Reducing the Cost to the Surface of Mars by 10,000x

The other day I was watching a clip of Elon Musk at SpaceX's headquarters in Boca Chica, Texas, talking about what it really means to go to Mars. It’s obvious that becoming a spacefaring civilization is important for humanity. The “why” is clear. But the “how” is a whole different beast. It turns out, going to Mars is insanely expensive—right now, we’re talking about something like a billion dollars per ton just to land stuff on the surface.

But what Elon says in that clip is actually a lot more profound. He has this moment where he goes, basically: To make this work economically, we need to get a million people to move to Mars. And to do that, we have to reduce the cost of getting stuff there by 10,000 times.

That’s a wild statement—but what’s so interesting is how deeply it reflects how Elon thinks about problems. He’s not just talking about rockets or spaceflight—he’s talking about incentives. What he sees is that there are plenty of people on Earth who would want to go to Mars and who could go—if the cost made sense. So the real challenge becomes: How do you make it cost-effective for a million people to go?

And the crazy part is, you can actually see them working on it in real time at SpaceX with Starship. The rocket is huge. But it needs to be. You can’t make Mars travel affordable with tiny spacecraft. Just like we don’t fly across the globe in little prop planes—we use big jets like the Boeing 737 because that’s the most cost-efficient way to do it at scale. In the same way, getting to Mars affordably will likely require rockets the size of Starship—or even bigger.

And here’s where Elon really stands out: he understands technology, but he also understands humans, markets, and incentives. He knows that if you can engineer a specific thing—a self-driving car, a massive reusable rocket—and if it solves a real economic problem, people will want it. That’s the core of how innovation works. And Elon’s one of the only people on Earth who can put together the capital, the engineering talent, and the sheer willpower to build those things.

Now, I don’t think we’re quite there yet. But I do think we’re closer than we’ve ever been. And what people don’t always realize is that if he actually pulls this off—if he brings the cost of getting to Mars, or even just to low Earth orbit, down by 10,000x or more—the ripple effects for humanity are exponential.

Because it's not just about Mars.

Once it's cheap to get to LEO, it becomes way more feasible to go further—into the outer solar system, to moons, asteroids, and maybe someday beyond. And by the time we have a city on Mars, we’ll probably have humans scattered across the solar system, exploring every place we can possibly reach.

So yeah, this post is about Elon, and SpaceX, and what I think he sees as the path forward. But more than anything, it’s about economics. It’s about picking wildly ambitious goals—and then figuring out how to make them make sense for other people. Because no matter how big the vision is, it only works if there’s demand. And Elon’s a master at creating that demand by making the vision real enough that people want in.