2021.05.06 埃隆-马斯克要做这个火星的事情

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SCIENCE
ELON MUSK IS MAYBE, ACTUALLY, STRANGELY, GOING TO DO THIS MARS THING
From his private Cape Canaveral, the billionaire is manifesting his own interplanetary reality—whatever the cost.

By Marina Koren
MAY 6, 2021
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Updated at 12:41 p.m. ET on May 10, 2021.

The little havanese likes to sit in a window of the one-story house, looking out onto the quiet street in Boca Chica, Texas. From its perch, it can watch neighbors passing by, glossy black grackles pecking in the grass, and palm trees swaying in the breeze. The dog’s presence is usually a sign that its owner, Elon Musk, is in town. That, and the Tesla parked in the driveway.



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There are other, more conspicuous signs that Musk has gotten comfortable in this remote part of South Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border. The hulking manufacturing tents just down the road. The steel strewn on the ground. The mechanical hum of machinery as workers in hard hats assemble spaceship after spaceship.

Musk has built a shipyard here. This is the staging area for SpaceX’s founding dream, the reason Musk got into the rocket business: to put human beings on Mars, not to drop a flag and go home, but to stay and survive. That Mars might be a terrible place to live is irrelevant. Musk believes that humankind should exist on more than one planet, and that we should start soon.

Musk intends to make a leap in that direction with Starship, a reusable spaceship-and-rocket system that he hopes will redefine travel—first by jetting from continent to continent, then from Earth to the moon, and finally from Earth to Mars. At a glance, this plan sounds like the kind of idealistic dream you’d expect from a wealthy entrepreneur who is often compared, without irony, to a comic-book hero. Or maybe, depending on your view of Musk, a self-aggrandizing fantasy from one of the most trollish, publicly chaotic figures of our time. But the fantasy is swiftly crystallizing into a feasible reality. The South Texas shipyard is churning at all hours. A Starship prototype finally stuck its landing last night (without bursting into flames minutes later). And the world’s top space agency believes in the effort too.


NASA has given SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop a version of Starship to land American astronauts on the surface of the moon for the first time since the Apollo program. Jeff Bezos’s rocket company, Blue Origin, which partnered with a few longtime NASA contractors to bid on the same job, has formally challenged NASA over its decision to choose a single contractor. The agency has put the contract on hold for the time being, but it appears that the next visitors to the moon—including, NASA has promised, the first woman and person of color—could be flying SpaceX.

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America has now tied one of its biggest space dreams to SpaceX, which means the country has tied it to Elon Musk, the company’s CEO and chief engineer. To build Starship, the billionaire has overhauled Boca Chica into his private Cape Canaveral, and has started referring to the area as “Starbase.” He has mocked Bezos and other competitors; he has chafed at federal oversight. He has also made Boca Chica the one place on Earth where the dream of getting to Mars feels most real. The Starship work that SpaceX is doing now, if it pans out, will be the company’s most impressive achievement. More impressive than landing rocket boosters upright on a ship in the ocean. More impressive than enveloping the planet in a bubble of hundreds of internet satellites. More impressive than launching astronauts to the International Space Station, and bringing them home safely.

Musk now says that Starship could land people on the moon in 2024, and take them to Mars within the decade. He is famous for his aspirational, and usually unrealistic, timelines. But the Starship project could bring humankind closer than it has been in 50 years to reaching another world again. If the idea of SpaceX sending people to the moon, let alone Mars, seemed like an abstraction a decade ago, then a decade from now, it might seem like a given.

Twenty years ago, if people were familiar with Elon Musk, they knew him as the nerdy powerhouse behind a couple of internet companies—Zip2, a software company that was eventually folded into the AltaVista search engine, and X.com, an online bank that eventually merged with PayPal. In 2002, after the entrepreneur from South Africa had sold off one business and left the other, a friend asked what he wanted to do next. Space exploration, Musk said—he’d always been interested in that. Born in 1971, the year of the third moon landing, Musk assumed that NASA had a plan to reach Mars, and soon. When he went searching for a schedule on NASA’s website, he told Wired in 2012, he found that the agency had no plans, nor a big enough budget for an Apollo-style rush to reach the red planet. “At first I thought, jeez, maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place! Why was there no plan, no schedule?” Musk said in the interview. “There was nothing.”

