💥 1 vital Mars city lesson

SpaceX wants to build a city on Mars — and it could look to history to get some help.

SpaceX wants to build a city on Mars — and it could look to history to get some help. It’s all in this subscriber-only edition of Musk Reads+ #109.

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Musk’s space-faring firm has big plans to build a million-strong, self-sustaining city on the red planet by 2050. It is unclear how the city’s government would work.

• The 1967 Outer Space Treaty says that your country is responsible for what gets launched into space — so spaceships launched from the United States answer to the United States

• SpaceX’s Starlink terms of service declare Mars is a “free planet,” where no Earth-based government has control over its authority

• SpaceX’s former general counsel David Anderman argued in Musk Reads+ #97 that the city might need to declare access to basic resources like air and water

• Musk argued in 2018 that a direct democracy could make sense for the small settlement

Science fiction writer Greg Bear, who previously participated in the National Space Society that advocates for greater access to space, tells Inverse that the first settlers will be “free thinkers.” They will have to come up with their own solutions for government, and as free thinkers in a strange new world, they may have radically different ideas.