Northstar1989

The farms will obviously be large, probably in most cases corporate-owned, but there will be THOUSANDS of them for a population of millions. Farms on Mars probably won't be nearly as productive as those on Earth (at least not as productive as in rich industrialized nations), so a significantly greater proportion of the population will haver to be dedicated to farming... And, it would be EXTREMELY unwise for any individual colony to allow all of its farming to become controlled by just one corporation. You've heard of Too-Big-To-Fail, right? It would be neither wise nor ETHICAL for a colony on a virgin planet with poor transportation infrastructure to allow a single owner to gain control over all its food resources. So of course there will be multiple farms, and multiple farmers. And hopefully, if they take a diversity if approaches to what they grow and how they grow it, not all those farms will fail at the same time... (this is also what granaries and food warehouses exist for, thpugh- to store surplus food in good years so there will be enough in bad ones...)

Actually, it is. It's a matter of productivity- which is the product of hard work and technology. If one farmer produces twice as much food as he eats in a year, then theoretically (ignoring spoilage and his need to trade food for other goods and services) his crops could fail every-other year and he'd still be able to feed himself so long as he stored or traded away for money (which he then held onto) his surplus on good years. Similarly, if a factory worker could survive if he only were paid twice subsistence-levels and found work every-other year, but held onto every cent he made on good years. Survival, generally speaking, is a matter of productivity, savings, and trade. Of course the whole picture is made more complicated when you work for an employer- for whom you might produce 500x as much food as you need, but only be paid barely enough to feed yourself if market conditions allow the employer to pay his laborers a low enough wage... On Mars, economic justice will not just be a matter of fairness- but of the survival of society. No society can persist for long if all its labor starves to death due to the greed of the rich few who own all the capital... Colonizing Mars is a risk- but so is war. Statistically, It's a much better investment than invading another country if we weigh the cost and risk vs. the benefits we can expect (an entire self-sufficient second planet for humanity) if it proves successful. And nobody is *demanding* we do it- only pointing out that it would clearly be in our own best interest as a species to cut back on military spending and building new coal power plants, and spend the time and money on colonizing Mars instead...

An O'Neill colony will NEVER be self-sufficient or self-expanding. The lack of any mineral resources in LEO and the difficulty and very limited supply of obtaining asteroids to mine ensures that such a colony will PERMANENTLY be dependent on re-supply shipments from Earth. That is not to say that such a colony couldn't eventually be PROFITABLE. At the very least, orbital colonies could someday allow us to increase our population without overcrieding. But an O'Neill colony is a fixed investment that can NEVER hope to grow in size on its own. A Mars colony, on the other hand, can grow out a network of new colonies across the entire surface if the planet and eventually build orbital colonies of its own- all using mineral resources mined locally on Mars. Minerals, not food or energy (the Sun provides plenty of the latter, and food can always be grown when you have energy, and humans to eat the food and recycle their waste as fertilizer), will ultimately be the limiting factor on human civilization as it expands out across the solar system...

I'm talking about the cost to seed a Martian colony and re-supply it until it can become self-sufficient and self-exoanding. Obviously there's a massive gap in time from them until the rest of the planet is colonized, and the colonies are nearly as well-developed as say, Germany- but none if tgat requires any additional economic input from Earth. Put another way, once Mars starts having its own industry, it will be incredibly valuable. You can initially think of it in terms of the cost in supplies it will offset needing to be sent from Earth. For instance, if a small factory produces enough value to offset $1 billion in imports from Earth each year (at $1000/kg that's only 1000 metric tons worth of production) then technically, that factory's contribution to Mars' annual GDP is $1 billion. If you want to claim the "cost" of living on Mars is high, even once re-supply from Earth is no longer necessary, then you have to also admit that the value of local production on Mars is astronomical. The same accounting-methods that are used to estimate the value of ISRU for missions sent from Earth apply to early Martian industry- except that the Martians themselves can do all the necessary R&D to develop it. Colonizing a new planet requires different ways of thinking about economic value. Your conclusions are incorrect because your PARADIGM is incorrect- you need to think of Martian industry not in terms of how valuable the products would be on Earth, but how valuable they are to Martians when used on Mars. A tiny 5-man workshop on Mars that produces life-support equipment weighing 10 metric tons each year easily produces an annual value in excess of $10 million US dollars...

