Cost of the Mars expedition

Starship Mk1 at Boca Chica
Source: TechCrunch, photo by Darrell Etherington

Recently, Elon Musk has said that a single launch of the Starship/Super Heavy combo will cost just $2 million. 

SpaceX’s  goal has long been to achieve truly reusable rocket launch capabilities, and for good reason: The company anticipates huge cost savings through re-usable rocketry versus expendable launch vehicles, which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk  has described as a process akin to an airline throwing away their passenger aircraft every time they complete a flight. They’ve made lots of progress toward that goal, and now frequently re-fly parts of their Falcon 9 rockets and their Dragon cargo capsules — but the Starship spaceship they’re building now should be even more re-usable.

Musk provided an idea of just how much that could save SpaceX — and by extension, its customers — at a surprise guest appearance at the U.S. Air Force’s annual pitch day in LA this week. Speaking with USAF Lieutenant General John Thompson at the event (via Space.com), Musk said that fuel costs for the Starship should be around $900,000 per launch, and that once you factor in operational costs, it’ll probably add up to around $2 million per use. 

[From TechCrunch]

It seems likely that the early Starships will not return from Mars, but will instead be used as temporary habitats while permanent living modules are built on and below the surface of Mars to shelter the first settlers, provide places to grow food, create air, recycle water, and all the other things humans will need on Mars to survive.  So each Starship from the first few expeditions that go to Mars will not be re-usable, or not often enough to cut its cost, though the Super Heavy that launches it will be.  Musk (I think) also hinted that the capital cost of a Starship is less than the cost of an expendable Dragon 9, which is $62 million.  (In a previous piece, I suggested that the cost of each Starship may be as low as $10 million, which is prolly too low.  The stainless steel frame might be just 2% of the cost of a carbon fibre composite rocket, but the engines, life support, fittings, etc, will push this cost up substantially.  But it might nevertheless be way below $60 million.)

So the cost of each Starship going to Mars will be, say,  $60 million for the Starship, plus $2 mill for the ten fuel launches to refill the Starship's fuel tanks in orbit, plus the cost of the fuel for the journey to Mars ($1 mill after rounding), plus the cost of the initial launch.  Less than $100 million.  SpaceX plans six ships to Mars of which four will be cargo and 2 crewed.  $600 million in total.  A single launch of the SLS will be between $1.5 and $2.5 billion per launch.  For an expendable vehicle.  And that won't give us any habitats on Mars, included with the SpaceX option.

$600 million to put boots on Mars.  OK, there will be other costs.  Rovers, power sources (wind turbines/solar panels/NASA's nuclear generators), food for at least 2 years, and of course, there will be a third expedition in 2027.    And although we would all like the first crewed ships to carry 100 people as the first ships did in Red Mars (it seems just right somehow, and, spookily, the arrival of the first Starships on Mars will happen 30 years after the first publication of that seminal work, published in 1992), the number will prolly be much lower, the minimum being set by the needed skillset for starting human life in a new and very hostile environment—engineers, biologists, gardeners, technicians, doctors, electricians, scientists, builders, robot techs, and more I don't know about.  Maybe, after all, we'll end up with the "first hundred", split between two ships.  Or maybe we'll have more ships, because we'll need so much food until the greenhouses and protein vats get going.  Each person eats roughly 1 tonne of food a year, so for 100 people, we'd need 200 tonnes of food, perhaps 300 just to be on the safe side.  That's two Starships for food alone!  Add in the cargoes of power generators, and you get to 4 or 5 Starships just for food and power.  So in all probability, the 2025 expedition will need 7 or 8 ships for cargo alone, as well as the crewed ships.

Despite all the extras costs, we're talking about not much more than $2 billion total for the 2022, 2025 and 2027 expeditions, which works out at $250 million  for each year between now and 2027.   That's just over 1% of NASA's annual budget of  $21.5 billion.   If NASA won't pay, the Air Force might.  And if they don't, I suspect SpaceX will have enough resources to do it itself, if no one else wants to play.  In fact, Musk could pay for it personally.  His net wealth is north of $20 billion.

SpaceX might still fail.  Safely re-entering a vessel as big as the Starship into the Earth's atmosphere will be an enormous technological and engineering achievement.  But remember when rival space companies fell about laughing when SpaceX tried its first retro-propulsive landing and failed?  Now, just 3 years later, it is routine.  Something that no national space agency or private company had ever achieved.  And SpaceX achieved it.  Somehow, I am very confident that in 2022, the first uncrewed Starships will land on Mars, followed by the first astronauts 26 months later.  I have to live just another 6 years to see humans on Mars.  I might just do it.