Elon Musk’s Mars plans are not just illusory, they are dangerous
My newest Quillette piece on why Elon Musk's plan for Mars is logistically ludicrous, strategically ill advised, and scientifically and politically divisive and dangerous.
Elon Musk not only wants to send a rocket to Mars with people on it in the next few years, he wants to populate the Red Planet in the coming decades. A careful examination of the logistics suggests this is not going to happen, and moreover, that the US can ill afford to set aside other NASA priorities to try and make it happen. I described these issues in a piece that appeared this evening in Quillette, and to which Elon Musk angrily responded by calling me ‘a retard’ on X about 30 seconds later. Here are the first few paragraphs. The full text is available by following the link below.
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Elon Musk wants to create a permanent human colony on Mars. He has recently announced plans to land the first human on the Red Planet within this decade, with the view to establishing a million-strong Martian colony within 20–30 years. This plan is logistically ludicrous, strategically ill advised, and scientifically and politically divisive and dangerous. Musk is utilising his vast fortune to try to reshape human destiny. We need to hit pause before his plans damage the international balance in space.
While Musk has a history of making science-fiction-like claims, he has also been the most successful technological entrepreneur of our time. He singlehandedly transformed the auto industry, making electric cars a practical reality within less than a decade, and created the first new rocket engine design in the US in more than a generation, ultimately enabling private industry to eclipse NASA in their ability to deliver humans and payloads into near-Earth orbit.
I have immense respect for Elon Musk’s accomplishments and his skill and acumen as an entrepreneur. He gave me two personal tours of SpaceX, which blew me away, and I have always admired his ability to think outside the box when creating new technologies. I am not alone in this regard: given his many successes, a lot of people are willing to give him a pass when he makes outrageous proposals that don’t pan out, such as the claim that his boring company will soon allow the supersonic transportation of people in underground tunnels between LA and San Francisco, or beneath the Atlantic.
His Mars plans are dangerously different, however….
You can go to https://quillette.com/2025/05/19/the-mars-vanity-project/ to read the full article. Enjoy.
I recently read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk and was surprised by how much admiration I gained for him. His family wasn’t wealthy, but they weren’t destitute either. As a child, his father bought him a Commodore computer, and Elon taught himself multiple programming languages. He wrote code for a video game and sold it to a magazine while still young.
When he left South Africa for Canada, he had only a couple thousand dollars. His mother worked to help put him through college. After graduating, Elon developed a digital yellow pages program and started a company he later sold for several million dollars. One of his first acts was to buy his mother a home and set her up financially.
Some of what he’s done is admirable—such as pushing the U.S. government to end “cost-plus” contracts with companies like Boeing. But there are also moments when I find myself thinking, Elon, what are you doing? For example, when he acquired Twitter, he decided to move its servers himself by unplugging them and loading them into U-Haul trucks—rather than letting the technicians handle it professionally.
As Dr. Krauss points out, Musk’s ideas about colonizing Mars are scientifically unsound. I also doubt history will look kindly on his attempts to influence the U.S. government through DOGE. His response to Dr. Krauss’ criticism was, to say the least, uncalled for.
Elon is both admirable and flawed. Nobody is as good as the best thing they’ve done, nor as bad as the worst. In other words, Elon is a human being. He’s entitled to a bit of hubris—but he’d do well to remember Icarus. Fly too close to the sun, and your wings will melt just as fast.
What did you expect? The new rich only like sycophants😀