The Musk superfans who want to live on Mars with Elon

Self-confessed “space dorks” worry Twitter is distracting their hero

This article was originally published on 21 April, 2023 by author Charlie McCann in 1843 magazine.

 

A hush fell over the crowd that had assembled less than four miles from the launchpad. In the distance stood the Starship. Some 120-metres tall – larger than the Statue of Liberty – it loomed above the coastal Texas flats, a mass of stainless steel interrupting a vast expanse of scrub, cacti and mesquite. The Starship is the largest, most powerful rocket ever built, and in 60 seconds SpaceX would, for the first time, attempt to vault it into the sky. The rocket is intended one day to convey cargo and human passengers to Mars, the colonisation of which is Elon Musk’s great ambition. The success of this test flight would bring Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, one step closer to inaugurating a new space age.

 

The people who had gathered to watch its dawning were not casual space nerds. The viewing area is owned by Rocket Ranch, a motel and campsite near Starbase, the facility where SpaceX has been building and testing its rockets for the past few years. Some people had been staying there for months in anticipation of the launch. A few had even quit their jobs in order to be sure of witnessing it. Others were so captivated by SpaceX and Musk’s Martian ambitions that they had permanently moved to the ranch.

 

Praveen, an Indian engineer and college student, drove for 22 hours from his university in Georgia to catch the Starship. “Musk is almost like a demi-god”

 

The evening before the launch, a group of about 100 people arrived at the Rocket Ranch outpost and set up camp, braving swarms of mosquitoes and each other’s snores. In the morning, the local sheriff’s officers sealed off the roads in the immediate vicinity of Starbase, as they do for every SpaceX launch. No one else would be getting in. Anthony Gomez, the ranch manager, told me we were closer to the launchpad than SpaceX mission control. An email from the management warned of the considerable danger to spectators: “THIS WILL BE A POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS AND LIFE THREATENING EVENT!” We were told that if the rocket exploded before take-off we would have less than 16 seconds to find shelter. Printed on the side of a shipping container was a message which read in large letters, “Don’t panic!”, the famous exhortation to intergalactic travellers in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. It was Gomez’s idea of a joke, but also indicative of his free-wheeling attitude to risk management.

As the countdown neared zero, Galen Matson, a long-term resident of the ranch, watched the plumes of cryogenic fuels curl out of the engines. “I’ve got goosebumps,” he said, sipping coffee from a mug with the logo of Atomic Rocket, a website devoted to making the science in sci-fi more rigorous. “I’ve been waiting so long for this. I really might cry.” I thought of the last line of the waiver liability form I had signed: “You may now witness history!”

 

Once (most of) the 33 engines ignited, the Starship began to levitate. As it rose higher and higher, one man’s outstretched arms lifted in tandem, as if he were at a rave or a happy-clappy church service. Within ten seconds, the rocket had disappeared beyond the clouds. But its journey through the atmosphere could be traced in the loud crackling that rumbled through the sky and pounded our chests. Spectators began yee-hawing and hugging each other; tears streamed down a few faces. Excitement about Starship has been building for years; now that it was hurtling through the sky, it was as if a dam had burst, with relief and joy cascading out of the crowd.

Some had quit their jobs in order to make the launch. Others had permanently moved to Rocket Ranch

 

Given the seeming success of this test, how soon might we expect to make landfall on Mars? Matson reckoned it would take as little as seven, maybe ten years. He longs to go to Mars himself. On that morning as he watched the Starship ascend into the clouds, his fantasy sidled a little further into the realm of possibility. It did not matter that, a few minutes later, the Starship exploded.

 

Rocket Ranch is tucked into a bend in the Rio Grande, at the southern tip of Texas. The long road meandering through the ranch’s campground is routinely lined with camper vans, trucks and Teslas. Many of them are connected to the internet via Starlink satellites operated by SpaceX. On the ground are clusters of tents and in the sky are grackles, iridescent black birds whose staccato calls evoke a 1990s dial-up modem, as Matson puts it. The border is close enough that my mobile-phone provider welcomed me to Mexico.

 

The main house is where guests gather to cook, eat, talk and pile onto worn sofas to watch livestreams of rocket launches. It is aptly called the clubhouse. Almost every wall is decorated with space paraphernalia. In one corner a vitrine in the shape of a rocket contains a model of the International Space Station. Hanging from the “Wall of Shame” are bits of debris scavenged from the remains of SpaceX’s previous launches.

 

Many of the people who flocked to the ranch in anticipation of the Starship launch were retired. (Constantly shifting launch dates are difficult to accommodate with an office job.) There were current and former NASA contractors, space-company executives, space-suit designers and space YouTubers and photographers. Those who did not work in the industry seemed to share their peers’ preoccupation with exploring new territory, in their own way: the van-lifers and gap-year wanderers, wending their way through terra incognita.

 

The guests tend to keep coming back. According to Gomez, Rocket Ranch’s manager, many become pen pals, and when friends return to the ranch, it has the feel of a reunion. What draws them back is not just the proximity to Starbase but the community of like-minded people. “I would talk to my family and they were just like, okay, okay, enough about Tesla, enough about SpaceX,” said Rand Harper, an executive-development coach with a Crest-white smile who has lived at the ranch since early February. The first time he checked in, he “opened the door and everybody was talking SpaceX and Tesla and the future and immediately I’m like, I’m home”.

