No, Elon Musk hasn’t taken anything into account or if he has, he hasn’t shared his discoveries. In his speeches about it, he is only focused on getting the colonists to Mars. His idea is you could sell your house for $200,000, buy a ticket to a "new world" on Mars, and set up home there, with no other financial support needed, just your ticket out there by analogy with settlers of the New World. But Mars is no “New World”. It has no crops, no plants, no native humans, no running water, no air, night time temperatures that regularly get cold enough for carbon dioxide to freeze out of the atmosphere as dry ice even in the “tropics”, high levels of ionizing radiation on the surface, especially if you are unlucky enough to get caught out in a solar storm, dust storms that can block out 99% of the sunlight for weeks on end, and most fundamentally, you can’t breathe, even with an oxygen mask, but need a full body pressure suit like the ones the Apollo astronauts used on the Moon just to breathe..

If you've only read the articles and books, and listened to Mars colonization enthusiasts, as they wax lyrical in realms of fantasy about future Mars cities and a terraformed Mars, you may not realize that there are others who are profoundly skeptical about it all, bringing a perhaps sobering dose of common sense. Paul Spudis, senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary institute in Houston, and author of The Value of the Moon: How to Explore, Live, and Prosper in Space Using the Moon's Resources. is particularly scathing about these ideas of a Martian colony in the near future. If you haven't come across these views before, his Delusions of a Mars Colonist may give you an interestingly different perspective.

"So aside from the inconvenient facts that we don’t know how to safely make the voyage, how to land on the planet, what the detailed chemistry of the soil is, or if we can access potable water, whether we can then grow food locally, or how to build habitats to shield us from the numbing cold and hostile surface environment, don’t know what protection is needed due to the toxic soil chemistry, or how to generate enough electrical power to build and operate an outpost or settlement – in spite of these annoying details that make this idea prohibitive, the creation of a Mars colony within a decade is marketed to the public as if the plans had already been drawn up."

..." With flashy artwork depicting futuristic cities, sleek flying cars, and lush green fields resplendent under transparent crystal domes (in startling contrast to the red-hued surrounding desert of the martian surface) it is simply assumed that a human colony on Mars will evolve into some kind of off-Earth utopia."

"But how will these future Mars inhabitants make a living? And by that, I mean what product or service will they offer that anybody on Earth will want? If you think that the answer is autarky (complete economic isolation and self-sufficiency), then you are imagining an economy (and likely, a political state) in which North Korea is a free market, pluralistic paradise by comparison. People who migrate to Mars need more than food and shelter – they will need imports from Earth, material and intellectual products designed to enrich and refine life on the frontier. What will they have of value to trade or to sell for these imports?"

..." Much is made of the possible economic value of “information,” but it is not clear that Mars is particularly rich in factual data marketable to those back on Earth, although a martian pioneer might have desperate need of it – which would make them their own “customers” and exacerbate the economic disparity of the colony to an even greater degree."

The Mars enthusiasts' plans get particularly sketchy when they cover the economics of a Mars colony (while Moon firsters tend to cover lunar economics in great detail). There is only one short, and perhaps not very convincing chapter on this in Case for Mars. This relies on exports of intellectual property rights by the inventive Mars colonists as one of the most important ways to pay for the colony.

You've sold your house on Earth - to pay for your trip - but you still need somewhere to live on Mars. Is he going to provide free houses on Mars for all his colonists? Surely not. A house on Mars would be vastly more expensive than one on Earth. He would no longer be making a profit on every colonist, but rather, an immense loss. Even Elon Musk couldn't sustain a business shipping a hundred colonists to Mars at a time while making a loss of millions of dollars per colonist.

Also, it's not much use being on Mars without an EVA spacesut. There are two main kinds of spacesuit, the IVA suit you wear inside a spacecraft, e.g. during launch, designed to protect you if you get a loss of pressure, and the EVA suit which protects your for missions outside your spacecraft or habitat (Extra Vehicular Activities). You would need both, but the EVA suit is the most expensive of the two. It's a little hard to get hold of unit cost estimates for a spacesuit, as they are hardly consumer items yet, but as a rough guide, it will set you back $2 million as the approximate cost of making a spare EMU for the ISS. That's not including the design cost, just the cost for someone to make it, given a design. It requires about 5,000 hours of work and would take someone who had all the necessary skills about two and a half years to build, given supply of all the parts and materials needed, a long job involving many complex intricate components, not unlike building a spaceship. Basically it is a very small mobile spaceship with its own independent life support. It currently costs $100,000 per astronaut just to fit the airtight bladder inside their gloves to help reduce the risk of them losing their fingernails as a result of the stiffness of the gloves, and to make the gloves a bit more comfortable.

