Thermonuclear blasts and new species: Inside Elon Musk’s plan to colonise Mars

SAN FRANCISCO - For more than two decades, Mr Elon Musk has focused SpaceX, his rocket company, on his lifelong goal of reaching Mars.

Over the last year, he has also ramped up work on what will happen if he gets there.

Mr Musk, 53, has directed SpaceX employees to drill into the design and details of a Martian city, according to five people with knowledge of the efforts and documents viewed by The New York Times.

One team is drawing up plans for small dome habitat. Another is working on spacesuits to combat Mars’ hostile environment, while a medical team is researching whether humans can have children there. Mr Musk has volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony, two people familiar with his comments said.

The initiatives, which are in their infancy, are a shift towards more concrete planning for life on Mars as Mr Musk’s timeline has hastened. While he said in 2016 that it would take 40 to 100 years to have a self-sustaining civilization on the planet, Mr Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he now expects one million people to be living there in about 20 years.

“There’s high urgency to making life multi-planetary,” he said, according to a publicly posted video of his remarks. “We’ve got to do it while civilisation is so strong.”

Mr Musk has long tried to defy the impossible and has often managed to beat tough odds. But his vision for life on Mars takes his seemingly limitless ambitions to their most extreme – and some might say absurdist – point.

No one has ever set foot on the planet. Nasa does not expect to land humans on Mars until the 2040s, and if people get there, they will be greeted by a barren terrain, icy temperatures, dust storms and air that is impossible to breathe.

Yet Mr Musk is so wedded to the idea of creating a civilisation on Mars – he once said he plans to die there – that it has propelled nearly every business endeavor he has undertaken on Earth. His vision for Mars underlies most of the six companies that he leads or owns, each of which could potentially contribute to an extraterrestrial colony, according to the documents and the people with knowledge of the efforts.

The Boring Company, a private tunnelling venture founded by Mr Musk, was started in part to ready equipment to burrow under Mars’ surface, two of the people said. Mr Musk has told people that he bought X, the social media platform, partly to help test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus might work on Mars. He has also said that he envisions residents on the planet will drive a version of the steel-panelled Cybertrucks made by Tesla, his electric vehicle company.

Mr Musk, who is worth about US$270 billion (S$362 billion), has publicly declared that he only accumulates assets – which include a roughly US$47 billion Tesla pay package – to fund his plans for Mars.

“It’s a way to get humanity to Mars, because establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars will require a lot of resources,” he testified in court in 2022 about his Tesla pay.

Whether Mr Musk can achieve his vision for a Martian colony in his lifetime is debatable.

“You can’t just land one million people on Mars,” said Mr Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who has known Mr Musk for 20 years and wrote the book The Case For Mars. Any colonisation of the planet would unfold over decades, he said.

Mr Zubrin added that Mr Musk is being particularly distracted from his Mars ambitions by his recent work on X. The tech billionaire often faces criticism for being spread too thin among the companies he runs.

While Mr Musk has spoken about Mars for years and SpaceX released two basic drawings of a colony around 2018, many specifics and the company’s shift towards civilisation planning have not previously been reported. Mr Musk has largely kept the colonisation plans quiet because SpaceX, under a US$2.9 billion contract with Nasa, must first send a rocket to the Moon, two people with knowledge of the company said.

The Times interviewed more than 20 people close to Mr Musk and SpaceX about the plans for a Martian city and reviewed internal documents, e-mails, social media posts and legal documents. Many of the people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.

Even they were sceptical that Mr Musk would build a Martian city in his lifetime. Some of them said he was just trying to best Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who envisions humans living in giant space stations throughout the solar system. Mr Musk has laid out an aggressive timeline for Mars to make them work harder, others said. Drawings of the colony are sometimes referred to as a “hype package”, two of them said.

Mr Musk and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. In a post on X after this article was published, Mr Musk said he had not volunteered his sperm and that no one at SpaceX had been directed to work on a Martian city. “When people have asked to do so, I’ve said we need to focus on getting there first,” he wrote.