Stuff happens. Crop failures happen here on Earth too. But if you work hard you can produce enough surplus value in your good years to buy food in your bad years from other farmers. Nobody ever implied that just because a Mars colony as a whole needs to eventually become self-sufficiency, every individual family and farmer needs to become self-sufficient. Obviously there will be trade and mutual interdependence between Martiasn colonists. You know as well as I that individual autonomy on Mars (or Earth, for that matter) is impossible- which is why you're using it as a straw-man argument...

The parts of Earth that are amenable to economic development, and not too busy killing each other or trying to kill Westerners with the necessary capital to help bootstrap their economic development are already developing towards a Germany-like status. Rapidly. The parts of Earth that are resistant to modernization for cultural reasons (like Zimbabwe or North Korea) would require wars and security-forces costing TRILLIONS of dollars to economically develop right now, making them much more expensive than colonizing Mars... The economic math *DOES* work out when you consider how much money a single war costs for a country like the United States right now, and how rarely those wars are even successful at meeting their goals. For the cost of just ONE of its recent wars, the USA could have already colonized Mars via Elon's latest plan. Sadly, it's far more expensive to drag a nation into the modern world, kicking and screaming, that doesn't want to modernize and educate its populace, than it is to colonize an entire new planet...

Obviously you have to have equipment to work hard on. Even on Earth a human is next-to-worthless without his tools. But when we're talking about the capability of a *mature* colony to support scientists and engineers, it will already HAVE that equipment, and the capability to make more equipment right there on Mars out of local resources. So re-supply from Earth doesn't even factor into the picture anymore at that point...

Mere survival is a powerful motivating factor to work. Most people would rather work hard than die... Mars will produce considerably *less* IP than Earth- it's a smaller planet and the ratio of IP to population will be far lower (as a MUCH larger fraction of the population must be dedicated to producing basic necessities). However even a medium-sized country like Germany supports MILLIONS of scientists and engineers here on Earth. If the entire PLANET of Mars can only support as many scientists and engineers as the mid-sized NATION of Germany once Mars is self-sufficiency and fully developed, it will still be a worthwhile investment for humanity to colonize Mars in terms of IP production... Put another way, if you could spend 100-200 Billion USD to add another Germany sized nation to Earth, it would be a worthwhile investment, wouldn't it? Also, if a much smaller proportion of the population get to be scientists and engineers, rather than manual laborers and mechanics, on Mars (with most people kept busy running all the sophisticated machinery necessary to keep the colony's industry and life support operational) then the average aptitude for science/math and intelligence of Martian engineers should be much higher than on Earth, as they will be a much more select group... (assuming a model of population demographics where intelligence and aptitude for science/math is randomly determined at birth... Of course in reality, culture, education, and upbringing all play enormous roles- and any Mara colony will probably have to much more carefully and scientifically attend to the upbringi g of successive generations if it hopes to survive- stupid people won't survive long on Mars...)

Now if only SQUAD would get that memo! I'm sick and tired of designing 100% reusable spaceplanes in stock, sometimes to find out they are actually MORE expensive than expendable rockets (with SRB first stages and optimized ascent-curves) simply because of fuel-costs... Yes, I know that RealFuels fixes the problem- but it also introduces realistic ISP's and TWR's that are much too powerful for stock, and then I end up using RSS 64K, and then re-entry heating becomes a major problem and all my launches take longer (which has become a real problem lately on my failing laptop...)