There had been a moment, after the moon landings, when the rest of the solar system had suddenly felt within reach, Mars especially. Even some of the Apollo astronauts had thought so, and had held out hope for a Mars mission. Instead, they became the last people to travel beyond low-Earth orbit. In the decades that followed, a wonderful assortment of space probes ventured into the solar system, to Mars and Saturn and Pluto, but human beings remained close to home, flying shuttles and building space stations.

Musk decided that he would rally some support for a Mars shot; perhaps a small greenhouse on the red planet’s surface—a beautiful juxtaposition of terrestrial life and an alien world—would capture the public’s attention. But when he looked into rocket launches, he was surprised by their steep price tags. Surely someone had figured out how to make space travel cheaper by now?

Read: The world’s richest men are brawling over the moon

Within a decade, SpaceX successfully launched a rocket into orbit, in 2008. By 2016, it had landed a 14-story rocket booster back on Earth in one piece—on the ground, and on a ship at sea—a triumph in an industry used to discarding expensive rocket bits in the ocean. SpaceX had sacrificed about a dozen boosters in this quest; there were big explosions, small explosions, mid-air explosions, made-it-to-the-barge-but-then-the-landing-legs-crumpled explosions. (The company eventually compiled the attempts all into a blooper reel.) A couple of Falcon 9 rockets carrying expensive payloads also exploded, but those failures feel distant now, and these days, the company’s mood is buoyant. To longtime SpaceX workers, the manic Muskian approach always pays off. “It went from, Holy crap, how are we going to do this? to what I would consider a quiet professional confidence,” a former SpaceX employee who worked on the company’s human-spaceflight efforts, and who requested anonymity in order to maintain future business ties with the company, told me. The Starship team’s confidence, the former employee said, is likely “sky high.”

Today, SpaceX regularly flies astronauts into orbit on a transportation system it designed from start to finish, and is the only private company to have earned that responsibility. But the Dragon capsule doing that work is a cozy, gumdrop-shaped container, not a giant spaceship, and can carry seven people at a time, not the 100 passengers Musk imagines boarding Starship someday. If successful, Starship would be unlike any other space vehicle in history, especially on its return to Earth. America’s now-retired fleet of space shuttles landed on runways like planes, Russian Soyuz capsules parachute down to the desert, and SpaceX’s Dragon capsules splash down in open water, but Musk envisions Starship landing vertically, as upright as it stood before liftoff. It is an enormous technical challenge.

Since December, workers at the Boca Chica shipyard have constructed several Starship prototypes—stocky, 150-foot-tall towers of stainless steel with fins—hauled them to a launchpad on a nearby beach on the Gulf of Mexico, and watched them launch. None of them survived until last night—the fifth attempt—when the prototype nailed the intricate maneuver it was designed to do: The spacecraft rose more than 30,000 feet into the sky, quieting its engines as it went, then flipped onto its belly and fell down, down, down, before firing up again and righting itself for a gentle landing, like a falling cat twisting around at the last minute to find its feet.

The string of fiery flights might have made it seem as if SpaceX was struggling, or unsure. But the opposite is true. SpaceX engineers jokingly call explosions RUDs, for “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” and the names of Starship prototypes start with SN, for “serial number,” a signifier that the product is not precious, but a good production line is. When one prototype is destroyed, another promptly takes its place. In the company’s early years, all those explosions might have given it pause, but now barely any SpaceX doubters are left in the industry.

Read: Why SpaceX wants a tiny Texas neighborhood so badly

Musk moved from California, where SpaceX is headquartered, to Texas last year. He appears in Boca Chica often, along with his children and his dog. SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment on this story, and hasn’t replied to other inquiries from The Atlantic in more than a year. The company has had little imperative to be forthcoming about Starship development, and it doesn’t have the same obligations to the public or the press as NASA does. Musk has also been impatient with the Federal Aviation Administration, which handles licenses for space launches and dispatches safety inspectors to Boca Chica, and has accused the agency of slowing SpaceX down. The new moon contract—a high-profile, taxpayer-funded assignment—might force a shade more transparency. SpaceX does broadcast Boca Chica’s test launches, but the best views of Starship work come from a small community that has formed to monitor the company’s efforts. Most days, anyone can drive past the secluded Starship site and take pictures, though security guards might ask you to move along if you get too close.

