Musk says first Crewed Missions to Mars could happen in 4 years

Self driving turned out to be more difficult than expected. Manned space flight is like flying to the Moon but longer. Worst case they die.

Elon's timelines are r-slurred, but SpaceX has delivered. Reliable and ridiculously cheap and now they're responsible for like 90% of the global traffic to space. Reusable rockets were a meme and it turned out they just work. Starlink was a meme and now governments are sneeding at it. All the while Boeing can't undock from the ISS lmao

There kind of is a rush button. It's called "don't be afraid to risk the thing blowing up, just send it anyway". Musk isn't NASA, he operates on a completely different plane when it comes to PR. If Musk sends 20 manned ships to Mars and 19 of them blow up, but one of them lands successfully, he will be hailed as a hero of humanity. Well, not by Redditors, but who cares.

Elon's timelines are off, his primary advantage is that he read enough classic sci fi to know which emerging technologies to invest in to own the future.

It is due to this reason that there is a possibility of him turning out to be the the world's first trillionaire, although honestly I put him as more likely to get as far as 300-400 billion USD and then get stuck there because I still trust somebody will out compete him in a decade or two.

Let's assume developing a manned interplanetary spacecraft is somewhere around the difficulty of developing an airliner that's profitable today.

Wouldn't it share many design problems (and solutions) with existing spacecraft, though?

It would need to support people for a very long time, over a year. But haven't we done that on ISS? There's a whole slate of stuff to design like water recycling, food storage/preparation, etc., but we do that on ISS as well.

I guess I agree that it's a huge design process, I just don't think they're starting at square 0 like you're implying here. Probably more like 80% of the way there.

Musk is famous for his overly optimistic timelines. Landing an uncrewed Starship on Mars in 2026 MIGHT be doable if everything with testing and refueling goes right in two years, and also because Starship is an empty shell on its current state. Life support systems for a crewed mission are a whole different beast, I still think that will delay their Artemis Lunar Lander into the 2030s.

Let's assume developing a manned interplanetary spacecraft is somewhere around the difficulty of developing an airliner that's profitable today. I think that's pretty charitable

Extremely charitable indeed lol. They need life-support systems for 2 years with enough redundancy and radiation shielding (cosmic and solar radiation alike). NASA won't risk their astronauts on missions to Mars without certifying every single system so regardless of Musk's insane takes I wouldn't be concerned about SpaceX doing something as reckless.

Men are from mars chud.

We should be sending all-female missions to Venus, like yesterday. Only then will space be equitable.

For a 2026 attempt they must first have a successful orbital mission (landing in one piece) and have tested orbital refueling. Starship can't leave earth's orbit without refueling so they have 2 years to test all of that. Even if they blow up landing on Mars it will still be a huge achievement and it could make the Mars Sample Return mission feasible again (the costs ballooned and NASA doesn't have the money to go ahead with current plans).

Now if they want to return it might take another 10 launches from Mars, each of these ship having to be transported to Mars makes for over 100 launches. Refining fuel on Mars could cut this number down somewhat.

Mars Gravity is weaker, it will be a single stage launch and fuel is set to he produced using ISRU. It's still r-slurred because you need a lot of power to produce all of that fuel and I'm not convinced a single-stage starship could go back all on its own, of maybe they're planning another starship in orbit for Mars-Earth transfer but you would still need to refuel.

I still think Mars missions will take a traditional NASA approach with Starship being used solely as a lander and with a transfer vehicle like Deep Space Transport being used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Transport

Refining fuel on Mars

I have no idea if this will turn out to be practical or not, but I wouldn't send a bunch of people out to another planet where their survival depends on successfully setting up an entirely new industry on another planet. We can't even imagine what could go wrong.