Yup. This is more interesting from a "what can a lunar outpost do that's useful" perspective. The kind of machinery necessary to refuel Aluminum-Oxygen Hybrid Rockets might end up requiring human supervision and maintenance, at least in the early stages... (theoretically, a sufficiently sophisticated robot can do anything a human can- but we're not quite to that point in robotics yet...)

That's how It's made on EARTH. There are alternative processes involving chemical extractions that are less power-intensive (though this does add the complexity of needing to recycle certain chemical cofactors that undergo redox reactions in the process...) Ultimately, though, *ANY* type of propellant-production ISRU boils down to leveraging electrical power to produce propellants in the end. Some are more energy-hungry than others, but all that really means is that your propellant production-rate ends up being lower with a given amount of electrical power... Higher energy demands just means larger solar arrays and battery-banks. Good thing the BFR is supposed to be able to transport 150 metric tons of payload to the Moon in a single trip at a very reasonable price! (compared to any existing rocket) Actually, Al *can* be extracted chemically. It requires some pretty harsh chemicals, though. Fluorine compounds are one of the needed sets of chemicals if I remember correctly...

Actually, the Moon has almost unlimited supplies of Oxygen (tied up in lunar aluminum-odide and silicate compounds) and exactly *ONE* useful fuel besides tiny amounts of Hydrogen in water-ice at the polar craters: Aluminum. When electrolyzed or chemically-separated from the regolith, pure Aluminum will readily burn with Oxygen in a Hybrid Rocket (Oxygen is passed over solid Aluminum, basically, and the throttle is controlled by how quickly you add Oxygen). It takes some effort to properly pack the Aluminum into the rocket in the first place though- I imagine It's the kind of thing you'd want to develop specialized machinery to do quickly and precisely... If you can manage it, though, you get a rocket with ISP somewhere between SRB's and most liquid fuels, and fuel-density superior even to Hypergolics. It's good enough to get you from the Moon to LEO and back, with a sufficiently large rocket- which means you can ship stuff mined and manufactured on the Moon to LEO space stations someday with nothing but propellant produced on the Moon... (the spacecraft you need would be pretty large compared to liquid-propelled spacecraft, though- so building a Space Elevator or Mass Driver on the Moon someday would really help...)

The right idea, basically, but there's no need for a tank that large if all you're doing is hauling small comsats to GEO and back- UNLESS you design the tug with super-large engineering margins so that it can remain in orbit for month or or years at a time without needing any refurbishment (such large engineering-margins would increase the dry mass by a lot- requiring larger tanks in order to achieve sufficient mass ratio). Of course, if you're designing to minimize maintenance, why only equip the tug with one Raptor? Two Raptors sufficiently close together that either can be thrust-factored through the Center of Mass (so only one engine needs be used at a time) would allow for alternating use of each engine to spread out the wear-and-tear and allow for less frequent servicing... Not sure if you can do that with vacuum-specialized Raptors: but if your tug is really as oversized as you're suggesting you should still have plenty of Delta-V even with atmospheric variant Raptors...

Actually, in some areas the lunar regolith is extremely rich in Aluminum- which can be burned with Oxygen in a Hybrid Rocket (solid fuel+ liquid oxidizer). Hybrid Rockets are throttleable, unlike SRB's, and can be turned on/off multiple times... If you wanted to stick with Hypergolics, on the other hand, there's an enormous source of Nitrogen right in LEO- the edge of Earth's atmosphere. It's entirely possible to collect Nitrogen with a Propulsive Fluid Accumulator, ship it to the Moon, and react it with Oxygen produced locally from regolith to produce N2O4 (the main oxidizer in most Hypergolics mixtures). Of course, PFA's can also collect Oxygen- so the only real reason you'd have for making N2O4 on tbe Moon would be if you were going to burn it on/around the Moon: say for refueling supply ships before they head back to LEO...