One of the most well-known chroniclers, Mary McConnaughey, who goes by BocaChicaGal online, has been following SpaceX’s operations since the company arrived in 2014. She lives within sight of the house where the Havanese likes to perch. McConnaughey and her neighbors in Boca Chica Village never imagined that someone might try to build a spaceship in their little coastal paradise. When I visited the village in the fall of 2019, SpaceX was trying to buy the residents’ homes. Some residents sold and left, but others remained, refusing the price SpaceX had offered them. Although Musk once indicated that SpaceX’s job would be easier if they would leave, the company appears to have stopped pursuing their properties for now. On test days, the residents are used to receiving warning notices and going somewhere else. One resident, Celia Garcia-Johnson, who wanted to avoid traveling far from home during the coronavirus pandemic, spends launch days with her dog in an Airstream parked a few miles from the village, courtesy of SpaceX.

The village is now an expanding space town. There are more Airstreams, for spaceship workers who stay overnight, and a restaurant called Prancing Pony. (In J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, an inn of the same name provisioned travelers before they embarked on a long journey.) Boca Chica “will grow by several thousand people over the next year or two,” Musk said in March, filling up with engineers, technicians, and support personnel “of all kinds.” In April, SpaceX threw a block party in the village, with a live band, and invited everyone, employees and remaining homeowners alike. Garcia-Johnson told me she enjoyed socializing with the SpaceX employees, some of whom live in the village themselves. But she can’t shake her uneasy feelings about the future of Boca Chica. Garcia-Johnson has owned her home here for nearly 30 years. “Scripture says ‘love thy neighbor,’ and if SpaceX is my neighbor, I guess I have to love SpaceX,” she told me.


If Boca Chica becomes a 21st-century spaceport, the last stop on Earth before Mars, it is difficult to imagine SpaceX tolerating straggling residents. Musk recently said that he would donate $20 million to schools in Cameron County, where Boca Chica is located, and $10 million to Brownsville, the nearest city, for “downtown revitalization.” Some of the homeowners here have feared that county officials, who are thrilled about SpaceX’s presence, could take over their properties through eminent domain. Using that power to make way for a private spaceport—rather than, say, a highway or a stadium—would be unusual, but not a surprise. SpaceX has launched hundreds of little satellites into Earth’s orbit without much input from the rest of Earth’s inhabitants. Musk has rarely faced insurmountable resistance in his attempts to shape the world around him, and this world could be just the beginning.

The first city on mars, according to musk, will be made of pressurized glass domes. No breathable air on the red planet, after all. After that, Musk has said, we’ll terraform Mars to make the planet resemble Earth. Musk is, obviously, mostly focused on the getting-there part, and his living-there plan sometimes seems almost cavalier. In a 2019 interview with Popular Mechanics, he called life on Mars “quite manageable.” “But the planning that will have gone into knowing what you’re going to do when you get there—for food, for water, for fuel,” the journalist interviewing him said, apparently giving Musk some room to address potential challenges. “Once you get there,” Musk replied, “that stuff is relatively straightforward.” Other times, he is more direct about the scale of the effort and the risks it entails. “It’s an arduous and dangerous journey where you may not come back alive, but it’s a glorious adventure,” Musk said at a recent speaking event.


Musk can get away with talking like this not just because he is the second-richest person in the world, but because he has made himself into a figure who can make outlandish plans sound plausible—who has already made outlandish plans possible. He can talk forever about the importance of turning humankind into a multiplanetary species, of bringing Earth’s plants and wildlife with us to Mars if or when some doomsday event wipes us out on this planet. The people who run NASA can’t inspire us—or scare us—like that. They certainly want to build a base on the moon, and someday plant an American flag on Mars. But they can invoke only the usual ideas, of American exceptionalism and spirit, that have underpinned the country’s space effort since its beginnings, and hold up the wonder of space travel as proof that “we can meet any challenge” on Earth, as President Joe Biden said recently. NASA can’t replicate Musk’s attitude to hardware, either. “We’re definitely going to build a lot of rockets, and probably smash a lot of them,” Musk said in a recent press conference.

