For more than two decades, Elon Musk has focused SpaceX, his rocket company, on his lifelong goal of reaching Mars.
Over the past year, he’s also stepped up work on what will happen if he gets there.
Musk, 53, has directed SpaceX officials 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 draws up plans for small dome habitats, including the materials that can be used to build them. Another is working on spacesuits to combat the hostile environment of Mars, while a medical team is investigating whether humans can have children there. Mr. Musk volunteered his sperm to help plant a colony, two people familiar with his comments said.
The initiatives, which are in their infancy, are a shift toward more concrete planning for life on Mars as Mr. Musk’s schedule has accelerated. Although he said in 2016 that it would take 40 to 100 years for a self-sustaining civilization to exist on the planet, Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he now expects one million people to live there in about 20 years.
“There is great urgency for life to become multiplanetary,” he said, according to a publicly released video of his remarks. “We must do it while civilization is so strong.”
Mr. Musk has long attempted to defy the impossible and often succeeded in beating the odds. But his vision of life on Mars takes his seemingly limitless ambitions to their most extreme – and some might say absurd – point. No one has ever set foot on the planet. NASA doesn’t expect to land humans on Mars until 2040. And if humans do get there, they’ll be greeted by barren terrain, freezing temperatures, dust storms and air that’s impossible to breathe.
Yet Mr. Musk is so wedded to the idea of creating a civilization on Mars — he once said he planned to die there — that it has driven nearly every business venture he has undertaken on Earth. His vision for Mars is at the heart of most of the six companies he runs or owns, each of which could potentially contribute to an alien colony, according to the documents and people familiar with the effort.
The Boring Company, a private tunneling venture founded by Mr. Musk, was started in part to prepare equipment to dig beneath the surface of Mars, two of the people said. Mr. Musk has told people he bought X, the social media platform, in part to help test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus might work on Mars. He also said he envisions the planet’s inhabitants driving a steel-paneled version of Cybertrucks made by Tesla, his electric vehicle company.
Mr. Musk, whose fortune is estimated at $270 billion, has publicly declared that he is only amassing assets — which include an estimated $47 billion Tesla pay package — to fund his plans for Mars.
“This is a way to get humanity to Mars, because creating a self-sustaining city on Mars will require a lot of resources,” he testified in court in 2022 about his Tesla salary.
Whether Mr. Musk can achieve his vision of a Martian colony in his lifetime is debatable.
“You can’t just land a million people on Mars,” said Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who has known Mr. Musk for 20 years and wrote the book “The Case for Mars.” Any colonization of the planet would take decades, he said.
Mr. Zubrin added that Mr. Musk was particularly distracted from his Mars ambitions by his recent work on X. The tech billionaire has often faced criticism for being too spread out among the companies he runs.
Although Mr. Musk has talked about Mars for years and SpaceX released two basic blueprints for a colony around 2018, many specifics and the company’s shift toward civilization planning have not been previously reported. Mr. Musk has largely kept the colonization plans quiet because SpaceX, under a $2.9 billion contract with NASA, must first send a rocket to the moon, two people familiar with the company said.
The Times interviewed more than 20 people close to Mr. Musk and SpaceX about plans for a Martian city and reviewed internal documents, emails, social media posts and legal documents. Many of the people spoke on condition of anonymity because they signed nondisclosure agreements.
Even they were skeptical that Mr. Musk would build a Martian city in his lifetime. Some of them said he was just trying to beat Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who envisions humans living in giant space stations throughout the solar system. Mr. Musk has laid out an aggressive schedule for Mars to make them work harder, others said. The colony blueprints are sometimes referred to as an “advertising package,” two of them said.
Mr. Musk and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
Saving humanity
Mr. Musk has been fascinated by Mars since he read Isaac Asimov’s 1951 science fiction novel The Foundation when he was 10 years old. In the book, the main character builds a colony in a galaxy to save humanity from the fall of an interstellar empire.
“They find a planet far from the galactic center and try to preserve human knowledge and civilization there while the galactic center is kind of falling apart,” Mr. Musk said in a 2013 Science Video interview.
In 2001, Mr. Musk tried to buy a Russian rocket to reach Mars, said Jim Cantrell, a former SpaceX employee who visited Russia with him that year. But after three trips, the Russians refused to sell even one official spit on Mr. Musk’s shoes, Mr. Cantrell said.
