SpaceX Evolution

While most billionaire entrepreneurs are content to build a single successful company, Elon Musk seeks a higher goal hence created a small army of symbiotic companies, with SpaceX at the center. Essentially Musk plans to transform us into a spacefaring civilization, through coordinated effort from all these companies, not in a century or two but within his lifetime.

SpaceX are developing Starship, a super heavy lift spacecraft capable of shuttling settlers to new worlds, such as the moon and Mars. In addition they created Starlink, a low cost satellite constellation to supply broadband anywhere around the globe, which they intend to extend to these brave new worlds. In parallel Tesla are transition us off fossil fuels to sustainable energy, something vital to the new space economy considering carbon fuel and free oxygen are in precious short supply in space, or anywhere off-world. The Boring company too are preparing to extend civilization in a new dimension – underground, a logical step for any new colony with a construction material deficit. Even Musk’s Neuralink should provide the ideal means to operate all manner of equipment from inside a pressure suit or remotely from a pressurized habitat.

To make his spacefaring vision manifest, Musk is driving tech development across a broad front, until they have accumulated all the tech necessary to construct the first city of Mars. However, they intend this settlement to support second stage development, a place to create all the tech necessary to go even further, to the limit of our solar system and beyond. This will require a new model of society to support this herculean effort, e.g. a free technocracy run by direct democracy.

Succinctly, we are entering a new era, which will have seismic effects on our reality and attitudes. All manual labor performed by AI robots, politicians made redundant through direct democracy, goods produced at the point of use via additive manufacturing, to name but a few changes. Not what we might expect – but the future has a funny way of surprising us.