When you sustain a group of engineers on Earth, you have to do so with local resources. When you sustain a group of engineers on Mars, you do so with Martian resources. Assuming a colony on Mars can become self-sustaining and (even if only slowly) self-expanding, eventually you gain MILLIONS of technically skilled people (or the equivalent cost in AI supercomputers) that you don't have to sustain from Earth once the entire planet is populated- all for the cost of a few hundred BFR missions that you never have to repeat. In the long run, Mars BECOMES the cheapest way to get more engineers from an Earth perspective. Sustaining a million engineers, even in India, can end up costing you TRILLIONS of dollars if you do it for 100 years. For 100 Billion dollars you can colonize Mars and have a million engineers on Mars someday at no further cost *to Earth* (the Martian economy has to sustain them- but that doesn't necessarily cost Earth anything) for at least the next 5000 years. See above. Also, no it wouldn't. Not if you send enough manpower and equipment there in the first 100 years (the more stuff you send early on, the quicker the Martian economy reaches self-sufficiency, as you have economies of scale, local economic specialization, and more brain s working on the scientific and engineering challenges of making the colony self-sustaining). If you only established a colony of 1000 people, sure, you would need to send supplies for hundreds of years if not longer- but a colony that small wouldn't require VERY MANY supplies in the grand scheme of things. Any colony on Mars would VERY QUICKLY figure out how to grow its own food and sustain its own life support- within a decade at most- and basic construction materials like concrete and metals would follow shortly thereafter. Most of the supplies you'd send thereafter would be complex manufactured products like electronics and heavy machinery, that would take a long time for a *small* Mars colony to develop to the point of being able to produce on its own... (but if you sent a million people to Mars in the first 60 years, these industries would arise very quickly)

The Shuttle was expensive for all sort of reasons that had nothing to do with its size or reusability. The Shuttle was expensive IN SPITE of its reusability, not bevause of it. Among other problems: (1) The SSME's were HIDEOUSLY complex as far as rocket engines go. No other engine has ever come close to the complexity of the SSME's before, or since. This made refurbishment of the engines INCREDIBLY expensive. (2) The Shuttle was built for maximum performance rather than cost-effectiveness. In the places where wide engineering-margins would have reduced the cost of reusability by requiring less frequent maintenance (*particularly* the engines) the margins were razor-thin. If the Shuttle had been built with a lower payload-fraction to allow for wider engineering-margins in places such as the engines (which should have also been built for a bit lower target ISP to save on complexity) then the costs of refurbishment would have been much lower... (3) The contracts to build and supply parts for the Shuttle were often sweetheart deals with favored contractors (who donated lots of money to DC politicians). So really, we didn't just get the Shuttle for the price taxpayers paid- we got the Shuttle and a whole lot of political ads and paid staff in election campaigns for that price. Consider it a bundle deal- a bundle nobody but the politicians really wanted... (4) Besides being a moneypot, the Shuttle was also designed as a jobs-program. Because the Shuttle was designed to employ as many people as possible, it required significantly more manpower than a design meant to be as affordable as possible. Technically, jobs programs put idle labor to use (the US has considerable un/under-employment), but the people who struggle to find jobs typically aren't talented engineers... A national street-cleaning program (to employ those with few skills), or expansion of the government's staff of historical site tour-guides (to put former history-majors now working as waiters to better use) would have been a better use of money, if the objective was really to reduce unemployment. In short, comparing a commercial rocket designed to be as cost-effective as posdible and the Shuttle is a fool's errand. And even if it weren't, the Shuttle could have been MORE affordable if it had traded payload-fraction for wider engineering-margins...

Humanity will eventually have to make a choice about the role of AI in society. I firmly believe the only way mankind can have a future is if we find a way to at least retain intellectual work for ourselves. Otherwise, robots will replace us all... Besides, AI's and supercomputers still require respurces to maintain. Even if humans are reduced to nothing more than mere supervisors for genetal AI's, making sure they don't all decide to kill us off, Mars will still increase the NUMBER of computers humanity can maintain, and the physical resources available for doing so. Even with general AI's, Mars still becomes a valuable source of Intellectual Property and knowledge...