Saving humanity

Mr Musk has been fascinated by Mars since reading Isaac Asimov’s 1951 science fiction novel Foundation when he was 10. In the book, the protagonist builds a colony across a galaxy to save humanity from the fall of an interstellar empire.

In 2002, Mr Musk founded SpaceX, a privately held company in Hawthorne, California. It eventually created partly reusable rockets and landed government contracts, including with Nasa. In recent years, it started Starlink, a satellite internet service that has expanded worldwide.

To reach Mars, SpaceX has built Starship, a nearly 122m reusable rocket. Starship’s immediate purpose is to take Nasa astronauts to the Moon, though it might later ferry residents to Mars and could also act as a small space station.

A future version of Starship may have a living space in its nose, three people familiar with the rocket said. Plans call for several floors of living quarters, with amenities like a running track and a movie theatre, two of the people said. One drawing of Starship’s interior, a version of which Mr Musk has posted on X, shows a violinist hovering in zero gravity as she plays for a crowd.

Starship may carry 100 passengers at a time to Mars, a journey that would happen about every two years, Mr Musk told the International Astronautical Congress in a 2016 presentation. Nasa has said a trip to Mars, located about 140 million miles from Earth, would take up to nine months.

In 2018, SpaceX engineers gathered with university researchers and others for a private meeting in Colorado to discuss the technology needed to survive on Mars, according to notes of the meeting obtained by The Times. Topics included harvesting ice to make water and selecting the right area on Mars to build a colony.

By 2023, the latest versions of Starship had been built at Starbase, a SpaceX facility in Boca Chica, Texas. In June, Starship successfully returned from a test flight to space for the first time.

Colony planning

Over the years, Mr Musk has dropped hints about how he thinks people would live on Mars.

One theme revolves around the continuation of human life on the planet. Scientists have not determined whether people can have children in space. Mr Musk has said children will not be allowed on the first flights to Mars because of the dangers, though he expects them to live there eventually.

But Mr Musk has a plan. In a 2013 interview, he said he hoped to create his own species on Mars, an idea that he has repeated over the years to SpaceX employees and others close to the company.

“I think it’s quite likely that we’d want to bioengineer new organisms that are better suited to living on Mars,” he said in the interview. “Humanity’s kind of done that over time, by sort of selective breeding.”

He also has a strategy for warmth. In a 2022 podcast interview, he said he would tackle the planet’s icy temperatures with a series of thermonuclear explosions that would warm the planet by creating artificial suns. Hundreds of solar panels, potentially built by Tesla, will help heat homes and create energy, three people familiar with his plans said.

Mr Musk’s pronouncements have in recent months shifted into more concrete planning by SpaceX employees.

The industrial design team has been creating and updating renderings for a city, two people said. The colony will centre on a giant dome for communal living, with smaller domes scattered around it. Discussions have lately focused on what materials to use for the domes. Mr Musk is particularly concerned with making sure the city looks cool, two other people said.

Civilisation secured?

Like Mr Musk, many of SpaceX’s more than 12,000 employees believe in life on another planet, according to the people familiar with the company and documents viewed by The Times. Workers sometimes wear “Occupy Mars” or “Rocket Parent” T-shirts to work and post suggestions for the Mars colony on an internal site. One recent idea was to build the city on the side 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.

Mr Musk’s presence in Boca Chica has waned recently, people familiar with the company said. He visits about once a month, sometimes in the middle of the night for a few hours with his toddler son X Æ A-12, two of the people said, compared with at least once a week previously.

Yet his resolve for a Martian civilisation appears unbowed.

In May, a Nasa official said that the agency did not expect to land humans on Mars until the 2040s. That same month, Mr Musk posted on X that it would take less than 10 years to send people there and that there would be a Martian city in about 20 years.

“For sure in 30, civilisation secured,” he wrote. NYTIMES