Open 24.65/7/668
The first businesses on Mars won’t sell dreams. They’ll sell survival — and quietly decide who shapes the next civilization
1 August 2025
The first time you buy something on Mars, it probably will not feel heroic. It will feel small. Practical. Almost insulting, considering the planet outside is trying, patiently and constantly, to kill you.
Maybe you are standing in a tunnel with a low ceiling, boots dusted red, air tasting faintly like metal because every life-support system on Mars will have its own smell, and you are staring at a menu board that does not yet know how to be a menu board. Someone has written today’s offerings in marker: extra battery minutes, two liters of processed water, a replacement gasket for your suit’s wrist seal, a handful of greenhouse basil that costs more than your first car. You tap your account, or you trade three favors, or you hand over a ration chit. You walk away with what you need, and you try not to think too hard about what “money” even means when the resupply window is a once-every-two-years kind of relationship.
The first businesses on Mars will not be clever. They will not be elegant. They will not be optimized.
They will be desperate.
They will exist because someone needs air, power, food, shelter, or a working valve right now. And someone else is willing to provide it, not because it is profitable in any traditional sense, but because survival creates its own economy long before it creates wealth.
That is where Jim Cantrell starts.
Not with venture capital decks or glossy renderings of domed cities, but with Jamestown. With mountain men. With people who nearly starved, froze, failed, and sometimes disappeared entirely, before anything resembling “opportunity” showed up.
Mars, he argues, is not a startup ecosystem. It is a frontier civilization.
And those two things look nothing alike.
Cantrell has a way of pulling the romance out of a future like that, not to ruin it, but to tell the truth about it. He has been around enough new frontiers to distrust the glossy versions. He introduces himself almost casually and then drops a line that carries two decades of history like it is a grocery bag: “I’m probably most well known for being the guy that took Elon Musk to Russia back in 2001 in search of converted ICBMs to go to Mars for a mice to Mars mission. And when that didn’t work, we started SpaceX.”
He says it like a footnote, but it is really a thesis. The future, as we like to imagine it, is usually born out of failure, inconvenience, and someone deciding they are not done yet.
Cantrell has built a career out of that decision. “I’m on my 12th space startup,” he says. “So I’ve been part of that whole unique ecosystem over the years… and so mostly success is a few failures. And so those are the ones you learn the most from, the failures.” Later, he will compare writing off a business to wrecking a race car, and he will not romanticize it. “Writing off a business has been one of the most painful things in my life. I think it was more painful than getting a divorce.”
Mars, in his telling, is not a clean slate. It is a very old slate with new chalk, and it will keep snapping chalk in half until we learn how to write differently.
“Mostly success is a few failures. And so those are the ones you learn the most from, the failures.”
The Survival Economy
Cantrell’s favorite analogy is not sci-fi. It is the New World, five centuries ago, when people crossed an ocean into a place that could not be negotiated with. He reaches for Columbus, the Vikings, Jamestown, the Spanish in the Southwest, the British on the East Coast, and he does it for a reason. Frontiers have patterns.
“Mars is gonna go down that same path, I think,” he says. “And so the early people there are gonna be like, hopefully not like the Vikings, but more like the Spaniards and the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean.”
Frontiers begin with a blunt question: can you stay alive long enough to become anything else?
In those early days, he argues, business is not an app store and it is not a boomtown of boutique cafés. It is resupply. It is triage. It is the grim arithmetic of calories, oxygen, spare parts, and a habitat that has no forgiveness built into it. “So I think Mars will go through that same phase where we’ll see just let’s survive, right?” he says. “And when Elon talks about, we’re going to send our first robots to Mars, I think that’s an interesting twist, right? We didn’t have that 500 years ago.”
This is the first uncomfortable truth about Martian entrepreneurship. The first markets are not glamorous, and the first profit margins are measured in continued existence. Cantrell describes an early Martian economy that looks less like Silicon Valley and more like an improvised supply chain with a human face. “So the problem with a Mars colony is there’s going to be little inherent wealth creation there to start with,” he says. “Wealth creation on Mars is going to come at a later stage. And so the entrepreneurs, I think will be sort of like the guys in the army. It’s like, well, hey, I got this for you. So it will be bartering the resources that come to Mars, that are supplied from Earth.”