No, no it's not. Antarctica is far LESS hospitable than Mars. It's much colder, for one (the temperature on Mars is lower, but the air is so thin that you lose much less heat/minute), the sunlight is actually LESS intense there due to the constant overcast or snowy weather and low angle of the Sun on the horizon (meaning the sunlight has to pass through lots and lots of atmosphere), the wind is much more powerful in Antartica due to the much higher atmospheric pressure, and snow/ice pose a much greater obstacle to collecting solar power than dust does on Mars... Plus, Antartica is much easier to leave for warmer climates than Mars is, and much less exciting to live on in our culture. If Antartica were as exciting as Mars, I'm sure lots of people WOULD live there despite all the challenges..

They get money by selling intellectual property. The CEO of a company employing 5000 scientists working long and hard hours in labs based on Mars might eventually have his company produce enough value in patents sold to Earth companies that he would be able to afford to purchase a few pieces of art from Earth- especially once there is plenty of infrastructure for transporting goods more cheaply between the two planets (I'm talking Propulsive Fluid Accumulators in orbit of both planets, orbital fuel depots, Microwave Beamed Power propulsion for the transfer-burns, and maybe even Mass Drivers on Earth and a Space Elevator or Mass Driver on Mars...) It's likely the only physical goods ever transported between Earth and Mars will be extremely high-value goods like artwork, science equipment, and sophisticated machibery- whereas most of what is traded will be scientific discoveries and digital entertainment (e-books, movies, and computer games...)

A 777 charter flight across the ocean is still a LOT cheaper than BUYING a new smaller plane and then destroying it after you reach your destination (a Cessna don't do, by the way- you need to compare two planes with similar ranges...) That's the comparison here: gigantic and reusable vs. small and expendable. Turns out that reusability still beats expendability, even with a very low load-factor.

You'd build a science outpost. That's the main thing you'd get from the Moon (besides maybe Helium-3)- scientific data. With 150 metric tons of mass-budget (and possibly multiple such landings to a single site) you could launch a lot of equipment for excavating an underground base for radiation and micrometeorite protection. You could also build a LOT of surface solar arrays (redundancy for micrometeorite strikes), underground battery-banks (2 weeks of night!), and underground greenhouses to grow food (the radiation of the lunar surface could actually kill or severely harm your plants, not to mention the occasional micrometeorite, and 4 week long day/night cycle: which would kill any Earth plant all by itself...) In short, when you start talking about 150 tons per landing, you can start thinking about a small permanent scientific outpost capable of growing it's own food, recycling it's own waste, with respectable long-term crew quarters, and doing lots of scientific research on the Moon itself requiring heavy equipment...

A huge waste, how? Sure they expend a lot of fuel- but it's also a huge waste to build an upper stage for every launch, only to burn it up in tbe upper atmosphere after using it. The BFR has enough payload-capacity that it can afford to slash it's payload-fraction by 80 or 90% in the pursuit of reusability and still have enough capacity to put usefup payloads in Low Earth Orbit... If you mean a waste accelerating a (mostly empty) BFR from LEO all the way to GTO, yeah you're probably right. Maybe SpaceX can be convinced to build a reusable space-tug to move payloads from LEO to GEO and return to LEO for refueling, but I doubt it... (Musk has his eye on the prize- Mars, and the cargo BFR is probably perfectly capable of hauling payloads from LEO to GTO or GEO after a few tanker-launches if necessary...)

