Mars Colony Night: Mask, Narrator and a trillion-dollar industrial chain

This post is part of our special coverage Syria Protests 2011

Every flight of human civilization begins like this。

In September 1620, 102 people crowded into a wooden boat called the Mayflower, anchored from the port of Plymouth, England, into the vicious North Atlantic. It is not just luggage, it is a political blueprint for building a "mountain city" on the new continent, a new world free of the British State and away from corrupt nobility。

They did not come to explore, nor did they come to do business; they were only a group of people who tried to escape from their fate。

After 1788, the first British prisoners were deported to Australia. The Europeans at the time saw that continent as the edge of the world, a natural place of exile, which was used specifically to throw away those who did not need it, leaving them to die. As a result, abandoned prisoners took root there, built cities and built a State。

Later, in 1848, California's gold rush, Siberia's development in 1880, Brazil's rubber boom in the early 1900s... every time human civilization tried to “replace”, it always got the same script: looking for a land without God, announcing the advent of a new order, followed by a mad influx of capital, human flows and technology, and in the worst of circumstances, a whole new logic of survival emerged。

It's Mars now。

THE DIFFERENCE IS, HOWEVER, THAT THE MAYFLOWER IS WITH THE ACQUIESCENCE OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT, THAT AUSTRALIA IS A CROWN COLONY, AND THAT CALIFORNIA’S GOLD RUSH IS BACKED BY THE U.S. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’S LAND POLICY. THIS TIME, THE PROCESS WAS DRIVEN NO LONGER BY THE WILL OF ANY COUNTRY, BUT BY A GROUP OF PRIVATE CAPITAL, INCLUDING VENTURE INVESTORS, SILICON VALLEY ENTREPRENEURS, FORMER NASA ENGINEERS, AND ELON MASK。

National will-driven colonization, based on tax, military and sovereignty logic, and private capital-driven colonization, marked by rates of return, exit paths and narrative premiums. The civilizations that are born of these two bottom logics are bound to be very different from each other from the beginning。

So, what's the bet on these guys with their personal capital

YOU'RE STILL ANXIOUS. AI, THEY'RE ALREADY TALKING ABOUT MARS MINERALS. RIGHTS

Tom Mueller is introducing his new company to a crowd of investors on an ordinary working day in 2025。

Mueller is not an ordinary entrepreneur. He worked at SpaceX for nearly 20 years, and he designed the Merlin engine for Falcon 9, the loud engine that sent humans into the International Space Station, pushed satellites into established orbit, and placed SpaceX from a desolate and failing enterprise into a commercial empire valued today at trillions of dollars。

At the end of 2020, Mueller left SpaceX and turned into Impulse Space. The core mission of this new company is to send goods to Mars orbit。

Yes, the target is either near-Earth orbit, or the moon, or Mars orbit。

His target clients were institutions and enterprises that were in desperate need of satellites, detectors and resupply tanks in Mars orbit. His logic is very clear: the infrastructure of the mission on Mars must start at this moment. By the moment the Marsk ship really started, someone had to wait on that lane。

In June 2025, Impulse Space took $300 million in C-cycle finance, totalling $525 million. The list of investors is very luxurious, Linse Capital leads the vote, Fields Fund, Lux Capital, DCVC, Valor Equity Partners. The Foundations Fund is Peter Tyre's fund, Valor Equity Partners, the early investor of the Mask. This is by no means a group of fanatical diasporas that have been driven out of their minds by Mars, but the oldest group of capital in Silicon Valley。

THE MOST POPULAR TOPIC IN YOUR FRIENDS' CIRCLES IS "IS AI GONNA MAKE ME LOSE MY JOB?"。

On the same timeline of the same planet, there are people who are burning their current jobs day and night, while there are people who belong to the Play Mars mine. This is the most real cognitive time difference, with different people folding up in different time dimensions, some living in 2025, some living in 2035 and others living in 2050。

This perception time difference is not new. In the early 1990s, when most Chinese were still discussing whether or not to buy a lottery, a small number of people had been playing the Internet; in the early 2010s, when most people were pressing the Nokia keyboard, people were already developing a mobile app。

Each wave of technology inevitably creates such time differentials. Those who were the first to open their eyes were not necessarily wiser, but rather placed in a vortex of information and capital that forced them to ask for answers in the far future。

But this time difference is even greater than ever before。

THE ANXIETY ABOUT AI IS TRUE, BUT IT'S STILL JUST AN ANXIETY THAT'S STUCK IN "THE MOMENT." AND THE MARS INDUSTRY IS A GAME OF "THE FUTURE" AND IT'S NOT FIVE YEARS, BUT 20, 50 YEARS。

Mars Industrial Chain

When it comes to the Mars industry, the first feeling of many people is that it's a distant science fiction, that it's a daydream by Mask, that it's a money-burning toy of Silicon Valley giants。

