[godtoldmetodoit]

I am a pretty big SpaceX fan, but so far, they've been tackling challenges that lend themselves to a rapid iteration if given sufficient capital.

Rapidly iterating on the incredible engineering difficulties inherent in building a reusable rocket does not mean you can do the same thing with an interplanetary mission that involves at least ~5 months of travel one way.

They need a whole other class of scientists and engineers to solve the "keeping a human alive for years in spacecraft/colony" problem. It just seems like a fundamentally different class of problem to me, and that SpaceX's strength of rapid iteration may be hardly applicable to this problem.

[m4rtink]

I still thing a lot of it transfers over, especially if Starship works as intended - send Starships to Mars often with proof of concept tech and any customer payloads & have part of it pressurized with prototype life support system. If it works fine after the trips on multiple occasions, you can be reasonably sure it will work with a crew as well.

Possibly more sure than the "classic" testing (and paperwork) heavy model that usually does very few actuall test flights due to costs.

[jacquesm]

No, it will just make it - marginally - cheaper. But the basic challenges remain just as strong.