And yet, the brash billionaire and the storied space agency have now linked their futures to each other. The first moon missions of the 21st century are bound to be repeats of the Apollo landings, only with much better footage from the surface. With SpaceX, Musk has brought the country back to the intoxicating moment that followed Neil Armstrong’s small step, when the air seemed to buzz with the possibility of more steps on other alien surfaces. This is the same Elon Musk who launched a Tesla into space, tweets about putting Dogecoin on the moon, and shares NSFW memes; who spread misinformation about the pandemic; whose posts have led to lawsuits on more than one occasion; and who is hosting Saturday Night Live this weekend, alongside the musical guest Miley Cyrus. At this point, Iron Man taking NASA astronauts to the moon would sound more believable. Until you remember that Musk really has made it this far.


Read: America’s new vision of astronauts

“NASA still does fantastic work, but when it comes to really changing the space sector as a whole, SpaceX is the one that people think of the most,” Laura Forczyk, a space analyst and the author of Rise of the Space Age Millennials, told me. Her book’s Millennial subjects pointed to SpaceX’s achievements as their source of inspiration, and she’s working on a new edition featuring interviews with members of the younger Generation Z, who say the same.

A triumphant return to the moon, or a historic voyage to Mars, is bound to captivate the public as the Apollo landings did. But it will not inspire America, or the world, in some magical, universal way. The majority of Americans believed that the Apollo program wasn’t worth the effort throughout the 1960s, with the exception of the awestruck reaction to Armstrong’s first moonwalk. Today, most Americans don’t believe going back to the moon should be a priority, and they’re not all that jazzed about astronauts setting off for Mars, either. The government can still push for the moon, regardless of public opinion, but unlike a private company like SpaceX, NASA at least has to explain where all that money is going and why. Meanwhile, a growing industry of private space tourism, with vehicles capable of flying more autonomously than ever before, is changing the profile of astronauts, and soon, perhaps, most people who go to space will not be highly trained pilots or scientists, but simply rich people. Already, a Japanese entrepreneur has purchased an entire Starship flight for as many as 12 passengers for a loop around the moon in 2024.


This future depends on Starship leaving the planet at all. The project still has a long way to go—more prototypes, more hours of tests and troubleshooting, a separate effort to engineer the behemoth rocket booster that will loft the spaceship into orbit and then return to Earth in the delicate sequence that SpaceX has nearly perfected with its other boosters. The South Texas shipyard will continue its sprawl along the coast, like a fast-growing invasive species. When Garcia-Johnson returned home after an explosive test in late March, she discovered a sign of the changing habitat—one of her windows had shattered from the force of the blast. SpaceX summoned a window company to repair it the next day, down the two-lane state highway that SpaceX fans call “the highway to Mars,” the only way into Boca Chica. Take this path all the way to Boca Chica, past the solar-panel farms and storage sheds, past the little street that used to be called Joanna Street until Musk renamed it Rocket Road, and you end up on the beach, with sky and sea stretching out before you. It’s a beautiful view on any day, and maybe, one day, it’ll be someone’s last look at Earth.

Marina Koren is a staff writer at The Atlantic.



科学
埃隆-马斯克也许，实际上，很奇怪，要做这个火星的事情。
从他的私人卡纳维拉尔角，这位亿万富翁正在体现他自己的星际现实--无论代价如何。

作者：Marina Koren
2021年5月6日
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更新于美国东部时间2021年5月10日下午12:41。

这只小哈瓦那犬喜欢坐在一层楼房的窗户上，看着德克萨斯州博卡奇卡安静的街道。从它的栖息地，它可以看到邻居们经过，光亮的黑色斑鸠在草地上啄食，棕榈树在微风中摇曳。这只狗的出现通常是它的主人埃隆-马斯克在城里的信号。还有停在车道上的特斯拉。



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什么是环境中的生物多样性损失？在这个地球日，我们要提请大家注意未来十年全球经济和地球面临的最大风险之一。现在观看。
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还有其他更明显的迹象表明，马斯克在南德克萨斯州靠近美墨边境的这个偏远地区已经变得很舒服。巨大的制造帐篷就在路边。散落在地上的钢铁。戴着硬帽的工人们在组装一艘又一艘飞船时发出的机械嗡嗡声。

