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

By | Sleepy.md

Every escape attempt by human civilization begins just like this.

In September 1620, 102 people squeezed into a wooden ship called the “Mayflower,” anchoring in Plymouth Harbor in England and sailing into the treacherous waters of the North Atlantic. In the cramped ship’s hold, it wasn’t just luggage being carried—there was an entire political blueprint. They meant to build a “city upon a hill” in the New World, a brand-new world freed from the constraints of the Church of England and away from corrupt aristocrats who preyed on them.

They didn’t come for exploration, and they didn’t arrive for trade; they were simply a group of people trying to escape their fate.

One hundred and sixty-eight years later, in 1788, the first group of British prisoners were transported to Australia. At the time, Europeans viewed that continent as the edge of the world—an ideal natural dumping ground used to package up people who weren’t needed, then discard them to fend for themselves. As it turned out, the prisoners who were abandoned there just happened to take root, build cities, and establish a nation.

Further along 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… With every attempt by human civilization to “reset,” the script is always the same. Find a land no one owns, proclaim the arrival of a new order, then watch capital, people, and technology surge in wildly. In utterly brutal circumstances, they somehow carve out a completely new logic of survival.

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, there were also U.S. federal land policies propping it up. This time, what drives the process isn’t any nation’s will, but a cohort of private capital—including venture capitalists, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, former NASA engineers, and Elon Musk.

Colonialism driven by national will is rooted in taxation, armies, and sovereignty logic; while colonialism generated by private capital, deep down, is engraved with return rates, exit paths, and narrative premiums. Civilizations grown from these two underlying logics are destined to be fundamentally different from the start.

So what exactly are these people waving the baton of private capital betting on?

You’re still anxious about AI—while they’re already discussing who owns Mars’s mining rights

On an ordinary workday in 2025, Tom Mueller is pitching his new company to a group of investors.

Mueller isn’t a typical entrepreneur. He worked at SpaceX for nearly 20 years, personally designing the Merlin engines of the Falcon 9. It was that roaring engine that put humans into the International Space Station, pushed satellites into their planned orbits, and also lifted SpaceX from the brink of bankruptcy into today’s trillion-dollar commercial empire.

By the end of 2020, Mueller left SpaceX and founded Impulse Space. The core mission of this new company can be summed up in a single sentence: move cargo to Mars orbit.

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

His target customers are institutions and companies that urgently need to deploy satellites, probes, and cargo landers in Mars orbit. His logic is unusually clear: the infrastructure for Mars missions must begin breaking ground right from now. By the time Musk’s Starship truly lifts off into the sky, someone has to be waiting in that corridor in advance.

In June 2025, Impulse Space raised $300 million in its Series C round, bringing total funding to $525 million. The investor roster is quite impressive: Linse Capital led the round; Founders Fund, Lux Capital, DCVC, and Valor Equity Partners participated as follow-on investors. Founders Fund is Peter Thiel’s fund, while Valor Equity Partners is an early investor in Musk-affiliated companies. This is absolutely not a bunch of ardent retail investors who are carried away by Mars fantasies—it’s among the most seasoned capital in Silicon Valley.

Let’s bring the focus back to the present. The hottest topic in your and my social circles is called “Will AI make me unemployed?”

On the same planet, along the same timeline, some people are anxiously fretting over their livelihoods right now, while others are bargaining over who gets Mars mining rights. This is the most real “cognitive time lag.” Different people get folded into different dimensions of time—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 typing on Nokia keypads, someone had already begun developing mobile apps.

Every technological wave inevitably creates this kind of time lag. Those who open their eyes first may not be smarter; rather, because they’re caught inside an information and capital vortex, they are compelled to seek answers from a farther future.

But this time, the time lag is even more extreme than ever before.

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

Mars industry supply chain

When people mention “the Mars industry,” many people’s first instinct is that it’s an unreachable science-fiction dream—Musk’s vague daydream, and a money-burning toy for Silicon Valley tycoons.

This kind of judgment held up without a hitch in 2015, and was broadly fair in 2020—but in 2025, it simply doesn’t hold anymore.