In 2002, Mr. Musk founded SpaceX, a privately held company in Hawthorne, California. Eventually, it created partially usable rockets and won government contracts, including with NASA. In recent years, it launched Starlink, a satellite Internet service that has expanded worldwide.
To reach Mars, SpaceX built the Starship, a nearly 400-foot long reusable rocket. Starship’s immediate purpose is to take NASA astronauts to the moon, although it may later carry residents to Mars and may also act as a small space station.
A future version of Starship could have a living space in its nose, three people familiar with the rocket said. The plans call for several floors of residential units, with amenities such as a running track and a movie theater, two of the people said. One drawing of the Starship’s interior, a version of which Mr. Musk posted on X, shows a violinist floating in zero gravity while playing to an audience.
Starship could carry 100 passengers at a time to Mars, a trip that would happen every two years, Mr. Musk told the International Astronautical Congress in a presentation in 2016. NASA said a trip to Mars, located about 140 million miles from Earth, it will 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 meeting notes obtained by The Times. Topics include collecting ice to produce water and choosing the right area of Mars to build a colony.
Until last year, the latest 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
Over the years, Mr. Musk has dropped hints about how he thinks humans will live on Mars.
One of the themes revolves around the continuation of human life on the planet. Scientists have not determined whether humans can have children in space. Mr Musk said children would not be allowed on the first flights to Mars because of the dangers, although he expected them to live there eventually.
But Mr. Musk has a plan. In his 2013 interview with Science Video, he said he hoped to create his own species on Mars, an idea he has repeated over the years to SpaceX employees and others close to the company.
“I think it’s quite likely that we’ll want to bioengineer new organisms that are more suitable for life on Mars,” he said in the interview. “Humanity has achieved this over time, through a kind of selective breeding.”
He also has a heat strategy. In a podcast interview in 2022, 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 would help heat homes and generate power, three people familiar with its plans said.
Mr. Musk’s statements in recent months have given way to more concrete planning by SpaceX officials.
The industrial design team has been creating and updating renderings for a city, two people said. The colony will be centered on a giant communal living dome, with smaller domes scattered around it. Recently, discussions have focused on what materials to use for the domes. Mr. Musk is particularly concerned about making the city look cool, two other people said.
An interior drawing obtained by The Times shows a family with young children standing in a domed neighborhood looking up at the stars.
In April, Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees that the Mars colony would be self-sustaining in case something happened to Earth and rockets could no longer reach it.
To achieve that, Mr. Musk plans to use Starship as something of a Noah’s Ark, carrying plants and animals on the initial journey, three people familiar with the plans said. Residents will then build greenhouses on Mars to grow food.
SpaceX is partnering with Impossible Foods, a plant-based alternative meat company, to provide food in SpaceX cafeterias but also to test the products as a possible source of protein for Mars, two of the people said.
Is civilization secured?
Like Mr. Musk, many of SpaceX’s more than 12,000 employees believe in the existence of life on another planet, according to people familiar with the company and documents reviewed by The Times. Workers sometimes wear “Occupy Mars” or “Rocket Parent” T-shirts to work and post Mars colony proposals 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 Monday and leave on Friday. Many work more than 100 hours a week.
The Boca Chica site has an industrial complex called Stargate with an office that some liken to a Las Vegas casino because the lack of windows makes it hard to tell whether it’s day or night, three people said. The new office being built there will have more windows, they said. Current and former employees said the Boca Chica site sometimes lacked basic safety protocols, such as caution tape around dangerous equipment.
SpaceX has faced a lawsuit and a complaint from the National Labor Relations Board involving eight former employees who said they were fired for complaining about Mr. Musk’s behavior and for making allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination at the company. SpaceX did not respond to the lawsuit and sued the NLRB, claiming it acted unconstitutionally.
Still, some officials said it was worth working there to establish a colony on Mars.
In a recent farewell email reviewed by The Times, a female SpaceX manager who worked on the Mars program described “brutal” 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.”
Mr. Musk’s presence in Boca Chica has diminished 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 young son X Æ A-12, two of the people said, compared with at least once a week before.
Yet his determination for a Martian civilization seems unwavering.
In May, a NASA official said the agency does not expect to land humans on Mars until 2040. That same month, Mr. Musk published on 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.
“Certainly after 30 years civilization is protected,” he wrote.
