I like the way that this is set up to be iterable. Being able to stick the landing on the BFR isn't actually necessary. No reason you couldn't use two rockets to launch the fuel and ship separately.
Beautiful, here's hoping they can pull this off. Best of luck to SpaceX.
What I don't quite get is that if we feel like we could figure out how to live on Mars, couldn't we relatively easily figure out how to live on a hot Earth?
I'm sure learning to sustainably live on a hostile planet will result in technology we can also use at home. And vice versa -- pushing for sustainability at home will lead to technologies we can use elsewhere.
The idea is to be a multiplanetary species. Not leave Earth for Mars. Plus, it's just really fucking awesome. That alone is enough reason for it to be pursued imo. Exploring and doing cool new things is part of what makes life worth living.
We have made our earth worse for habitat, in the name of doing "cool things" and "make life worth living". But still we can live here and find happiness, unlike Mars. Living in Mars and building cities there is wonderful. The project might even succeed completely. But people will find more "emptiness" in space than on earth.
That's a different and more uncertain reliability model for continued existence of the human species - at least for the probabilities I'd personally assign for the events required for getting to mars vs a serious effort at fighting climate change. (Especially given how weakly fighting climate change is supported among the two mainstream presidential candidates.)
Fuel. We have two options to to get back from Mars. Bring the fuel with us or harvest the fuel there. Bringing the fuel is unrealistic, "The bottom line of all these calculations is that you can get about eight times as much stuff to Mars for the same amount of fuel if you send it one-way instead of trying to bring it back!"[1] So let's mine the fuel there. We've never done that. We don't know how long it takes. We have to bring all the equipment in one go, it might even increase the weight of the mission by 8x!
The whole one-way thing is just the easiest. It's no guarantee you're stuck on Mars forever(future flights might be better equipped for return), and it's far simpler than making a guarantee that you won't get stuck on Mars forever.
Beautiful, here's hoping they can pull this off. Best of luck to SpaceX.