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

Author: Sleepy.md

Every escape of human civilization starts out like this.

In September 1620, 102 people packed themselves into a wooden ship called the “Mayflower,” set sail from the port of Plymouth in England, and headed into the treacherous North Atlantic. In the cramped hold, they carried not only luggage, but an entire political blueprint: they would build “a city upon a hill” in the New World—a new world freed from the restraints of the Church of England and far from the corruption and exploitation of aristocrats.

They did not come for exploration, and they did not come to do business—they were simply a group of people trying to escape fate.

A hundred and sixty-eight years later, in 1788, the first batch of British convicts were transported to Australia. At the time, Europeans regarded that continent as the edge of the world: a natural place of exile, meant to bundle up unwanted people and cast them away to fend for themselves. And yet, the convicts they abandoned just happened to put down roots there, building cities and eventually forming a nation.

If you count further down the timeline— the California Gold Rush of 1848, the major development of Siberia in the 1880s, the rubber boom of the early 1900s… every time human civilization attempts a “reset,” it gets the same script: search for a land with no owner, proclaim the arrival of a new order, and then watch capital, people, and technology surge in at a frenzy, forging an entirely new survival logic out of the most brutal circumstances.

Now it’s Mars’s turn.

But the difference is that the Mayflower had the British government’s tacit approval; Australia was already a colony of the British Crown; and behind the California Gold Rush there was also the U.S. federal government’s land policy propping things up. This time, what drives the process is no longer any national will, but a group of private capitals—including venture capitalists, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, former NASA engineers, and Elon Musk.

Colonization driven by national will is rooted in a logic of taxation, the military, and sovereignty; while colonization spawned by private capital is fundamentally steeped in return on investment, exit paths, and narrative premium. Civilizations nurtured by these two sets of underlying logics are destined to diverge from the start.

So what exactly is this crowd swinging the big stick of private capital betting on?

You’re still anxious about AI; they’re already discussing Mars mining rights

In an ordinary workday in 2025, Tom Mueller pitches his new company to a group of investors.

Mueller isn’t a typical entrepreneur. He’s worked at SpaceX for nearly 20 years, personally designing the Merlin engines for Falcon 9—the roaring engines that not only carry humans into the International Space Station and push satellites into their designated orbits, but also lift SpaceX from the brink of bankruptcy into a commercial empire valued today in the trillions.

At 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: deliver cargo to Mars orbit.

Yes—the destination isn’t low Earth orbit, and it’s not the moon either. It’s Mars orbit.

His target customers are institutions and companies that need to deploy satellites, probes, and cargo craft on Mars orbit. His logic is unusually clear: the infrastructure for Mars missions must be broken ground from this moment onward. By the time Musk’s Starship truly lifts off into the sky, someone must already be waiting along that route.

In June 2025, Impulse Space raised $300 million in its Series C round, bringing total funding to $525 million. The investor lineup is impressive: Linse Capital led the round, with Founders Fund, Lux Capital, DCVC, and Valor Equity Partners participating. Founders Fund is Peter Thiel’s fund, and Valor Equity Partners is an early investor in Musk-related companies. This is absolutely not a bunch of retail fanatics blinded by Mars fantasies, but rather some of the most seasoned capital in Silicon Valley.

Zoom back to the present: the hottest topic in your and my social circles is “Will AI make me unemployed?”

On the same planet, on the same timeline, some people are anxious day and night about their current job, while others are negotiating who gets ownership of Mars mining rights. This is the most real “cognitive time difference.” Different people are folded into different dimensions of time—some live in 2025, some in 2035, some in 2050.

This kind of cognitive time difference isn’t new. In the early 1990s, when most people in China were still debating whether they should buy a color TV, a small group was already tinkering with the internet; then in the early 2010s, when most people were still typing on Nokia keypads, someone was already developing mobile apps.

Every wave of technology inevitably creates this kind of time lag. The ones who open their eyes first may not be smarter, but they are caught in the whirlpool of information and capital, forcing them to seek answers in a more distant future.

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

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

Mars Industry Supply Chain

When people talk about “Mars industry,” many people’s first instinct is that it’s unreachable sci-fi: Musk’s vague, far-fetched dream, and a money-burning toy for Silicon Valley tycoons.

That assessment held up in 2015 and was largely fair in 2020, but in 2025, it no longer holds.

