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One of the things Elon Musk said in his September 2016 speech about the ITS was that the cost of getting to Mars is essentially infinite right now. In his powerpoint, he put it at $10 billion per person. Now, the logistics of the ITS aside, I wonder how accurate this is. How much WOULD it cost to get humans on Mars? What are the different cost breakdowns of different approaches, and which mission configuration would be best? And, most importantly, what happens if we Kerbal it? The challenge is to send a few Kerbals to Duna, using only currently-available propulsion methods, with enough supplies to live on for the trip, as cheaply as possible. Rules: Propulsion. No nukes and no airbreathers. SABRE isn't up and running, and NTR isn't likely any time soon, so your propulsion needs to be chemical only. No ion engines; we need to assume you're running against some kind of a deadline. ISRU. Nope, sorry. We can't wait around on Duna forever. Payload. Send up to 12 Kerbals to the surface of Duna and bring them back to Kerbin. But they need consumables, right? Let's be very Spartan and say that they each need a total of 0.2 tonnes of food and other consumables for each leg of the trip. You can pack that extra payload any way you want; that's approximately two Science Jrs per Kerbal, and you can ditch up to half of them (they're empty, after all) before you enter Duna's SOI. Prop transfer. This is not only permitted, but encouraged. I highly recommend it. Reuse. Recovery of components is encouraged by a cost reduction as outlined below. Scoring. Your total score is the total mission cost divided by the number of Kerbals you actually land on Duna and return safely. Kerbals which stay in Duna orbit do not count, and dead Kerbals do not count. Any recovered components (reusable launch vehicles, etc.) are counted at 30% of their full cost. You do not have to include the cost of whatever you use for dry mass payload for consumables. The winner is whoever has the lowest score. Mods. No part mods and nothing that would affect scoring, but anything else is fine. I only have the Demo, or I'd make my attempt, but obviously this can be done. I'm mostly interested in seeing HOW it is done, what mission architectures are used, and so forth. Good luck!