The grin that Elon Musk wore during Donald Trump’s inaugural address widened further when the president pledged that Americans would “plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars”. Colonising the red planet en route to creating “a spacefaring civilisation” has long been one of Musk’s driving ambitions — and a prime motivation for his building SpaceX into the world’s most successful space company.
Trump is not the first president to proclaim an ambition to land astronauts on Mars but, with dedicated support from the world’s champion rocketeer and richest person, he has a better chance of success than his predecessors. Some might regard spending $1tn establishing a Martian base as hubristic waste when so much needs fixing on our own planet. The proposal, though, is more popular than many of Trump’s other enthusiasms. A YouGov poll in 2023 found 57 per cent of Americans supported sending astronauts to Mars, with only 19 per cent opposed.
Musk has become such a polarising character that his championing a Mars programme may also appear to his detractors a gigantic vanity project. Yet his record with Tesla and SpaceX has demonstrated an exceptional ability to achieve ambitious technological feats. Putting humans on another planet would be hugely inspiring for people not just in the US but worldwide. Remember the wave of enthusiasm for science and technology, particularly among the young, after the Apollo Moon landings.