Every escape of human civilization begins this way.
In September 1620, 102 people crowded onto a wooden ship called the Mayflower, setting sail from Plymouth Harbor in England into the treacherous North Atlantic. The cramped cabin carried not only luggage but an entire political vision: to build a “city upon a hill” on the new continent—a fresh world free from the control of the Church of England and the exploitation of corrupt nobility.
They did not come for adventure or trade; they were simply a group trying to escape their fate.
In 1788, 168 years later, the first British convicts were transported to Australia. At the time, Europeans regarded the continent as the edge of the world—a natural place of exile, designed to discard unwanted individuals and leave them to fend for themselves. Yet, those abandoned convicts took root there, built cities, and forged a nation.
Looking further ahead, the California Gold Rush of 1848, the large-scale development of Siberia in the 1880s, the Brazilian rubber boom in the early 1900s... Each time human civilization has attempted to “reset,” it has always received the same script: seek out unclaimed land, proclaim the arrival of a new order, then watch as capital, people, and technology flood in, forging an entirely new logic of survival against the harshest of conditions.
Now it's Mars's turn.
But the difference is that the Mayflower had the tacit approval of the British government, Australia was inherently a British Crown colony, and the California Gold Rush was underpinned by U.S. federal land policies. This time, what drives this process is no longer any national will, but a group of private capital—including venture investors, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, former NASA engineers, and Elon Musk.
State-driven colonization is rooted in the logic of taxation, military power, and sovereignty; privately funded colonization is fundamentally shaped by return on investment, exit strategies, and narrative premium. The civilizations born from these two underlying logics are destined to diverge fundamentally from the outset.
So, what exactly are these individuals wielding their private capital as a club betting on?
On a typical workday in 2025, Tom Mueller is pitching his new company to a group of investors.
Mueller is not an ordinary entrepreneur. He spent nearly 20 years at SpaceX, personally designing the Merlin engine for the Falcon 9—the powerful engine that has carried humans to the International Space Station, placed satellites into their intended orbits, and lifted SpaceX from a company on the brink of bankruptcy to today’s trillion-dollar commercial empire.
At the end of 2020, Mueller left SpaceX to found Impulse Space, a new company whose core mission is succinctly stated: delivering cargo to Mars orbit.
Yes, the target is not low Earth orbit or the Moon—it's Mars orbit.
His target customers are organizations and enterprises urgently needing to deploy satellites, probes, and supply modules in Mars orbit. His logic is exceptionally clear: infrastructure for Mars missions must begin construction right now. By the time Musk’s Starship finally lifts off, someone must already be waiting on that corridor.
In June 2025, Impulse Space secured a $300 million Series C round, bringing its total funding to $525 million. The investor lineup is impressive: Linse Capital led the round, with participation from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, DCVC, and Valor Equity Partners. Founders Fund is Peter Thiel’s venture firm, and Valor Equity Partners was an early investor in several of Musk’s companies. This is not a group of hype-driven retail investors swept up by Martian fantasies—but rather some of Silicon Valley’s most seasoned capital.
Back to the present, the hottest topic in our social circles is: "Will AI make me lose my job?"
On the same planet, along the same timeline, some are struggling day and night to secure their next meal, while others are negotiating the ownership of Martian mining rights. This is the most real form of cognitive time lag—people are folded into different temporal dimensions: some live in 2025, others in 2035, and still others in 2050.
This cognitive lag is not new. In the early 1990s, while most Chinese were still debating whether to buy a color TV, a small group was already experimenting with the internet; by the early 2010s, while most people were still using Nokia keypads, others were already developing mobile apps.
Each wave of technological advancement inevitably creates such a time lag. Those who see it first aren’t necessarily smarter—they’re simply caught in the vortex of information and capital, forcing them to seek answers from a farther future.
But this time, the time difference is more extreme than ever before.
While anxiety about AI is certainly real, it remains a concern confined to the "present." The Mars industry, by contrast, is a grand strategic bet on the "future"—a future not measured in just five years, but in twenty or fifty.
When people hear "Mars industry," their first instinct is that it’s an unreachable sci-fi fantasy, a vague daydream of Musk’s, or a costly toy for Silicon Valley billionaires.
This assertion was flawless in 2015 and largely accurate in 2020, but it no longer holds in 2025.
