No. Unless their aim is just to be delivered to Mars and die there, dead on arrival or soon after, that could be done on that budget perhaps, though it is very optimistic.
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 a spacesuit. A spacesuit will set you back $10 million. That's not including the design cost, just the cost for someone to make it, a months 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 also will need to be maintained and repaired, which itself is a tricky job, and it has a finite life too.
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 $10 million to build, would need a lot of maintenance, and after using it for a while it would need to be discarded and replaced by a new one.
Elon Musk and Robert Zubrin are hopeful that Mars colonists could pay for their spacesuits, and everything else they need, through their inventions and other intellectual property, 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.
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 that idea of exports of intellectual property rights by the inventive Mars colonists as one of the most important ways to pay for the colony.
Zubrin also covers the idea of exporting deuterium which is an idea that doesn’t really work when you look at it closely. Yes deuterium is valuable, but the Mars deuterium is only concentrated five times relative to the deuterium on Earth, it’s only present at a concentration of r 0.078% in Mars ice, and you have a target of 99% concentration. This would save just one step out of many in a deuterium enrichment plant.
Heavy water plant near Arroyito, photograph by Frandres This plant produces most of the world’s deuterium, at a rate of 200 tons per year, and is powered by a nearby hydroelectric power station at Arroyito dam with a power output of 128 MW. (I'm not sure how much of that power output is used for the plant, do say if any of you know).
The equipment for extracting deuterium weighs 27,000 tons including the support structures and includes 250 heat exchangers, 240 pressure vessels, 90 gas compressors 13 reactors and 30 distillation columns. (Statistics from Arroyito Heavy Water Production Plant, Argentina)
Other ideas for economic benefit from Mars are equally sketchy.
The Moon is a bit different. Though life would be very expensive there also, authors like Paul Spudis etc do pay a lot of attention to the commercial case. The big advantage the Moon has is its nearness to Earth, making exports far easier and tourism possible. It's not quite "day trip" but you could visit it, and be back within a week. Also there are various ideas that could reduce costs of transport to Earth hugely, which wouldn't work for Mars. It's only two days away also, with easy access any time of the year (not just every two years), and far far easier to get back in an emergency, which makes it much safer for humans. Far easier to leave the surface than for Mars, reducing export costs. Also there's the possibility of ice at its poles, combined with solar power available 24/7 year round as a source of abundant power. Paul Spudis and others believe it will be economic to supply this ice as water and rocket fuel to LEO, outcompeting water sent from Earth. Water is vital to humans in space and very expensive to send to orbit at present.
So, the "Moon firsters", though optimistic at times about the commercial value of the Moon, do tend to be far more realistic than the "Mars firsters". They are not so involved in these ideas that seem to belong more in science fiction than in real life, of just setting up home as if you could build a log cabin on Mars and live off the land. You may be interested in my Is there a fortune to be made on Mars, the Moon or anywhere else in space? in my "MOON FIRST Why Humans on Mars Right Now Are Bad for Science" (it was also featured as an article in Forbes magazine). It compares the economic case for Mars and for the Moon.
In “We Need to Stop Talking About Space as a ‘Frontier’.” by Lisa Messeri she suggested that language helps and that perhaps we need to stop thinking about space as a "Frontier" with its unfortunate connotations of damage to the environment of North America, and the destruction of American Indian peoples and cultures.
"Comparing outer space to the frontier is so prevalent that it’s sometimes hard to remember that it is a metaphor, not an accurate portrayal of what lies beyond Earth. The commercial space industry prides itself on newness and novelty, and yet the reliance on the same old metaphor both limits the imagination of humans in space and glosses over the social and historical problems of imagining a frontier that is empty and beckoning."
..." But mobilizations of the frontier metaphor from Turner to today don’t just ignore the historical reality of war, disease, and environmental destruction. The Americanness of the frontier metaphor is also at odds with the need for international cooperation in the new era of space exploration. While the frontier might inspire Tumlinson and his fellow American baby boomers, does it have salience more broadly? As we try and move from a model of space competition to space cooperation, does the frontier, which necessarily pits “us” against “them,” undermine the peaceful expansion many imagine?"
Steven Lyle Jordan put it rather well, I thought, in his blog post: Space is not a frontier, commenting on her article - why not refer to space as our "environment" rather than our frontier?
"There is lots of room for expansion in the Environment… but absolutely no guarantee that we can, in fact, expand beyond this oasis and thrive. Most of the Environment is downright hostile to us. Intelligence might allow us to figure out a way… but the uncontrolled elements of that vast Environment may eventually doom us to non-existence anyway. Once more… we have no way to know. But there’s nothing stopping us from trying; only the incredible difficulty and unlikelihood of succeeding."
"The word “environment” embodies the knowledge of science and nature, the desire to experience it and learn what is learnable… but not to desecrate, strip-mine or destroy it for personal gain. If that’s not a noble-enough reason to explore new environments, I don’t know what is."
"This way of thinking about space probably gives us the best and most accurate image of the universe and our place in it. It will also serve us best in imagining our future activities in space: How we should treat the vast Environment; and how we should act when or if we discover others out in the Environment. (It probably wouldn’t have hurt if we’d considered Earth this way, instead of seeing it as empty spaces to exploit. Just saying.)"
So, this focus on colonization for its own sake really narrows our vision, I think. Everything we do becomes a step on the way to the aim of eventually attempting to colonize a place with freezing temperatures, frequent dust storms, water only in the form of ice, and a near vacuum for an "atmosphere". Well that's how I see it at least.
So, I don’t see us colonizing any of these places for their own sake, any time soon. Rather there has to be some other reason to be there. The Moon is the most likely place to provide such a reason because it is so close to Earth and also so little gravity, and books on the Moon settlement have many chapters about the economic value of the Moon, unlike books on Mars that skim over this in a single chapter typically with rather sketchy ideas about how it just possibly might be economically worth while if .... Also, the lunar lava tube caves could potentially give huge low maintenance enclosed spaces. If we build closed system habitats like that, eventually, perhaps they could even be as economic to live in as Earth through economies of scale and because the Moon has no weather to speak of and is tectonically very quiet. But that's a bit of a way into the future.
Mars could provide such a reason too, for scientific study, search for present day life or past life, and its two moons also. Lockheed Martin looked into Phobos and Deimos as intermediate destinations for their "Stepping Stones to Mars" and they remain destinations of great scientific interest, both in their own right, and as a base for studying Mars from orbit. Deimos also is a type of meteorite that may well have abundant water ice. They are tiny worlds so we also need to consider the potential of negative scientific impact of humans building a base on them. Perhaps we might eventually have settlements there of some sort too. I cover this in detail in I cover this in the sections Interesting flyby and orbital missions for Mars.
Anyway I argue strongly that Moon is the obvious place to start our experiments in sending humans to somewhere else other than Earth, for safety reasons and nearness to Earth too as well as all the other reasons.
For more about this see my OK to Touch Mars? Europa? Enceladus? Or a Tale of Missteps? (This answer is mainly an extract from it).
See also my answer to Is there anything of economic value on Mars that would allow trade to finance a colony on Mars?
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