A Field Guide to Space

The sky is not the limit 🚀

Field Guide Vol. 251

For as long as humans have looked at the sky, outer space has inspired a sense of possibility and grandeur. In this week’s Field Guide, journey with us beyond our planet and through the cosmos as we explore the mysteries of the universe, beginning with Silicon Valley’s sci-fi fever dreams of colonizing Mars.

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Colored still from the movie Flight to Mars. 1951. (Getty Images).

Colonizing Mars

By Isobel Cockerell

This piece is published in collaboration with Coda Story as part of our Complicating Colonialism issue.

It was a late spring evening in Devon, England, in May 2021. Even before we saw the satellites, the party had become surreal: it was one of the first gatherings in the region since the pandemic had begun. We were camping in tipis in a field overlooking the Jurassic Coast, the ocean thundering below. Inside the biggest tent, people were singing, smoking, shouting. The evening was unraveling. Someone—masked, costumed—stuck his face inside the flap and yelled, with great theater: “Starlink is visible! Starlink is visible!”

Half of the party knew what he meant, the other half just stared. Led by those who knew, we thundered out into the dark field and peered up at the sky. Directly above our heads, above our field, our very tent—a moving train of what looked like stars, perfectly spaced, perhaps fifty of them, speeding across the sky, on and on and on. Some people in the crowd began screaming: the ones who knew nothing of the satellite network Starlink, who thought the world was ending. Their reaction of pure, primeval terror was echoed all over the world every time Starlink sent up a new batch of satellites, and people who had never heard of Elon Musk’s project looked up.

Since the beginning of the Space Race, in 1955, fewer than 250 objects a year were sent into orbit. Then, in May 2019, came the launch of Starlink, which has since launched more than 6,000 satellites. Musk has ambitions to put 42,000 satellites into space, blanketing the whole planet in a kind of mesh. As the pandemic raged across the world, the night sky quietly began changing forever—and a few months after my trip to Devon, Elon Musk became the richest man on Earth.

Musk has repeatedly said that revenue from Starlink, which is forecasted to be about $6.6 billion in 2024, is in service of his ultimate dream for Starlink’s parent company SpaceX: making humans multiplanetary. Colonizing Mars.

“There’s really two main reasons, I think, to make life multiplanetary and to establish a self-sustaining civilization on Mars,” Musk said in 2015. “One is the defensive reason, to ensure that the light of consciousness as we know it is not extinguished—will last much longer–and the second is that it would be an amazing adventure that we could all enjoy, vicariously if not personally.”

The red planet, the fire star, the bringer of war. For millennia, humans have stared up at the rust-colored planet in the sky and wondered.

“Mars has been fascinating to people for as long as there’s been human beings,” the science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson told me over a Zoom call. “It’s weird. It’s red. It has that backward glitch in its motion, it wanes and grows in its brightness. Everyone always knew it was weird, and it’s attractive to people.”

Robinson lives in Davis, California, well within what he calls the “Blast Zone” of Silicon Valley’s influence. He wrote Red Mars, a cult sci-fi classic about colonizing the planet, in 1992, when Musk was a college student. Three decades on, Mars is on our minds more than ever, and Robinson’s fiction is morphing into reality.

An avid sci-fi fan, Musk says he will send the first ship to colonize the red planet by the end of this decade. His dream to colonize space is shared by many of the most powerful players in tech.

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