The current state of the Mars industry closely resembles the internet in 1998. Back then, infrastructure was still under development, most companies were burning cash, and business models were unclear—but there was already enough real capital, real technology, and real talent operating within it. You can say it’s still early, but you cannot deny its existence.
This interstellar supply chain can be broadly broken down into five layers, from bottom to top.
Layer One: Transportation.
To send something from Earth to Mars, you first need a rocket. While SpaceX’s Starship is the dominant player in this infrastructure layer, another company, Relativity Space, is also significant.
This company uses robots to 3D print an entire rocket. Their rocket, Terran R, has 95% of its components—from engines to the fuselage—printed. Previously, Relativity Space already held $2.9 billion in launch contracts. Their reasoning is that traditional rocket supply chains are too long and fragile; once high-frequency, large-scale launches begin, part procurement becomes a critical vulnerability. 3D printing, by contrast, can drastically compress the supply chain, since you only need a stock of raw materials and a single printer.
Layer 2: Rail transport.
Transporting cargo from low Earth orbit to Mars orbit presents entirely different engineering challenges, requiring specialized propulsion systems and orbital planning—and this is precisely the frontier that Mueller’s Impulse Space is tackling. The propulsion system they are developing enables spacecraft to perform precise, delicate maneuvers in deep space. It is an essential infrastructure for future Mars missions, just as logistics networks are vital to today’s massive e-commerce empires.
Layer three: Architecture.
Humans have landed on Mars—where will they live? The most fascinating company on this level is ICON, a 3D-printed construction company. They have already successfully printed homes and military bases on Earth, and now hold a $57.2 million contract from NASA to research how to use local materials—such as Martian soil (basalt, perchlorates, sulfur)—to directly 3D print human habitats. This initiative is named Project Olympus.
In addition, ICON built a Mars habitat simulation called CHAPEA for NASA in Houston, Texas. This 158-square-meter, fully 3D-printed habitat welcomed four volunteers in June 2023—none of whom were actors or influencers, but rather scientists and engineers carefully selected by NASA. During their 378-day simulated Mars mission, they grew their own food, wore spacesuits for every outdoor excursion, and communicated with the outside world under a strict 22-minute one-way delay, matching the actual communication latency between Mars and Earth.
On July 6, 2024, this long and solitary interstellar survival exercise was officially declared over.
Layer 4: 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 promising are the asteroids orbiting Mars. These rocky bodies are rich in platinum-group metals—platinum, palladium, and rhodium—elements that are extremely scarce on Earth but are critical to the core supply chains of today’s new energy vehicles, semiconductors, and hydrogen energy industries.
A company called AstroForge is mining these metals from asteroids. In February 2025, they successfully launched their first prospecting satellite, Odin, headed directly toward asteroid 2022 OB5. While the $55 million in funding is modest by aerospace standards, they are the world’s first private company to send a mining satellite into deep space.
Layer 5: Energy and Resources.
Mars is barren, lacking fossil fuels and offering only 43% of Earth’s solar efficiency, making nuclear energy the only realistic option. But a far more transformative energy reservoir lies on the Moon: vast quantities of helium-3, an isotope extremely rare on Earth but abundantly present on the lunar surface, regarded as the theoretically ideal fuel for nuclear fusion.
A company called Interlune is aggressively developing helium-3 extraction technology on the Moon. In May 2025, they officially signed a purchase agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy. This is not just a transaction—it is the first government procurement contract in human history for resources from an extraterrestrial body.
These five levels each feature real companies, actual funding, and tangible, cutting-edge technologies. In 2025, global space startup funding neared $9 billion, a 37% year-over-year surge. This is not science fiction—it’s a thriving, real-world industry taking shape.
But here’s a problem, a very real one: Do these investors who have poured in huge sums of money truly believe they will see a tangible return in their lifetime?
Among these investors, few truly believe they’ll live to see the Martian city completed.
Josh Wolfe, a partner at Lux Capital, said in an interview that their substantial investments in space companies are not bets on any specific delivery timeline, but rather on the valuable Earth-based technological byproducts these companies will create while tackling interstellar challenges—regardless of success or failure.
Interlune is developing lunar helium-3 extraction technology; even if lunar mining never becomes a commercially viable enterprise, the expertise they’ve built in cryogenic separation and vacuum operations remains highly applicable in Earth-based semiconductor and medical equipment industries. ICON is relentlessly focused on 3D-printing homes using Martian soil; even if human colonization of Mars is delayed by another fifty years, their 3D printing technology has already proven a viable business model in Earth’s affordable housing market.
This is essentially a “win-win” investment structure. Capital is not gambling on Mars, but rather using Mars as a metaphor to hedge against the uncertainties of Earth’s operations.
But this is only the first layer of this logic. The hidden second layer is even more intriguing.
On April 1, 2026, SpaceX secretly filed its IPO application. With a target valuation of $1.75 trillion and plans to raise $75 billion, if realized, this would be the largest IPO in human history, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s $25.6 billion in 2019 and Alibaba’s $25 billion in 2014, far exceeding everyone’s expectations.
The IPO documents outline three uses of the raised funds: first, to push the launch frequency of Starship to "crazy limits"; second, to deploy AI data centers in space; and third, to fully enable both crewed and uncrewed Mars expeditions.
Note this order: Mars is listed last, but it represents the ceiling of the entire valuation narrative.
If you remove Mars from SpaceX’s story, what’s left? Just another ordinary rocket manufacturer, plus a satellite internet business called Starlink.
Rocket Company's valuation cap is roughly on the scale of Boeing or Lockheed Martin—hundreds of billions of dollars. Starlink is a good business, but in the satellite internet sector, where the competitive landscape is becoming increasingly clear, it certainly cannot justify a $1.75 trillion valuation.
Mars, and Mars alone, is the ultimate narrative lever capable of forcibly elevating valuation from the billions to the trillions.
This is the most extreme application of speculative economics: narratives leverage capital, capital funds technology development, technology validates the narrative, and then attracts even larger-scale capital. This virtuous feedback loop has been fully perfected by Musk.
When SpaceX was founded in 2002, the market didn’t believe a private company could send humans to the International Space Station. In 2012, when the Dragon spacecraft first docked with the ISS, those who had mocked Musk began to change their tune. In 2020, SpaceX delivered on its NASA contract by sending astronauts into space aboard the Crew Dragon. Each technological milestone turned narrative into reality, and that reality then generated new narratives.
Within this closed loop, "belief" itself becomes a form of productivity. Belief leads to investment, capital drives technology, technology validates faith, which in turn ignites even more fervent追随 and an even greater flood of hot money.
But this logic has one prerequisite: Musk himself must believe it.
In June 2025, Peter Thiel, in an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, made a telling statement: “2024 was the year Musk stopped believing in Mars.”
Peter Thiel is one of Musk’s oldest friends and earliest investors. The two co-founded PayPal and navigated the brutal early days of Silicon Valley together. His words carry a weight entirely different from outside speculation.
According to Peter Thiel, Musk’s original vision was to turn Mars into a libertarian political utopia. This idea is firmly anchored in the cultural work of science fiction author Robert Heinlein’s classic novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
The book depicts a group of prisoners exiled to the Moon who, after breaking free from Earth’s regime, establish an organic order and ultimately ignite a revolution to declare independence. Musk has worn out this book—he wants to replicate that story on Mars, creating a special zone free from U.S. government taxation, free from EU overregulation, and utterly rejecting “woke culture.” Everything operates according to the harshest laws of the free market: winners take all, and the weak are eliminated.
This ambition, though never explicitly stated by Musk publicly, is the underlying driving force behind the entire Mars mission. Going to Mars has never been just a technological expedition—it is, at its core, a grand political escape.
Until one day, Musk had a conversation with DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis. Hassabis casually dropped a line: “You should know, my AI will follow you to Mars.”
It means you can’t escape it. When you transport humans to Mars, you bring along all of human values, biases, power structures, and ideologies. AI is precisely the concentrated amplifier of these deep-seated societal afflictions. The AI you nurture on Earth will be the same AI that emerges on Mars. Mars has never been a blank canvas—it’s merely a copy of Earth, one that comes at a higher cost and demands even greater struggle for survival.
Elon Musk remained silent for a long time, then finally said, “Nowhere to run. There’s truly nowhere to run.”
In Peter Thiel’s view, it was this conversation that forcibly pulled Musk onto the political stage in 2024. Rather than building a utopia on Mars, he chose to directly reshape power structures here on Earth—that’s the deeper reason behind his full-throated support for Trump and his deep involvement with DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). Since escape wasn’t an option, he decided to completely transform the very place he once wanted to avoid.
The Puritans aboard the Mayflower crossed the Atlantic to America, but they also brought aboard the rigid class hierarchy, racial prejudice, and power structures of England. The “city upon a hill” they painstakingly built ultimately became a reflection of the old world—slavery, entrenched class divisions, and religious persecution resurfaced, merely dressed in new rhetoric.
The same was true of Australia’s penal colonies, which perfectly replicated the British Empire’s class hierarchy, merely transferring the title of “aristocracy” to “free settlers.” Every time humanity attempts to forge a new order on a new continent, it inevitably implants the genetic code of the old civilization within it.
People carry their own ideologies with them, and the ideologies go along.
The very struggle to escape became irrefutable proof of an inescapable fate.
In light of this, does this trillion-dollar interstellar strategy still hold meaning? Beneath the shadow of a civilization with nowhere to escape, are there still those undertaking this Sisyphean expedition?
After Musk said "nowhere to run," he didn't stop moving forward.
By the end of 2026, Starship will still fly, carrying Tesla Optimus robots ahead to tread the red soil of Mars, paving the way for subsequent crewed missions. In 2029, the countdown for crewed expeditions will officially begin. Building a Martian city of one million people means transporting one million tons of cargo, assembling one thousand Starships, and completing ten thousand launches—just the cost of these countless launches would reach a staggering one trillion dollars. To this day, Musk remains under the spotlight, stubbornly repeating these enormous, mind-boggling figures.
But this is not just his story.
In March 2025, AstroForge's prospecting satellite Odin lost all contact in deep space.
It launched on February 26, 2025, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 as a secondary payload on the IM-2 mission, targeting the asteroid 2022 OB5. Its mission is to capture images of the asteroid’s surface to verify whether platinum-group metals are indeed trapped within it.
At launch, everything proceeded normally. However, soon after, the ground stations began losing signal. The primary station in Australia went offline, the backup station was misconfigured, a power amplifier at another site mysteriously failed just before launch, and even a newly built cell tower interfered, completely disrupting the reception band. Odin slipped into silence, drifting in the dark void of space, 270,000 miles from Earth, its fate unknown.
In the aftermath of this loss, AstroForge CEO Matt Gialich wrote in his post-mortem report: “At the end of the day, you’ve got to get in the ring and give it your all. You’ve got to try.”
They humorously dubbed their failed mission "Odin't" (Odin + didn't) in a self-deprecating, darkly comedic way. Immediately after, they unveiled the ambitious DeepSpace-2 plan: a massive 200-kilogram spacecraft equipped with electric propulsion and landing legs—this time, aiming to actually land on an asteroid.
This is the true nature of the space industry. It is not the light, agile game of “move fast and break things” from Silicon Valley, but something far heavier, far more somber—a destiny carved in stone. When you launch your painstakingly crafted creation into the void, the moment communication is lost, it becomes a nameless speck of dust in the vast cosmos. You will never know its fate, nor find its remains. All you can do is swallow the endless silence and go back to build another.
July 6, 2024, Houston, Texas. As the 3D-printed hatch slowly opened, four volunteers who had completed 378 days of "Mars exile" returned to Earth.
Microbiologist Anca Selariu faces the camera and says: “Why go to Mars? Because it is genuinely achievable. Deep space unites humanity and ignites the brightest光芒 within our souls. This is one small step for Earthlings, yet sufficient to illuminate the long night of centuries to come.”
Structural engineer Ross Brockwell openly admitted that, during this isolated period, his deepest insight was that, in the face of the infinite stars, imagination and awe for the unknown are the most precious qualities that sustain humanity.
Meanwhile, medical officer Nathan Jones reaped deeply introspective rewards from this prolonged isolation. He concluded, “I learned to appreciate each season as it came and to wait calmly for the next.” Over the course of more than three hundred days, he learned to draw.
These four individuals are not Musk. They do not carry the myth of $1.75 trillion in capital, and no one cares about their fleeting words on social media. They entered that room because someone had to be the first to try. Gialich launched that satellite because someone had to be the first to try. Mueller left SpaceX to found Impulse Space because someone had to be the first to try.
Faced with Musk’s pessimistic remark, “Nowhere to escape,” these people did not flee or give up—they first went to experience what that place felt like.
After stepping out, Selariu said: "I'm truly grateful to have regained constant access to information, but I'll miss the luxury of being disconnected. After all, in this world, a person's value is defined by their presence in the digital realm."
She spent 378 days in a room simulating Mars, and what she missed most upon returning to the noisy Earth was the silence there.