I have to say that I've never understood the practicalities or economics of colonising Mars. In order to survive (literally) the colony will need full medical services in all specialties, stocked with a full range of medical equipment and medicines and anesthetics.
Clients for what services, though? We know Epstein had plenty of clients for his tax avoidance and financial services companies, but I'm not sure that's the client list people have in mind.
Science fiction has a lot to answer for in creating this myth of a Mars colony as a laudable goal, as a step in the colonization of space as humans spread through the solar system. And I say that as an ardent science-fiction reader.
One might have hoped hat these enthusiastic free market libertarian billionaires would have paid a bit more attention to Leonard E Reed's classic I, pencil, which discusses the role of the free market system in creating the complex supply chains necessary to make something as simple as a pencil, and thought about their implications for colonies whose very existence depends, at least in its early years or decades, on a centrally planned economy that is responsible for importing, at huge expense, all the raw materials and finished goods the colony needs.
Or even read the history of early Western European settlements that tried to survive in the New World. Settlements that didn't have to worry about the lack of water, oxygen, plants & animals, building materials, gravity and atmospheric shielding from radiation.
The ultimate goal of the Mars boondoggle is, one must assume, to somehow convert Mars into a liveable planet. Given the mind-boggling costs involved, there's really only one scenario where that would be needed, and that's the Earth becoming ecologically uninhabitable. (Not that we aren't hard at work at achieving that ...)
So much so that it's hard to overstate. A lot of futurists and others who are super optimistic about human space colonization always seem to have a weirdly misplaced belief that sci-fi writers have managed to solve most of the high-level technical stuff and any questions about the actual feasibility of those things are annoyances and fearmongering. Often we're talking about technologies that don't exist yet but would absolutely need to exist in order for any of this to work, yet there is a resistance to spending any serious discussion on whether they're even realistic.
The persistence of these fantasies speaks directly to our fear of death. That gibbering fear of death for oneself, the individual, is often blunted by extending ourselves through proxy: my legacy will live on, my children will live on, our species will on. To contemplate the death of our species -- vulnerable as we are on this one little planet -- is to face the implacability of death for ourselves without that handy avatar of an eternal wave of humanity throughout the rest of time.
And in a rocket ship that looks like it was designed by science fiction writers in the 1950s.Meanwhile, we can't even prevent our astronauts' bodies from becoming so feeble from a few months of zero gravity that they can't walk when they return to Earth. That, despite logging hour after hour of weight-lifting, cycling, and running on the treadmill in the ISS.
Months.
Mars is a roughly three-year round trip by the time you hang out there and wait for the planets to get in position for a fuel-efficient (read: possible vs. impossible) route. SpaceX's plan is to launch human missions in the 2030's.
Now now, you know many of them have barely read anything about economics. They just know just enough libertarian theory to think they know they don't need to pay taxes.
I eecall reading a concept of using a teather between a crew capsule and a supply capsule so it would spin on a much longer radius. I don't remember if that was the same article that proposed using tanks of nutrient soup to protect the crew from radiation in transit by putting them around the quarters.