马斯克在这里建造了一个船厂。这是SpaceX的创始梦想的集结地，也是马斯克进入火箭行业的原因：把人类送上火星，不是为了扔下旗子回家，而是为了留下来生存。火星可能是一个可怕的居住地，这无关紧要。马斯克认为，人类应该存在于不止一个星球上，而且我们应该尽快开始。

马斯克打算通过 "星际飞船 "在这个方向上实现飞跃。"星际飞船 "是一种可重复使用的飞船和火箭系统，他希望它能重新定义旅行--首先从大陆到大陆的喷射，然后从地球到月球，最后从地球到火星。乍听之下，这个计划就像你所期望的那种理想主义的梦想，来自于一个富裕的企业家，他经常被比作漫画书中的英雄，毫无讽刺意味。或者，根据你对马斯克的看法，这可能是我们这个时代最爱耍花招、公开混乱的人物之一的自我吹嘘的幻想。但是这个幻想正在迅速地变成一个可行的现实。南德克萨斯州的造船厂正在不分昼夜地忙碌着。一艘星际飞船原型昨晚终于着陆了（几分钟后没有爆炸起火）。世界顶级航天机构也相信这一努力。


NASA已经给了SpaceX一份29亿美元的合同，以开发一个版本的星际飞船，让美国宇航员在月球表面着陆，这是自阿波罗计划以来的第一次。杰夫-贝索斯的火箭公司 "蓝色起源 "与美国宇航局的几个长期承包商合作竞标同一工作，并就美国宇航局选择单一承包商的决定正式提出质疑。该机构暂时搁置了合同，但似乎下一个登月的访客--包括NASA承诺的第一位女性和有色人种--可能会乘坐SpaceX。

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美国现在已将其最大的太空梦想之一与SpaceX公司捆绑在一起，这意味着该国已将其与该公司的首席执行官和首席工程师埃隆-马斯克捆绑在一起。为了建造星际飞船，这位亿万富翁将博卡奇卡检修成他的私人卡纳维拉尔角，并开始将该地区称为 "Starbase"。他嘲笑贝索斯和其他竞争对手；他对联邦监督感到不满。他还使博卡奇卡成为地球上让人感觉前往火星的梦想最真实的地方。SpaceX现在正在进行的 "星际飞船 "工作，如果能成功，将是该公司最令人印象深刻的成就。比把火箭助推器直立地降落在海洋中的船只上更令人印象深刻。比将地球笼罩在数百个互联网卫星的气泡中更令人印象深刻。比把宇航员发射到国际空间站，并把他们安全送回家更令人印象深刻。

马斯克现在说，Starship可以在2024年让人们登陆月球，并在十年内将他们带到火星。他因其抱负而闻名，而且通常是不现实的时间表。但 "星际飞船 "项目可能使人类比50年来更接近于再次到达另一个世界。如果说十年前SpaceX将人们送上月球，更不用说火星的想法似乎是一个抽象的概念，那么十年后，它可能看起来是一个必然的想法。

20年前，如果人们熟悉埃隆-马斯克，他们知道他是几家互联网公司背后的书呆子--Zip2（一家软件公司，最终被并入AltaVista搜索引擎）和X.com（一家网上银行，最终与PayPal合并）的实力派。2002年，在这位来自南非的企业家卖掉一家公司并离开另一家公司后，一位朋友问他下一步想做什么。马斯克说，太空探索，他一直对这个感兴趣。马斯克出生于1971年，是第三次登月的那一年，他认为美国国家航空航天局有一个到达火星的计划，而且是很快。他在2012年告诉《连线》，当他在美国宇航局的网站上搜索时间表时，他发现该机构没有计划，也没有足够的预算来进行阿波罗式的急于到达红色星球。"起初我想，天啊，也许我只是找错了地方！为什么没有计划，没有时间表？为什么没有计划，没有时间表？" 马斯克在采访中说。"什么都没有。"

