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\n The cosmos has long been a canvas for creatives who imagine a future where people live among the stars. Now, humanity stands at a pivotal juncture as the laborious, expensive and high-stakes process of attempting to convert such grand visions into reality is actually underway.\n <\/p>\n
\n In the Western world, perhaps no one has more influence over how this future may be realized than Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Two of the world\u2019s richest men, both of whom own commercial space companies, they have a combined net worth that tops $630 billion, a sum that is growing to rival the amount of money NASA has been allocated over its entire 66-year history.\n <\/p>\n
\n Musk and Bezos have different ideas of what humans\u2019 future in space should look like, and their visions are not mutually exclusive. But each presents its own challenges \u2014 technically, financially, politically and ethically.\n <\/p>\n
\n Musk has had perhaps the largest impact of any one person on space exploration in recent years, from both a cultural and technological standpoint. And he has long made known his singular focus on Mars, envisioning a day in which the red planet hosts a sprawling settlement of people.\n <\/p>\n
\n Meanwhile, Bezos, whose influence in the space industry has been somewhat tempered by his rocket company\u2019s slower pace<\/a>, has kept his focus a bit closer to home.\n <\/p>\n \n He has touted a vision of moving \u201cheavy industry and polluting industry off Earth\u201d \u2014 perhaps onto spinning spaceborne laboratories where colonies of humans live and work full time.\n <\/p>\n \n In Bezos\u2019 imagined future, Earth is reserved for living and vacationing, perhaps preserved indefinitely as a national park.<\/a>\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a crazy time to be alive; it\u2019s almost like somebody wrote this as a script,\u201d said Phil Metzger, a planetary physicist with the University of Central Florida. But, he added, living in space could be \u201cethically good for our civilization.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI think if we do it right, we could create a really bright future.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Phil Metzger, University of Central Florida\n <\/p>\n \n Creating in-space settlements, however, is not a moral imperative, argues Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist and associate professor at Australia\u2019s Flinders University. And the stories Musk and Bezos tell about our future may ring differently to people across different socioeconomic classes.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI would say there are probably more people concerned by the impacts of climate change on Earth right now than are looking forward to a future in space,\u201d Gorman added.\n <\/p>\n \n Musk and Bezos have billed their extraterrestrial pursuits as philanthropic, saying that off-Earth colonies are a form of life insurance that will guarantee humanity\u2019s survival if a natural or human-made catastrophe leaves our home planet uninhabitable.\n <\/p>\n \n But there are significant differences between their ideas of cosmic habitation.\n <\/p>\n \n Since founding SpaceX in 2002, Musk has said the company\u2019s guiding mission is to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars. That vision includes sending convoys of robots and then people to live within enclosed habitats, perhaps in Mars\u2019 Arcadia region<\/a>. There, water to sustain such a colony may be trapped less than a foot beneath the dusty red surface.\n <\/p>\n \n Eventually, Musk has said, he hopes to put Mars through a process called terraforming, in which humans make the red planet more Earth-like by pumping gases into the atmosphere to create warmer temperatures and a water cycle that mimics that of our home world.\n <\/p>\n \n Scientists, however, do not agree on whether terraforming is physically possible.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI think \u2018Total Recall\u2019 has the right idea,\u201d Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for NASA\u2019s Mars Exploration Program, previously said to CNN, referencing the 1990 movie in which an ancient extraterrestrial artifact is used to create breathable air on Mars.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cYou\u2019d need to use some alien technology,\u201d Meyer said.\n <\/p>\n \n Gorman said that she believes ecological environments on other worlds are worth protecting as they are \u2014 even if no life-forms exist there.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe surface of a planet or moon can preserve evidence of everything that happened. \u2026 We can reconstruct the history of the solar system from what we see on the surface,\u201d Gorman said.\n <\/p>\n \n Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000, does not believe humans need to pursue a settlement on another planet at all \u2014 even referring to such ideas as \u201cplanetary chauvinism<\/a>.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n His view aligns with ideas put forth by Gerard O\u2019Neill, the late physicist and Princeton University professor who posited that humans should aspire to live in gargantuan space stations that orbit close to home and spin to provide simulated gravity. O\u2019Neill\u2019s ideas were the subject of the 2021 documentary, \u201cHigh Frontier<\/a>.