Comment by jandrese

IMHO, to achieve anything close to the timelines Elon has publicly stated you need to do both at once. The habitats are a decade long development effort at a minimum. The capacity and dimensions of the launch vehicle are known, there is no reason to not be working on the prototypes now.

There is so much foundational technology that has to be developed first to even make them a possibility. Even your step 2 requires them to be fully developed and reliable, because there is no flying in spares from Earth if something breaks down. If I were to give Elon the benefit of the doubt this would be one of the factors in the refocus on the Moon base, but even that is dubious. I still think the "make humanity multi-planetary" talk is a diversion.