The current shape of the Mars industry supply chain is extremely similar to the internet in 1998. Back then, the infrastructure wasn’t built yet; most companies were still burning money; business models weren’t clear. But there was already enough real capital, real technology, and real talent operating within it. You can say it’s still early, but you absolutely can’t deny that it exists.

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

First tier: transportation.

To send things from Earth to Mars, you first need rockets. In this layer of infrastructure, the leader is obviously SpaceX’s Starship—but another company called Relativity Space can’t be ignored either.

What this company does is use robots to 3D print an entire rocket. Their rocket, Terran R, has 95% of its parts printed—from the engines to the airframe. Previously, Relativity Space already held $2.9 billion worth of launch contracts. Their logic is that the supply chain for traditional rockets is too long and too fragile; once you enter a high-frequency, large-scale launch phase, part supply becomes a fatal bottleneck. But 3D printing compresses the supply chain to the extreme, because you only need a pile of raw materials and a printer.

Second tier: orbital transport.

Transporting cargo from low Earth orbit to Mars orbit presents entirely different engineering challenges, requiring dedicated propulsion systems and orbital planning. And this is exactly the ground Impulse Space under Mueller is working to conquer. The propulsion systems they’re developing can support spacecraft to perform precise micro-maneuvers in deep space. It’s an indispensable foundation infrastructure for future Mars expeditions, much like today’s logistics lifeline is to a massive e-commerce empire.

Third tier: construction.

Once people are on Mars, where will they live? The most interesting company in this tier is ICON, a 3D printed construction company. They have already successfully printed houses and military bases on Earth. Now they hold a $57.2 million NASA contract, focusing on research into how to source materials on-site and directly print human dwellings using Martian soil (basalt, perchlorate, sulfur). The project is named Project Olympus.

Not only that—ICON is also building for NASA in Houston, Texas, a Mars habitat simulation module called CHAPEA. This 158-square-meter fully 3D printed module welcomed four volunteers in June 2023. They aren’t actors, and not influencers either; they are scientists and engineers carefully selected by NASA. During the 378-day Mars survival simulation, they grow their rations by hand; when going outside for walks, they must wear spacesuits. Even communications with the outside world are set extremely strictly as a one-way delay of 22 minutes, because the actual communication delay between Mars and Earth is exactly this number.

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

Fourth tier: mining.

What resources are on Mars? Iron, aluminum, silicon, magnesium, as well as large amounts of carbon dioxide and water ice. But even more commercially imaginative are the small asteroids around Mars orbit. Inside those rocks are platinum-group metals—platinum, palladium, rhodium—elements that are extremely scarce on Earth. Precisely these are the core lifeblood of today’s electric vehicle, semiconductor, and hydrogen energy industry chains.

A company called AstroForge is doing exactly this: going to asteroids to extract these metals. In February 2025, they successfully launched their first prospecting satellite, Odin, heading straight for the asteroid designated 2022 OB5. With total funding of $55 million, it isn’t much in the space industry, but they are the world’s first private company to truly send a mining satellite to deep space.

Fifth tier: energy and resources.

Mars is barren. There’s no fossil fuel, and the efficiency of solar energy is only 43% of Earth’s. Nuclear energy naturally becomes the only realistic option. But the most epoch-spanning energy treasure is located on the Moon. There’s an abundance of helium-3—an isotope that’s extremely scarce on Earth, yet stored in surprising quantities on the Moon’s surface. It’s seen as theoretically the most perfect nuclear fusion fuel.

A company called Interlune is working relentlessly on helium-3 extraction technology on the Moon. In May 2025, they officially signed a purchase agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy. This isn’t just a transaction—it’s the first government procurement contract in human civilization history specifically targeting resources from an extraterrestrial body.

Across these five tiers, each one has real companies in operation, funding backed by real money, and hard-core applied technologies. In 2025, total funding for space startups worldwide is nearing $9 billion, up 37% year over year. This isn’t a hazy science-fiction fantasy; it’s a real industry that’s roaring into form.

But there’s one problem here—one very real problem: do those investors throwing down huge sums truly believe they’ll be able to see a return on investment in real money within their lifetimes?

The bigger the dream, the easier the money

Among these investors, not many truly believe they will live long enough to see a Mars city completed.