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Referred to as \u201cO\u2019Neill colonies,\u201d these structures would be miles wide and each hold up to 1 million people, said Bezos in 2019<\/a> during his most detailed presentation about his space ambitions to date. The Blue Origin founder was a student at Princeton in the 1980s when O\u2019Neill taught there.\n <\/p>\n \n Bezos has also said that future space colonies must be supported by resources such as frozen water that can be harvested from the moon. And Blue Origin is developing a lunar lander called Blue Moon that could aid such resource extraction.\n <\/p>\n \n He has expressed his preference for this approach over attempting Mars travel, noting in 2019 that the moon is \u201cthree days away, and you don\u2019t have constraints on launch that you have with Mars,\u201d which is best accessed only every two years when the planet better aligns with Earth during a \u201ctransfer window.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cYou can go to the moon just about any time you want,\u201d Bezos noted.\n <\/p>\n \n Metzger and Gorman said they favor Bezos\u2019 vision of our spacefaring future over Musk\u2019s.\n <\/p>\n \n It\u2019s wise for space-based civilizations to remain near Earth, they explained, because it would provide an easy pathway to resupply the settlements in their early days. And sticking close to home may pay untold dividends for inhabitants\u2019 mental health, Gorman said.\n <\/p>\n \n But if Musk is successful in establishing a Mars settlement, that will likely make it far easier to one day realize O\u2019Neill colonies as well. \u201cA rising tide will float all boats,\u201d Metzger said.\n <\/p>\n \n Neither Blue Origin nor SpaceX responded to email inquiries from CNN for this story.\n <\/p>\n \n Regardless of their differences, both Musk\u2019s and Bezos\u2019 visions are underpinned by a similar thesis: Humans will soon live and work in space, and the cosmos will one day become the main stage for the economy.\n <\/p>\n \n The billionaires, however, have made clear they\u2019re operating on vastly different timescales.\n <\/p>\n \n Bezos has admitted that the technology required to build and deploy an O\u2019Neill colony does not yet exist, and he has no intention of personally overseeing its construction.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cHow are we gonna build O\u2019Neil colonies? Nobody knows. I don\u2019t know. Nobody in this audience knows. That\u2019s for future generations to figure out,\u201d he said in 2019.\n <\/p>\n \n In the meantime, Blue Origin is focused largely on developing precursor technologies that are cost effective and could help spur innovation \u2014 but they don\u2019t necessarily accomplish new things.\n <\/p>\n \n Blue Origin\u2019s New Glenn rocket, for example, is the most technologically advanced offering the company has debuted. And it\u2019s mostly designed to compete with SpaceX\u2019s Falcon rockets by hauling satellites and other cargo to Earth\u2019s orbit at a fraction of the price of older technologies.\n <\/p>\n \n Musk, on the other hand, operates with a far greater sense of urgency.\n <\/p>\n \n SpaceX is currently battling the laws of physics as it attempts to hash out the design for Starship \u2014 the largest rocket system ever constructed. So far, the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) vehicle has launched on 10 suborbital test flights with varying degrees of success. (Pieces of the Starship have failed or exploded in flight during six of those test missions.)\n <\/p>\n \n But Musk is hoping Starship will be ready to enable the initial setup of a Martian colony within the next five years.\n <\/p>\n \n During a speech in May, Musk mapped out a basic plan<\/a> that begins with launching several cargo-carrying spacecraft to Mars late next year. Humans would follow just two years later in 2028, and convoys of hundreds of spacecraft would arrive in the years after, delivering \u201cabout a million tons\u201d of infrastructure.\n <\/p>\n \n However, the technological hurdles SpaceX must surmount to bring Starship to fruition are immense, noted Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut and SpaceX consultant who is a professor of astronautical engineering at the University of Southern California.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThey might just be butting up against some very intractable engineering problems,\u201d Reisman said. \u201cI think it could end up never working, or it could end up revolutionizing our entire future of activities in space.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Musk has long said Starship\u2019s sheer size and power could make brand-new types of missions possible, including carrying groups of humans to Mars and deploying massive new space telescopes.\n <\/p>\n \n The US government is proving to be a valuable ally to billionaires with extraterrestrial ambitions.\n <\/p>\n \n Faced with its own lofty goals and budget constraints, NASA has been increasingly encouraged<\/a> to partner with private-sector companies like Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin and Musk\u2019s SpaceX \u2014 particularly as hawkish lawmakers in DC have made clear that they view space exploration as a national priority amid a race with China for dominance in the field.\n <\/p>\n \n The fact that today Musk and Bezos are each pouring billions of private-sector dollars into creating new space technologies has introduced a new dynamic: Whereas NASA used to be the primary bankroller and goal-setter for such efforts, billionaire-led companies are now playing an equal if not greater hand in developing new technologies.