This assertion was unbroken in 2015 and largely fair in 2020, but it was not established in 2025。

The current form of the Mars industrial chain, it looks like the Internet in 1998. At that time, the infrastructure had not been completed, most companies were burning money and the business model was not clear, but there was enough real capital, real technology and real talent in it. You can say it, Still Earthy, but you can't deny it exists。

This interplanetary industrial chain, from the bottom to the top, can be reduced to approximately five layers。

First tier: delivery。

The first thing we need is a rocket. In this building, although the lead is SpaceX's starship, another company called Relativity Space cannot be ignored。

What this company is doing is printing the entire rocket 3D with robots. Their rocket Terran R, from engine to arrow, 95% of the parts are printed. Previously, Relativity Space had a $2.9 billion launch contract in its hand. Their logic is that the supply chain of traditional rockets is too long and too fragile, and that the supply of spare parts becomes a dead end as soon as they enter the large-scale launch phase of HF. And 3D printing can compress the supply chain to the extreme, because you just need a bunch of raw materials and a printer。

Second tier: orbital transport。

The delivery of goods from the near-Earth orbit to the Mars orbit faces distinct engineering challenges that require exclusive propulsion systems and orbital planning. And that's where Mueller's Impulse Space is attacking. The propulsion systems they have developed can support spacecraft to complete precision micro-motivation in deep air. It is an indispensable infrastructure for the future of Mars' expedition, and it is precisely today's logistics in the vast empire of electricians。

Third floor: architecture。

Where do you live? The most interesting company on this level is ICON, a 3D print construction company. They have successfully printed houses and military bases on Earth, and now have $572 million in contracts with NASA, focusing on the extraction of materials in situ and the direct printing of human dwellings using Martian soil (historical rock, high-chlorate, sulphur). The scheme is named Project Olympus。

BESIDES, ICON ALSO BUILT A MARS HABITAT SIMULATION MODULE FOR NASA IN HOUSTON, TEXAS. THIS 158 SQUARE METRE FULL 3D PRINTOUT BROUGHT IN FOUR VOLUNTEERS IN JUNE 2023. THEY'RE NOT ACTORS, THEY'RE NOT NET RED, THEY'RE NASA'S CHOSEN SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS. IN THE 378-DAY MARS SURVIVAL SIMULATION, THEY PLANTED FOOD RATIONS WITH THEIR HANDS, HAD TO WEAR SPACE SUITS ON THEIR WAY OUT, AND EVEN COMMUNICATION WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD WAS SET TO BE EXTREMELY HARSHLY SET AT 22 MINUTES OF ONE-WAY DELAY, BECAUSE THE ACTUAL COMMUNICATION BETWEEN MARS AND THE EARTH WAS THAT FIGURE。

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

Level 4: Mining。

What are the resources on Mars? Iron, aluminium, silicon, magnesium, and lots of carbon dioxide and water ice. But more commercially imaginative are asteroids around the Mars orbit. These rocks, rich in platinum metals, platinum, platinum, and platinum, which are extremely scarce on Earth, are precisely the core of the current new energy vehicle, semiconductor and hydrogen energy chain。

What a company called AstroForge is doing is picking these metals on an asteroid. In February 2025, they successfully launched the first prospecting satellite, Odin, heading straight for asteroid 2022 OB5. A total of $55 million was not significant in space, but they were the first private company in the world to actually send mining satellites to deep space。

Fifth floor: Energy and resources。

Mars is infertile, with no fossil fuels and only 43 per cent of the Earth's solar efficiency, and nuclear energy is naturally the only realistic option. But the more time-sensitive energy reservoir is located on the Moon. There is helium-3, which is extremely scarce on Earth and has an alarming reserves of isotopes on the surface of the Moon and is considered the most theoretically perfect fusion fuel。

A company called Interlune is killing the helium-3 of the Moon. In May 2025, they formally signed a paper purchase agreement with the United States Department of Energy. This is not only a deal, but also the first government procurement contract in the history of human civilization for the resources of extraterrestrial celestial bodies。

Each of these five levels has real-life companies, real-gold financing and hard-core technology. In 2025, Global Space Enterprise ' s total financing approached $9 billion, a 37 per cent increase over the same period. It's not an empty science fiction, it's a real industry that's booming。

But here is the question, a very real one: do these investors, who have put down heavy money, really believe in seeing the return of real money and silver in their lifetime

The bigger the dream, the better the money

Few of these investors believe that they can live to see the city of Mars finished。

Josh Wolfe, a partner of Lux Capital, said in an interview that they would be betting heavily on space companies, not at any specific delivery schedule, but at the same time, that they would build valuable technological by-products on Earth, whether successful or not, when they were dealing with interstellar problems。

