Originally Posted by
Rakaydos
There's a pretty large gap between 100 person "scientific station" and a million per year "Evacuate the earth minimum shipping amount."
The SpaceX plan is to make it economically viable for 1 million pioneers to spend their own money to live on mars. They estimate that a million person colony has enough redundancy and population base to operate an industry that can make them ACTUALLY independant from earth.
They arnt going to make that viable with elevator cable "launches" every other week (because it takes half that time for the climber to go each way) and needing to repair LEO velocity paintchip damage. They need DAILY launches from hundreds of pads around the world to bring down the costs to airliner-like... so that's what they want to build.