Guess where I am. Go on. Guess! Guess! Okay, I’m going to give you a hint. I’m in a pod, far away from home and I’m staring down at a reddish surface. Beside me are small jars packed with delicious bites and packets of freeze-dried vegetables. Of course, there are also energy bars as this is a long journey. Inside my pod, I’m surrounded by screens and touchpads and lots of buttons. I have a little door for privacy and nearby there is a Chinese teenager who I’ve identified as passenger zero because he has a crewcut with blonde tips, an action suit (stretchy black pants, stretchy, clingy T-shirt), extra-large headphones and a diamond stud in each ear. He’s not carrying anything else – no bag, no reading material, no power bank, no extra layers, no impulse purchase Rabanne fragrance from duty-free. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t smile, he just looks forward. His eyebrows are exquisitely groomed. I’m wondering how he can embark on such a journey with so few possessions and the more I analyse his behaviour, the more I’m convinced that he’s been trained and selected for what’s ahead.
He doesn’t need anything other than headphones and diamonds because he is part of a generation that will soon venture far, far away, and need very little in the way of worldly possessions – because information will be beamed to screens in their eyelids, space undies will be self-cleaning, sweat glands will be permanently removed from intimate areas and meals will always be in the form of kibble. Yes, gentle reader, I am hurtling along in a gleaming slender tube with a proper Space Cadet and, wow, do I have a lot of questions about the SpaceX IPO and my upcoming trip to Mars.
Before that, however, let’s flutter back down to earth, for the briefest of moments. The more eagle-eyed Faster Lane readers will have figured out that I am currently flying high above the red earth of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, my futuristic pod is seat 1A on an Etihad Airbus 321LR, the little jars of mini bites really do exist and the Chinese kid, I’m onto him. He’s a smuggler. Those diamond studs were picked up in Antwerp and he’s going to wear those headphones to hide them as he walks through customs in the UAE. (On a related note, in a future column I will tell you all about a Flemish acquaintance who told me that her family friends were involved in the diamond trade and actively engaged in “Tuchus Geschäft”). And just in case you were wondering, no, I have not had the tiniest sip of the Perrier-Jouët Belle Époque Brut 2015 or the Perrier-Jouët Blason Rosé but clearly someone who has been writing the copy for SpaceX’s Mars mission manifesto has.
While I am quite sure there are many readers who did quite well out of the SpaceX IPO and have joined the ranks of new-gen tech-meets-defence millionaires, I am also sure that we need to pause, pull ourselves away from our more responsible Sunday reading, don our interstellar Starship jumpsuits and read what analysts clearly thought justified the company’s valuation.
I fully understand that it’s easy to get carried away with thoughts of speeding through the heavens when days are spent on earnings calls for agri-tech firms. But seriously? It’s going to take 90 days to get to Mars in a vehicle that will accommodate 100 people and can carry up to 100 tonnes. Let’s stop right there. A little simple arithmetic gets me to at least 50 tonnes of food and drink – assuming that Space Cadets won’t be in medically induced comas, and will need more than kibble and water to get through the journey. On top of that you have all the extra bits that these people will need for life on Mars – pets, favourite house plants, vinyl collections and 40 years of Monocle magazines. If you’ve saved every piece of print we’ve done for the past two decades, that’s more than a quarter of a tonne right there. Did none of the highly paid bankers looking at this flotation ask such a simple question? Or probe into grittier topics, such as what people will do for three months in space in a nine-metre-wide Starship? Are there renders of what the couchettes will be like? Is there a sample “day in the life”, let alone three months in the life of making it to Mars?
Meanwhile, back here on planet reality, the Swiss are today voting on measures to cap the population at 10 million people. I’m curious if the country invested big in SpaceX to handle future population overspill? Who needs sunny mountain living when you can be semi-weightless on Mars?
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