The Night Before Mars Colonization: Musk, Narrative Leverage, and a Trillion-Dollar Industry Chain

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Original author: Sleepy.md

Every escape of human civilization begins in exactly this way.

In September 1620, 102 people packed into a wooden ship called “Mayflower,” dropped anchor at Plymouth Port in England, and sailed into the treacherous North Atlantic. What was loaded into the cramped ship’s hold was not just luggage, but a complete political blueprint: they would build a “city upon a hill” in the New World—a brand-new world freed from the Church of England’s control and far from the corrupt aristocrats’ exploitation.

They didn’t come for exploration, and they didn’t come for commerce—they were simply a group of people trying to escape fate.

178 years later, in 1788, the first batch of British prisoners were sent to Australia. At that time, Europeans regarded that continent as the edge of the world—an ideal natural dumping ground, meant specifically to package up those who weren’t needed and cast them away to fend for themselves. As it turned out, the abandoned prisoners took root there, built cities, and formed a nation.

Further down the timeline: the California Gold Rush of 1848, the massive development of Siberia in the 1880s, the rubber boom in Brazil in the early 1900s… Whenever human civilization tries to “reset,” it always gets the same script: search for a land with no master, proclaim the arrival of a new order, then watch capital, people, and technology surge in wildly. In brutally harsh conditions, they carve out an entirely new survival logic—by force.

Now it’s Mars’s turn.

But the difference is that the Mayflower had tacit approval from the British government; Australia was already a colony of the British Crown; and behind the California Gold Rush, U.S. federal land policies provided additional support. This time, the engine driving the process is no longer any country’s will, but a group of private capital—venture capitalists, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, former NASA engineers, and Elon Musk.

Colonialism driven by national will has taxation, armies, and sovereignty logic as its underlying color; while colonialism spawned by private capital, at its core, is etched with return on investment, exit pathways, and narrative premium. The civilizations bred by these two foundational logics are destined to differ radically from the very start.

So what exactly are these people swinging the big stick of private capital betting on?

You’re still anxious about AI—and they’re already discussing Mars mining rights

In a typical workday in 2025, Tom Mueller is pitching his new company to a group of investors.

Mueller isn’t a typical entrepreneur. He’s worked at SpaceX for nearly 20 years, personally leading the design of the Merlin engines for Falcon 9—the roaring engines that not only carried humans into the International Space Station and placed satellites into their intended orbits, but also lifted SpaceX from the brink of near bankruptcy into the commercial empire it is today, with a valuation in the trillions.

At the end of 2020, Mueller left SpaceX and founded Impulse Space. In one sentence, the core mission of this new company is: deliver cargo to Mars orbit.

Yes, the target isn’t low Earth orbit, and it isn’t the Moon—it’s Mars orbit.

His target customers are institutions and companies that urgently need satellites, probes, and resupply modules deployed in Mars orbit. His logic is exceptionally clear: the infrastructure for Mars missions must be broken ground starting now. When Musk’s Starship truly lifts off into the sky, someone must already be waiting along that route.

In June 2025, Impulse Space raised $300 million in a Series C round, bringing total funding to $525 million. The investor roster is impressive: Linse Capital led the round, with Founders Fund, Lux Capital, DCVC, and Valor Equity Partners participating. Founders Fund is Peter Thiel’s fund, and Valor Equity Partners is an early investor in Musk-linked companies. This is absolutely not a group of retail investors intoxicated by Mars fantasies, but one of Silicon Valley’s most seasoned capital blocs.

Pull the focus back to the present: the hottest topic in your and my social circles is called “Will AI make me lose my job?”

On the same planet, along the same timeline, some people are frantic about the jobs and paychecks in front of them day and night—while others are negotiating who will own Mars mining rights. This is the most real “cognitive time lag”: different people are folded into different time dimensions—some live in 2025, some live in 2035, and some live in 2050.

This cognitive time lag isn’t new. In the early 1990s, when most Chinese people were still debating whether to buy a color TV, a small group of people were already tinkering with the internet. By the early 2010s, when most people were still typing on Nokia keyboards, someone had already been developing mobile apps.

Every wave of technology inevitably manufactures this kind of time lag. Those who open their eyes first may not be smarter; it’s just that, trapped in the whirlpool of information and capital, they are forced to seek answers from a farther future.

But this time, the time lag is wider than ever.

Worry about AI is certainly real—but it’s still a worry trapped in the “now.” The Mars industry, however, is a big chess game betting on the “future,” and that future isn’t just five years away—it’s twenty years, fifty years.

Mars industry supply chain

When people mention the “Mars industry,” many people’s first instinct is that it’s unreachable science fiction: Musk’s vague, ethereal dream; Silicon Valley tycoons’ money-burning toy.

