Why Musk's Mars Mission Is Troubled Before Take-Off

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.

- KAJAL BASU

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 starships, establishing and sustaining colonies, hyperfinance, return boosters, orbital fueling, 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.