Elon Musk Is Maybe, Actually, Strangely, Going to Do This Mars Thing
Updated at 12:41 p.m. ET on May 10, 2021.
The little Havanese likes to sit in a window of the one-story house, looking out onto the quiet street in Boca Chica, Texas. From its perch, it can watch neighbors passing by, glossy black grackles pecking in the grass, and palm trees swaying in the breeze. The dog’s presence is usually a sign that its owner, Elon Musk, is in town. That, and the Tesla parked in the driveway.
There are other, more conspicuous signs that Musk has gotten comfortable in this remote part of South Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border. The hulking manufacturing tents just down the road. The steel strewn on the ground. The mechanical hum of machinery as workers in hard hats assemble spaceship after spaceship.
Musk has built a shipyard here. This is the staging area for SpaceX’s founding dream, the reason Musk got into the rocket business: to put human beings on Mars, not to drop a flag and go home, but to stay and survive. That Mars might be a terrible place to live is irrelevant. Musk believes that humankind should exist on more than one planet, and that we should start soon.
Musk intends to make a leap in that direction with Starship, a reusable spaceship-and-rocket system that he hopes will redefine travel—first by jetting from continent to continent, then from Earth to the moon, and finally from Earth to Mars. At a glance, this plan sounds like the kind of idealistic dream you’d expect from a wealthy entrepreneur who is often compared, without irony, to a comic-book hero. Or maybe, depending on your view of Musk, a self-aggrandizing fantasy from one of the most trollish, publicly chaotic figures of our time. But the fantasy is swiftly crystallizing into a feasible reality. The South Texas shipyard is churning at all hours. A Starship prototype minutes later). And the world’s top space agency believes in the effort too.
