MARS ATTACKS:
How Elon Musk's plans for Mars threaten Earth
By Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Illustrations by Zach Weinersmith with select images courtesy of Penguin Press
Layout by Erik English
March 20, 2025
The world is nearly all parcelled out,
and what there is left of it is being
divided up, conquered, and colonised.
To think of these stars that you see overhead at night,
these vast worlds which we can never reach.
I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that.
It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.
-Cecil Rhodes
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, is intent on creating a one-million-person colony on Mars. As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk also seems content to break anything that stands in his way—including potentially a Cold War era treaty that has kept humanity safe for over 50 years, the Outer Space Treaty (OST). Musk’s rejection of international governance could have lasting implications for life on earth, and could augur a new era of geopolitical conflict.
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik-1, ushering in the age of spacefaring as geopolitics.
Just a decade later the two sides of the Cold War joined the international community to ratify the main international treaty that still governs space today: The 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty. How were nations able to come together and create a regulatory framework for lands none of them had yet visited?
Fear likely helped.
The first thing to fear was being the loser in human expansion beyond Earth. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to go to space.
Less than a month after that, the US sent Alan Shephard to space. While the Soviets beat the US in many of the human space firsts, the Americans were close behind, catching up quickly, and no one could be certain who would win Kennedy’s newly-declared race to the moon.
Now largely forgotten by the public was the escalating threat of space-weaponization.
On July 9, 1962, the United States lit up the sky with a 1.4 megaton H-Bomb detonated 400 kilometers high as part of a project called “Starfish Prime.”
Radio transmissions and phone calls were disrupted, streetlights thousands of miles away in Hawaii flickered out, airplanes experienced electrical surges, and six satellites were damaged.
Now largely forgotten by the public was the escalating threat of space-weaponization.
On July 9, 1962, the United States lit up the sky with a 1.4 megaton H-Bomb detonated 400 kilometers high as part of a project called “Starfish Prime.”
Radio transmissions and phone calls were disrupted, streetlights thousands of miles away in Hawaii flickered out, airplanes experienced electrical surges, and six satellites were damaged.
The USSR conducted similar tests, which at one point knocked out parts of Kazakhstan’s electrical grid. None of this was forbidden by international law at the time.
So, just five years after the first satellite, the two most powerful nations on the planet find themselves in a terrifying new type of arms race that would’ve been unimaginable a generation earlier, and neither is certain who has the upper hand.
Faced with this fearful reality, leaders and diplomats did something that seems to be ever more difficult today: they cooperated.
Cooperation began with the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which ended high altitude nuclear testing.
The same year, the United Nations declared a set of principles for space, which would ultimately become the 1967 United Nations Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, otherwise known as the Outer Space Treaty or OST.
Along with three smaller treaties ratified during the next eight years, OST remains the rules of the road for space over 50 years later.
Put simply, the treaties require good behavior in space: no claims of sovereign territory, no weapons of mass destruction in space, and if you cause harm with a space object, you’re obligated to make the harmed party whole.
Many enthusiasts for space expansion believe the Outer Space Treaty has impeded humanity’s flourishing, by limiting the growth of a dynamic capitalist space-economy. In our conversations with them, they frequently hope for, or expect, these documents will be torn up. This is possible, but may imply more than you think.
There are differences between these systems, of course. Notably, Antarctic law bans resource exploitation, sea law regulates it, while the emerging consensus is that space law allows resource exploitation by anyone, provided they don’t claim sovereignty over the land where the extraction is occuring.
But, the throughline is that all are commons. In every instance after World War II, where technology opened up a vast new territory to humanity, we chose to stop land claims, and to prioritize peace, research, and environmental preservation. These different treaty systems don’t exist in isolation. A new precedent in what nations can do in the commons of space could impact what nations can do in the commons of Earth.
Undoing space law, then, could affect more than would be Martian homesteaders—it could alter the regulatory structure for roughly half of Earth’s surface.
International law doesn’t always have a lot of fans, and we won’t defend its every hypocrisy and failure. What we will say is that under the post-WWII system, our world has gotten richer, less colonial, and in a feat that would have surprised anyone in 1945, has never since Hiroshima and Nagasaki witnessed the use of nuclear weapons in warfare.
Boring? Maybe, but then your roof is boring until there’s a hole in it.
Our concern today is that SpaceX’s CEO, Elon Musk, has big plans for space - and those plans are not all consistent with the OST.
Musk, frequently listed as the world’s richest man, would like to see a one-million person, self-sustaining settlement on Mars in the next 30 years.
This part of the dream is not clearly in violation of international law. The OST denies sovereign territorial claims, but in theory, Musk’s settlers don’t need to do that to simply exist on the Martian surface.
Having a million human beings raise families in an international commons for generations without making any land claims might ultimately get a bit dicey, but in the short term it’s not clearly illegal. But what would clearly violate the OST, is the plan by Musk and fellow travelers to start a new nation in space.
Although Musk’s specific legal position isn’t always clear, a Terms of Service agreement for SpaceX’s Starlink Internet Service is not ambiguous: “For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.”
Whether you think this is a good or bad idea, what we can say confidently is that it is incorrect.