Josh Wolfe, a partner at Lux Capital, once said in an interview that they were putting heavy bets on space companies—not really betting on any specific delivery timeline, but valuing the fact that these companies, whether they succeed or not, will produce valuable technology spin-offs on Earth by tackling interstellar challenges.

Interlune is developing lunar helium-3 extraction technology. Even if the lunar mining business can never be closed into a full cycle, the technology they accumulate in low-temperature separation and vacuum operations still has tremendous potential applications in Earth’s semiconductor and medical device fields. ICON is stubbornly trying to print houses using Martian soil; even if the schedule for Mars immigration is delayed by another fifty years, it doesn’t matter, because their 3D printing technology has already run a business model in the low-cost housing market on Earth.

Essentially, this is an “it’s a win either way” investment structure. Capital isn’t gambling on Mars; it’s using Mars as a cover to hedge the uncertainties of how Earth operates.

But this is only the first layer of the logic. The second layer beneath it is even more intriguing.

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

In the IPO documents, the use of funds is written as three things: first, pushing the launch cadence of Starship toward “a crazy extreme”; second, deploying AI data centers in space; third, comprehensively driving an unmanned and crewed Mars expedition.

Notice this order. Mars is placed last, 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 manufacturer, plus a satellite internet business called Starlink.

The upper valuation limit for a rocket company would be roughly on the scale of Boeing or Lockheed Martin—hundreds of billions of dollars. Starlink is a good business, but in a satellite internet landscape that’s becoming increasingly clear, it absolutely can’t justify a $1.75 trillion valuation.

Mars—and only Mars—is the ultimate narrative lever that can force the valuation from the “hundreds of billions” level up to the “trillions” level.

This is the most extreme way to play “expectation economics.” Narrative leverage pulls in capital; capital moves in and funds technology; technology becomes real and grounds the narrative; and then an even larger-scale capital story is pulled out again. This closed-loop flywheel is something Musk has already fully figured out.

When SpaceX was founded in 2002, the market didn’t believe a private company could send people to the International Space Station. In 2012, when the Dragon spacecraft docked with the ISS for the first time, those who had once mocked Musk began to change their tune. In 2020, SpaceX used the crewed Dragon spacecraft to send astronauts into space and fulfill NASA orders. Each technological milestone turned the narrative into reality, and reality generated new narratives again.

Within this closed loop, “belief” itself is upgraded into a form of productivity. You place bets because you believe; funding pushes technology; technology verifies faith; then faith triggers even more fervent followers and hotter money.

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

“No way to escape”

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

Peter Thiel is one of Musk’s oldest friends and one of the earliest investors. The two partnered to found PayPal, and together they fought through the brutal early Silicon Valley arena. What he said carries completely different weight from outsiders’ speculation.

According to Peter Thiel, Musk’s initial thinking was to build Mars as a political utopia of orthodox libertarianism. The idea has an extremely clear cultural anchor—Robert 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 a spontaneous order and ultimately ignite revolutionary flames to proclaim independence. Musk devoured this book. He wanted to replicate that story on Mars—create a special zone on Mars with no U.S. government taxing it, no EU meddling regulation, and absolutely excluding “woke culture.” Everything runs according to the harshest rules of the free market: winners take all, and the weak are eliminated.

Musk never said this ambition out loud on the record, but it is the underlying driving force behind the entire Mars plan. Going to Mars has never been only a technological expedition; at its core, it is a grand political escape.

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

Meaning: you can’t escape. When you relocate humanity to Mars, you also package up humanity’s values, biases, power structures, and ideologies in full. AI is precisely the condensed amplifier of all those civilization’s clingy flaws. Whatever kind of AI you nurture on Earth, that’s what will grow on Mars. Mars is never a pristine blank canvas—it’s just a copy of Earth, and it comes at a higher cost and with harsher survival conditions.

Musk was silent for a long time, and finally said: “No way to escape. Really—no way to escape.”

In Peter Thiel’s view, it was this conversation that forced Musk to move onto the political chessboard in 2024. Instead of building a utopia on Mars, why not directly change the power structure on Earth? That’s the deeper reason he threw his full support behind Trump and deeply involved himself in DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency). If you can’t run from it, then you might as well completely transform the very place you originally wanted to avoid.

