I’ll try to cut to the chase here.

For decades now, space enthusiasts have looked for the proverbial ‘silver bullet’ to revolutionize spaceflight & enterprise.

Well? It’s happening: but it’s not one ‘bullet’, but three.

1) SpaceX’s planned Falcon 9 Super Heavy; capable of putting upto 68 metric tons into LEO.

2) Franklin Diaz, ex NASA astronaut, has shown that a 200KW VASIMR propulsion system can send a manned spacecraft to the Red Planet in 39 days. (BTW, a self-contained VASIMR propulsion system can be reused; parked in LEO after every mission; and thus can serve to propel extra massive commercial payloads from LEO to GEO, etc).

3) At Stanford University in California, Professor Shanhui Fan and his team are working on ultrathin solar-cells that will be thinner than wavelengths of light: 700 nanometers. Furthermore, the solar-cells he is working on will be made of organic materials (density? 1200kg/m^3? compared to silicon: 2700kg/m^3); and they will theoretically have an efficiency 10X greater than other ultrathin solar-cells being developed by other scientists/engineers have come up with  (4-5 percent efficiency x 10 = 40-50 percent efficiency of photon to electricity conversion?; one square meter x 0.5 x 1400 Watts/m^2 = 700 Watts of electrical p0wer near Earth ; 500 Watts between Earth and the Red Planet.

OK! Combine all three ‘silver bullets’: without offending the tree huggers, a manned mission to Mars using 400-500 square meters of these promising, hypothetical & astonishingly light  & ultrathin solar-panels can generate upto (an average) 200KW of electric power to power a VASIMR with an Isp of 5000 seconds. And SpaceX can provide their planned HLV’s to lift the necessary hardware, fuel and crew to a LEO disembarkation orbit.  39 days to the Red Planet sometime between 2020-2025? It’s now possible. And a commercial space-firm can now lead this enterprise instead of NASA I think.