That is a startling image if you are used to thinking about Mars as the next sleek chapter in human progress. The first entrepreneurs on Mars might look like quartermasters, mechanics, and the person who figured out how to keep a pump from freezing for an extra twelve hours. The first “startup” might be one guy who can repair seals better than anyone else, and the first “unicorn” might be the team that can consistently keep food yields from collapsing.
And that is not a failure of imagination. It is imagination that respects physics.
Minimum Viable Civilization
Once you get past survival, we like to assume the story becomes familiar: shops, services, trades, brands. But Cantrell is careful about the phrase “past survival,” because on Mars, survival is not a phase you graduate from. It is a baseline you keep paying rent on.
He asks a question that feels like it belongs in a product meeting and a philosophy seminar at the same time: what is the minimum viable civilization?
“The interesting thing to think about, I think, is exactly what you mentioned, which is what’s sort of the minimum viable civilization there for people to want to go, right?” he says. And then he starts naming the real thresholds. Not the Instagram thresholds. The biology thresholds.
“Can you breathe? Do you have water? Do you have enough to eat?”
From there, he moves to the moment when a colony begins to stop being a camp and starts being a society. “We believe we can grow plants on Mars,” he says. “I think there’s a little doubt that given the right amount of water and fertilizers and the seeds and so on, we can farm on Mars if you follow what happens after that animal husbandry will follow. So cows on Mars, yes, I said it.”
If you have ever been inside a barn, you can feel how much life hides inside that sentence. The idea of “cows on Mars” is funny, and then it is not funny, because it implies feed, waste management, veterinary care, enclosed ecosystems that can tolerate failure, and a kind of domestic normalcy that no one in a pressure suit can fully replicate. It also implies a market. “I’d love to see that, get yourself a good Martian burger,” he says. “I’m sure people would pay a premium for that.”
Premium is a revealing word here. Premium means scarcity. Premium means inequality. Premium means that even in a world where everyone is living inside a machine, someone still gets the better table by the window.
Cantrell goes there quickly, and it is one of the most honest moments in the whole conversation. He believes the early built environment will push society into a visible hierarchy. “I’m of the opinion that most of the habitation will be underground,” he says, framing it as an engineering inevitability. Underground is efficient. It is safe from radiation. It is stable. It is the Boring Company’s dream translated into an existential requirement.
But then he pauses on what humans actually need. “There’s something about the human spirit that needs to see the Vista,” he says. So he imagines a future split between those who can afford views and those who cannot. “So there’s probably going to be ultimately this bifurcation of, you know, these domed cities… beachfront properties of these domed cities where you can actually see outside of it to the vistas of Mars… And then, you know, the slums, if you will, underground.”
On Earth, we have learned to treat inequality as background noise. On Mars, it might be architectural. The very shape of your habitat could be a class marker. The glass becomes privilege. The rock becomes necessity. If that sounds dystopian, it is also painfully plausible, because it is not driven by ideology. It is driven by who gets sunlight.
Company Towns and the Price of Power
When people talk about “the first businesses on Mars,” they usually mean restaurants, shops, entertainment, the stuff that makes a place feel like a place. Cantrell’s mind goes first to utilities.
“If it were me, for example, and I had all this money, well, I would send some power stations to Mars,” he says. “You know, I would go buy a bunch of these solar power stations here, make them work on Mars, and then sell the power to the people there, right?”
There is a reason that line lands with a dull thud. It is not because it is boring. It is because it is true.
Power is not just a service on Mars. It is life. Whoever owns power owns oxygen processing, water extraction, heat, communications, farming lights, drilling, manufacturing, and the ability to expand. In the early years, utilities are not an industry among industries. They are the foundation that decides which other industries can exist at all.
Cantrell’s worldview is shaped by frontiers where capital arrives first as a lifeline and then as a leash. He expects Earth wealth to dominate early, because “Earth is where the resource concentration is, the wealth concentration is.” Mars is “a frontier civilization,” and it will attract the people and entities willing to fund the risk.
That logic has consequences. It leads to a Mars that begins as a company town.
“I think this human element of struggle and difficulty in overcoming that is part of who we are.”
“It’s going to start out as sort of a company town sort of affair,” he says, and he does not pretend to know the exact corporate name on the sign. But he does speculate about the gravitational pull of a single powerful actor. “It will probably be some group of Elon Musk something or another that owns that town.”