Today’s 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 cash, and the business model wasn’t clear—but there was already enough real capital, real technology, and real talent working inside it. You can say it’s “Still Early,” but you absolutely can’t deny that it exists.

This interplanetary supply chain, from the ground up to the top end, can roughly be broken down into five layers.

First layer: transportation.

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

What that company does is to 3D print an entire rocket using robots. Their rocket, the Terran R, has 95% of its parts printed, from the engines to the airframe. Previously, Relativity Space had already secured $2.9 billion worth of launch contracts.

Their logic is that traditional rocket supply chains are too long and too fragile; once you enter a high-frequency, large-scale launch phase, the parts supply becomes a fatal weakness. But 3D printing compresses the supply chain to the extreme—because you only need a pile of raw materials and a printer.

Second layer: orbital transport.

To move cargo from low Earth orbit to Mars orbit involves entirely different engineering challenges, requiring dedicated propulsion systems and orbit planning. And this is exactly the position Impulse Space, under Mueller’s command, is tackling. The propulsion systems they develop can enable spacecraft to perform precise maneuvering in deep space. It’s indispensable infrastructure for future Mars expeditions—just as logistics lifelines are essential to a large e-commerce empire today.

Third layer: construction.

When people get to Mars, where will they live? The most interesting company in this layer is ICON, a 3D-printed construction company. They have already successfully 3D printed houses and military bases on Earth. Now, with a $57.2 million NASA contract, they focus on researching how to use local materials—Mars soil (basalt, perchlorate, sulfur)—to directly print human habitats. This plan is called Project Olympus.

Not only that, ICON is also building a Mars habitat simulation chamber for NASA in Houston, Texas, called CHAPEA. This 158-square-meter, fully 3D-printed chamber welcomed four volunteers in June 2023. They aren’t actors and not influencers either; they are scientists and engineers handpicked by NASA.

During a 378-day Mars survival simulation, they planted rations themselves; when they went outside for walks they had to wear spacesuits; even communications with the outside world were set with extreme strictness to a one-way delay of 22 minutes, because the actual communications delay between Mars and Earth is precisely that number.

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

Fourth layer: mining.

What resources does Mars have? Iron, aluminum, silicon, magnesium, and large amounts of carbon dioxide and water ice. But even more commercially imaginative are the asteroids around Mars orbit. Those rocks are rich in platinum-group metals that are extremely scarce on Earth: platinum, palladium, rhodium—elements that are ultra-rare on Earth, yet are exactly the key lifeblood of today’s electric vehicle, semiconductor, and hydrogen-energy industry chains.

A company called AstroForge is working on extracting these metals from asteroids. In February 2025, they successfully launched their first prospecting satellite, Odin, bound straight for the asteroid designated 2022 OB5. A total funding amount of $55 million isn’t much in the space industry, but they are the first private company in the world to truly send mining satellites into deep space.

Fifth layer: energy and resources.

Mars is barren. It has no fossil fuels, and the efficiency of solar power is only 43% of Earth’s. Nuclear energy naturally becomes the only realistic option. But the truly epoch-making energy treasure lies on the moon. There is an abundance of helium-3—an isotope that is extremely scarce on Earth but stored in surprising quantities on the lunar surface—and it’s considered, in theory, the most perfect fuel for nuclear fusion.

A company called Interlune is hard at work on helium-3 extraction technology from the moon. In May 2025, it 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 for resources from extraterrestrial bodies.

These five major tiers all have companies operating in real time, real money funding, and hard-core technologies deployed on the ground. In 2025, total funding for space startups around the world is approaching $9 billion, up 37% year over year. This isn’t elusive sci-fi—it’s a real industry taking shape with a roar.

But there’s a problem here, a very realistic one: do these investors who pour in heavy money really believe they will see real returns in their own lifetimes?

The bigger the dream, the easier the money

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

Josh Wolfe, a partner at Lux Capital, once said in an interview that they are betting heavily on space companies—not because they’re wagering on which specific delivery timetable will happen, but because they care about the fact that whether these companies succeed or fail in solving interstellar problems, they will still produce valuable technological spin-off products on Earth.

Interlune’s work on extracting lunar helium-3— even if the business of lunar mining can never be fully closed as a loop—still means that the technologies they have accumulated in cryogenic separation and vacuum operations are still highly valuable in Earth’s semiconductor and medical device sectors.

