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Harry_the_space_man t1_ivljyf9 wrote

Reply to comment by BigPhotojournalist76 in Do you think it's possible for Elon to land people on Mars by 2029? I am skeptical of his claims. by [deleted]

This idea that we need to test on the moon to prepare for mars is complete bullshit. And spaceX are aiming to fully find mars through Starlink, not investors. And NASA say the would want a person on mars by the 2040s, but they have been extremely vague about any plans.

There are valleys on Mars that can sustain a high radiation tolerance, which the moon does not have. Mars is also a lot warmer, with temperatures between 20 Celsius and minus 30 Celsius.

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simcoder t1_ivlkxcf wrote

Got any evidence about Starlink fully funding Mars? It's funny how often that keeps coming back up.

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Harry_the_space_man t1_ivlqgpk wrote

Because it’s the stated plan. Starlink has roughly 900,000 paying subscribers (it was 100,000 at the beginning of the year). The average Starlink cost is 110 for residential, and 135 for movable starlink. With 100,000 users on mobile Starlink, that’s 162,000,000 a year in revenue, plus the 1,056,000,000 per year from residential, and they have 1,218,000,000 in revenue per year. Right now they are constantly launching satellites and combined with other Starlink related expenses they are spending roughly 1.5 billion per year on Starlink. So they are making a roughly 300 million loss on Starlink each year. But with there planned 13,000 sats all working at once with laser links, they could service tens of millions of people. According to a Microsoft poll over 70 million people in America alone would spend upwards of 100 dollars for good internet, and that’s just America. Even if you be pessimistic and say they can only manage 10 million subscribers, that’s a yearly revenue of 13,350,000,000. They can accomplish this by launching Starlink V2s on starship with 5X the bandwidth of normal Starlink sats for double the cost. And because of the laser links they can distribute the usage.

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BigPhotojournalist76 t1_ivt13id wrote

Point to where I said it was a need. I said that's the plan for NASA. Personally I think it's a much better alternative to charging toward another planet without any space infrastructure and without understanding the full effects on the human body.

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