\n <\/p>\n \n Nowhere is that more evident than in NASA\u2019s Artemis program, an effort to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972.\n <\/p>\n \n While NASA spent more than $40 billion developing its own spacecraft and rocket for a crewed moon-bound flight, the agency is turning to the private sector for help with almost every other aspect of the mission. Blue Origin<\/a> and SpaceX<\/a>, for example, have both received multibillion-dollar contracts to develop lunar landers, or vehicles that will ferry astronauts from their NASA-built spacecraft to the moon\u2019s surface.\n <\/p>\n \n For SpaceX, the lander in development is Starship \u2014 a stunning proposition considering that a fully operational Starship will theoretically be powerful enough to accomplish a crewed lunar landing mission all on its own. However, NASA intends to have Starship work alongside the space agency\u2019s own SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, at least initially.\n <\/p>\n \n NASA awarded Starship a $3 billion contract to conduct the first crewed Artemis landing, slated for as soon as mid-2027.\n <\/p>\n \n The deal highlights how NASA has begun shaping its own programs around what the private sector has to offer, rather than the other way around.\n <\/p>\n \n And that\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing, Metzger said. If SpaceX\u2019s rocket that is purpose-built for Mars also helps NASA achieve its goals of beating China to the moon, \u201cNASA should get whatever synergy they can from that.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n But there\u2019s no denying that this emerging dynamic gives billionaires and their space companies unprecedented power that could play out in exciting \u2014 and perhaps dangerous \u2014 ways.\n <\/p>\n \n If the visions put forward by Bezos and Musk are realized, they\u2019re likely to be accompanied by an economic upheaval unlike anything humanity has previously experienced.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt will likely only take 20 to 40 years before industry in space will dwarf the industry on the Earth,\u201d with the in-space economy doubling every two years, Metzger said. \u201cThat\u2019s actually plausible.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n That means the private-sector architects of our future in space stand to make so much money that it could forever tip the balance of power on and off Earth, Metzger warns.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThen all power is held by those who own the capital,\u201d Metzger said, referring to a possible future in which the economy does not require skilled laborers. Those with the financial means could instead be able to leverage robotics and artificial intelligence to scale up their wealth indefinitely.\n <\/p>\n \n And the precursors for that reality may already be in motion, Metzger noted. Companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX can use the fortunes of their billionaire founders to make technological leaps for which there may never be a large field of competitors.\n <\/p>\n \n That\u2019s why, according to Metzger, policy leaders should be thinking about how to prevent dramatic wealth aggregation. In his interview with CNN, Metzger said those measures could include the government stepping in to dilute space corporations\u2019 equity or creating some sort of universal basic income.\n <\/p>\n \n He said The Hawking Center<\/a> at the University of Central Florida, of which Metzger is the director, is also currently exploring ways to ensure that more people across the world can reap the financial benefits of such proposed futures in space.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIf you have a few people who have a billion times more wealth than everybody else combined, then they\u2019re going to be able to control politicians one way or another,\u201d Metzger said about a future in which no steps are taken to mitigate wealth aggregation among space barons. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to create a way to democratize ownership and space industry during these next 40 years, or it\u2019s too late.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Gorman agreed with Metzger\u2019s assessment, noting that science fiction writers \u2014 including known Musk favorite Isaac Asimov \u2014 have been warning for generations about the power disparities that spacefaring civilizations may incubate.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cA few individuals are already controlling so much of the planet\u2019s wealth,\u201d Gorman said. \u201cI think that is a concern.\u201d\n <\/p>\n Environmental and technical risks<\/p>\n \n Plenty of other challenges and ethical quandaries will arise in the meantime.\n <\/p>\n \n One imminent question is environmental.\n <\/p>\n \n Musk has said<\/a> that he hopes SpaceX will one day be launching its Starship megarocket as many as 10 to 24 times per day \u2014 or once an hour. That would mark an enormous leap in launch activity.\n <\/p>\n \n Currently, the global rocket industry, led by SpaceX, has a combined total of about five launches per week. Dramatically scaling up the number of spaceflights would take its toll on Earth\u2019s environment.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe issue is depositing heat in the stratosphere (during rocket launches), because the heat drives chemical reactions, which create a greenhouse gas,\u201d Metzger said.