Interlune's development of lunar helium-3 extraction technology, even though the lunar mining business is never closed, still holds great promise in the area of semiconductors and medical equipment on Earth, where they settle at low-temperature separation and vacuum operations. ICON, even if it delays the migration schedule for Mars for another 50 years, does not matter because their 3D printing technology has run out of business models in the low-cost housing market on Earth。

This is essentially a "win-win" investment framework. Capital is not on Mars, but on Mars, in the name of Mars, the uncertainty about how the Earth works。

But this is only the first level of this logic. The hidden second layer of logic is more fun。

On April 1, 2026 SpaceX filed an IPO application in secret. Target valuation 1.75 trillion United States dollars and plan financing $75 billion. If this figure materializes, it will be the largest IPO in human history, surpassing the $25.6 billion in Saudi Arabia and the United States of America in 2019, and the $25 billion in Ali Baba in 2014, more than anyone could have imagined。

THREE THINGS ARE WRITTEN IN THE IPO DOCUMENT FOR FUND-RAISING PURPOSES: FIRST, TO PUSH THE LAUNCH FREQUENCY OF THE SHIP TO THE "CRAZY LIMIT"; SECONDLY, TO DEPLOY THE AI DATA CENTRE IN SPACE; AND THIRDLY, TO FULLY DRIVE THE UNMANNED AND MANNED MARS EXPEDITION。

Watch this order. Mars is at the end, but it is the ceiling of the entire valuation narrative。

If you take Mars out of SpaceX, what's left of it? It is an ordinary rocket manufacturer, plus a satellite Internet business called Starlink。

The upper limit of RPG's valuation is probably a Boeing or Lockheed Martin scale of tens of billions of dollars. Starlink is a good business, but in an increasingly competitive satellite Internet track, it will never be possible to give a 1.75 trillion valuation。

Mars, and only Mars, is the ultimate narrative lever that can force valuation from a billion to a trillion。

This is the most extreme game of "predict economics". Narrative leverage leverage leverages capital, and the downside of capital is technology, technology is a reality, and then capital on a larger scale. This wheel is closed. Mask is completely out。

When SpaceX was founded in 2002, the market did not believe that a public enterprise could send people to ISS. In 2012, for the first time a dragon ship had docked on the International Space Station, and those who had mocked Mask had begun to change their mouths. In 2020, SpaceX used a manned dragonship to put astronauts into space and cash out NASA orders. Each technical milestone translates narratives into reality, and then reality produces new narratives。

In this ring, "religion" itself is raised to a productive level. Trust bets, funds drive technology, technology validates faith and then triggers more fanatical followers and more intense hot money。

But there is a premise to this logic: Mask himself has to believe。

"There's nowhere to run."

In June 2025, Peter Tyre, in an interview with the columnist Ross Doouthat of The New York Times, dropped an interesting sentence: "2024, the year that Mask stopped believing in Mars."

Peter Tyre is one of Mask's oldest friends and one of the first investors. Together, they founded PayPal, who crawled through the early Silicon Valley ' s cruel Shuro. His words, and his speculations, are definitely two points。

According to Peter Tyre, Mask ' s initial calculations were to make Mars a political utopia of fundamental liberalism. This idea has an extremely clear cultural anchorage — the scientific fiction writer Robert Heinlein, known as the " Bad Moon " 。

The book depicts a group of prisoners exiled from the Moon, who built a spontaneous order after disengagement from the Earth ' s regime and eventually set off a revolutionary fire to proclaim independence. Mask turned the book upside down, and he wanted to copy the story on Mars and create a special zone on Mars without taxes from the United States, without EU oversight, and with absolute rejection of the “culture of awakening”. Everything works according to the most cruel rules of the free market, with winners eating it, and the weak getting out。

This ambition, which Mask never made clear on the stage, is the bottom driver of the entire Mars program. To Mars is never more than a technological expedition. It is essentially a grand political exodus。

Until one day, Mask and Deepmind were talking to CEO Demis Hassabis. Hassabis downplayed a sentence: "You know, my AI will follow you to Mars."

IT MEANS YOU CAN'T ESCAPE. WHEN YOU MOVE HUMAN BEINGS TO MARS, YOU ALSO COVER THE WHOLE SPECTRUM OF HUMAN VALUES, PREJUDICES, POWER STRUCTURES AND IDEOLOGIES. AI IS THE CONDENSATOR AND AMPLIFIER OF ALL THIS CIVILIZED ANTHRAX. WHAT KIND OF AI YOU HAVE ON EARTH, WHAT KIND OF AI ON MARS. MARS IS NEVER A WHITE AND FLAWLESS CANVAS, BUT A COPY OF THE EARTH, AND IT IS MORE EXPENSIVE AND DIFFICULT TO SURVIVE。

Mask was silent for a long time, and finally said, "There is no escape. There is really no escape."

