tater

We've gotten into this argument before, but I can see the "backup of humanity" argument as being rational. That said, I don't see it in any sort of near-future timeframe, more like many hundreds of years or more. Of course the effort to push ourselves farther out from LEO at all does pay a dividend, even without actually "backing up humanity"---we gain the capability to much more effectively mitigate planet-killing threats. The ability to rapidly put several hundred tins in LEO, for example...need not be ITS, it could be a smaller craft with a ton of dv compared to what we could loft now to match with, then divert an asteroid. Clearly we could be more efficient by focusing on that threat for our spacecraft vs settling Mars, but honestly it is not "cool" enough until we actually need it (then a rush program might not be fast enough), so other stuff is more likely to get funded.

The booster doesn't put itself in orbit, it turns around and heads back, and S2 burns for orbit.

That's at the "basic science" level if anything is---fundamental laws of physics. Mars offers planetary geology, and how humans do in a nasty radiation environment at 0.38g. That's pretty much it.

Yeah, Id say that's more like sample return than "ore" though.

I think it does a direct EDL from Mars, it doesn't have the dv to blow on an orbital insertion.

Career is always going to be wonky in SSTU, because of "low part count solutions." The early game is very much part limited as the sole difficulty hurdle. I suppose you could use higher price as a balance, and engines like Merlin could appear later in the tree as they are modern engines, after all, not late 50s---early 60s tech. This might force some stock parts early on, past the usual mk1 pod I end up using.

Launching 20 Dragons to load the ship up would eliminate any cost reduction of making a large craft.

Regarding the study of the effects of 0.38g on people long term (or 0.16g), it would be vastly easier to spin up a Bigelow or two above ISS (to mitigate drag), but below the Van Allen belt and test 0.38 g there, where the logistical train is a few hundred km, and the radiation exposure is about like living in Aspen.

This is a ridiculous comparison. Apollo was not better at all than unmanned probes would have been. You cannot compare a cheap probe to the vastly expensive Apollo program. You need to compare Apollo with a counterfactual where unmanned lunar exploration gets exactly the same resources as Apollo. In that case, we get the exact same mass in lunar transfer orbit. Which means that we get vastly more surface collection. The return capsule is about the same, but we collect all the samples the astronauts did, plus the mass of the astronauts, and every piece of equipment needed to keep them alive, plus all their food. The only subtraction would be that the rovers might have been slightly heavier to be remote controlled such that they could shovel their collections onto the return vehicle. Time is meaningless, a probe can take as long as needed, astronauts had limited time because they carried limited supplies. The argument that geology is better done by people is not even close to being true, even in the 1970s, and it's less true now by a long shot. And a nominal manned mission is well over 100 billion $. Your math is flawed. The problem is that the sample return mission is designed to be as inexpensive as possible. The human mission collects more simply because it gets mass economies of scale. With the same resources in money, by definition a robot mission would return MORE than a human mission, because it can return every kg a human mission could return, plus the mass of the humans, and everything required to keep them alive. Given that Mars DRAs, a robotic rover is effectively included, and the mass of gear to collect and transfer samples would be less than the life support mass, easily.

Rare earths would be better extracted from asteroids if the goal was shipment to earth. Why would anyone involve 2 gravity wells in such resource extraction?

There is nothing worth extracting on mars that could be brought back cost effectively, and extraction would be vastly more expensive than a guy showing up in what is now San Francisco and buying himself a shovel and a pickaxe.

Very little of it is economically justifiable, IMO. If the announcement had been about a suborbital passenger vessel, then that would be true... then he could later say, "oh yeah, it's actually a Mars vessel, but we wanted to test it." I'm trying to retrofit utility to it, since there is no utility for a Mars settlement transport, because settling Mars makes no sense.

