SAN FRANCISCO — For more than two decades, Elon Musk He focused on reaching Mars, the ultimate goal of his life, and founded the rocket company SpaceX.
Over the past year, he has also been accelerating his work on what would happen if he got there.
Musk, 53, has instructed SpaceX employees to study the design and details of a Martian city, according to five people familiar with the effort and documents reviewed by The New York Times. One team is drawing up plans for small dome habitats, including the materials that could be used to build them. Another is working on space suits to combat Mars’ hostile environment, while a medical team is investigating whether humans could have children there. Musk has volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony, two people familiar with his comments said.
Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times
While the initiatives are still in their infancy, Musk’s timeline is accelerating as he shifts toward more concrete planning for life on Mars. While he said in 2016 that it would take 40 to 100 years to have a self-sustaining civilization on the planet, Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he expected to have 1 million people living there in about 20 years.
“There is a great urgency to make life multiplanetary,” he said, according to a publicly released video of his remarks. “We have to do it while civilization is this powerful.”
Musk has long sought to defy the impossible, and has often beaten overwhelming odds. But his vision of life on Mars takes his seemingly limitless ambitions to the extreme—and some might say absurd. No one has ever set foot on the planet. NASA doesn’t expect to land humans on Mars until the 2040s. And if humans do get there, they’ll find a barren wasteland, icy temperatures, dust storms, and unbreathable air.
But Musk is so committed to the idea of creating a civilization on Mars—he once said he planned to die there—that it has been the driving force of nearly every commercial venture he has undertaken on Earth. His Mars vision underpins most of the six companies he leads or owns, each of which could potentially contribute to an offworld colony, according to documents and people familiar with the efforts.
The Boring Co., a private tunneling venture founded by Musk, was launched in part to prepare equipment to dig beneath the surface of Mars, two of the people said. Musk has said he bought the social platform X in part to help test how a consensus-based citizen-led government might work on Mars. He also said he envisions the planet’s inhabitants using a version of the steel-paneled Cybertrucks made by electric vehicle company Tesla.
Musk, whose net worth is around $270 billion, has publicly stated that he has amassed assets solely to fund his Mars plans, including his Tesla salary package of around $47 billion.
“This is a way to get humanity to Mars, because building a self-sufficient city on Mars is going to take a lot of resources,” he said, testifying in court in 2022 about his salary from Tesla.
It is debatable whether Musk will be able to realize his vision of establishing a Mars colony in his lifetime.
“You can’t just land a million people on Mars,” said Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who has known Musk for 20 years and wrote the book “The Case for Mars.” Any colonization of the planet would take decades, he said.
Zubrin added that Musk’s recent work, particularly on the X, has distracted him from his Mars ambitions. The tech billionaire has often been criticized for being too dispersed among the companies he runs.
Musk has been talking about Mars for years, and while SpaceX released two basic drawings of a colony around 2018, many details and the company’s shift toward civilization planning have not been reported before. Musk has largely kept colonization plans quiet because SpaceX is required to send a rocket to the moon first under a $2.9 billion contract with NASA, two people with knowledge of the company said.
The Times interviewed more than 20 people close to Musk and SpaceX about the Mars city plans, reviewing internal documents, emails, social media posts and legal filings. Most of the people spoke on condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements.
They even suspected Musk would build a Mars city in his lifetime. Some said he was simply trying to outdo Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who envisions humans living in giant space stations across the solar system. Others said Musk was laying out an aggressive timeline to get more people to work on Mars. Two said the drawings of the colony were sometimes called “advertisement packaging.”
Musk and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
Saving Humanity
Musk has been fascinated with Mars since he was 10 years old when he read Isaac Asimov’s 1951 sci-fi novel “Foundation.” In the book, our hero establishes a colony in a galaxy to save humanity from the collapse of an interstellar empire.
“They find a planet far away from the center of the galaxy and try to preserve human knowledge and civilization there while the center of the galaxy is falling apart,” Musk said in a 2013 interview for a science video.
Musk tried to buy a Russian rocket to reach Mars in 2001, said Jim Cantrell, a former SpaceX employee who visited Russia with him that year. But after three trips, the Russians refused to sell, and one executive spit on Musk’s shoes, Cantrell said.
Musk founded SpaceX, a private company, in Hawthorne, California, in 2002. It eventually built partially reusable rockets and won government contracts, including from NASA. In recent years, he launched Starlink, a satellite internet service that has expanded around the world.
To reach Mars, SpaceX built Starship, a reusable rocket that is about 400 feet long. While Starship’s immediate purpose is to take NASA astronauts to the moon, it could later take residents to Mars and also function as a small space station.
