Imagine Mars
Mars from high orbit: a rust-red globe against black space, Valles Marineris cutting a dark scar across the equator.

Imagine Mars

First-principles notes on crust, ice, power, Starship, and the silicon backbone that makes return possible.

Read the researchWatch the films

Crustal gap

32 km

thickness delta

Exchangeable ice

20–30 m

global equivalent

Surface load

3.6 MW

continuous

Return propellant

2,400 MT

LOX / LCH4

39A cadence

24 / yr

tanker launches

Starship S40 in orbit over a sunlit Earth: heatshield tiles and stainless flank, the ship stretching toward the curved horizon.

Vehicle · SpaceX published figures · August 2026

Starship

Fully reusable. Methane and oxygen. Tankers in LEO, then Mars. The published vehicle is 124 meters of stainless and 33 Raptor 3s. This desk keeps the surface loads that vehicle still has to close.

Stack height
124 m
Diameter
9 m
Payload, reusable
100+ t
Super Heavy
72 m
The road to Mars
A stainless Starship in a flyby over the curved rust face of Mars, black space above the terminator, no landing.

Starship · 8 min

The First Interplanetary Flyby

Two years outside the Earth-Moon system, a flyby of the Red Planet, and a return to Earth. Not a landing. A named commander is not a closed architecture.

Read the flyby analysis
A dense star field over a dark horizon — the view this desk argues we have to reach.

Manifesto

A single planet is an unacceptable failure mode

Consciousness trapped on one world is a brief accident. Ice, power, Starship, and the TeraFab files are the loads that have to close.

Read the manifesto

On this desk

The Rock That Broke Open Mars

A rover wheel fractured an ordinary stone in Gediz Vallis. Inside: yellow crystals no mission had confirmed on Mars — native elemental sulfur.

Watch the film
Yellowknife Bay mudstone in Gale crater, the Sheepbed outcrop where Curiosity drilled Cumberland.

Curiosity · 12 min

Mars’s Subsurface Sanctuary

A dense star field over a dark horizon — the view this desk argues we have to reach.

Consciousness · 12 min

The Imperative of Making Life Multiplanetary

Observatory

Gallery
Mars from high orbit: a rust-red globe against black space, Valles Marineris cutting a dark scar across the equator.Mars’s crustal dichotomy: smooth northern lowlands meeting the cratered southern highlands.Jezero crater’s ancient river delta, layered sediment fans on the crater floor.Late-afternoon Martian dunes, long shadows on pale dust under a thin salmon sky.A stainless-steel Starship standing on a dusty Martian plain at sunset, its shadow stretched across the ground.A speculative green Mars: darkened lowlands and a pale ocean covering much of the northern hemisphere.Dispatch still of a greened Mars globe used in the X post on thickening the atmosphere.A wall of ochre dust advancing across the Martian surface, the Sun a dim disk behind it.

Dispatch

From the timeline

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2026-08-19

The Martian Dichotomy

2026-08-19

A single planet is a failure mode

2026-08-19

Specialist models are another 100×

2026-08-18

One unified physical machine

2026-08-15

The ice is not vanishing