Even Elon seemed doubtful they would make the 2022 launch-date. He said it was aspirational. I would expect they DON'T make their 2022 launch date for the first cargo (with humans by 2024). In fact I don't expect any humans of Mars until 2032. But I'll only be 43 then and I'll probably live to see it. Heck, I might even be a surgeon with a wife and family to bring to Mars with me as one of the early colonists by then (though I'd probably wait another 5-6 years for the colony to be more on its feet before leaving) and not be too old for interplanetary travel. By contrast, with Musk's plans to perfect Falcon Heavy reusability first, it's probably not by until at least *2052* that the first human colonists would set foot on Mars, and I'd be an old man by then, and so would Elon. I don't blame him for wanting to leapfrog ahead of all that extra Research and Development- ESPECIALLY when a big-picture analysis shows there's more benefit to be gained and more money to be made by going for a 100% reusable BFR first and skipping the 100% reusable Falcon Heavy, so long as SpaceX doesn't suddenly face any competitors that can develop a smaller, low-cost 100% reusable launch system in the next 20 years... Before the collapse of Escape Dynamics due to lack of financing (which was working towards a 100% reusable microwave-thermal spaceplane), and revelations that SKYLON probably don't be ready as soon, or as cheaply as initially anticipated (it should STILL, as a 100% reusable HTHL spaceplane be able to beat conventional launchers like the Delta 4 and Ariane 5 on a cost-basis: but it's unlikely to be able to beat the BFR's 100% reusable cost for undersized payloads, despite its much smaller vehicle size than the BFR... It turns out spaceplanes are expensive and difficult to build, even innovative ones with SABRE engines...) I would have said this was a risky move for SpaceX. But now it doesn't look like SpaceX has any realistic competitors for the position of cheapest traditional launch service to LEO or GTO, except eventually Blue Origin- and their company motto is basically "slow and steady wins the race". A 100% reusable BFR will DEFINITELY bear only partially-reusable Falcon 9 launches on a cost-basis... This is a case of "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun YOU!" SpaceX doesn't really have any competitors that can come anywhere CLOSE to the Falcon 9 on a cost basis, so the BFR doesn't really have to live up to its promise of being drastically cheaper than the Falcon 9 due to full reusability, it doesn't even have to be as affordable as tge CURRENT Falcon 9- it just has to be a marginally cheaper way to launch small commercial satellites than anything produced by their competitors. If SpaceX can do that, they can build up a massive launch history for the BFR launching small satellites- and then assuming they can avoid or fix any major issues, it should be a no-brainer to talk NASA into partnering with them to send astronauts to the Moon (and after that, Mars) on a proven launch vehicle with hundreds of successful launches under its belt while Orion/SLS is probably still dicking around in Low Lunar Orbit at best...

No, Mike, you're wrong. I'm sorry but you really missed the point here. Musk's point implicitly relied on the knowledge that THERE ARE NO 100% reuse rockets currently in existence yet. Not Falcon 9, not Falcon Heavy (which hadn't yet even flown) NOTHING can recover both its launch and upper stages yet. So, the most apt comparison *really is* between buying a small plane, flying it once, and throwing it away vs. an excessively large for the cargo but reusable, 747. It's cheaper to charter a 747 for one day than it is to buy a small plane you will destroy- even if your cargo is only 1 passenger. There ARE no "feeder routes" to orbit. You either make it to orbit with your cargo or you don't. There is no halfway point where you drop off your cargo and wait for anothet small rocket to carry it the rest of the way to orbit There was also another hidden logic to Musk's comparison that he didn't really get very explicit about so as not to scare his shareholders- it's possible that it might not be possible to reuse a small rocket with a useful sized payload *AT ALL.* It might just turn out that upper stage reusability requires so much mass that the only way to accomplish it even for, say, a 15 ton payload, is with a big honking rocket like the BFR. It might turn out that the payload-fraction that is possible with cheap 100% reusability and today's technology is so small that even a Falcon Heavy can only carry a couple tons to orbit. In that case, this spells doom for Falcon Heavy 100% reusability, but still leaves the door open for re-using the entire BFR. Even if it requires launching the fuel tanker for the BFR 30 times to LEO instead of a half-dozen times (and probably using a fuel-depot as an intermediate stsging-point for the BFR, to reduce the docking-hazard to the valuable crew and Mars cargo), it's still possible for the BFR to accomplish everything Elon Musk envisioned for it including going to Mars on such a tiny payload-fraction. On the other hand, a completely reusable Falcon Heavy configuration with only a 0.3% payload-fraction becomes next to worthless...