That kind of assertion was airtight in 2015, and broadly fair in 2020, but in 2025, it just doesn’t hold.

The current form of the Mars industry supply chain is extremely similar to the internet of 1998. Back then, the infrastructure wasn’t fully built yet, most companies were still burning money, and business models weren’t clear—but there was already enough real capital, real technology, and real talent running through it. You can call it “Still Early,” but you absolutely can’t deny its existence.

This interstellar supply chain, from the bottom to the top, can roughly be broken down into five layers.

First layer: launch and transportation.

To send things from Earth to Mars, you first need a rocket. In this layer of infrastructure, of course Starship from SpaceX leads the way—but another company called Relativity Space also can’t be ignored.

What this company does is use robots to 3D print an entire rocket. Their Terran R rockets have 95% of their parts printed—from the engines to the rocket body. Previously, Relativity Space already secured $2.9 billion in launch contracts. Their logic is that traditional rocket supply chains are too long and too fragile; once you enter high-frequency, large-scale launch phases, component supply becomes a fatal weakness. But 3D printing compresses the supply chain to the extreme, because you only need a batch of raw materials and a printer.

Second layer: orbital transport.

Moving cargo from low Earth orbit to Mars orbit faces completely different engineering challenges, requiring dedicated propulsion systems and trajectory planning. And this is exactly the battlefield that Impulse Space, under Mueller’s leadership, is working to conquer. Their developed propulsion system can support precise maneuvering for spacecraft in deep space. It’s indispensable infrastructure for future Mars expeditions—just as the lifeline of today’s logistics is to a massive e-commerce empire.

Third layer: construction.

Once people land on Mars, where will they live? The most interesting company in this layer is ICON, a 3D-printed construction company. They’ve already successfully 3D printed homes and military bases on Earth. Now they hold a $57.2 million NASA contract focused on studying how to source locally and use Martian soil (basalt, perchlorate, and sulfur) to directly 3D print human dwellings. The project is called Project Olympus.

Not only that—ICON is also building a Mars habitat simulation unit for NASA in Houston, Texas, called CHAPEA. This 158-square-meter, fully 3D-printed module welcomed four volunteers in June 2023. They’re not actors, and they’re not influencers—just carefully selected NASA scientists and engineers. During a 378-day Mars survival simulation, they planted their rations themselves, and every time they went outside they had to wear spacesuits. Even communications with the outside world were set with extremely strict constraints: a 22-minute one-way delay. That’s because the actual communications delay between Mars and Earth is precisely that number.

On July 6, 2024, this long and lonely interstellar survival exercise officially came to an end.

Fourth layer: mining.

What resources does Mars have? Iron, aluminum, silicon, magnesium, plus lots of carbon dioxide and water ice. But even more commercially imaginative are the small asteroids around Mars orbit. In those rocks, there’s a rich concentration of platinum-group metals that are extremely scarce on Earth—platinum, palladium, and rhodium. These elements, so rare on Earth, are exactly the critical throat of today’s electric vehicle, semiconductor, and hydrogen energy industry chains.

A company called AstroForge is doing exactly this: mining those metals from asteroids. In February 2025, they successfully launched their first prospecting satellite, Odin, heading straight to the asteroid designated 2022 OB5. Total funding of $55 million isn’t much by space industry standards, but they are the world’s first private company that genuinely sends mining satellites to deep space.

Fifth layer: energy and resources.

Mars is barren. There’s no fossil fuel, and solar power efficiency is only 43% of Earth’s. Nuclear power naturally becomes the only real option. But the more epoch-making energy treasure lies on the Moon. There’s an abundance of helium-3—an isotope that is extremely scarce on Earth yet stored in astonishing quantities on the Moon’s surface—and it’s considered, in theory, the most perfect fuel for nuclear fusion.

A company called Interlune is hard at work on the extraction technology for lunar helium-3. In May 2025, they officially signed a purchase agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy. This isn’t just a deal—it’s the first government procurement contract in human civilization history specifically for resources from extraterrestrial celestial bodies.

These five tiers all have companies that are truly operating, real funding in real money, and hardcore technologies that are actually being deployed. In 2025, the total funding for space startups worldwide is close to $9 billion, up 37% year over year. This isn’t hollow sci-fi—it’s a real industry that’s roaring into formation.

But there’s one problem— a very real one: do these investors who pour in huge sums of money truly believe they can see real financial returns during their own lifetimes?

The bigger the dream, the easier the money to raise

Among these investors, not many truly believe they’ll live to see Mars city construction completed.

Josh Wolfe, a partner at Lux Capital, once said in an interview that they’re putting heavy bets on space companies—not gambling on which specific delivery timeline will be met, but valuing the technology spin-offs that these companies will generate on Earth, regardless of whether they succeed or fail while tackling interstellar problems.