The Puritans on the Mayflower crossed the Americas—but they also loaded the ship with England’s rigid class hierarchy, racial biases, and power logic. Their carefully constructed “city upon a hill” ultimately became a reflection of the old world. Slavery, class rigidity, and religious infighting rose again from the dead—only with a different set of rhetoric.

The same is true for the penal colony in Australia. It perfectly replicated the class order of the British Empire, only transferring the “title” of “nobles” to “free immigrants.” Each time humanity tries to be reborn with a new order in the New World, it unconsciously plants genes from the old civilization within it.

People carry their own ideologies along, and the ideologies follow.

The very struggle of attempted escape becomes, ironically, the ironclad proof that escape was never going to happen.

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

But the Starship still has to fly

After Musk said “no way to escape,” he didn’t stop moving forward.

By the end of 2026, the Starship still has to fly—carrying Tesla Optimus robots to first step onto the red sands of Mars, clearing the way for subsequent crewed missions. In 2029, the countdown for a crewed expedition will officially begin. Building a Mars city with a population of a million means pouring in one million tons of supplies, assembling one thousand Starships, and completing ten thousand launches. Just the launch costs for that scale reach an astonishing $1 trillion. Even today, Musk remains under the spotlight, stubbornly repeating these enormous numbers that are dizzying to even consider.

But this isn’t just his story.

In March 2025, AstroForge’s prospecting satellite Odin fully went dark in deep space.

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

At liftoff, everything seemed normal. But soon after, the ground station began losing signal. The Australian primary station went down; the standby station had configuration errors; and an amplifier at another site was mysteriously damaged just before launch. Even a newly built mobile phone signal tower was somehow inserted like a wedge, completely disrupting the receiving frequency band. Odin vanished into silence, drifting in a dark deep-space region 270k miles from Earth—its fate unknown.

Faced with this outcome, in a post-incident review report, AstroForge CEO Matt Gialich wrote: “In the end, you fucking have to step into the ring and take a swing. You’ve got to try it.”

They dressed up this failed mission with self-deprecating dark humor, calling it “Odin’t” (Odin + didn’t). Immediately after, they decisively unveiled the grand plan for DeepSpace-2—a massive 200-kilogram object equipped with electric propulsion and landing legs. This time, they would truly land on an asteroid.

This is the real texture of the aerospace industry. It isn’t the light, Silicon Valley game of “quick iteration, embrace failure.” It’s a heavier, more desolate kind of destiny. When you throw your hard-wrought creation into deep space, once the signal is cut off, it becomes just an anonymous speck of dust in the vast universe. You can’t know where it ends up, and you can’t find its remains. All you can do is swallow the dead silence across the sky, go back, and build the next one.

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

Microbiologist Anca Selariu told the cameras: “Why go to Mars? Because it’s truly possible. Deep space can tightly connect human beings and ignite the brightest light in our souls. This is a small step for Earth people, but it’s enough to illuminate the long nights ahead for centuries.”

Structural engineer Ross Brockwell said more plainly that during those years cut off from the world, his deepest realization was: when facing an endless sea of stars, imagination and awe for the unknown are the most precious qualities that keep humanity going.

And for medical officer Nathan Jones, his takeaway from this long isolation was highly inward. He concluded: “I learned to enjoy every season in the moment and calmly wait for the next season to arrive.” Over more than three hundred days, he learned how to draw.

These four people aren’t Musk. They didn’t carry a $1.75 trillion capital myth, and nobody cares about their fragments of words on social networks. They went into that room because someone had to go first and try it. Gialich launched that satellite because someone had to go first and try it. Mueller left SpaceX and founded Impulse Space because someone had to go first and try it.

In the face of Musk’s pessimistic line—“no way to escape”—these people didn’t run away, and they didn’t give up. Instead, they went first to try what that place is actually like.

After Selariu exited the spacecraft, she said: “I’m definitely grateful to be able to access information anytime 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 lived in a simulated Mars room for 378 days. After returning to the noisy Earth, the thing she missed most was the quiet there.

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