New technologies
Built for Earth, or Built for Something Bigger?
The tools a colony needs are being perfected right now, by people who say they are building them for us
Here is something I have been noticing for about ten years, and I want to put it down before somebody else does.
The technologies you would need to live off this planet are getting built. Not in a lab somewhere, not on a NASA schedule, but in the ordinary economy, sold to ordinary people, for reasons that have nothing to do with space. And the odd thing is how much of it comes from the same handful of companies, and how often those companies are run by a man who has said out loud, for twenty years, that the point is Mars.
So I want to ask a question I cannot answer. Are these things being built for Earth? Or are they being built for something bigger, and Earth is where the bills get paid?
Start with the truck
Nobody drives a gasoline engine on Mars. There is no air to burn it in and no gasoline to burn. That is not a policy, it is chemistry. Any vehicle that ever moves on another world is going to be electric, with a battery, running a brushless motor, charged off a solar panel or a reactor.
Twenty years ago that drivetrain was a golf cart. Today it is the best-selling car in a dozen countries, and the reason it is so good is that a hundred thousand engineers spent a generation making it cheap, tough, and long-lived for commuters. The motors, the battery chemistry, the power electronics, the regenerative braking, the software that manages the whole thing so it does not catch fire. All of that is exactly what a rover needs, and none of it was developed for a rover.
I do not think that is an accident. I think it is the cleanest example of the pattern, which is why I am starting with it. But it is not the only one.
The list
Here is what I would put on it, and I am sure the reader can add to it.
Batteries and grid storage. A colony runs on stored power, because the sun goes down and the dust storms come. The battery packs now being bolted to power grids to smooth out wind and solar are, to within a rounding error, the power plant of a base.
Solar panels. The cost of a watt of solar has fallen by something like ninety percent in my working life. That did not happen because of space. It happened because of rooftops. But there is no oil on the moon, and there is no coal in the belt, and sunlight is the one thing out there that is free.
Printing. I have written two articles on this and will not repeat them. Metal printing is in production for aircraft and medical parts, and there has been a printer on the space station for years.1 It is the supply chain for anywhere you cannot ship a spare.
Robots that see. Every warehouse in the country is being filled with machines that pick things up, move them, and put them down, using cameras and software rather than a track on the floor. Every one of those is a prototype for the miner I described in the robotics piece. The lunar version needs radiation-hard electronics and a different lubricant, and that is all it needs.
Self-driving. A vehicle that can find its own way across ground it has never seen, with nobody at the wheel, is the difference between a rover you drive from Earth with a twenty-minute delay and one that just goes. It is being perfected on city streets, for taxis.
Water. The desalination plants and closed-loop water recycling being built for dry cities are the life support system of a habitat. The station already drinks its own recycled water. The rest of the world is catching up because it has to.
Growing food indoors. LED grow lights tuned to the wavelengths a plant actually uses, and stacked vertical farms in warehouses, were developed to sell lettuce in cities. They are also the only way anybody is going to eat on Mars.
Satellite networks. Thousands of small satellites talking to each other by laser, put up to sell internet to rural customers, are the exact architecture of the positioning and communications system I have argued is the first thing you do when you arrive at a planet.
Reusable rockets. The one item on this list that is openly about space. But even this one is being paid for by satellites and government contracts, not by colonies.
The man at the front of it
I am going to name him, because pretending not to would be silly. Elon Musk started SpaceX in 2002 and the company still says, on its own website, that the ultimate goal is enabling people to live on other planets.2 He also runs the electric car company, the battery and solar business, the satellite network, the tunneling company, and the humanoid robot program.
Look at that list next to the one above it. It is nearly the same list.
Now, I do not know his mind and I am not going to pretend to. Maybe every one of those businesses exists because it makes money on Earth, and the overlap with a Mars colony is a coincidence he noticed after the fact. Maybe he built the car company to fund the rocket company and everything since has been the same move repeated. Maybe it is both, and there is no clean line between building for here and building for there.
What I can say is this. Whether or not he intends it, the effect is the same. The parts of a colony are being manufactured at scale, tested by millions of customers, and driven down in price, and none of that would be happening if the only customer were a space agency.
Why this matters to a magazine like this one
When I started Star Bound in 1993, the argument for private enterprise in space was an argument. You had to make it. I made it to Buzz Aldrin's face in 1996 and he agreed with me, and it still felt like a minority position, because the only things that had ever gone to space had gone there on a government check.
It is not an argument anymore. It is a description of what is happening. The rockets are private. The landers NASA is waiting on are private. And underneath all of that, the boring stuff — the motors, the batteries, the panels, the printers, the software — is coming out of the consumer economy, where nobody has to be convinced that space is worth it, because they are just buying a car.
That is a bigger shift than any single rocket, and I do not think it gets talked about enough.
So which is it?
Built for Earth, or built for something bigger?
I do not know, and I have decided that I do not need to. If the tools get built and the price comes down and a generation of engineers learns how to make them reliable, it does not much matter what was in anybody's heart when they signed the checks. The colony gets its parts either way.
But I will tell you what I think, since this is my magazine. I think it is both, and I think that has always been how the big things get done. You build what pays today, with one eye on what you actually want, and you do not always say the second part out loud.
That was the whole idea behind a magazine, thirty years ago. Build the subscriber base first. Then build the rest.
From one explorer to another, we appreciate you reading this far. We are excited about what this endeavor brings, and we would like you along for the rest of it.