One word: Money. In case you didn't follow any of the discussion of that here, on numerous other web forums, or YouTube, the general consensus among intelligent space nerds about Falcon 9 upper stage reusability is that it would be impractical (you'd have too little useful payload), and that it would cost BILLIONS of dollars to develop and perfect with the Falcon Heavy. The BFR has an entirely different style of upper stsge reusability than the Falcon Heavy would, so there really would be no overlap between that and BFR's reusability. Elon Musk (or more likely, one of his brightest engineers) had the insight to realize that once you perfect 100% stage reusability, the cost of building the rocket really doesn't add that much to your launch cost compared to the costs of things like ground operations. By discontinuing the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, SpaceX is able to focus its product line- eventually no longer needing to maintain part inventories for the Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy. More importantly, SpaceX is able to skip over most of the expense of perfecting Falcon Heavy upper stage reusability entirely- saving BILLIONS of dollars in R&D and test launches. For a marginal cost of BILLIONS of dollars the only thing the Falcon Heavy provides is *slightly* lower launch costs than a fully-reusable BFR, since with 100% reusability the costs of building the rocket no longer become that significant (since it can be re-used again and again) compared to costs like ground control and launchpad construction. Put a different way and using made-up numbers: if your cost to LEO is $10,000/kg with a gigantic rocket launching small satellites then it makes sense to spend $2 Billion to reduce launch costs by 20% to build a rocket that is more appropriately sized to small payloads. But if your launch costs are only $500/kg with the 100% reusable gigantic rocket and you're going to have to build up an extensive operational history for it before you entrust it with human crews anyways, then it makes no sense to spend an additional $2 Billion to reduce launch costs by a further 20% to $400/kg by perfecting 100% reusability for the smaller rocket as well... If SpaceX ever acquires major competitors in the field that perfect both launch and upper stsge reusability as well, then they will be forced to revive the Falcon Heavy and perfect 100% reusability for it if they want to remain competitive. But barring that, a 100% reusable rocket, even a giant freaking rocket that's way too big for most of the payloads it launches is still MUCH cheaper than a smaller, expendable rocket. It's like Elon Musk said at the IAC presentation- it's cheaper to charter a reusable 747 than it is to purchase a single-prop Cessna and throw it away after the slight. A reusable Cessna would be cheaper- but SpaceX is taking advantage of the fact that it has no serious commercial competitors for upper stsge reusability to leapfrog ahead to going to Mars sooner ratger than later... It's about putting the big picture ahead of the details. Is the BEE cheaper than a reusable Falcon Heavy? ABSOLUTELY. But, it's better for the company and better for humanity to have the capability of re-visiting the Moon, placing GIGANTIC payloads in orbit (including new space stations and REALLY BIG space telescopes), and traveling to Mars 10 or 20 years sooner rather than having a 10 or 20% cheaper launch system for sending small satellites to LEO when the reusable NET will already be DRASTICALLY cheaper with its 100% reusability than anything we have today... The BFR also gets around the problems of mass-growth in developing upper stsge reusability. If it turns out they're only going to be able to get 1/6th the payload-fraction they originally planned with 100% reusability, the BFR still has a perfectly commercially viable LEO payload-capacity of 25 tons to LEO. If the Falcon Heavy ends up losing thos much of its payload-fraction in order to achieve rapid 100% reusability, it becomes *worthless* as a commercial launch vehicle in 100% reusability configuration. So, due to a weird sort of logic of bigger being better because you can lose more payload-fraction to achieve rapid 100% reusability and accomplish a wider variety of missions with it, going straight to the BFR is actually a SAFER investment of capital in developing upper stage reusability. I knew the brilliance of the plan the moment I saw it- and can't believe I didn't realize its inherent advantages myself before Musk told the world about his plan...