The law here is quite clear: Mars settlers are not allowed to form their own nation, which would represent a territorial claim. Moreover, when they arrive on Mars, they will be the responsibility of some Earthbound nation, not free actors. If a bunch of Americans, or Chinese people, or Indians try to set up a Martian claim, effectively they are taking land out of a commons considered to belong to all. This is neither legal nor likely to be geopolitically irrelevant.
Predicting the exact effect of rising tensions is difficult, but to understand the cause for concern, imagine the nation you find most geopolitically threatening announces today that it secretly built a 50-person Moon base.
What’s more, it insists that since the Outer Space Treaty is a worthless relic of a bygone age, it is free to claim thousands of square miles of the lunar surface as sovereign territory of its home state. Perhaps, having landed on the poles, it claims the tiny portion of the Moon that has both water ice and near-perpetual access to sunlight. If you picked America as the nation of concern, how would you expect China to react? Or vice versa.
And lest you think this is just a case of the SpaceX lawyers going rogue, Musk himself recently said that, “The Martians will decide how they are ruled. I recommend direct, rather than representative, democracy. Uncrewed Starships landing on Mars in ~2 years, perhaps with crewed versions passing near Mars, and crewed Starships heading there in ~4 years are all possible.”
Musk’s disdain for international law is no secret. Recently, in a Town Hall in Philadelphia, he said:
“I’m against globalist power. … I think the UN should not have a lot of power. It’s like, who voted for them? You know, I didn’t vote for them. We want power to the people. Maximum power to the individual.
We should not have any sort of international treaties that restrict the freedom of Americans, and we should minimize the amount of federal interference at the state level… Agencies at the federal and the national level should have minimal to zero power over you.”
What options do we have for forcing Musk to conform to international law?
If launching from the US, any rocket intended to launch Martian settlers would need to be approved by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). If the plan for a particular rocket launch includes “starting a new nation in space in violation of a long-standing international treaty,” then it would be the FAA’s job to keep that rocket grounded.
But—wait—we hear the chorus of space settlement advocates chanting “how are you going to stop us if we’re already on Mars?”
The plan here seems to be to lie about the intention of the mission, and then set up a new nation upon arrival at the Martian surface, presenting the governments of Earth a fait accompli. Here too though, the United States government retains immense power over the behavior of Martians.
For the foreseeable future, people living on Mars will be absolutely dependent on resupply ships sent from Earth. And many Martians will still have assets that could be seized on Earth. Even from an average of 140 million miles away, Earth has ways of encouraging compliance.
But will it?
When we began writing about this topic, Musk was merely a very rich man in charge of a breakthrough rocket technology. In the years since, he has accumulated political, and geopolitical, power.
In February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine for a second time, SpaceX provided the Ukrainian military with their Starlink Satellite Internet service. In response, Russian officials at the UN made thinly-veiled threats about blasting Starlink satellites out of the heavens.
Soon after, Starlink restricted use, stopping satellite-internet-enabled drone attacks on the Russian Navy. While we don’t think Musk gave the Starlink units to Ukraine with power in mind, his unique access to space technology gave him power over life and death situations in the middle of a hot war.
Musk’s geopolitical clout has only grown since. Citing concerns that bureaucracy would make getting humans to Mars impossible, Musk threw his considerable fortune and social media empire X behind Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
President Trump has since made his “First Buddy” head of the Department of Government Efficiency, established by Executive Order on Trump’s very first day in office. And, to Musk’s delight, during his inauguration speech, Mr. Trump namechecked the philosophy underpinning America's 19th century wars of conquest westward, saying,
“And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
Will a very Musk-friendly Trump administration be willing to put the brakes on Musk’s Martian ambitions? If not, will the international community respond? Their main option for a response would likely be sanctions, either on the US or on Mr. Musk’s overseas business interests. But given the size of the American economy, and of Mr. Musk's wallet, it’s unclear how successful this might be against a determined US administration.
So here we are. The OST, born in fear, designed in part to avoid 19th century style territorial scrambles remains in place. Partially this is because it has served the interests of Earth nations, and partially this is because technology has limited human expansion. Today, the technology is catching up with the space ambitions of the 1960s, and much of that is down to one company: SpaceX. Its leader seems adamant about starting a nation in space, and with his growing political power it’s not clear the United States will stop him.
Although we are skeptical of the idea of a million-person Mars city any time soon, we believe space expansion will eventually happen. And while the first Space Race was a peaceful contest to perform a specific mission, the rhetoric surrounding the Moon and Mars today often concerns territory and mineral access. A contest between nuclear powers is concerning; a turf battle between nuclear powers far more-so. And while traditionally, human spacefaring is mostly about national prestige, a scramble for territory might offer the victor something altogether new: a chance to rewrite the rules.
In his 1962 speech at Rice University, president Kennedy said of the then-new science of spacefaring his nation had entered into: “only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.” Thanks in no small part to Mr. Musk, the United States now has that pre-eminence.
If the world’s most powerful nation, helped along by history’s most powerful rocket company, were to scrap international space law, it would have consequences that may echo for centuries.
Kelly Weinersmith
Dr. Kelly Weinersmith is an adjunct faculty member in the BioSciences Department at Rice University. Her research has been featured in The Atlantic, National Geographic, BBC World, Science, Nature, and... Read More
Zach Weinersmith
Zach Weinersmith is the cartoonist of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. He also writes popular science books with his wife Kelly,... Read More
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