It took 7 years to go from a primitive orbital capsule to a manned lunar landing.
With 1960s technology.
Don't use the pace of NASA progress within the last 2 decades as some sort of benchmark, it has no meaning and no correlation to anything other than government handouts to important congressional districts.
What is possible and what will be possible within 10-20 years is a great deal more than what has been done.
SpaceX is seemingly capable of building a Saturn V class launch vehicle in less time and for far less money than was done historically. Given that I don't doubt that they'll be able to do amazing things.
I'm not looking at NASA's progress at all here. I'm sure SpaceX can accomplish a lot in that time frame, but saying they'll definitely be on Mars then is simply wishful thinking. Lift capacity is not the sole limiting factor.
Certainly. But look at the simple facts. From 1961 through the 1990s only 2 organizations (the US and Soviet governments) had developed or flown manned spacecraft. Since then 6 organizations have developed, built, and flown such spacecraft: China, Scaled Composites (a sub-orbital flight), SpaceX (an unmanned test flight of a crew capsule), ESA and Japan (ISS modules and re-supply craft), and Bigelow Aerospace (unmanned tests of inflatable space habitats). It's especially notable that half of these achievements are from non-governmental activities.
The point being: the ability to build manned spacecraft is much less difficult and much less rare than it once was, and no longer restricted to governments. Given that, it's no small stretch to imagine impressive increases in lift capacity coupled with equally impressive reductions in launch cost facilitating even greater fluency with manned spacecraft design, construction, and operation.
It is not so terribly difficult to mount a manned mission to Mars as some people seem to imagine. Read Zubrin's "The Case For Mars" to see how it can be done rather efficiently. Given the projected payload capacity of the proposed Falcon XX launcher it would really only take a few launches to get things running.
Given that SpaceX has already built a seemingly functional crew capsule will it really take much more than 20 more years to build and test all of the necessary pre-requisite components of a manned Mars mission? I don't think the timeline is so terribly optimistic really.
With 1960s technology.
Don't use the pace of NASA progress within the last 2 decades as some sort of benchmark, it has no meaning and no correlation to anything other than government handouts to important congressional districts.
What is possible and what will be possible within 10-20 years is a great deal more than what has been done.
SpaceX is seemingly capable of building a Saturn V class launch vehicle in less time and for far less money than was done historically. Given that I don't doubt that they'll be able to do amazing things.