在登月之后，曾经有一段时间，太阳系的其他地方突然感觉触手可及，尤其是火星。甚至一些阿波罗飞船的宇航员也曾这样认为，并对火星任务抱有希望。相反，他们成了最后一个在低地球轨道以外旅行的人。在随后的几十年里，各种各样的太空探测器冒险进入太阳系，前往火星、土星和冥王星，但人类仍然离家很近，驾驶航天飞机和建造空间站。

马斯克决定，他将为拍摄火星争取一些支持；也许在红色星球的表面建立一个小型温室--陆地生命和外星世界的美丽并列--会吸引公众的注意力。但当他研究火箭发射时，他对其高昂的价格感到惊讶。当然，现在已经有人想出了如何让太空旅行变得更便宜的办法？

请看。世界上最富有的人正在为月球争论不休

在十年内，SpaceX在2008年成功发射了一枚火箭进入轨道。到2016年，它将一个14层楼高的火箭助推器完整地降落在地球上--在地面和海上的一艘船上--这是一个习惯于将昂贵的火箭碎片丢入海洋的行业的胜利。在这次探索中，SpaceX已经牺牲了大约12个助推器；有大爆炸、小爆炸、半空中爆炸、已到驳岸但又落地时腿部溃烂的爆炸。(该公司最终将所有的尝试编成了一个爆笑短片。）几枚携带昂贵有效载荷的猎鹰9号火箭也发生了爆炸，但这些失败现在感觉很遥远，而这些天，该公司的情绪很振奋。对SpaceX的长期员工来说，Muskian的狂热方式总是能得到回报。"它从，我的妈呀，我们要怎么做？"变成了我认为的一种安静的职业自信，"一位曾在该公司从事载人航天工作的前雇员告诉我，他要求匿名，以保持与该公司未来的业务联系。这位前雇员说，星际飞船团队的信心可能是 "天高云淡"。

今天，SpaceX经常用它从头到尾设计的运输系统将宇航员送入轨道，而且是唯一一家赢得这一责任的私营公司。但从事这项工作的 "龙 "式太空舱是一个舒适的口香糖形状的容器，而不是一艘巨大的宇宙飞船，而且一次可以搭载7个人，而不是马斯克想象中的有一天有100名乘客登上 "星船"。如果成功，"星际飞船 "将不同于历史上任何其他航天器，尤其是在返回地球时。美国现已退役的航天飞机队像飞机一样降落在跑道上，俄罗斯的联盟号太空舱跳伞降落在沙漠中，SpaceX的龙式太空舱溅落在公开水域中，但马斯克设想的星舰是垂直降落，像升空前一样直立。这是一个巨大的技术挑战。

它们没有一个幸存下来，直到昨晚--第五次尝试--当原型机钉住了它被设计成的复杂的机动性。航天器升上了3万多英尺的天空，一边升一边使其引擎安静下来，然后翻转到腹部，往下掉，往下掉，然后再次点火，摆正身体，轻轻着陆，就像一只坠落的猫在最后一刻扭转身子，找到自己的脚。

一连串火热的飞行可能让人觉得SpaceX似乎在挣扎，或者不自信。但事实恰恰相反。SpaceX的工程师们戏称爆炸为RUD，意思是 "快速非计划性拆卸"，而Starship原型机的名字以SN开头，意思是 "序列号"，这意味着产品并不珍贵，但一条好的生产线才是。当一个原型机被摧毁时，另一个原型机会迅速取代它的位置。在该公司的早期，所有这些爆炸可能会让它暂停，但现在行业内几乎没有任何SpaceX的怀疑者了。

阅读。为什么SpaceX如此想要一个小小的德克萨斯社区？

马斯克去年从SpaceX总部所在的加利福尼亚州搬到了德克萨斯州。他经常出现在博卡奇卡，同时还有他的孩子和他的狗。SpaceX没有回应对这篇报道的评论请求，一年多来也没有回复《大西洋》的其他询问。该公司几乎没有必要对 "星际飞船 "的开发持开放态度，而且它对公众或媒体的义务也不像美国国家航空航天局那样。马斯克对联邦航空管理局也很不耐烦，该局负责处理太空发射的许可证，并向博卡奇卡派遣安全检查员，他指责该局拖累了SpaceX。新的登月合同--一项高调的、由纳税人资助的任务--可能会迫使人们更加透明。SpaceX确实对博卡奇卡的测试发射进行了广播，但对 "星船 "工作最好的看法来自于一个小社区，该社区已经形成了对该公司工作的监督。大多数时候，任何人都可以开车经过僻静的 "星舰 "现场并拍照，不过如果你靠得太近，保安可能会要求你离开。