 

The successful launch of the Starship (before it exploded) meant for Musk’s most ardent acolytes that, all of a sudden, Mars may be within reach

 

The ranch is “a mecca for really committed space dorks”, said Matson. In one corner of the clubhouse there is a false window. On the sill stands a votive candle, with a picture of a beatific Musk wrapped around it (he’s holding a shiba inu, the dog which became the face of dogecoin, a cryptocurrency he has promoted). Musk deserves such a display of devotion because, as a Rocket Ranch Facebook post said, he “has done more to carry us through the open window” – to bring humans to space – “than any other person in our history”.

I quickly came to realise that people’s feelings about Musk were bound up with their feelings about travel to Mars. Musk, unlike NASA, is serious about settling Mars. His use of reusable rockets is drastically reducing the cost of space missions. That might bring down the cost of settling Mars from prohibitively expensive to just insanely expensive (without accounting for trivialities like the lack of a breathable atmosphere).

 

A startlingly high number of people with whom I spoke did not simply want to move to the red planet. They wanted to be among the first to go, even if the rigours of life there meant “that I would go and die in a month”, said John McCorquodale, a nomadic electrical engineer who, with his long blonde hair, had the air of an elf turned academic.

 

Underlying this yearning is a deep pessimism about humanity’s future on Earth. Many think a catastrophe will strike at some point, wiping out Homo sapiens. It is not clear what shape this calamity might take – climate change, an asteroid, a world war – but what is certain is that it is coming. Earth is overdue for a collision with a “planet-killer asteroid”, said Felix Schlang, a YouTuber who makes videos about astronomy and space (as do many of the ranch’s enthusiasts). Harper, the executive-development coach who had been living at the ranch for the past two months, argued – citing Musk himself – that the catastrophe could be coming soon, making interplanetary travel an urgent priority. “The window may be very narrow.”

 

Would-be Martians long to labour in pursuit of a noble cause. Matson, a courteous electrical engineer who serves unofficially as house chef, invokes his experience in Afghanistan. In the early 2000s, he worked as an engineer for a number of defence contractors, helping to build Afghanistan’s telecommunications infrastructure “from scratch”. “At the end of the day, you didn’t just, like, send a couple emails. You felt like you really accomplished something,” he said. Pouring himself into his work, believing that “we were there trying to do the right thing”, was “the most gratifying work” he had ever done. “There’s something about a struggle that gives you such purpose.” He said he would sign up for the first voyage to Mars.

 

Many people did not understand why Musk bought Twitter last October; it was not obvious how it furthered the project of colonising Mars

For others too the life of the earthling feels empty of meaning. McCorquodale said American culture has atomised society into suburban households and isolated individuals. The first ship to Mars, he hoped, would carry the kind of people he had met at the ranch, who want to knock down the white picket fence and commune with each other. The demands of survival on Mars will require new arrivals to work together. From that crucible of struggle, the pioneers may forge new kinds of social relations.

 

Several ranchers I spoke with referred to Musk’s master plan, the idea that all his businesses, or most of them, are intended to support the mission to colonise Mars (Musk himself has not claimed this). To avoid the punishing radiation on Mars’s surface, for instance, humans could live in underground tunnels carved by the giant drills of the Boring Company, one of Musk’s other ventures. The only source of power on Mars will be electricity; the vehicles could therefore all be Teslas. Happily, some of these companies’ products might solve problems on Earth, but according to this rationale, that is not their primary purpose.

 

The successful launch of the Starship (before it exploded) meant for Musk’s most ardent acolytes that, all of a sudden, Mars may be within reach. For that, and for other accomplishments, Musk is widely praised by ranchers. Their admiration sometimes borders on veneration. At the outpost, I met Praveen, an Indian engineer and college student, who drove for 22 hours from his university in Georgia to catch the Starship. “Musk is almost like a demi-god,” he said.

 

But I also detected some rumblings of ambivalence. When I asked the Rocket Ranch crowd what they thought of Musk, a minority, but a substantial one, responded with a “hmm”, or at least an acknowledgment that he was controversial. Many people did not understand why he bought Twitter last October; it was not obvious how it furthered the project of colonising Mars. They worried that running Twitter and squabbling with politicians and the media was distracting him from the real mission. When Musk asked Twitter users to vote on whether he should step down as ceo, Matson, “bemused” by Musk’s foray into social media, voted in favour.

 

“I don’t like the hero worship,” Gomez admitted. “But I’m guilty of it myself”

 

Musk’s Twitter antics have, at least for some, pierced an aura of infallibility that had enveloped him. According to McCorquodale many fans believed that when Mars was colonised, “Musk would be king”. Before last year, McCorquodale might have supported Musk’s coronation, because he seemed to possess superhuman levels of intelligence and focus that he was using to save humanity: “I was willing to suspend disbelief and figured we just had some sort of a lizard alien.” But the acquisition of Twitter was “a giant error”, McCorquodale said. And in his stewardship of the platform, Musk revealed himself to be “a more asinine censor” than any of his predecessors. The saga taught McCorquodale that the visionary he revered was “just a dude”, prone to the same petty grievances as the rest of us.

 

But when the Starship soared into the sky on Thursday, a lot of these misgivings seemed to fall away. No one I spoke to cared that not all of the engines had fired properly, or that the booster rocket had failed to separate as planned, or that SpaceX was forced to blow up the rocket. Gomez, the ranch organiser, was keen for me to understand that the launch still counted as an “absolute success”: progress is only ever achieved incrementally. As Musk says, “if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” SpaceX’s track record has borne that out; a history of risking failure on the launchpad has put the company on the cusp of sending Starship into space. But I wondered whether Gomez and the others would even be capable of an impartial assessment of the launch. At dinner a few days earlier, Gomez admitted he was struggling to keep his admiration for Musk in perspective. “I don’t like the hero worship,” Gomez admitted. “But I’m guilty of it myself.”