If Interlune develops lunar helium-3 extraction technology—even if the business of mining the Moon can never fully close the loop—the know-how they accumulate in cryogenic separation and vacuum operations can still go far in the semiconductor and medical device fields on Earth. ICON hard-battles the use of Martian soil to 3D print houses— even if the Mars immigration timeline is pushed back fifty years, it doesn’t matter, because their 3D printing technology has already worked out a business model in Earth’s low-cost housing market.

At its essence, this is an investment framework of “winning both ways.” Capital isn’t just placing wild bets on Mars; it’s using Mars as the name for hedging the uncertainties of how Earth’s operations play out.

But that’s only the first layer of this logic. The second layer, lurking beneath, is even more intriguing.

On April 1, 2026, SpaceX secretly filed for an IPO. Target valuation: $1.75 trillion. Planned funding: $75 billion. If this number comes true, it would be the largest IPO in human history—surpassing Saudi Aramco’s $25.6 billion IPO in 2019, surpassing Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO in 2014, and exceeding everyone’s imagination.

In the IPO filing, the use of proceeds lists three things: first, push Starship launch frequency to “crazy extreme”; second, deploy AI data centers in space; third, comprehensively drive a Mars expedition with no crew and with crew.

Pay attention to that order. Mars is last in the list, but it is the ceiling of the entire valuation narrative.

If you take Mars out of SpaceX’s story, what’s left? Just an ordinary rocket manufacturing business, plus a satellite internet business called Starlink.

A rocket company’s valuation cap is probably on the scale of Boeing or Lockheed Martin—hundreds of billions. Starlink is a good business, but in a satellite internet market whose competitive landscape is increasingly clear, it absolutely can’t justify a $1.75 trillion valuation.

It’s Mars—and only Mars—that is the ultimate narrative lever that can forcibly pull valuation from the “tens of billions” range up to the “trillions” range.

This is the most extreme play in “expectation economics.” Narrative leverages capital; capital comes in and funds technology; the technology gets deployed to make the narrative real; and then you extract even larger-scale capital again. This flywheel loop has already been fully run by Musk.

When SpaceX was founded in 2002, the market didn’t believe a private company could put people into the International Space Station. In 2012, when the Dragon spacecraft docked at the ISS for the first time, those who once mocked Musk started to change their tune. In 2020, SpaceX sent astronauts to space using the crewed Dragon and fulfilled NASA orders. Each technical milestone turned the narrative into reality, and reality then generated new narratives.

In this loop, “belief” itself is upgraded into a kind of productivity. Bet because of belief—funds push technology—technology validates faith—then it unleashes even more fervent followings and hotter, surging hot money.

But this logic has one prerequisite: Musk himself must believe.

“Nowhere to escape”

In June 2025, Peter Thiel, during an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, dropped a cryptic line: “2024 was the year Musk stopped believing in Mars.”

Peter Thiel is one of Musk’s oldest friends and one of his earliest investors. The two co-founded PayPal and fought together through the brutal hellscape of Silicon Valley’s early days. What he said carries a very different weight from outside speculation.

According to Thiel, Musk’s initial calculation was to build Mars into a political utopia of fundamentalist libertarianism. The idea has a very clear cultural anchor: Robert A. Heinlein’s classic science fiction novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

The book depicts a group of lunar prisoners who, after escaping Earth’s regime, build an emergent order—then finally ignite revolutionary fire to declare independence. Musk tore through the book and wanted to replicate that story on Mars: create a special district on Mars where there is no U.S. government taxation, no EU micromanagement, and absolute rejection of “woke culture.” Everything would operate according to the most brutal rules of a free market—winner takes all, the weak eliminated.

Musk never spelled this out openly on the record, but it’s the underlying driving force behind the entire Mars plan. Going to Mars has never been only a technical expedition; at its core, it’s a grand, large-scale political escape.

Until one day, Musk chatted with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. Hassabis casually tossed out a line: “You should know, my AI will go to Mars with you.”

Meaning: you can’t escape. Once you relocate humanity to Mars, you’ve packaged humanity’s values, biases, power structures, and ideology to go along with it. AI is exactly the concentrated amplifier of all the civilization’s lingering ailments. If you nurture what kind of AI on Earth, then on Mars it will spawn what kind of AI as well. Mars has never been a blank, pristine canvas; it’s just a copy of Earth—only at higher cost, and with harsher living conditions.

Musk was silent for a long time, and finally said, “Nowhere to escape. Really nowhere to escape.”

In Thiel’s view, it was this conversation that pushed Musk in 2024 toward the political chessboard. Rather than building a utopia on Mars, you might as well change power structures directly on Earth. That’s the deep reason he threw his full support behind Trump and deeply involved himself with DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency). Since you can’t run away, then just completely transform the place you originally wanted to avoid.