He even imagines governance as an extension of whatever platform dominates social coordination. “I guess he bought Twitter turning into X, but it was to run life on Mars,” he says. “It’s a direct participation democracy where Elon will post in questions on X, and you know, he’ll be the mayor of Mars, is essentially is what it will be.”
You do not have to agree with the speculation to feel what is underneath it: on Mars, governance will not be an abstract debate. It will be a set of daily operations. Someone has to “build the road… maintain the dome… have the power systems,” as he puts it, and those tasks immediately become political. Not because politics is inevitable, but because coordination is inevitable.
Cantrell is a Libertarian, and he says so plainly. He also says something you rarely hear from anyone with a strong ideology, which is that reality is messier than the banner. “Capitalism in a pure sense is great, but it doesn’t do all these things the most efficient way,” he says. He imagines “a little bit of this generic societal government” that exists simply because Mars does not tolerate neglect.
What governs Mars, in his mind, is not a constitution first. It is a value system. “So the core of Mars is going to be a set of values,” he says. “And as we watch how that evolves, it’s going to be very interesting to see what those values are.”
Values are where economics turns into culture. They decide whether the first wave of settlers becomes a cooperative survival community or an extractive hierarchy that just happens to be inside a dome.
The Investors Who Wait, and the Ones Who Don’t
One of Cantrell’s most cutting observations is about risk aversion. “A lot of companies, interestingly, are so risk-adverse,” he says. “They’re just going to watch to see how this plays out.”
He is not gentle with them. “They’re going to think of this as a shit show,” he says, and then adds the deeper point: they will miss what the opportunity actually is, because they cannot see it yet.
He returns to the New World analogy again, this time emphasizing the blindness of the present. “Nobody had any clue what the New World would be 500 years in the future. No idea,” he says. “If you would have had, you know, time travel images of the way it is today, nobody would have believed you. They would have probably burned you at the stake.”
Mars, he argues, will follow the pattern of investment: small, risky money first, then larger money when risk declines, then floods of capital when it becomes “low risk.” That is how fortunes get made. Not by arriving when the airport is built, but by building the dirt road that will someday become the runway.
He loves the railroad analogy for that reason. “You create these tracks, these tracks of iron that go across the wilderness,” he says. “And those are the people that really created the centers of wealth in the west over time.”
On Mars, the “railroad” may be power generation, pressurized tunneling, water extraction, oxygen processing, local manufacturing, and the communications layer that keeps the whole thing from collapsing into isolated pockets of fear. It may also be something we have not invented yet, something that looks obvious in hindsight and impossible in the present.
Cantrell takes a swing at a very large prediction, and he knows how it sounds. “I think the next trillionaires are going to be made on Mars,” he says. “Ooh, a trillion dollar bill. And it’s that big of an opportunity.”
The word trillionaire is absurd in the mouth until you remember how absurd “billionaire” once sounded. His real claim is not the number. It is the mechanism: risk and timing, paired with infrastructure and control.
He does not expect Earth brands to dominate. “How many of those brands will be from the Earth? Probably not that many, honestly,” he says. “There might be a few, but, you know, I don’t think we’ll see Walmarts on Mars. We’ll probably see, I don’t know, Mars Mart or something like that.”
It is a joke that carries a warning. If you show up late, you will be buying your oxygen from someone whose logo you have never heard of.
“I think the next trillionaires are going to be made on Mars.”
The Missing Middle Class
If Cantrell has one recurring anxiety about Mars, it is not whether we can build the hardware. It is what the hardware does to us.
When he talks about sending humanoid robots early, he sounds genuinely shaken. “When I realized that they were going to send Optimus robots on the first or second mission to Mars, that just like blew my mind,” he says.
His analogy for why that makes sense is practical and slightly hilarious. “If there’s an island in the middle of the Atlantic that suddenly popped up… and we say, hey, let’s go settle it. Would you go there without Kubota tractors? Hell no.”
Of course you would bring machines. Mars is the most machine-dependent environment humans have ever attempted to inhabit. The part that troubles him is what it does to social structure when labor becomes optional for some people and still mandatory for others.
“Maybe the servants are the robots,” he says. “I talked about what kind of people we’re going to send in. Maybe it is robots. That would be a different kind of society than one where you had this mixture.”
Then he introduces a sentence that sounds simple until you try to imagine a world without it. “It seems like, this is my own personal opinion, every society needs a middle class,” he says.