IN PETER TYRELL'S VIEW, IT'S THIS CONVERSATION THAT BROUGHT MUSKER TO THE POLITICAL TABLE IN 2024. INSTEAD OF BUILDING A UTOPIA ON MARS, A CHANGE IN POWER STRUCTURES ON EARTH IS THE DEEP REASON WHY HE FULLY SUPPORTS TRUMP’S DEEP INVOLVEMENT IN DOGE. IF YOU CAN'T GET AWAY WITH IT, THEN YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO REMODEL THE PLACE YOU WANTED TO RUN AWAY。

The Pilgrims on the Mayflower travel far across the Americas, but have also loaded British class discipline, racial prejudice and power logic into their cabins. Their bitterly constructed “mountain-tops” ended up as a reflection of the old world, with slavery, class stratification, the resurgence of religion, but with a different set of rhetoric。

This is also true of Australia's exile, which perfectly recapitulates the English Empire's class order and simply cedes the title of “nobility” to “free immigration”. Every attempt by humankind to introduce a new order on the new continent, the genes of old civilizations are not automatically implanted。

When people take their ideology, they follow it。

The struggle to escape is itself a stark proof of the inescapability of escape。

In that case, does it make sense to hit a trillion-dollar starship? In the shadow of civilization, is there anyone else who is still on this Sicily expedition

But the ship is still flying

After Mask had said "there is no escape", he did not stop moving forward。

At the end of 2026, the Starfleet was still flying, carrying Tesla Optimus robots on their way to Mars, and travelling for the next manned mission. The countdown of human expeditions will be officially launched in 2029. Building a million-person Martian city would mean dumping 1 million tons of material, massing 1,000 starships and completing 10,000 launches, the cost of which alone would be as high as $1 trillion. To this day, Mask is still in the spotlight, obstinately repeating these huge and dazzling figures。

But that's not his story alone。

In March 2025, AstroForge ' s prospecting satellite Odin was completely lost in deep air。

It flew SpaceX Falcon 9 on 26 February 2025 as a secondary payload for the IM-2 mission, with a sword pointing to asteroid 2022 OB5. Its mission was to film the surface of the rock to confirm whether it really contained platinum metal。

All right, let's go. Soon, however, the ground station began to lose its signal. The main Australian station was down, the backup station was in disarray, the power amplifier at another site was destroyed unexpectedly on the eve of launch, and even a new cell phone signal tower was plugged in, completely disrupting the receiving frequency. And so Odin went into the dead, drifting deep into the dark, 270,000 miles from the Earth, alive and dead。

In the face of this defeat, AstroForge CEO Matt Gialich wrote in his wrap-up report: "In the end, you have to get on the fucking stage and give it a shot. You have to try

They called this "Odin't" in a cynical black humor. Next, the great plan of DeepSpace-2 -- a huge thing weighing 200 kilograms, equipped with electric propulsion and landing legs -- was to be thrown out, and this time they were actually landing on an asteroid。

That's the most authentic quality of the space industry. It is no more than a light game of Silicon Valley's "fast-overs, embrace-failed" game, but a thicker, darker destiny. When you throw into deep space the creations of the leukemia of your heart, once the signal is broken, it becomes an unknown dust in the vast universe. You have no way to know its destination, nor find its ruins. All you can do is swallow the silence of the sky and go back to the next one。

JULY 6, 2024, HOUSTON, TEXAS. WHEN THAT 3D-PRINTED HATCH SLOWLY OPENED, FOUR VOLUNTEERS WHO HAD ENDED 378 DAYS OF MARS EXILE RETURNED TO THE WORLD。

A microbiologist, Anca Selariu, said to the camera, "Why Mars?" Because it's really possible. Deep spaces can bind human beings and inspire the brightest light in our souls. This is a small step taken by the people of the earth, but enough to light up the long night of the coming centuries."

The structural engineer, Ross Brockwell, frankly said that in these isolated years, his deepest consciousness was that imagination and fear of the unknown were the most precious qualities that would sustain human progress。

And the medical officer Nathan Jones was extremely ingrained in this long isolation. He concluded: "I have learned to enjoy every season in the present, and have waited in peace for the coming season." In over 300 days, he learned to paint。

These four are not Mask. They do not carry the $175 trillion in capital myth, and no one cares about their mere words on social networks. They came in because someone had to try first. Gialich launched the satellite because someone had to try it first. Mueller left SpaceX and created Impulse Space because someone had to try first。

In the face of the pessimist “none to run”, these people did not flee, did not give up, but first tried to see what it felt like。

After leaving the cabin, Selariu said, "I'm really happy to get back to the information, but I'm going to miss the luxury of disconnecting. After all, in this world the value of a person is defined by the sense of existence of the digital world.”

She spent 378 days in a model room on Mars, and when she returned to the noisy Earth, the last thing she wanted was to be quiet there。