最知名的记录者之一，玛丽-麦康纳(Mary McConnaughey)，在网上的名字是BocaChicaGal，自2014年SpaceX公司抵达后，她一直在关注该公司的运作。她住在哈瓦那犬喜欢栖息的房子的视线范围内。麦康纳和她在博卡奇卡村的邻居们从未想过有人会试图在他们小小的沿海天堂建造一艘飞船。当我在2019年秋天访问该村时，SpaceX正试图购买居民的房屋。一些居民卖掉后离开了，但另一些人留下来，拒绝了SpaceX给他们的价格。虽然马斯克曾经表示，如果他们愿意离开，SpaceX的工作会更容易，但该公司似乎暂时不再追求他们的财产。在测试日，居民们已经习惯于收到警告通知并去别的地方。一位居民Celia Garcia-Johnson希望在冠状病毒大流行期间避免离家太远，她和她的狗在一辆停在离村子几英里外的气流中度过发射日，这是SpaceX提供的。

该村现在是一个不断扩大的太空小镇。有更多的Airstreams，供飞船工人过夜使用，还有一家名为Prancing Pony的餐厅。(在J.R.R.托尔金的《中土世界》中，一家同名的旅馆在旅行者踏上漫长的旅程之前为他们提供食物）。马斯克在3月说，博卡奇卡 "将在未来一两年内增加几千人"，塞满了工程师、技术人员和 "各类 "支持人员。4月，SpaceX在村里举办了一个街区派对，有现场乐队，并邀请了所有人，包括员工和剩余的房主。加西亚-约翰逊告诉我，她很享受与SpaceX员工的社交活动，他们中的一些人自己就住在村里。但她无法摆脱对博卡奇卡未来的不安情绪。加西亚-约翰逊在这里拥有自己的家已经近30年了。"圣经上说'爱你的邻居'，如果SpaceX是我的邻居，我想我必须爱SpaceX，"她告诉我。


如果博卡奇卡成为21世纪的太空港，成为火星之前地球上的最后一站，很难想象SpaceX会容忍散落的居民。马斯克最近说，他将向博卡奇卡所在的卡梅隆县的学校捐赠2000万美元，并向最近的城市布朗斯维尔捐赠1000万美元，用于 "市中心的振兴"。这里的一些房主担心，对SpaceX的存在感到兴奋的县政府官员可能会通过征用权接管他们的财产。使用这种权力为一个私人太空港--而不是高速公路或体育场--让路，将是不寻常的，但并不奇怪。SpaceX已经向地球轨道发射了数百颗小卫星，而没有得到地球上其他居民的多少投入。马斯克在试图塑造他周围的世界时很少遇到不可逾越的阻力，而这个世界可能只是一个开始。

根据马斯克的说法，火星上的第一个城市将由加压的玻璃穹顶构成。毕竟，红色星球上没有可呼吸的空气。马斯克说，在此之后，我们将对火星进行地形改造，使其与地球相似。显然，马斯克主要关注的是到达那里的部分，而他在那里生活的计划有时看起来几乎是轻率的。在2019年接受《大众机械》采访时，他称火星上的生活 "相当可控"。采访他的记者说："但是，在知道你到了那里之后要做什么的时候，要做的规划--食物、水、燃料。"显然，他给了马斯克一些空间来解决潜在的挑战。"一旦你到了那里，"马斯克回答说，"这些东西相对来说很简单。" 其他时候，他对这项工作的规模和它所带来的风险更加直接。"这是一次艰苦而危险的旅程，你可能无法活着回来，但这是一次光荣的冒险，"马斯克在最近的一次演讲活动中说。


