Yep, everyone get out your pitchforks. It's another Elon hater. While my opinion that "Starship's Mars Promise is Vaporware" is not unique in the rocket community, I figured it's a good start for the first opinion piece for this site and to run out guns blazing against the Elon fanboys who will be ready to call me a baffoon. However, I must make a clarification on my arguement today: While I think that Mars and Earth-to-Earth transport are MAJOR MAJOR vaporware promises from SpaceX, I think there is a chance for Starship to be a viable rocket for SpaceX's Starlink program. Not a certainty due to the complexities of refurbishing space hardware that had to put up with re-entry heating and due to various independent estimates on Starship's expected launch costs, but perhaps possible. It is certainly clear that Starlink is THE ONLY mission application Starship's architecture is well optimized for.

To start with Mars, it is abundantly clear that SpaceX has no serious plans in place for any kind of Mars Civilization. They've got a really good CGI team to make pretty presentation of large cities on Mars, but the company has shared no technical details on how to even make these cities or even small settlements possible on Mars. What materials are we gonna build these bases out of? How will you build a landing pad for Starship on Mars? How are you going to grow food? How are you going to make sure people can survive long term and not get blasted by deadly ionizing radiation on the surface constantly, or freeze to death? How are you going to handle the psychological implications for settlers living far away from much better developed civilization? How are... you get the point. Realistically, the rocket to take you to Mars is a TINY part of the problem of actually trying to get people there. There are a MILLION different problems relating to biology, radiation shielding, logistics, etc to solve that a big ass rocket CANNOT just solve by itself. SpaceX has shown next to nothing for solving these problems, nor are they making any point to try and specify that Martian habitation research is one of their big spending points in their budget. IF they really were trying to get people there and have them survive for more than a few minutes, they'd have a SH*TLOAD of R&D ongoing for habitation studies and solving the various logistical nightmares that a mars mission will end up having. Words can say one thing, but actions speak louder. SpaceX does not care about Mars.

WIP