
Extraplanetary spacefaring has a hoary history in science fiction. Elon Musk, our so-touted Mars visionary, is an avid sci-fi reader. A book he acknowledges as foundational to his outlook is Robert Heinlein’s Hugo Award-winner, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1967), about an insurrection of the moon’s penal colony against the Earth-based Lunar Authority.
And there you might just have the root cause of Musk’s out-of-Earth drive. But what would he like to take to Mars? What would he like Mars to be? Among the questions not yet being asked is whether his Marsism—a neologism coined by Thomas Michaud in a 2020 research paper—is self-created, or whether it is one of the many ideas he has appropriated in his hyper-corporatism without giving credit.
For sci-fi writers, bringing Mars into their orbit is almost de rigueur, like designing a chair is for designers. Themes have included building starship, establishing and sustaining colonies, hyper-finance, return boosters, orbital fuelling, terra-forming, bio-adaptation, containing contamination from Earth, and iconoclastic politics, among a host of others that Musk might have read.
Astrophysicist Erika Nesvold was being cautionary when she said, “[If] you think it’s our destiny to go out and reproduce as much as possible, or grab as many resources as possible, that’s going to affect how we treat the places that we go to and how we treat each other... A lot of people also love to talk about space as a blank slate, which I think is not accurate because it’s a blank slate now, but once we get there, we are bringing all of our baggage with us.”
The primary problem with Musk is that he follows the adage that technology is unrelated to morality, even though he is an exemplar of the conviction that technology and politics are, and should be, intermeshed. And that morality is divorced from finance.
What sort of polity would Musk export to Mars? Certainly one that is well off, although why the well-heeled should want to leave Earth’s safety for exploratory precarity is a good question. Musk once estimated ticket prices would be $100,000-500,000 each. Just as likely if his team makes a Mars landing is that he will try to interfere in its political processes as the destinationists try to find their footing distinct from the divisive politics of Earth.
Even while bankrolling Donald Trump’s right-wing agenda, Musk has said that he would prefer a “direct democracy”, with the electorate directly deciding policies, as opposed to an electoral democracy. Direct democracy exists in its most actionable form in Liechtenstein, a 160-sq-km—less than half of Gaza—supermonarchic microstate with a population of 40,000, where it takes 30 years of continuous residency to apply for citizenship. With one of the highest per-capita GDPs in the world, it is a rich person’s paradise, and a conservative one at that: it granted women the right to vote only in 1984.
European countries are especially aware of the dangers of a runaway, hyper-corporate, expansionist space programme. Musk wants a city on Mars in 20 years. Ambitious perhaps, but not overly so, given the money he is throwing into what can only be described as a financially maximalist but narrow-focus endeavour.
“The term NewSpace describes the ongoing commercialisation of space travel and its increasing integration with the non-space economy, which is being driven by private players in particular,” wrote Timo Stellpglug in 2023 while comparing space laws in Germany and Liechtenstein.
What is Musk’s budget for SpaceX’s Mars programme? He tweeted in September 2024, “Making life multiplanetary is fundamentally a cost-per-tonne to Mars problem.” A funding problem, not a complex issue involving viable tech-spend, social investments, environmental anthropocentrism, or ethics. In 2016, he said that SpaceX was spending tens of millions of dollars on spacecraft to colonise Mars. He employed metaphors of a spacewar and colonialism: “The Mars Colonial Fleet would depart en masse. Much like Battlestar Galactica.” His ‘interplanetary transport system rocket’ would hold at least 100 people. The plan is for an invasion of Mars, not a foray.
But deadlines are playthings. In 2016, Forbes reported it was “2024, for a 2025 arrival”. Musk estimated the cost at $10 billion. In 2024, he pumped it up, saying that building a self-sustaining city on Mars would require at least one million tonnes of equipment costing over $1,000 trillion, an impossible sum given the world’s GDP of just $110 trillion. He said that it costs $1 billion to deposit a tonne on Mars.
Nasa’s non-returning probe missions actually cost up to $200,000 per tonne. Musk wants to hack it down to $100,000—a difficult doubling in efficiency. Somehow, this calculus reads like it has been spun off the top of his head—much like his wish for the US department of government efficiency to amputate $2 trillion from US government spending.
Musk does have a plan for making Mars an attractive destination for long-term living: terra-forming, which would entail pumping greenhouse gases into Mars’s atmosphere to make it thicker and warmer. Musk advocates doing so by dropping nukes on Mars. The idea is so embedded in SpaceX lore that the company sells t-shirts, which Musk is often seen wearing, with the legends ‘Nuke Mars’ and ‘Occupy Mars’.
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist