A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

by Kelly Weinersmith

In 2015, there were about fourteen hundred active satellites. As of 2021, there were about five thousand; and as of October 2022, around three thousand working satellites are controlled by SpaceX’s satellite internet service, Starlink.

How does democracy function in a society where air is rationed—and possibly under corporate control?

In our experience, a lot of people think SpaceX in particular is some kind of scam, using old government-created space technology for personal enrichment, or somehow hiding the true costs of space launch to fleece public coffers. We’ve encountered this idea again and again, and all we can say is that it’s so contrary to the plain facts as to verge on a conspiracy theory. However you feel about Musk, SpaceX has genuinely revolutionized space launch, and every space agency on Earth, including NASA, has failed to duplicate their technology.

In fairness, Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos’s Blue Origin, and other rocket launch companies have gotten plenty of government contracts, but that’s been the standard way space has been done in the United States since the early days of space flight. The revolution in pricing only arrived with SpaceX.

Both Bezos and Musk overhype things, yes, but the evidence is that they actually believe in a space-settlement future. What concerns us is not that they’re lying, but that they have weird beliefs about human ...

What we do think is that space settlements probably are, and ought to be, a project of centuries, not decades.

Idyllic views of the future always seem to come with the hidden assumption that human nature will change. That somehow, the flaws of mankind will just melt away amongst the awesomeness of living among the stars. People will abandon mundane flaws like booze and drugs, and also everyone will be super-efficient like some kind of environmentalist’s dream. But that’s never been the case as we march forward, so I don’t see why it would happen in the future. —Andy Weir,

An Earth with climate change and nuclear war and, like, zombies and werewolves is still a way better place than Mars. Staying alive on Earth requires fire and a pointy stick. Staying alive in space will require all sorts of high-tech gadgets we can barely manufacture on Earth.

As space visionary Krafft Ehricke reportedly said, “If God wanted man to become a spacefaring species, He would have given man a Moon.”

It is not hyperbole to make the statement [that] if humans ever reside on the Moon, they will have to live like ants, earthworms or moles. The same is true for all round celestial bodies without a significant atmosphere or magnetic field—Mars included. —Dr. James Logan, former NASA chief of Flight Medicine and chief of Medical Operations at Johnson Space Center