Annual budget required to build and maintain a small Martian base?

[Valerij]

     
Don't see why Mars should be any different, if Mars is livable at all.  But the premise here is that a base can grow into a settlement and then into a city state/nation.

   
Mars, in its present form, is unsuitable for human life. But the task, in the general case, is to teach a person to live on such now lifeless planets as Mars.
   

[lamontagne]

For a small Martian base, I would suggest the salaries of the personnel x 10.  So for 100 people, 200 K x 100 people x 10 = 200 000 000 dollars.  This might be supported by 2 starship flights per synod, at 50 million$ each (500$/kg).  So Bare costs of perhaps 300 million $ per year.  The original base infrastructure might have required a few billion$ to put in place.  If we have a 100% turn over rate then the cost might double.
This would be some kind of exploration/scientific base, with no immigration and entirely dependent on the original state.  There would probably be no children, likely using estrogen implants or reversible vasectomies, or both, to be fair.

Scott Base cost 250 million to 'rebuid' so that seems a good baseline.  https://www.stuff.co.nz/science/113844159/scott-base-rebuild-to-cost-250-million

For these costs, i would expect SpaceX to have gone bankrupt, erasing the need to finance the launch and development costs and the infrastructure and existing rockets to have been taken over by a cheap operator.  If we add some significant profit, perhaps double all this for a bit less than one billion per year.
This could go on for decades, with significant refurbishment every twenty years or so.

[lamontagne]

At the other extreme, an aggressive immigration program would not really have a budget, but rather a growth rate target.  Self financing immigrant would pay for the transportation, at a few million $ each.  Population might double every synod for the early years, then growth rate would slowly go down as local production required more and more human resources, leaving less personnel available for building expansion.  Children would have to be possible, or there wouldn't really be a point to it all.
Earth would want to keep the settlement as dependent as possible to sell the most possible goods and help repay it's costs and the loss of productive people to another 'space', while the settlement would tend to do as much as possible locally to give its people things to do and to reduce costs of transportation.  To attain a certain degree of self sufficiency and stop paying transportation costs, population growth through immigration would be as high as practically possible.

To be attractive Mars would need to offer growth, a pleasant place to live and opportunity for the children and a good education system.  As there is, in practice, nothing that can be sent back to Earth for significant financial gain, there would be no point in having cheap exploitative colony.  There is just no way to make that model work with the transportation costs.
Abundant cheap energy, either through an aggressive nuclear program or locally produced, dirt cheap solar arrays and batteries would be required to allow local production to compete with Earth exports.  Abundant energy is required to offset the high cost of building pressurized enclosures for living.

For an Earth government supporting such a program, there would be some gains from hosting the manufacturing base required for the launches and transportation vehicles, plus significant exports for some time.  The proportion of exports per capita would go down with time but the volume would keep up for a while, I expect.

In the much longer run, Mars doesn't offer a significant biological reservoir to face large scale catastrophes.  Terraforming might help with this, or perhaps the development of very large scale habitats.

And the budget for this would be the cost to keep a finger in the pie, so to speak.  A few billion, perhaps, for a military and administrative presence.  But all in all a tiny portion of the 'host' country's economy. 

[high road]

You can't compare it to the American nation for all sorts of obvious reasons. Imagine if there was no atmosphere over north America and nothing living. Then reset your brain.

As long as North America was in a position to export enough to cover the costs of import (the united states has always imported plenty of goods, that's why cities close to sea access are the largest), it would have sought a way out from egregious taxation. Like every self respecting city/region did since at least antiquity.

But considering you need a massive number of complex supply chains to produce everything a human population wants (as in: will seek a way to pay to import) and local production is easily several times as expensive due to having to make the stuff that would be considered available resources on Earth, that seems off topic for this thread.

It should be possible to model a Mars colony on a computer and work out at what stage it has a chance of surviving independently from Earth.

It is. But it gets very complex very quickly, and local production becomes much more expensive than importing stuff from Earth very quickly when you look at it in order of saved imported mass. Local food production already takes decades to earn back in terms of imported mass.

A small Martian base with a limited cost takes the form of a skeleton crew that is all but fully supplied from home, maybe even taking the hydrogen for the return trip along. That's how much additional mass is needed to even build the most basic local production. (However, this does not take into account that it takes quite an industry to fuel and launch a Starship. I had no way to model that and that would make the initial base much, much bigger).

[daedalus1]

You can't compare it to the American nation for all sorts of obvious reasons. Imagine if there was no atmosphere over north America and nothing living. Then reset your brain.

As long as North America was in a position to export enough to cover the costs of import (the united states has always imported plenty of goods, that's why cities close to sea access are the largest), it would have sought a way out from egregious taxation. Like every self respecting city/region did since at least antiquity.

But considering you need a massive number of complex supply chains to produce everything a human population wants (as in: will seek a way to pay to import) and local production is easily several times as expensive due to having to make the stuff that would be considered available resources on Earth, that seems off topic for this thread.

I'm not sure you're understanding my point which is,  if Mars had an atmosphere and plant and animal life, a city still wouldn't be self sufficient from earth. The fact it is a planet with almost no atmosphere and no life means the situation is orders of magnitude worse.

[high road]

You can't compare it to the American nation for all sorts of obvious reasons. Imagine if there was no atmosphere over north America and nothing living. Then reset your brain.

As long as North America was in a position to export enough to cover the costs of import (the united states has always imported plenty of goods, that's why cities close to sea access are the largest), it would have sought a way out from egregious taxation. Like every self respecting city/region did since at least antiquity.

But considering you need a massive number of complex supply chains to produce everything a human population wants (as in: will seek a way to pay to import) and local production is easily several times as expensive due to having to make the stuff that would be considered available resources on Earth, that seems off topic for this thread.

I'm not sure you're understanding my point which is,  if Mars had an atmosphere and plant and animal life, a city still wouldn't be self sufficient from earth. The fact it is a planet with almost no atmosphere and no life means the situation is orders of magnitude worse.

This is the post before yours, which I assumed you responded to:

The US got fed up with the English after about 160 years or so.  1610 to 1776.  The population went from 350 loyal subjects to 2.5 millions Americans in that time.
Don't see why Mars should be any different, if Mars is livable at all.  But the premise here is that a base can grow into a settlement and then into a city state/nation.

You don't need to be self sufficient to become independent. I can't think of any civilization gaining independence since at least the bronze age that didn't need to import stuff and/or conquer the places where resources were being extracted or produced. Them not being free to do so as they see fit is usually the reason to strive for independence in the first place.

For independence, you only need a way to pay for imports. Which is indeed orders of magnitude more difficult on Mars, and gets harder the more you try to do locally, as more and more people are needed and need to be supplied so they can produce stuff in far less efficient production chains. So I think we both disagree with the premise being valid, but if the premise is valid (well, changed from 'livable' to 'can make enough money to eke out a living', like the Viking settlers in Greenland), then full self-sufficiency is not a requirement for independence.