Did this guy just literally ask an AI chatbot for insight on SpaceX's classified military plans?
> "It is unlikely that these gaps can be closed until the end of the decade."
I actually worked out my own BFR plan over the couple years of teasers we had leading up to the 2016 IAC presentation. It was based on a 3-part vehicle a bit like Soyuz (separate hab and capsule) of 15m diameter for the launcher and 12m diameter for the upper stage, payload, and capsule, which seemed to offer more options than a 2-part vehicle.
Musk makes some very optimistic plans, some of them clearly without doing the math, and each numerically extraordinary aspect renders the other numerically extraordinary aspects more difficult to believe. Even if you can class 80 or 90% of his ideas as "Audacious but feasible", there are frequent areas where he gets ahead of himself and projects unlikely extremes that become numerical impossibilities in conjunction with each other.
What is clear is that you can launch a colony on Mars based around Starship-like vehicles, but the number of launches per human Mars resident to sustain and switch them out is large ("100 colonists per launch vehicle" is wildly overshooting; Keeping 100 colonists alive for a return mission will require hundreds of Starship-sized launches, some of them years in advance), the risks are large, and that the missions are at minimum conjunction-class (a 3 year round trip) rather than opposition class. A colony that attempts to grow until it approaches self sufficiency demands lots and lots of automation, an expansive ISRU, mining, and agricultural industry, and a population of maybe ~10^4 people; Getting there is going to demand literally 10^5 to 10^6 launches, decades of work, and 10^4 to 10^5 reusable launch vehicles in play for decades.
But it's got to start somewhere; Hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit like "Flags and footprints" and "We can save some cost by using a once-in-a-decade Venus orbital assist" and "We can fit a manned Mars program into a 20 billion dollar NASA budget in theory" does not colonize other planets at all.
Musk & Griffin had a relationship around establishing a Mars colony even before SpaceX foundation. Musk even tried to recruit Griffin when assembling SpaceX founding team.