A future version of Starship could have a living space in the nose, three people familiar with the rocket said. Plans call for several floors of living space, along with amenities such as a running track and a movie theater, two of the people said. One rendering of the Starship’s interior, a version Musk shared on X, shows a violinist floating in zero gravity while playing to a crowd.
Starship will be able to carry 100 passengers to Mars at a time, Musk said at the International Astronautical Congress in 2016, and the trip would take about two years. NASA says a trip to Mars, which is about 140 million miles from Earth, would take up to nine months.
In 2018, SpaceX engineers met with university researchers and others in Colorado for a private meeting to discuss the technology needed to survive on Mars, according to meeting notes obtained by the Times. Topics included harvesting ice to make water and choosing the right site on Mars to colonize.
Until last year, the final versions of Starship were built at Starbase, a SpaceX facility in Boca Chica, Texas. In June, Starship successfully returned from a test flight into space for the first time.
Colony Planning
Musk has offered hints over the years about how humans might live on Mars.
One theme revolves around the survival of human life on the planet. Scientists have not yet determined whether humans will be able to have children in space. Musk has said that children will not be allowed on the first missions to Mars because of the dangers, but he hopes they will eventually live there.
But Musk has a plan. He said in a 2013 science video interview that he hoped to create his own species on Mars, an idea he’s repeated to SpaceX employees and others close to the company over the years.
“I think we’ll want to bioengineer new organisms that are better suited to living on Mars,” he said in the interview. “Humanity has done that over time, through selective breeding.”
He also has a strategy for heat. In a podcast interview in 2022, he said he would combat the planet’s frigid temperatures with a series of thermonuclear explosions that would warm the planet by creating artificial suns. Hundreds of solar panels that could be built by Tesla would help heat homes and generate energy, three people familiar with his plans said.
Musk’s statements have shifted toward more concrete planning by SpaceX employees in recent months.
The industrial design team is creating and updating visuals for a city, the two people said. The colony would be centered around a giant dome for communal living, with smaller domes scattered around it. Discussions have recently focused on what materials to use for the domes. Musk is particularly interested in making the city look cool, the two people said.
One interior drawing obtained by the Times shows a family with their young children standing in a domed neighborhood and looking up at the stars.
Musk told SpaceX employees in April that the Mars colony would be self-sufficient if something were to happen to Earth and rockets could no longer reach it.
To achieve this, Musk plans to use Starship as a sort of Noah’s Ark, carrying plants and animals on the first voyage, three people familiar with the plans said. Afterwards, residents will build greenhouses on Mars to grow food.
SpaceX has partnered with plant-based alternative meat company Impossible Foods to provide food for its cafeteria, two sources said, and the products will also be tested as a possible protein source for Mars.
Is Civilization Secured?
Like Musk, many of SpaceX’s 12,000-plus employees believe in life on another planet, according to people familiar with the company and documents reviewed by the Times. Employees sometimes wear “Occupy Mars” or “Rocket Parent” T-shirts to work and post proposals for a Mars colony on an internal site. One recent idea has been to build a city on the rim of a giant crater.
Some employees working on the Mars plans are based in Boca Chica, while others from the Southern California office fly in on Mondays and leave on Fridays. Many work more than 100 hours a week.
The Boca Chica site includes an industrial complex called the Stargate, and some say it has an office that resembles being in a Las Vegas casino because the lack of windows makes it hard to tell whether it’s day or night, three people said. A new office being built there will have more windows, they said. Current and former employees said the Boca Chica site sometimes lacks basic safety protocols, such as putting caution tape around dangerous equipment.
SpaceX is grappling with a lawsuit from eight former employees who say they were fired for complaining about Musk’s behavior and making allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination at the company, as well as a complaint from the National Labor Relations Board. SpaceX has not responded to the lawsuit and has filed a lawsuit with the NLRB, claiming it acted unconstitutionally.
Still, some employees say there is value in working there to create a Mars colony.
In her final farewell email seen by the Times, a female SpaceX executive who worked on the Mars program described “brutal” working hours and conditions, especially for working parents. But she also said the company was “an amazing place” and that she “wouldn’t trade this experience for anything.”
Musk’s presence in Boca Chica has diminished recently, people close to the company said. He visits for a few hours once a month, sometimes in the middle of the night, with his young son, X Æ A-12, while he previously visited at least once a week, the two people said.
But his determination for Martian civilization appears unshaken.
In May, a NASA official said the agency didn’t expect to send humans to Mars until the 2040s. That same month, Musk wrote in X that it would take less than 10 years to send humans there and that there would be a Martian city in about 20 years.
“Civilization was certainly achieved in the 30s,” he wrote.
c.2024 The New York Times Company