马斯克能够逃脱这样的谈话，不仅仅是因为他是世界上第二富有的人，还因为他已经把自己塑造成一个能够使离奇的计划听起来合理的人物--他已经使离奇的计划成为可能。他可以永远谈论把人类变成一个多行星物种的重要性，把地球上的植物和野生动物带到火星上，如果或当一些末日事件把我们消灭在这个星球上。管理美国国家航空航天局的人不能激励我们，也不能像这样吓唬我们。他们当然想在月球上建立一个基地，并在某一天在火星上插上美国国旗。但他们只能援引通常的想法，即美国的例外主义和精神，这些想法从一开始就支撑着国家的太空努力，并将太空旅行的奇迹作为地球上 "我们可以迎接任何挑战 "的证明，正如乔-拜登总统最近所说。NASA也无法复制马斯克对硬件的态度。"马斯克在最近的一次新闻发布会上说："我们肯定会建造很多火箭，而且可能会砸碎很多火箭。

然而，这位粗鲁的亿万富翁和这个富有传奇色彩的航天局现在已经将他们的未来与对方联系在一起。21世纪的第一次登月任务必然是阿波罗登陆的翻版，只是表面的镜头要好得多。通过SpaceX，马斯克将这个国家带回了尼尔-阿姆斯特朗迈出一小步后的那个令人陶醉的时刻，当时空气中似乎都弥漫着在其他外星表面迈出更多步伐的可能性。就是这个埃隆-马斯克把特斯拉发射到太空，在推特上说要把狗币放到月球上，并分享NSFW备忘录；他传播关于大流行病的错误信息；他的帖子不止一次地导致诉讼；他还在本周末主持周六夜现场，与音乐嘉宾麦莉-赛勒斯一起。在这一点上，钢铁侠带着美国国家航空航天局的宇航员登月听起来更可信。直到你想起马斯克真的做到了这一点。


阅读。美国对宇航员的新愿景

"美国国家航空航天局仍然做得非常棒，但当谈到真正改变整个太空领域时，SpaceX是人们想到最多的，"太空分析师和《太空时代千禧一代的崛起》的作者劳拉-福克告诉我。她书中的千禧一代受访者指出，SpaceX的成就是他们的灵感来源，她正在编写一个新版本，对更年轻的Z世代成员进行采访，他们也这么说。

胜利重返月球，或历史性的火星航行，必然会像阿波罗登陆那样吸引公众的注意力。但它不会以某种神奇的、普遍的方式激励美国或世界。大多数美国人认为，在整个60年代，阿波罗计划不值得努力，除了对阿姆斯特朗的第一次月球行走的惊奇反应之外。今天，大多数美国人不认为重返月球应该是一个优先事项，他们也不对宇航员出发去火星感到兴奋。不管公众意见如何，政府仍然可以推动登月，但与像SpaceX这样的私人公司不同，NASA至少要解释所有的钱都去了哪里，为什么。与此同时，一个不断增长的私人太空旅游行业，其飞行器能够比以往任何时候都更自主地飞行，正在改变宇航员的形象，也许很快，大多数去太空的人将不是受过严格训练的飞行员或科学家，而只是有钱人。已经有一位日本企业家购买了一整个Starship航班，供多达12名乘客在2024年绕月飞行。


这个未来取决于星际飞船根本没有离开地球。该项目仍有很长的路要走--更多的原型，更多的测试和故障排除时间，以及设计巨大的火箭助推器的单独努力，该助推器将把飞船送入轨道，然后以微妙的顺序返回地球，SpaceX已经在其其他助推器上几乎完善了这一程序。南德克萨斯州的船厂将继续沿着海岸线蔓延，就像一个快速增长的入侵物种。当加西亚-约翰逊在3月底的一次爆炸测试后回到家时，她发现了一个栖息地变化的迹象--她的窗户被爆炸的力量震碎了。SpaceX公司第二天就召集了一家窗户公司来维修，沿着被SpaceX粉丝称为 "通往火星的公路 "的双车道州立公路，这是进入博卡奇卡的唯一途径。沿着这条路一直走到博卡奇卡，经过太阳能电池板农场和仓库大棚，经过以前叫乔安娜街的小街，直到马斯克把它改名为火箭路，最后你来到海滩上，天空和大海在你面前延伸。这在任何时候都是一个美丽的景色，也许，有一天，这将是某人对地球的最后一眼。

Marina Koren是《大西洋》杂志的工作人员。