Spacesuits to dome habitats: Inside Elon Musk's plan to colonise Mars

Musk, 53, has directed SpaceX employees to drill into the design and details of a Martian city, according to five people with knowledge of the efforts and documents viewed by NYT

By Kirsten Grind

For more than two decades, Elon Musk has focused SpaceX, his rocket company, on his lifelong goal of reaching Mars.

Over the last year, he has also ramped up work on what will happen if he gets there.

Musk, 53, has directed SpaceX employees to drill into the design and details of a Martian city, according to five people with knowledge of the efforts and documents viewed by The New York Times. One team is drawing up plans for small dome habitats, including the materials that could be used to build them. Another is working on spacesuits to combat Mars’s hostile environment, while a medical team is researching whether humans can have children there. Musk has volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony, two people familiar with his comments said.

 

The initiatives, which are in their infancy, are a shift toward more concrete planning for life on Mars as Musk’s timeline has hastened. While he said in 2016 that it would take 40 to 100 years to have a self-sustaining civilization on the planet, Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he now expects one million people to be living there in about 20 years.

“There’s high urgency to making life multi-planetary,” he said, according to a publicly posted video of his remarks. “We’ve got to do it while civilization is so strong.” Musk has long tried to defy the impossible and has often managed to beat tough odds. But his vision for life on Mars takes his seemingly limitless ambitions to their most extreme — and some might say absurdist — point. No one has ever set foot on the planet. Nasa doesn’t expect to land humans on Mars until the 2040s. And if people get there, they will be greeted by a barren terrain, icy temperatures, dust storms, and air that is impossible to breathe.

Yet Musk is so wedded to the idea of creating a civilization on Mars — he once said he plans to die there — that it has propelled nearly every business endeavor he has undertaken on Earth. His vision for Mars underlies most of the six companies that he leads or owns, each of which could potentially contribute to an extraterrestrial colony, according to the documents and the people with knowledge of the efforts.

The Boring Company, a private tunneling venture founded by Musk, was started in part to ready equipment to burrow under Mars’s surface, two of the people said. Musk has told people that he bought X, the social media platform, partly to help test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus might work on Mars. He has also said that he envisions residents on the planet will drive a version of the steel-paneled Cybertrucks made by Tesla, his electric vehicle company. Musk, who is worth about $270 billion, has publicly declared that he only accumulates assets — which include a roughly $47 billion Tesla pay package — to fund his plans for Mars.

“It’s a way to get humanity to Mars, because establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars will require a lot of resources,” he testified in court in 2022 about his Tesla pay. Whether Musk can achieve his vision for a Martian colony in his lifetime is debatable.

“You can’t just land one million people on Mars,” said Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who has known Musk for 20 years and wrote the book “The Case for Mars.” Any colonization of the planet would unfold over decades, he said.

Zubrin added that Musk is being particularly distracted from his Mars ambitions by his recent work on X. The tech billionaire often faces criticism for being spread too thin among the companies he runs.

While Musk has spoken about Mars for years and SpaceX released two basic drawings of a colony around 2018, many specifics and the company’s shift toward civilization planning haven’t previously been reported. Musk has largely kept the colonisation plans quiet because SpaceX, under a $2.9 billion contract with NASA, must first send a rocket to the moon, two people with knowledge of the company said.

The Times interviewed more than 20 people close to Musk and SpaceX about the plans for a Martian city and reviewed internal documents, emails, social media posts and legal documents. Many of the people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.

Even they were skeptical that Musk would build a Martian city in his lifetime. Some of them said he was just trying to best Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder who envisions humans living in giant space stations throughout the solar system. Musk has laid out an aggressive timeline for Mars to make them work harder, others said. Drawings of the colony are sometimes referred to as a “hype package,” two of them said.

Musk and SpaceX didn’t respond to requests for comment.

THE MARTIAN CITY

- One team is drawing up plans for small dome habitats

- Experts are working on spacesuits to combat Mars’ hostile environment 

- Medical team is researching whether humans can have children there

- Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he now expects 1 million people to be living on Mars in about 20 years

- Nasa doesn’t expect to land humans on Mars until the 2040s

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