No human effort in space is scientifically efficient outside the science of how humans live in space, IMO. I guesstimated that a cost/launch (vehicle included) for a suborbital version that still only flies 100 times would be ~2M$, but the thing has a passenger volume over 2X a 747, so 800 would not be impossible at $2500/seat cost (business class is way more than that for a gajillion hour flight now, 45 minutes is pretty appealing---plus you get to then claim astronaut status .

I said this in the other thread, but I think that the ITS component is interesting as a VTVL transport concept---Earth transport. Let;s spitball a minute... The ITS has a usable passenger volume (including the cargo space) that is roughly twice the passenger volume of a 747. So it could theoretically hold several hundred people, possibly approaching 1000 in an airline seating configuration. They say that the cost to build on is about 200M$, and 130M$ for the tanker. That's slightly more than a 747. Their total reuse as a Mars vehicle is said to be 12 times, but for this application, but the tanker says 100 for a similar profile. My guess is a lot of the cost must be LS stuff, and other long-duration mission redundancies. So call it closer to a 747 at ~150M$. Even with just 100 uses, that's a vehicle cost of 1.5M$/launch. They said 0.5M maintenance per use for the tanker, let's go with that. 2M$ a flight. That's $2500/seat if it seats 800. First class to the other side of Earth is nearly 10X that. Business class is more than 2X that. There might be no coach class, but it's not an impossible business model. Perhaps start with air cargo until you have many flights with no issues, then mess with air travel.

@Workable Goblin, I don't think Antartica is a very good model. If there were not treaties forbidding people from taking ownership, then nations and businesses would do that if for nothing other than oil. There is an economic driver for actual settlement, and Antartica is many orders of magnitude easier and more hospitable than Mars. Yeah, that's a legit concern. Realistically, the market would likely be limited to near a few high value cities, likely with a possible facility on or near the sea. NYC, London, LA, Tokyo, Shanghai...

That's why the suborbital application is actually the most interesting bit to me. To convince people to take a ride into space period would require it to be safe. The way to know if it is safe, is many, many flights. As @DerekL1963 said, it's another chicken and egg issue. Suborbital flights, not as a joy ride, but as transportation that is also a joy ride might well fill this role. It could also have government customers... rapid deployment to a forward air base, for example. I posted "Pegasus" above, but it's counterpart was "Ithacus," which was meant to deploy 1200 troops anywhere on Earth in about an hour. If you could make the "spaceship" function as an airliner analog, with hundreds of seats, things might get interesting. The biggest issue would be the g-loading, though I'm unsure what that would look like in the suborbital application.

Yeah, ETT is pretty good.

Yeah, I agree, within the current system, at least delivery to Kerbin (or an existing station/base that a contract has required) would make vastly more sense.

Colonization as a private activity requires an economic driver. There is not one forthcoming for Mars.

If it is economical to bring ore anyplace other than where it is mined, the ISRU is grossly overpowered. ISRU is only valuable because the propellant/etc is at the place you want to be. Studies of lunar regolith mining for propellant have shown that it merely offsets landing costs. That's it. Hauling ore should cost more propellant than you get, 100% of the time, or something is broken.

An SSTO with no payload that cannot be reused is useless, though.

Give me several billion please! Your return might be "intangible." You game?

The best money maker would likely be using the spacecraft as a vtvl suborbital passenger liner, like the Pegasus concept from Phil Bono in the 60s. With no need for recreation areas, and little need for more than max capacity seating for under 1 hour flights, you could probably put north of 200 aboard, easily. Wonder what the operating cost would be used that way? First class is full at 15 grand or more for trans pacific flights, 40 minutes to Asia would be worth a premium...

Heal up, @sal_vager!

I don't think it's remotely analogous to colonizing the Americas. Anyone dropped off with some simple tools could easily live. The New World was so easy that the earlier immigrants (edit: "Native Americans") never had to leave the Stone Age. Any destination for humans on Mars must be entirely constructed. They can no more bootstrap themselves than they could an O'Neill colony. That's on top of the fact there is no possible RoI at all---it's not a matter of an insufficiently high RoI, but that there is no plausible return at all.