It seems plausible to me that the first Starship prototype used to take people into LEO might use a commercial crew Dragon capsule (or major portions of one) mounted inside the cone of Starship. That would enable up to 7 astronauts to reach LEO the soonest, versus designing and building the full size passenger pressure vessel and all associated life support systems production Starship will need for Dear Moon and future moon/Mars manned missions. I can't imagine Elon wanting to delay the first manned orbital flights for the amount of time needed to execute the final crew sections and life-support of the ship.
Interesting thought of yours. I immediately think "no way!!!", what a band-aid, and he doesn't go for band-aids unless they are the obvious best step (which he's done before, to good avail).
So who knows!
I think we need to get solar panels & batteries (or if we have a better energy source available, that, for instance, I think Mars is a good candidate for early nuclear power types of energy unless we can move Mars closer to Sun or put up a partial-Dyson-sphere-powered molten moon around Mars that acts as a second sun after proper UV protection of course), global circumnavigation conductors that can induce magnetic fields to induce an ionosphere on Mars to keep in atmosphere, a bunch of air and air hunters (that may be trapped under surface or in other chemicals), ways to get good habitation above and below ground (many layers and/or levels of membrane containers for air (concentric is my favorite idea (concentric atmosphere bubbles with most or all connected to ground at some point; a leak in one is ok since it just goes into the next level, and then you patch it, and everything is fine; you do want to eventually export atmosphere into the concentric levels anyway as you make it*); tunnel boring and shoring systems; air, sewer, earthquake, and root containment structures and membranes around every underground habitation to land transition membrane (probably use my concentric idea partially by just doing every land-habitat wall with a map of what is exposed the most and what to what), food sources (I am thinking grass for cattle inside the above-ground air containers, so need to have soil makers, basically rock grinders that grind up soilable rock and land material to grass growing consistency, and of course water sources, and of course, water source miners, probably some plumbing from mine fields to growing fields until they can heat up the water enough to make it precipitate, but I think they'd need water-strong membranes over every water mine field before starting to maintain the hydrology inside the planet's atmosphere), then of course when that's going, keep a steady stream of cattle going up there (clean cattle, good biomes, and in secret, since every communist will be trying to build a utopia without cattle, but I just don't think we can do it; ruminants (grazing animals) are the best way to spread foliage seeds around a planet if you spread them all far and wide). I think all of that should be done as soon as possible. The sooner and faster the better. My only exception to that is if we are going to land some asteroids or smaller planets onto or joined to Mars, or have dangerous moon-placement projects without 100% chance of success, which could interfere with the cost-benefit analysis of doing any step ASAP. If we assume that we won't be moon-placing, or asteroid-delivering, or that if we do so that we do so
very carefully so as not to disturb existing valuables (infrastructure and eventually valuable life as soon as it is present), then that can be this year that we launch materials for that, provided we have good plans with backups to get those materials in stage for the planet planet-side.
That goes for any eventually habitable planet that we're targeting now. I presume Mars. I am not prejudice if there are additional/better targets. For instance, I'm agnostic about Earth moon vs. large planet moons vs. Mars as long as we do the low hanging fruit firstish and early. I want more farming and rural living real estate with forests on Earth's moon, so I'm for that, but since moon is so close to Earth, we need redundancy at Mars-magnitude distances, so I'd be OK if we do both or either fast as long as we do, say, Mars ASAP; generally speaking, and in practical terms, that means I agree with Elon, that we need to do Mars ASAP. The next close pass would be my favorite pick for first time, and ramp up fast, ASAP.
I don't see a necessary need to include humans on any of those first missions to Mars. Earth moon is more variable; that can take fine-grained timing
and fine-grained fast response since it's so close, getting materials up fast, and
as soon as the moon is habitable by early best-outcome high use pioneers where it would be beneficial to get them up soon, to do so. I could see that using your band-aid measure if the timing happens to consider that the optimum route, but only in that case.
I could see politics being a factor: since we must preserve humanity, we must launch early to plant the materials and humans as soon as possible in every case so that any anti-human-activists don't have their way with the leading Kings and Queens of Earth (using their lying excuse of being "preservationists" of anti-humanist religions, which for whatever reason, seem to hold heavy sway in the minds of the Kings and Queens and Dictators (China's Xi, Putin, etc.), perhaps as a tool to slow down the best of us while they feed their jealousies). The political side of this only means the same thing I said above: go faster.
So, in balance, maybe it would be optimum to use such a band-aid as using Crew Dragon early and often. If so, and only if so, I'm all for it.
But my gut reaction to using the current Crew Dragon is "no way"; they/SpaceX/humankind can use what they learn from Crew Dragon to get humans going within about 4 to 6 years in properly made interplanetary (poorly-named "Starships") and still be OK. But have as plan A or B what you said: to have Crew Dragon standing by for the most early and hardy of pioneers as appropriate; most likely, I'd say moon. They should be practicing all that (human-livable-"life-support" system) stuff in the "Starships" as they launch many to Mars to see if humans could make the trip; put in some good atmospheres and non-human human analogs that make waste and use air and have to recycle that, practice that on every trip, to really test it out, as they deliver more and more materials. By the same token, I like the idea of delivering pure air and UV-sterilized air in the early trips, so there may be consideration of treating and packaging up the tested air for any air that is considered non-poisonous, sterilizing it, and delivering it in containers for early settler use. Any failed tests that produce bad air would have to be sterilized and put into waste containers so it doesn't contaminate materials and the planet.
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* Unfortunately my concentric atmosphere membrane idea requires designated landing areas; the sooner the dust can be cleared from those designated landing areas, the better. The atmosphere membranes would edge to ground far enough from the landing zones to allow the landings to not disturb the atmosphere containers (surface-bound bubbles, if you didn't visualize this already). After a protective air-containing ionosphere gets going, it makes sense to allow the outermost layer of atmosphere concentric bubble to temporarily cover rocket landing zones, and then remove those layers from the landing zone for landing and take offs, letting that lightest of the atmospheres escape into the un-membraned planetary atmosphere layer. At some scale, it will be important to do fast atmosphere-making on Mars to turn it into human-breathable and plant-farmable as soon as possible.
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P.S., anybody worried about disturbing life on Mars, we are life on Mars,
net present value**. If that person slows us down or stops us,
that person worried about disturbing life on Mars would be the culprit disturbing said life, and
must be stopped and ignored at every turn. Since we know those religious anti-humanists exist, we should be strategic about it, and not really get them ante'd-up; kind of divert around them as much as possible until their voice has about as much use as the howl of wind around the aerodynamic sound inefficiencies and window leaks in a Tesla Model S: slightly annoying to some of us, trending to zero and no real effect on the goal.
**
Net present value (NPV) used in a civil/social/human value/morals sense makes sense to us who studied Bitcoin value: money is a social system for exact value, as close as we can systemically make it. Every current definition you will easily find on the Internet for NPV will likely talk about cash and money, but that definition applies to human values and human kind as well, regardless of application of monetary system. And of course, that turns quickly into monetary value as the development and budgeting is calculated. If anybody knows a better word or term, I'd be open to it.