For an idea of the cost of a suit including design, a 1998 Washington post report says that NASA paid $10.4 million per suit for it's initial order of twelve EMU suits, and the Chinese EVA spacesuits are reported as costing $4.4 million each. The Apollo spacesuits cost less per person but were less capable and only needed to last for three EVAs each. Your suit also will need to be maintained and repaired, which itself is a tricky job, and it has a finite life too, the 1998 EMUs were certified for 25 space walks each before they needed to be returned to Earth for expensive overhaul. A Mars suit would need to have a longer design life than that surely. We don't really have the technology of a durable, low maintenance deep space suit capable of doing large numbers of space walks yet, which is likely to require many new innovations. So, our reality is a fair bit away yet from the spacesuits of science fiction.

Suitsat - a Russian Orlon suit that reached the end of its useful life, discarded as a satellite experiment. With current technology at least, your "Mars suit", as complex as a small spaceship, would probably cost around $2 million to build, not including design costs, would need a lot of maintenance, and after using it for a couple of dozen EVAs, it would need to be discarded and replaced by a new one, or sent back to Earth for reservicing. Is it true that Mars colonists could pay for their spacesuits, and everything else they need, through their inventions which they sell back to Earth?

Then, to survive in your habitat you need complex life support too. It's not like an aqualung with an endless supply of air. You need to have carbon dioxide scrubbed all the time as we can't survive long if levels build up to as high as 1% of the atmosphere, which doesn't take long in a small enclosed habitat. Many other noxious gases like hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide will build up in the habitat too, like "sick building syndrome" to the nth degree. You can't just open a few windows to air your house.

How are you going to pay for all that technology, which also is likely to need a fair bit of servicing? You need solar power, you need batteries, or nuclear power to survive dust storms that blot out the sun. Then you have to have a habitat that can hold in the atmosphere at a pressure of ten tons per square meter outwards pressure. You also need radiation shielding meters thick covering it to protect from cosmic radiation and solar storms. How much does that kind of a "house" cost to build? You can't build it on Mars, except the shielding, the rest has to be imported from Earth. Also if it is anything like the ISS, it has a finite life. After a few decades you will need to import a new "house" to replace the old one which is now aged so much in the harsh space environment, surrounded by vacuum, huge temperature changes every day, that it is no longer worth repairing.

Nothing grows there. You are suddenly in the middle of a desert, with no water, maybe ice but it has to be melted to be used, a few rocks, and most difficult of all, no air to breathe. You never need to think about how to get air to breathe when colonizing on Earth. Without a pressurized spacesuit you can't even go outside to repair your habitat, so the spacesuit is vital. The average temperatures are the same as Antarctica, but it's much worse than that sounds, because the temperature swings are so extreme between day and night. It's so cold that carbon dioxide freezes out as dry ice / water ice frosts in the morning for 100 days of the two Earth year long Mars year even in the tropics. You get dust storms every two years which sometimes blot out the sun completely for weeks on end. If you somehow could take one of the coldest driest deserts on Earth, the Atacama desert, and elevate it to a height of 30 kilometers on Earth, you'd have the same atmospheric pressure as the lowest points on the Mars surface, that is still far more habitable than Mars (still a little oxygen in the atmosphere, more sunlight, no dust storms, easy access from Earth, ozone layer and magnetosphere to protect you somewhat), The top of Mount Everest (at 8.848 km above sea level) is far more hospitable than Mars. And how do you pay for it? Elon Musk's idea is that the colonists pay through inventing things.

Perhaps, as he says, Mars would have a labour shortage with jobs in short supply - but what job is going to apy you hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for your habitats and spacesuits on Mars, and their maintenance and repair and replacements when they wear out? And what exports will Mars have to pay for all those imports?

Well, Elon Musk shares Robert Zubrin's ideas that the Martian colonists in such tough situations will be so inventive they will invent a stream of inventions that transform life on Earth and earn them huge amounts of money to pay for their colony. I suppose it is understandable that he'd find this idea compelling ,considering his own inventiveness. It's based on analogies with the technological inventiveness of early settlers in the US. Again this seems bordering on fantasy to me. Surely it will be mainly the other direction, that with all their complex technology, which they will need just to survive at all, they will depend tremendously on the many discoveries we made on Earth? Even Elon Musk with all his inventiveness and business nous would not be able to pay to support everyone in a Mars colony, and he hasn't suggested that he hopes to do so.

This contains material from my OK to Touch Mars? Europa? Enceladus? Or a Tale of Missteps? which is work in progress, though nearly finished.