ICON’s focus on 3D-printed houses using Mars soil— even if the timeline for Mars immigration is pushed back fifty years—doesn’t matter, because their 3D printing technology has already made the business model work in Earth’s low-cost housing market.

In essence, this is an “win-win no matter what” investment framework. Capital isn’t gambling on Mars with reckless bets; instead, it borrows the name “Mars” to hedge against uncertainties in how the Earth operates.

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

On April 1, 2026, SpaceX secretly filed for an IPO. Target valuation: $1.75 trillion. Planned financing: $75 billion. If that number comes true, it would be the largest IPO in human history, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s $25.6 billion in 2019, surpassing Alibaba’s $25.0 billion in 2014, and exceeding everyone’s imagination.

In the IPO documents, the use of proceeds is listed in three items: first, drive Starship’s launch cadence to the “crazy extreme”; second, deploy AI data centers in space; third, comprehensively drive crewed-and-uncrewed Mars expeditions.

Pay attention to that order. Mars is at the end, but it’s the cap of the entire valuation narrative.

If you remove Mars from SpaceX’s story, what’s left? Just a run-of-the-mill rocket manufacturing company, plus a satellite internet business called Starlink.

A rocket company’s valuation ceiling is probably in the ballpark of Boeing or Lockheed Martin—hundreds of billions. Starlink is a good business, but in a satellite internet market whose competitive landscape is becoming increasingly clear, it absolutely can’t support a $1.75 trillion valuation.

And it’s only Mars— and only Mars—that can force valuation up from the “hundreds of billions” to the “trillions.”

This is the most extreme play in “expectations economics.” Narrative leverage pulls in capital; capital enters and burns into technology; technology lands and makes the narrative real; then the narrative pulls out an even larger scale of capital. This flywheel closed loop has been fully run by Musk.

When SpaceX was founded in 2002, the market didn’t believe a private company could send people into the International Space Station. In 2012, when the Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station for the first time, people who 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. Every technological milestone turned the narrative into reality, and then reality generated a new narrative.

In this closed loop, “belief” itself is upgraded into a form of productive force. You bet because you believe; funds drive technology; technology confirms belief; and then ignites even more fervent followers and surging hot money.

But this whole logic has a prerequisite: Musk himself has to believe.

No Escape

In June 2025, when Peter Thiel was interviewed by Ross Douthat, a columnist for The New York Times, he said something deeply suggestive: “2024 was the year Musk stopped believing in Mars.”

Peter Thiel is one of Musk’s oldest friends and also one of the earliest investors. The two co-founded PayPal and fought their way through the brutal inferno of Silicon Valley’s early era together. What he said carries absolutely different weight from outsiders’ speculation.

According to Peter Thiel, Musk’s initial plan was to turn Mars into a political utopia of fundamentalist libertarianism. The idea had a very clear cultural anchor: Robert Heinlein’s masterpiece “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.”

In the book, a group of prisoners banished from the moon build a spontaneous order after breaking free from Earth’s regime, and ultimately ignite revolutionary flames announcing independence. Musk devoured the book; he wanted to replicate that story on Mars—creating a special zone on Mars with no taxation by the U.S. government, no meddling oversight from the European Union, and an absolute rejection of “woke culture.” Everything operates according to the most brutal rules of a free market: winner takes all, losers get eliminated.

Musk never spelled this ambition out openly on the surface, but it was the underlying driving force behind the entire Mars plan. Going to Mars has never been only about a technological expedition; at its core, it’s a grand political escape.

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

Meaning: you can’t escape. When you relocate humanity to Mars, you also package humanity’s values, biases, power structures, and ideologies in full and carry them over. AI is precisely the concentrated and amplified embodiment of all those civilization’s attachable evils. The kind of AI you nurture on Earth will grow the kind of AI on Mars. Mars has never been a pristine blank canvas; it’s just a copy of Earth—and the cost is higher, and survival is tougher.

Musk was silent for a long time, and finally said: “No escape. It really is no escape.”

In Peter Thiel’s view, it was this conversation that forcibly pushed Musk to the political chessboard in 2024. Rather than building a utopia on Mars, it would be better to change the power structure directly on Earth—this is the deep reason he fully supported Trump and deeply involved himself in DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency). Since you can’t run, then you might as well thoroughly remake the place you originally wanted to avoid.