Come join us. Because we are Star Bound.
John LangEditor
Ideas in Star Bound are published open — take them, build them better. Our open proposal.
A note on where this comes from. I am not a metallurgist, a spacecraft engineer, or a degreed engineer of any kind. But I am a practical one, with more than forty years in heavy industrial construction: welding, millwright work, hydraulics, mining, and thirty-three years of electrical construction and commissioning on the North Slope of Alaska, in a place that punishes anything built wrong. Much of that time I have worked as a field engineer, which means I am the one standing in front of the equipment when the drawing turns out to be wrong, and the fix has to be made on the spot, with what is on hand, and has to work the first time. Anyone who has done that long enough learns that a lot of engineering gets corrected in the field by people with more experience than the people who drew it. That is the eye I bring to these subjects: not what should work on paper, but what actually gets built, and what breaks. The facts I take from other people are footnoted so you can check them and read further. The ideas built on top of those facts are my own, and I would rather see them knocked down by somebody who knows better than left standing because nobody looked.
Sources
- AMFG, 3D Printing in Space: A Guide to Lunar and Orbital Additive Manufacturing; Airbus, The world's first metal 3D printer for space is on its way to the ISS. ↩
- SpaceX, Starship's Twelfth Flight Test — the company's standing description of itself: founded in 2002, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets. ↩
The cost decline of solar power, the state of electric drivetrains, warehouse robotics, and indoor farming are described here from general knowledge and are not footnoted; each is easy to check and none is controversial. The claim about Mr. Musk's intentions is a question, and I have tried to keep it one.
More from Star Bound
- Top of the Loop, Bottom of the LoopThe two animals nobody budgets for, and what happened the last time we forgot them
- Light Is the ThrottleWhat a mine in Idaho and a garden in Alaska taught us about growing things fast — and what continuous daylight does to a plant that never gets to sleep
- Commission It FirstWe have already run phase one. It cost one man 150 million dollars of his own money, and it very nearly killed the people inside.
- Life in the BarrelO’Neill gave us the barrel in 1976 and got very little of it wrong. What he did not finish was the inside — and the standard the inside has to meet isn’t twenty years. It’s forever.
- Worms: The Backbone of CivilizationWhy the first Martians will need a bucket of worms more than another rocket
- Send the Robots FirstWhy the road to Mars runs through the moon, and why the first lunar miners will never leave Earth
- Wet the Ground and WaitA passive water generator for the desert, and why we should build one before we need one on Mars
- Send the Refinery, Not the OreWhy the belt gets mined by factory ships, and why that is the one job we cannot run from a chair
- Grind the Asteroid, Print the PartWhy there will never be a steel mill in space, and what replaces it
- Powder or WireThe two ways to print metal, why neither one is ready for the Belt, and the questions somebody has to answer first
- Bones Don't Travel WellThe one problem no rocket solves, and why Gerard O'Neill worked out the answer in 1976
- Blow the Rock Like GlassMy father's answer to how you build something big enough to spin, and the man who worked it out in 1963
- Mission Watch: September 2026What private enterprise and the agencies actually did this summer, in the order that matters
- The Question I Asked Buzz AldrinIn 1996 I asked the second man on the Moon what part private enterprise would play in space. Thirty years later, the answer is checkable
- A Thousand GaragesBefore there is a printer in space, there has to be a shipyard on the ground, and the shipyard does not have to be in one place
- Sixteen Inches of SteelThe number that breaks the mile-wide barrel, four ways around it, the one we would bet on, and a file you can print tonight
- Launch the Parts, Not the ShipYou cannot launch a habitat big enough to spin. So you launch a shipyard, and you let the robots build it.
- Fish, Salt, or DirtThree ways to feed a habitat, what each one costs you, what each one can't survive, and a question for the reader.
- Thirty Thousand Volts and a Piece of Tin FoilI drove an hour and a half to call a man a liar. He turned on a computer monitor instead, and I have been thinking about it for twenty years.
- A Message in a Bottle, Thrown HardEvery article in this magazine is about how to build something. This one is about how to pay for it.
- The Box Nobody TestedIn 1991 eight people were sealed inside three acres of glass to prove a closed world could keep them alive. It nearly didn't, and the reason was sitting in the walls the whole time.
- Out the Side of the MountainTwenty miles of vacuum tube under a Hawaiian volcano, and a freight train that never comes back down. What a ground-based mass driver would actually take, and why it exits the flank instead of the summit.
- That’s Not a Rocket, It’s a Freight TrainHow I wired the one on my bench in 1994, the one I drew and never built, and why a mass driver runs on railroad logic, not rocket logic.
- Cold, Vacuum, and a Hundred Thousand JointsWhat geosynchronous orbit does to the ten-inch panels in "A Thousand Garages," starting with the question every steel man asks first — and one thing that article got wrong.
- One Press or Ten ThousandElon Musk casts a car underbody in one shot with a machine the size of a house. We proposed ten thousand garages. It turns out we may both be right, on different walls — but nobody knows until somebody breaks fifty panels on purpose.
- Cast It or Print ItThree ways to make a hundred thousand habitat panels. What each one buys you, what each one costs you, and where each one belongs. The first entry in a department that exists to write both columns down.
- Powder or PlateThe garages stay. What's in them changes.
- Refuel It or Strip ItThe graveyard belt is the closest junkyard we've got.
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