The Puritans aboard the Mayflower crossed the Atlantic to the Americas, but they also brought the British class system, racial prejudice, and power logic into the ship’s hold. Their carefully constructed “city upon a hill” ultimately became a reflection of the old world: slavery, class ossification, and religious domination smoldered back to life—only with a different set of rhetoric.

The Australian penal colony is the same. It perfectly replicated the class order of the British Empire, merely handing over the title of “nobility” to “free immigrants.” Every time humanity tries to reinvent a new order in the New World, it unconsciously plants the genes of the old civilization into it.

People take their ideology with them—and the ideology follows.

The struggle of those trying to escape in the first place becomes, precisely, the ironclad evidence that they’re destined not to be able to escape.

If so, does this interstellar master plan—worth trillions—still have meaning? Under the shadow of a civilization with nowhere to escape, is anyone still undertaking this Sisyphus-like expedition?

But the Starship still has to fly

After Musk finished saying “nowhere to escape,” he didn’t stop moving forward.

By the end of 2026, Starship still has to fly—carrying Tesla Optimus robots to lead the way onto the red soil of Mars, paving the route for subsequent crewed missions. In 2029, the countdown for a crewed expedition will officially begin. To build a Mars city with a population of one million means pouring out one million tons of supplies, assembling one thousand Starships, and completing ten thousand launches. Just the cost of launches at that scale would be an astonishing $1 trillion. Even today, Musk remains under the spotlight, stubbornly repeating these massive numbers that can make your head spin.

But this isn’t his story alone.

In March 2025, AstroForge’s prospecting satellite Odin was completely lost in deep space.

It launched on February 26, 2025 aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 as a secondary payload for the IM-2 mission, heading toward the asteroid 2022 OB5. Its mission was to photograph the surface of that rock to confirm whether platinum-group metals are truly sealed inside.

At takeoff, everything was normal. However, soon afterward, the ground station began losing signal. Australia’s main station went down, the configuration of the backup station got mixed up, and in another location a power amplifier mysteriously failed just before the launch. Even a newly built cell tower was inexplicably inserted into the chain, completely scrambling the receiving frequency band. Odin just vanished into silence, drifting in a dark expanse 270k miles from Earth, with its fate unknown.

In the face of such a defeat, AstroForge CEO Matt Gialich wrote in the post-mortem report: “At the end of the day, you have to get on the boxing ring and give it everything. You’ve got to go try.”

They used a self-deprecating kind of dark humor, calling the failed attempt “Odin’t” (Odin + didn’t). Right after that, they decisively unveiled the grand plan for DeepSpace-2: a massive 200-kilogram behemoth equipped with electric propulsion and landing legs. This time, they would truly land on an asteroid.

This is the real texture of the space industry. It’s not the lightweight game from Silicon Valley—“quick iteration, embrace failure.” It’s a heavier, more austere kind of fate. When you throw your hard-crafted creation into deep space, once the signal is cut off, it becomes just an anonymous speck of dust drifting through the vast universe. You can’t know where it ends up, and you can’t find the remains. All you can do is swallow the endless silence, go back, and build the next one.

On July 6, 2024, in Houston, Texas—when that 3D-printed hatch door slowly opened, four volunteers who had completed a 378-day “Mars exile” returned to the human world.

Microbiologist Anca Selariu told the cameras, “Why go to Mars? Because it’s genuinely possible. Deep space can tightly connect humans and ignite the brightest light in our souls. It’s a small step for Earth people, but enough to illuminate the long dark night of centuries to come.”

Structural engineer Ross Brockwell, meanwhile, admitted that in this time cut off from society, the deepest takeaway for him was that when facing the boundless star sea, imagination and reverence for the unknown are the most precious qualities that keep humanity going.

And for medical officer Nathan Jones, the harvest from this long isolation was extremely inward. He summarized, “I learned to enjoy every season in the moment and calmly, patiently wait for the next one to arrive.” Over more than 300 days, he learned to draw.

These four people weren’t Musk. They didn’t carry the mythical burden of a $1.75 trillion capital story, and nobody cared about their little snippets on social networks. They went into that room because someone had to be the first to try. Gialich launched that satellite because someone had to be the first to try. Mueller left SpaceX and founded Impulse Space because someone had to be the first to try.

In the face of Musk’s pessimistic line, “Nowhere to escape,” these people didn’t run away, and they didn’t give up. They went first to try what that place was actually like.

After Selariu exited the module, she said something: “I’m really grateful to be able to access information whenever I want again, but I’ll miss the luxury of being disconnected. After all, in this world, a person’s value is defined by how present they are in the digital world.”

She spent 378 days in a room simulating Mars. After returning to the noisy Earth, what she missed most was the quiet there.