On Mars, the middle class is not just an income bracket. It is a stabilizing layer of people who work, build, maintain, and care for systems without owning them and without being crushed beneath them. It is the class that makes “normal” possible. If robots take the work, what becomes of identity, status, purpose, and belonging? If only a few humans are needed to keep everything running, who gets to be essential?
Cantrell’s fear is not that robots will make life easier. It is that robots will make life hollow, and that the resulting society will drift toward something ugly. “If our Earth analogies are any example, it will start to look like a monarchy and a monarchy family,” he says. “And boy, that isn’t dysfunctional. I don’t know what is.”
He does not want that outcome, and he says so. “I kind of hope that that doesn’t happen,” he says, because “this human element of struggle and difficulty in overcoming that is part of who we are.”
Mars, then, is not just a test of engineering. It is a test of whether we can build a civilization that does not accidentally optimize itself into cruelty.
What Mars Exports
When the conversation finally turns to the big economic question, the one people love to argue about at conferences and on late-night podcasts, Cantrell refuses the easy answer. Will Mars export something valuable back to Earth? Will it be rare earth minerals, exotic manufacturing, pharmaceuticals in low gravity, intellectual property, a new kind of energy?
“My answer has to be the latter because we don’t know what that is, by the way,” he says, meaning we do not know what the killer export will be.
He offers one possibility, almost reluctantly. “If I had to guess about, you know, what first Mars exports to Earth would become, it would probably be, you know, something like rare earth minerals.”
But his deeper claim is that Mars will eventually stop being a colony and become a civilization. “I tend to think of it more as something that will become self-sustaining, just like the New World was,” he says, and then makes the leap that is both thrilling and unsettling. Mars might become “a completely independent civilization.”
That is where the “future businesses on Mars” conversation becomes something else entirely. If Mars becomes independent, then the real economic story is not trade. It is identity. A civilization makes things not just to sell them, but to express what it values and what it believes it is for.
Cantrell imagines Mars as a place that could eventually serve as a stepping stone to the wider solar system. “Maybe that’s what Mars becomes, is, you know, the spaceport for the galactic Star Trek, you know, kind of society,” he says. He even frames today’s rockets as transitional. “Rocket technology exists today is 100 plus years old,” he says, arguing that chemical propulsion is “old technology,” useful but limited, and that the next leap will require deeper physics and new propulsion.
The businesses that matter in that future may look nothing like Earth businesses. They may be infrastructure companies, yes, but also cultural institutions. Schools. Governance frameworks. Mental health systems. Storytellers. People who can keep a society cohesive when the sun outside is small and cold and the radio delay makes arguments last longer.
In that sense, the most valuable export Mars might produce is not a mineral. It is a new way of organizing human life under extreme constraint.
The Entrepreneurs Who Win
When asked what advice he would give to first Martian business owners, Cantrell dodges the guru role, but his answer still reads like a blueprint for frontier success.
“I don’t know if I know enough to give them advice,” he says, then immediately gives the kind of advice you only hear from people who have actually lost and kept going. “You got to get in and you got to be a part of the race in order to have an outcome, right? The surest way to lose is to not participate.”
He is an auto racer, and he has a book coming about “what entrepreneurs can learn from auto racing,” which makes sense because racing is a controlled environment for risk, failure, feedback, and humility. You push until you spin, and then you learn what you did wrong, or you keep spinning forever.
His other core requirement is not strategy. It is something less fashionable and more durable. “Passion is the core of everything,” he says. “And if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, you’re not going to be as good at it as the person that is passionate.”
He warns against building what nobody wants. “There are often these brilliant passionate people who build this thing that nobody wants,” he says. “Sometimes they’re 20 years early, 40 years early. Sometimes they just are crazy. So you can’t be that guy.”
Mars will punish vanity projects. It will not tolerate products that exist mainly to impress. The market will be ruthless because the environment is ruthless. Everything that survives will do so because it provides real value under pressure.
And then Cantrell reveals what drives him, which is also, in a strange way, a clue to who might thrive on Mars. “Yeah, it’s pretty easy. I just like building things,” he says. He describes tearing apart toasters as a child, building forts, go-karts, motorcycles, cars, then satellites and rockets and homes and businesses. Building is his through-line, and he sees it as the through-line of civilization.
