How is living on Mars significantly harsher than the ISS?
You would get resupply missions once every 2 years [0] instead of 10 times a year, but in general they share most of the downsides but Mars has soil, gravity and an atmosphere.
You would get resupply missions once every 2 years [0] instead of 10 times a year, but in general they share most of the downsides but Mars has soil, gravity and an atmosphere.
When things go south on Mars, you die.
Supporting the survival of six people on the ISS also costs billions of dollars a year. Even if you cut launch costs by a factor of 10, it's still going to be north of a billion dollars. Supporting the survival of a viable colony on Mars would bankrupt the world twice over.
Once you've got enough people and supplies, you can build farms, which means less food needs to be shipped out, freeing capacity for other goods. Presumably a lot of the infrastructure will be shipped out long before people are, so all they need to do is collect things from the supply drops, then assemble and expand.
Get the Mars colony to self sufficiency and the cost to Earth will trend to zero.