This sounds like a joke to me. This should be a prime example of why SpaceX's suggestions of rocket-landing Dragons and reusable Falcons aren't
that bad; they may be extraordinary, but they don't have nearly as many empty claims and nonsensical statements as this.
It is not easy to live on Mars. It isn't even easy to visit Mars. This is mistake #1, and it is a very, very big mistake. You can't just invent a "cheap rover" that has rover-superpowers. Or mod a Dragon into a Mars hab, and assume that it'll work like a system in operation for decades, when you're entering totally unexplored territory (in the technological sense). Their claim of "no new developments" is a lie; it has to be said. Yes, you may not need nuclear-electric propulsion or ISRU or other proposals to fulfill this 'plan', but the hardware needed for landing on Mars doesn't exist. It has to be developed first. Development of space hardware, especially in a case like this is not easy, nor is it cheap. They make it all sound terribly easy, and that is nigh-delusional. Especially when you consider the unknowns. Of which there are a huge amount.
Financing such a program is an incredible burden that demands an extraordinary plan. "We'll sell the whole thing as the rights to a reality show" isn't a very good plan. Something like this will cost on the order of billions of dollars and not even exceptional success is likely to make it a viable venture. And spaceflight contains no half-naked cat-women, no
asteroid thickets, no gunfights (you hope) and no exciting plotlines. Spaceflight is
supposed to be boring- because boring is better than dead. It's a very different world from the edited footage of interesting people playing it up for the camera that makes up reality TV.
For example, just look at the viewership of NASA TV- and NASA TV is free. The public may be interested in spaceflight- they see a picture of Dragon grappled by the ISS, they read the headline, they're impressed, and then they move on. But hardly anyone (and I'm sure this includes many space enthusiasts) would want to watch, say, a live feed of COTS2+ on-end for several days. There's just nothing going on.
And there's a fine line between "emigration" and "going somewhere to die". Emigration generally requires that there's something to emigrate to- such an aim of a functioning society and considerable infrastructure. A few groups of four living out of a series of modified Dragon capsules is emphatically not that.
If you want to build a town in the middle of nowhere, the least you could do is put effort into learning how to actually
build the town.