\n <\/p>\n \n About 1,000 metric tons of black carbon are injected into the atmosphere annually by rocket launches, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates. The agency\u2019s 2022 research<\/a> found that \u201ca 10-fold increase in hydrocarbon fueled launches, which is plausible within the next two decades based on recent trends in space traffic growth, would damage the ozone layer, and change atmospheric circulation patterns.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n (SpaceX\u2019s Falcon and Starship rockets as well as Blue Origin\u2019s New Glenn use hydrocarbon fuels.)\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWill the governments of the world allow the entire global budget of launching through the atmosphere to be used up by one country and by one company?\u201d Metzger asked, referring to a theoretical limit that might need to be placed on the number of launches to avoid environmental catastrophe. \u201cThat\u2019s a big unknown.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n But on the flip side, it is possible that a spacefaring future could bolster Earth\u2019s environmental resilience \u2014 particularly if Bezos\u2019 vision of moving heavily polluting industries into space is realized.\n <\/p>\n \n Bezos has said he believes that humanity\u2019s ever-growing consumption of energy will eventually drain our home planet\u2019s finite resources.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe good news is that if we move out into the solar system, for all practical purposes, we have unlimited resources,\u201d Bezos said in 2019<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n Another billionaire, former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, who recently purchased his own rocket company, has been quietly propping up the idea that data centers should be moved off Earth<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cPeople are planning 10 gigawatt data centers,\u201d Schmidt said during a congressional hearing<\/a> in April, calling energy demands a looming crisis. \u201cThese things are industrial at a scale that I have never seen in my life.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Gorman, however, said she is not swayed by claims of environmental stewardship, pointing to the irony of altering Mars\u2019 atmosphere to better suit humans. \u201cIf you\u2019ve got any concern for saving or preserving the environment of Earth, why would you think Mars is expendable?\u201d she wondered.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI think it\u2019s kind of disingenuous,\u201d she added, noting that she does not believe backup civilizations or mining resources from space would be necessary to solve our Earth-based environmental woes.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIf we had technologies that would enable people to live in these incredibly tough and challenging environments (in space),\u201d Gorman said, \u201cthen we have the technology to more efficiently use resources on Earth and make sure we\u2019re not completely destroying the environment.\u201d\n <\/p>\n All the risks and rewards<\/p>\n \n If humanity were to survive Earth\u2019s destruction, morphing into a species that survives entirely outside the environment in which it evolved, the challenges would grow increasingly existential.\n <\/p>\n \n Whether you were in an orbiting laboratory near Earth or within a Martian habitat, any tiny flaw in the life-sustaining infrastructure could spell disaster. Humans could be easily killed by radiation exposure<\/a>, and the lack of atmospheric pressure on Mars or in orbit would cause a person\u2019s blood to boil if they were exposed.\n <\/p>\n \n And then there is the issue of procreation.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIs Mars gravity enough for human gestation or birth, for child rearing? That\u2019s an open problem,\u201d Metzger said.\n <\/p>\n \n Even attempting to research whether a child could survive such conditions presents an ethical quandary.\n <\/p>\n \n Musk and Bezos have admitted that a future in which humans live safely in permanent extraterrestrial habitats is not easy or guaranteed.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cEarth is the best planet, and it is not close,\u201d Bezos said in 2019, quoting the late NASA astronaut Jim Lovell<\/a> by saying that space exploration makes one realize that \u201cyou go to heaven when you\u2019re born\u201d \u2014 not when you die.\n <\/p>\n \n Musk has also admitted that living on Mars would be exceedingly dangerous, especially in the early days of colonization: \u201cIt\u2019s not for the faint of heart. Good chance you\u2019ll die, and it\u2019s going to be tough going. \u2026 It\u2019d better be pretty glorious if it works out.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n But Musk also suggests that the act of pursuing a spacefaring future, despite the perils, can serve as a sort of balm for existential dread.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cLife cannot just be about solving one tragic problem after another,\u201d Musk said during a SpaceX broadcast of a Starship test flight launch attempt on August 25. \u201cThere must also be reasons to get up and want to be excited about the future. And a future where we are a space-faring civilization is infinitely more exciting than one where we are not.\u201d\n <\/p>\n![\"Blue](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/sipausa-58826092-20250903201808742.jpg\")
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