I know we’ve discussed the feasibility of this in the past, but I think it bears further examination.

First of all, let’s define self-sustaining. It doesn’t mean never receiving supplies from earth; it means a base/colony could support its population without those supplies. That scenario would likely mean very Spartan living but nonetheless be self sustaining. A potential 100% autarky. For a colony on the Moon or Mars to be able to do that, there would obviously need to be a minimum population level. Musk believes that for Mars that number is upwards of one million people. I would tend to agree that a population that size should be able to create a division of labor that could meet all its own needs.

Establishing a population of that size would take thousands of Starship launches to transfer the crew, equipment and resources needed to jump start such an off-world civilization. Musk’s plan is to be able to eventually launch 10 Starships per day during the earth-Mars launch windows. That’s about 250 launches every 26 month window. In that optimistic scenario a million+ Mars colony could be established in a half century. That accounts for others (Blue Origin, ULA, China, India, Russia, etc) getting into the Mars transport game as well, which is a strong likelihood once a base is fairly established.

That process may begin sooner than we thought. SpaceX just announced they are moving their first unmanned cargo flights to Mars up to the December 2028 launch window (from the previous 2030 window). This aggressive timeline is probably unrealistic, especially since Starship has yet to even have a single orbital flight. But it is a deliberate strategy similar to JFK’s moon landing before 1970 challenge. It makes SpaceX workers live with a barely plausible timeline, and pushes them to work harder and more aggressively. If you set timelines that are too lenient, people work slower because there is no urgency.

That’s called Parkinsons Law: Work expands to fit the timelines. Projects will add more items to be checked off, more inspections to be done, create new roles, new studies, add more committees and bureaucracy and meetings, etc. Aggressive timelines force cutting away everything but the absolute necessary. It makes engineers immediately start looking at things in terms of: can this be done? If not, why? Breaking the task down until you get to a minimal set of problems to solve. It may still take longer than planned but that’s better than creating a long timeline only to find bottlenecks way down the road.

Prepositioning equipment on Mars several years before the first humans arrive was championed by Zubrin’s Mars Direct vision three decades ago. Only now it is planned on a larger scale and with a likely nuclear reactor. The difference between now and then is a soon-to-be Trillionaire who has the lifelong dream to make it happen. Yeah Musk is a douche bag, but we all have to be cheering for him to make this a reality.