The Puritans on the Mayflower crossed the Atlantic to the Americas, but they also packed England’s rigid class system, racial prejudice, and power logic into the ship’s holds. Their “city upon a hill,” carefully constructed, ultimately became a reflection of the old world: slavery, class entrenchment, and religious factional oppression flared up again—only repackaged with a new set of rhetoric.

The Australian exile destination was the same. It perfectly replicated the class order of the British Empire, merely transferring the title of “aristocracy” to “free immigrants.” Every time humanity tries to be reborn with a new order in a new continent, it unconsciously plants the genes of the old civilization within it.

People carry their own ideology with them; ideology goes along.

The struggle of trying to escape in itself becomes the ironclad proof that you are destined not to escape.

So does this trillion-dollar interstellar plan still have meaning? Under the shadow of a civilization with nowhere to escape, is anyone still undertaking this Sisyphus-like expedition?

But the Starship still has to fly

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

By the end of 2026, Starship still has to fly. With Tesla Optimus robots going first, it will begin trekking to the red sands of Mars to pave the way for subsequent crewed missions. In 2029, the countdown for crewed expeditions will officially begin.

To build a Mars city-state with a population of one million means pouring in one million tons of supplies, assembling a thousand Starships, and completing ten thousand launches. Just the launch costs for all that scale amount to a staggering one trillion dollars. Even to this day, Musk remains under the spotlight, stubbornly repeating these massive numbers that are dizzying.

But this isn’t a story about him alone.

In March 2025, AstroForge’s prospecting satellite Odin completely went silent in deep space.

It launched on February 26, 2025 aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9, as a secondary payload for the IM-2 mission, aiming at the asteroid 2022 OB5. Its mission was to take pictures of that rocky body’s surface, to confirm whether platinum-group metals are really sealed within.

At the beginning of the launch, everything was normal. But soon, the ground station started losing the signal. The Australia main station went down; the configuration of the backup station got mixed up; and in another location, the power amplifier was mysteriously damaged in the days leading up to the launch—even a newly built cell phone signal tower had a crossbar shoved in, completely disrupting the receiving frequency band.

And so Odin drifted into dead silence, floating in the dark deep space 270k miles from Earth—its fate unknown.

In the face of such a defeat, AstroForge CEO Matt Gialich wrote in his post-mission review: “In the end, you have to get on the boxing ring and take the shot. You have to try.”

They turned the failed mission into a kind of self-deprecating dark humor, calling it “Odin’t” (Odin + didn’t). Immediately afterward, they decisively unveiled the grand plan for DeepSpace-2: a massive object weighing 200 kilograms, equipped with electric propulsion and landing legs. This time, they would truly land on an asteroid.

This is the truest texture of the space industry. It’s not the light game of “rapid iteration, embrace failure” from Silicon Valley; it’s a heavier, more grim fate. When you throw your painstaking creation into deep space, once the signal is cut off, it turns into an anonymous speck of dust scattered across the vast universe. You can’t know where it ends up, and you can’t find what’s left of it. All you can do is swallow the dead silence of the cosmos, go back, and build the next one.

On July 6, 2024, in Houston, Texas—when the 3D-printed chamber door slowly opened, four volunteers who had spent 378 days in “Mars exile” returned to the world of the living.

Microbiologist Anca Selariu told the cameras, “Why go to Mars? Because it’s really possible. Deep space can tightly connect humans and awaken the brightest light in our souls. It’s just a small step for Earth people, but enough to illuminate the long night of centuries ahead.”

Structural engineer Ross Brockwell was more candid. In the isolated months cut off from the world, his deepest realization was: in the face of the boundless star sea, imagination and reverence for the unknown—those are the most precious qualities that keep humanity moving forward.

And for medical officer Nathan Jones, what he gained in this long isolation was highly inward-looking. He summarized it like this: “I learned to enjoy every season in the present, and to stay calm and wait for the next one to arrive.” Over more than 300 days, he learned to draw.

These four people aren’t Musk. They didn’t carry the capital myth of $1.75 trillion, and no one cares about any snippets they post on social networks. They went into that room because someone had to be the first to go and try. Gialich launched that satellite because someone had to be the first to go and try. Mueller left SpaceX and founded Impulse Space because someone had to be the first to go and try.

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

After Selariu exited the chamber, she said something: “I’m definitely grateful to be able to get information at any time 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 spent 378 days in a room simulating Mars. After returning to the noisy Earth, what she missed most wasn’t anything else—it was the quiet there.