First, they have to get there in the first place to prove the concept. That won’t happen this year, so it can only happen three years from now. Five years from now, they can send the precursor equipment to prepare the first settlement site for manned settlement. That means that seven years from now, at the earliest, they can begin sending settlers. So, what does SpaceX and Starship do in the meantime?

For them, the answer became obvious. AI centers in space, where solar power is abundant, and lunar manufacturing, where mass costs far less to get into space and even costs less to get into low Earth orbit. A lunar manufacturing base can save a lot of money over launching from the Earth, so this is an obvious choice for what to do while twiddling thumbs waiting for the next Mars launch window. They gain experience with Starship while building yet another cash cow in addition to Starlink. Maybe more than one cash cow, if lunar mining becomes lucrative for other projects and other companies.

Mars isn’t any more on the back burner than it would have been, but SpaceX keeps busy by refocusing during the downtimes. I worked for someone who called this type of work ‘a sense of urgency;’ when we couldn’t work on one satellite, perhaps due to lack of parts or waiting for an electrical test to finish, the crew for that satellite worked on others or on preparations for future work. It sounds obvious, but many companies do not work that way, keeping crews relatively idle when there is an hour’s delay. In fact, we didn’t really work that way, either, except that summer we were making up for lost time because all our traveling wave tube amplifiers had to be fixed due to the vendor’s design flaw, and we had seven satellites to complete, most of them already late.