Elon Musk’s Ark spacecraft aims to help humanity survive nuclear war

SpaceX is racing to conduct the next test flight of its incredibly advanced craft – the Titan-sized “space ark” designed to carry humans to a terraformed Mars – even as the specter of a nuclear war extends its shadows over the Earth.

After Moscow’s ambassador to Washington personally warned him that the Ukrainian resistance’s use of the SpaceX satellite system could prompt Russia to respond with tactical nuclear weapons, Elon Musk stepped up testing of the Starship spacecraft, as if he tried to exceed atomic time. bomb.

Musk told his hand-picked biographer, Walter Isaacson, that Ambassador Anatoly Antonov had directly threatened him that Moscow would repel any Ukrainian attack on occupied Crimea, home to the Kremlin’s Black Sea fleet. , with nuclear weapons.

Even as Musk engaged in shuttle diplomacy with Antonov and with Ukrainian leaders to avoid any nuclear battlefront, the SpaceX Starship project commander redoubled his efforts in developing the super-capsule.

While his Plan A involves fostering the peaceful sphere of spaceflight to the International Space Station, ferrying NASA, Allied, and Roscosmos astronauts to the outpost aboard his Dragon spacecraft, Musk also has a interplanetary plan B: create a second foundation for human civilization on Mars without weapons, far from the atomic missile silos positioned in the northern hemisphere of the Earth.

The creator of SpaceX – the world’s first independent space superpower – sketched his vision of Mars as an off-world sanctuary during a fantastical overview he presented recently at its Starbase launch center, the massive Skunkworks rocket which he develops, at the speed of a bullet, to the right. off the turquoise seas of the Gulf of Mexico.

Musk said that as the darkness of war darkens Earth’s fate, “there is a great urgency to make life multiplanetary.”

“The company’s overarching goal is to sustainably expand life on another planet – Mars is really the only option – and to do so ideally before World War III.”

“Obviously I’m not talking about abandoning the Earth or anything like that and we want the Earth to be as good as possible for as long as possible,” he added, “but there are some things which may escape our control.”

“So we want Mars to become a self-sustaining civilization as quickly as possible.”

Quickly building a refuge for humans on Mars is imperative, SpaceX’s chief rocket designer said, “if there’s something that destroys Earth – like let’s say there’s a Third World Thermonuclear War World War”.

Even an advanced lunar colony would not survive as a refuge for humanity, Musk said, because nuclear warriors would “probably launch a few nuclear weapons at the Moon.”

“It’s much harder to film Mars with nuclear power,” Musk said, as if narrating a movie he’s replayed countless times in his head. “Mars would see it coming and probably have some time to stop the incoming missiles.”

Around the same time that Vladimir Putin’s emissary in Washington gave Musk the ultimatum on the use of atomic weapons in Ukraine, another Kremlin lieutenant began threatening, at UN meetings, to shoot down SpaceX Starlink satellites that transmit high-speed internet coverage to the occupied country.

At the same time, Russia’s official TASS news agency reported the deployment of fighter-bombers and advanced missile systems to destroy Starlink transceivers used along the conflict’s front lines.

The Kremlin is apparently preparing to extend its brinkmanship in the skies by placing a nuclear-armed spacecraft into orbit, designed to perpetually circle the Earth and challenge the satellites of NATO countries helping Ukraine. This could pave the way for a confrontation between Russian and allied ASATs, which could in turn trigger a broader conflict, defense experts at US universities and think tanks say.

While some critics have ridiculed Elon Musk’s visionary plans to turn Mars into a second-world sanctuary for A wise manthe SpaceX designer-inventor is not alone in proposing that celestial colonies could guarantee humanity’s future even if the home planet were destroyed by nuclear war.

In one of his latest interviews with the BBC, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned: “We face a number of threats to our survival from nuclear war, catastrophic global warming and genetically modified viruses . »

“Although the risk of a catastrophe on planet Earth in any given year may be quite small, it accumulates over time and becomes a near certainty within the next thousand or ten thousand years.”

Yet Professor Hawking, author of the world-bestselling book ‘A Brief History of Time’, tempered his doomsday oracle by saying: ‘By then we should have expanded into space and to other stars , so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.

While laying out his prophecy, Hawking predicted that it would take up to a century to begin founding independent colonies in space.

But Musk has proposed creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars within just 20 years, via flotillas of spaceship arks that leave Earth every two years, when the planets are optimally aligned. Each spacecraft will accommodate 100 colonists, and 10,000 flights will foster a thriving SpaceX cosmopolis of one million first-generation Martians.

“You know, the giant Starship Factory that we’re building is obviously the key to all of this,” Musk said at the Starbase conference. “And the launch sites that we build here and at Cape (Cape Canaveral Space Station) and elsewhere in the future will be key to that.”

Starship’s next-generation technology, colossal size, high-speed evolution, and total reusability all represent a planet-changing revolution in spaceflight – one that will be chronicled in history books for years to come. centuries, said Professor Kip Hodges, the founding director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, one of America’s leading centers for space studies.

In terms of launching robots and humans, satellites, servers and other building blocks of a hyper-technological society to Mars, SpaceX’s Starship is absolutely unrivaled, he told me in an interview.

The first wave of astronauts will live inside and conduct research from Starship outposts that begin crisscrossing the red-orange dunes of Mars, Professor Hodges says, as groups of arks form citadels and then cities under geodesic domes assembled by robot.

Although Elon Musk has yet to outline a plan to save birds, giraffes, dolphins and Dalmatians by carrying genetic samples from every known species on Earth aboard his arks, he has developed a plan director to transform the red planet, now frozen, into a dynamic planet. new proto-Eden.

“We can warm Mars and densify the atmosphere,” he predicted at the spellbinding Starbase conference. “There would be a liquid ocean on about 40% of the surface, which would make it an Earth-like planet in the long term. »

“Elon Musk has rightly identified nuclear weapons as an ongoing threat to humanity,” says Tim Wright, treaty coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the group that won the Nobel Prize for Peace 2017 for his central role in the promulgation of the United Nations Nuclear Weapons Treaty. the ban on nuclear weapons.

Thousands of warheads “are still in missile silos and on submarines, ready to launch at any moment,” Wright told me in an interview. “A thermonuclear war could render much of the Earth permanently uninhabitable. »

“It’s important to focus on eliminating weapons,” Wright says.

With his considerable wealth and influence – the SpaceX founder now has 184.9 million followers on X/Twitter – Elon Musk could do more to help the global movement to completely abolish nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth, he adds.