You are arguing against strawman. I'm telling you that there is willingness to accept as high risk as it is necessary. Not that we should be aiming at sending suicide squads to Mars.
> for which there is plenty of research that can be done on Earth (and in LEO).
Everybody is welcomed to do the research on Earth. And Starship will make LEO based research some 100x cheaper.
$100B for ISS vs. ~$1B for Starship in a pessimistic scenario. ISS and Starship have similar usable internal volume.
> Let's also see it actually successfully do orbital refueling, which would be a prerequisite for even getting to the moon with the proposed design, not to mention Mars.
Exactly. Working hardware silences detractors better than anything.
SpaceX won that contract including all the legal challenges a bit over a year ago. Give them some time.
> Let's see it fly and let's see the total budget before such hopeful conclusions.
It's a fixed cost contract, not cost+ like SLS which BTW costs NASA 4 billions per launch all things considered according to their own estimates.
> for which there is plenty of research that can be done on Earth (and in LEO).
Everybody is welcomed to do the research on Earth. And Starship will make LEO based research some 100x cheaper.
$100B for ISS vs. ~$1B for Starship in a pessimistic scenario. ISS and Starship have similar usable internal volume.
> Let's also see it actually successfully do orbital refueling, which would be a prerequisite for even getting to the moon with the proposed design, not to mention Mars.
Exactly. Working hardware silences detractors better than anything.
SpaceX won that contract including all the legal challenges a bit over a year ago. Give them some time.
> Let's see it fly and let's see the total budget before such hopeful conclusions.
It's a fixed cost contract, not cost+ like SLS which BTW costs NASA 4 billions per launch all things considered according to their own estimates.