He also admits to something raw and honest, the kind of thing polite profiles usually sand away. “But the other part of it is sort of this inner drive that I refuse to be a loser,” he says. “If you’re racing and you’re not aiming to be a winner, then why are you racing?”
Mars will attract people like that. People who cannot tolerate stagnation. People who see difficulty as an invitation. People who are willing to look foolish early because the only way to arrive at competence is to survive the humiliating part.
It will also attract people who think they are going for freedom and discover they are going for responsibility.
The Frontier That Rewrites Us
Near the end, Cantrell makes a claim that sounds like bravado but is really a historical pattern in disguise. “100% history will repeat itself,” he says, when asked whether Mars could become the next frontier that pulls talent away from Earth. “That’s the secret, and that’s why Mars will be the same thing.”
Then he says it outright. “So Mars will be the next United States of America, but on a different planet.”
There is a lot packed into that sentence. The romance of the frontier. The violence of the frontier. The innovation of the frontier. The inequality of the frontier. The myths we tell ourselves afterward. The amnesia. The pride. The grief. The weird, stubborn hope that maybe next time we can keep the good parts and refuse the worst ones.
Cantrell is not naïve about the worst ones. He talks about governance and values and who gets on the “train to go to Mars.” He speculates that a Mars society might resemble a Middle Eastern monarchy model in some ways, with wealthy citizens and imported labor. He is not endorsing it as a dream. He is pointing at how power tends to organize itself when survival requires hierarchy and resources are scarce.
Mars will not automatically make us better. It will make us more ourselves, stripped down. It will reveal what we truly value when comfort is no longer available as a distraction.
And that is why the question of “future businesses on Mars” is not, at its core, a question about markets. It is a question about what kind of people we become when we cannot outsource consequences.
Will the first power stations be owned like public goods, or sold like oxygen subscriptions? Will domes become community centers or gated vistas? Will robots free humans to pursue meaning, or will they hollow out the social fabric until only elites and caretakers remain? Will failure be treated as a teacher, as Cantrell insists it must be, or as a sin that gets you exiled back to Earth?
Even the smallest transaction in that underground corridor, the overpriced basil, the gasket, the extra battery minutes, is a vote for a certain kind of society.
Mars is a frontier, yes, but it is also a mirror. It reflects back what we brought with us, and it forces us to decide what we are willing to keep.
Signal Received
Mars will not be built by vision statements or glossy pitch decks. It will be built by people who show up early, break things, learn the hard lessons, and keep going anyway. Jim Cantrell’s throughline, from early SpaceX failures to a future of Martian trillionaires, is not about inevitability. It is about participation. The surest way to lose the future, on Mars or anywhere else, is to sit it out.
The first businesses on Mars will not be glamorous. They will sell power, air, food, heat, repairs, coordination. They will feel closer to quartermasters than disruptors, closer to railroads than apps. Wealth will follow infrastructure, not inspiration, and the people who control survival systems will quietly shape society long before anyone argues about culture or governance.
Mars will almost certainly begin as a company town, layered with inequality baked into architecture itself. Domes with views and tunnels without them. Robots doing the dangerous work. Humans negotiating what meaning looks like when labor, scarcity, and class are all being rewritten at once. History suggests this is unavoidable. History also suggests it does not have to end the same way.
The deepest risk Mars poses is not technical failure. It is social fracture. Hunger, isolation, delayed communication, and enclosed spaces will stress human systems in ways we have barely tested. Biosphere experiments, frontier settlements, and long voyages all point to the same lesson: when resources tighten, values surface. Cooperation becomes survival, or society collapses inward.
And yet, this is exactly why Mars matters. Not as an escape from Earth, but as a proving ground. A place where humanity is forced to decide, deliberately, which systems are worth rebuilding and which should be left behind. Mars will not make us better by default. But it will make us honest.
The future Martian economy will not be defined by what it exports to Earth, but by what it preserves of us. If Mars becomes a spaceport to the stars, it will only be because it first becomes a place people can live with dignity, purpose, and shared responsibility.
The next frontier is not about conquering a planet.
It is about learning whether we can build a civilization that deserves to last. *
Adapted from Joe Sweeney’s interview with Jim Cantrell for the Aspiring Martians: Everyday Mars episode titled "Martian Businesses" which aired on 29 July 2025.