all starts to seep in.

Many seemingly unsolvable problems also arise. Where does the money come from? How will we make the Martian surface habitable? Even if getting launch costs down to 2 million as Musk stated once is possible (hard to believe, Falcon 9 is nowhere near that today), the amount of peripheral costs (maintenance, staffing, logistics, training, the list goes on) is extraordinary.

I’m pretty sure they’ll get to mars in the next 10 years. And they even have a good shot and doing that multiple times. But based on the sheer amount of payload that needs to get to Mars, it seems like a mission that will exceed the lifetime of SpaceX.