This is a special post for quick takes by ChristianKl. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Elon's idea of building a thousand Starships per-year to get to Mars seems ill-thought-out.
Starship is very well designed for bringing objects into orbit and down from orbit but not for the interplanetary journey.
For the interplanetary journey, you likely want to have a ring-space-station that's propelled by ion thrusters.
Having a ring-space-station means that it's easy to produce artificial gravity and generally have the infrastructure to have a good journey for more people.
Cole Nielson-cole is working towards designing fiber composit construction stages for space, he has thoughts about this, in short, microwave lasers as energy transmission and rectifying antennas as energy receivers. But he doesn't get into the topic of lasers and I'm pretty sure we don't have that today, right?
You need to send some Starships to get down to the surface on Mars but you could likely do that job with a handful of starships. You don't need to produce 1000 starships per year to do that.
7Carl Feynman
I’m confused. Suppose your ring-shaped space hotel gets to Mars with people and cargo that weighs equal to the cargo capacity of 1000 Starships. How do you get it down? First you have to slow down the hotel, which takes roughly as much fuel as it took to accelerate it. Using Starships you can aerobrake from interplanetary velocity, costing negligible fuel. In the hotel scenario, it’s not efficient to land using a small number of Starships flying up and down, because they will use a lot of fuel to get back up, even empty.
Would you care to specify your scenario more precisely? I suspect you’re neglecting the fuel cost at some stage.