>The difficult and unglamorous problems of a Mars mission—how do you wash your socks? What is there to eat?
How do you breathe? Elon was talking about Starship having a crew capacity of 100 yet there doesn't seem to be any mention of how they would scrub the air of all that CO2. I've heard estimates that with existing solutions Starship might only be able to support 10 colonists per trip.
There is no possibility of a "Starship" can carrying 100 people to Mars.
NASA has figured the can has room for a maximum of 17 astronauts on such a trip. And, that is without spacesuits or anything else they would need once there. So figure another, cargo, can for the stuff they would need on the ground.
Maybe bring along a couple of spacesuits in the crew can, to wear while they fetch the rest. And, maybe just 9 crew so none kill each other on the way out.
Life support is not particularly difficult if you can just throw mass at it.
It's probably true that Starship would only be capable to support 10 colonists all the way to Mars and that's still pretty damn good. This number will grow if you have a separate life support system on the surface and don't have to rely on the ship but the first missions will indeed have a very small crew.
Talk of Starship carrying 100 people is in reference to the "Earth to Earth" transportation idea, i.e. carrying passengers on a short hop between continents.
It probably isn't. Most mission critical problems and bottlenecks are resource depletion problems, and those can be easily solved by just sending a shitload of resources to Mars before sending people.
Need to scrub CO2 from the air? Nope, I'll just send over 10 extra cargo starships filled with Oxygen. Food for 100? Coming right up!
The whole plan hinges on making enough money with starship that sending up 100 rockets with triple-redundant resources becomes economically viable. At that point, you can slowly start building a somewhat self-sustaining infrastructure. But until you get there, the plan will just look foolish.
How do you breathe? Elon was talking about Starship having a crew capacity of 100 yet there doesn't seem to be any mention of how they would scrub the air of all that CO2. I've heard estimates that with existing solutions Starship might only be able to support 10 colonists per trip.