In 1948, after being shipped to America from Nazi Germany in
Operation Paperclip — a US intelligence program which sought to repurpose Nazi scientists to fight the Cold War —
Werner von Braun, the Nazi who invented the
V-2 aka Vengeance Rocket, wrote a hard science fiction book in German called
Marsprojekt at Ft. Bliss, TX and published it in 1952 in English and various forms in the years after.
In the
book, which is extremely technical and detailed, scientists build rockets to send humans to Mars. On arrival to the red planet, they find an
underground society (because the surface is uninhabitable) honeycombed with
tubes for travel. There are no “nation states” per se on Mars because technology has made them obsolete.
The leader of the Martian government is called “the Elon.”
The Mars Project: A Technical Tale, Chapter 24 “How Mars Is Governed”
A coincidence?
Ask Elon Musk’s father, Errol who says he named his son after books he was read as a child by von Braun and his mentor, fellow Nazi rocket scientist
Hermann Oberth — who did not qualify for Operation Paperclip but came to America to work for von Braun in 1955.
Errol Musk says he built rockets as a youth in South Africa and was taught that “the head of the Mars colony would be called ‘the Elon.’” Since Musk’s maternal grandfather had the middle name Elon by coincidence he thought, “I like that name because it means something to me.”
Remarkably,
Marsprojekt aka
The Mars Project: A Technical Tale in English, appears to paint a fictional future Mars that Elon Musk is attempting to literally create in the real world. The parallels between von Braun’s vision and Musk’s actions cannot be a coincidence.
First, von Braun credits the three acknowledged pioneers of rocketry: American
Robert Goddard, Oberth, and
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky — the late 19th-early 20th century
Russian Cosmist and rocket scientist who Elon Musk regularly praises as his inspiration. But Tsiolkovsky was also a eugenicist who believed we should overpopulate the Earth to force humanity to become “multi-planetary” —
two ideas Musk promotes constantly, although never quite admits the connection between them.
Some of Von Braun’s other ideas for a Martian government have parallels to Peter Thiel’s techno-fascist concept of “
network states” — digital countries that replace “nation-states” as the dominant form of governance.
"The Earth had
not yet cast aside the concept that the riches of any particular region, whether in natural resources or skill and energy of its inhabitants, should be devoted primarily to the welfare and comfort of those same inhabitants. Thus each country of Earth attempted energetically to elect such representatives as would most effectively further its own, immediate welfare and interests
Thousands of years of civilization on Mars had permitted refined technology completely to
remove all regional concepts.
[emphasis added]"
Notably, von Braun’s Martian government is also a
technocracy, government by engineers, scientists, and generally, the intelligentsia. Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman was arrested in Canada in 1940 for being in a fascist, pro-Hitler movement called “
Technocracy, Inc.”
From The Mars Project, practically a handbook for aspiring technocrats:
"Instead of geographical differences of opinion,
political debates went on between the representatives of various branches of science, technology and administration concerned with maintenance and improvement of living conditions.
Traders and transportation people would differ with sociologists; physicians could not agree with ventilation
engineers; private industry would argue with government; employees had grievances against employers; and so on, ad infinitum.
The ultimate result of these differences was
a congress of professionals from each of the complicated branches upon which the highly involved society of Mars was dependent, and each branch was represented in proportion to its importance. Mars appeared to be doing extremely well with this system."
What about Elon Musk‘s obsession with tunnels and underground transportation, embodied by his seemingly odd projects
Hyperloop, and
Boring Company? Von Braun has you covered there too:
"Conditions of life on Mars, vastly different from those of Earth, made it possible for the planet to be governed without any form of regional representation. It was possible to make any conceivable journey within the confines of the planet in less than four hours
in the high-velocity subways. This, and the fact that the very concept of nostalgia was unknown, due to
subterranean existence which prevented Martians from developing attachment to local scenery or dwellings, together with the standardization of all ideas and desires, had much to do with it."
Musk’s worldview, ambitions and ideology seem to stem largely
from science fiction, a series of visions that he’s obsessed with pushing towards, regardless of the harm it may do in the short term.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...9045-fdf7-4c32-87b8-a17b66b5db36_800x800.jpeg
Elon and Errol Musk are estranged, although they seem to share the same views about women and reproduction,
pro-natalism, which the idea that we should create as many humans as possible no matter the cost.
“The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce”
— Errol Musk

Given Elon’s
clear efforts to create the Martian technocratic colony that his father named him for, one must ask, is this all about
daddy issues? Is Elon trying to prove that he can do what his father read about as a child — to build a fleet of rockets to go to Mars and build a utopia — no matter what pain, suffering and death it causes on Earth?