A Company Town the Size of a Planet
Power, dependence, and governance on Mars
28 November 2025
On Earth, governance is easy to ignore until it breaks. Most days, it hums quietly in the background: zoning laws you never read, safety standards you take for granted, elections you vaguely trust to count the votes correctly. You can dislike the system, distrust it, even resent it, and still survive because the stakes are cushioned by abundance. If something fails, you move. You complain. You opt out.
Mars will not allow that luxury.
On Mars, governance is not abstract. It is oxygen pressure. It is who controls the power grid. It is whether a disagreement ends with mediation or exile. It is the difference between a livable habitat and a sealed coffin. Politics, stripped of ceremony, becomes infrastructure. Authority becomes survival.
This is the quiet truth at the center of space settlement that rarely makes it into glossy concept art or keynote speeches. Before Mars becomes a place where people live, it will become a place where people are governed. And unlike Earth, Mars will not forgive mistakes made casually.
That reality shaped my conversation with Kelly Weinersmith, co-author of A City on Mars, a book that has become essential reading precisely because it refuses to treat space settlement as a purely technical challenge. The book asks a more uncomfortable question: not whether humans can survive on Mars, but whether our institutions can.
The Fantasy of a Clean Slate
Mars is often described as a “fresh start,” a blank world where humanity can finally do things right. This idea is powerful because it is vague. It allows anyone to project their preferred future outward, unchallenged by precedent.
As Kelly put it plainly, “Anyone can project anything into space. And we don’t really have settlements in space yet. So you can imagine that it would be like anything because we don’t have the experience to say otherwise.”
That imaginative openness is not evidence of possibility. It is evidence of uncertainty.
The belief that new worlds naturally produce better societies has deep roots, particularly in American culture. It traces back to Frederick Jackson Turner, whose 1893 frontier thesis argued that democracy and rugged individualism were forged through westward expansion. The frontier, Turner claimed, stripped away hierarchy and forced cooperation.
But as Kelly emphasized, that story only holds if you ignore who benefited.
“If it’s like the American West at all, that’s not what it was like,” she said. “So the white men did have an opportunity to pick some of their roles. But if you look at, for example, diaries of women on the Oregon Trail, three-fourths of the women expressed that they did not want to go.”
The frontier did not magically produce equality. It produced winners and losers, often along lines of power that were already familiar.
“At the end of the day, the frontier thesis isn’t really supported at all. Sorry, dude.”
Recent economic research has tested Turner’s claims empirically, and the results are mixed at best. Frontier regions tend to show slightly higher individualism and slightly lower support for centralized welfare programs. The effects are small, persistent, and morally ambiguous.
Which is why Kelly’s conclusion is blunt: “At the end of the day, the frontier thesis isn’t really supported at all. Sorry, dude.”
Mars, importantly, does not even meet the basic conditions of that analogy. “There’s no part of Mars that’s great for farming,” she noted. “And additionally, you’re going to be living at much higher densities than Frederick Jackson Turner had in mind.”
There is no homesteading on Mars. There is only shared dependence.
Small Groups, Big Power
Early Mars settlements will begin with small crews. At that scale, governance feels informal, even personal. Decisions happen through consensus, familiarity, and trust.
But informality is not the absence of power. It is power without insulation.
“As you start scaling up,” Kelly explained, “you do start needing things like a strategy for what do you do if someone sort of breaks the rules or causes a problem.”
Even on the International Space Station, there are protocols for severe behavioral emergencies. They exist not because astronauts are unstable, but because isolation, confinement, and stress change people. Mars will amplify those pressures, not soften them.
Rules are inevitable. Enforcement is unavoidable. The only real question is how deliberately those systems are designed.
Communes, Company Towns, and the Shape of Control
When space advocates imagine early Martian governance, two models appear again and again: communal living and company towns. Both have deep histories on Earth. Both have failed and succeeded in specific contexts. Neither translates cleanly to Mars.
Communes promise shared resources, shared responsibility, and collective decision-making. On paper, they seem well-suited to a resource-scarce environment. In practice, long-lived communal societies have survived only by being selective, disciplined, and culturally cohesive. They carefully manage membership, punish freeloading, and rely heavily on social enforcement mechanisms like shame and exclusion.
On Earth, exit has always been the safety valve. If a commune becomes intolerable, people leave. Mars removes that option. If leaving means waiting years for a launch window or risking permanent physical harm, governance becomes coercive by default. Even benevolent systems can become traps.
Company towns solve different problems. They emerge where infrastructure is expensive and centralized. Housing, medical care, education, food supply, and employment collapse into a single authority. This arrangement can function, sometimes even peacefully, but it concentrates power in ways that are difficult to unwind.
On Mars, the analogy becomes extreme. The entity that builds the habitat controls not just wages and rent, but atmosphere. Oxygen is not a metaphor. It is a bargaining chip.
History offers warnings here too. Company towns on Earth often began with pragmatic intentions and slid into exploitation because leverage invites use. Mars magnifies that leverage. There is no competing employer down the road. No train out of town. No alternative landlord. The planet itself enforces monopoly.
“When the company owns the housing, they will use that as leverage against the workers.”
Law Without Distance
International law technically governs space today through the United Nations Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits national sovereignty claims and assigns responsibility to launching states. In theory, Mars belongs to everyone.
In practice, enforcement depends on Earth’s willingness to intervene.
Private actors already exercise enormous influence over space infrastructure. Elon Musk has publicly discussed Martian self-governance in ways that collide with existing law. Whether those collisions produce consequences will depend less on treaties than on supply chains and political will.
For decades, Martian settlements will rely on Earth for resupply. That dependence creates leverage. “Earth will have the ability to say, hey, look, if you all don’t follow our rules, we’re not going to approve any more rocket flights,” Kelly said.
This creates a planetary-scale version of a company town, where authority resides millions of kilometers away.
Crime, Punishment, and the Cost of Confinement
Every society must decide what happens when someone causes harm. On Mars, that decision carries physical consequences.
Prison makes little sense in a closed environment where every cubic meter must justify its existence. Exile may be impossible. Execution, whether euphemized as “airlocking” or not, is a moral catastrophe disguised as efficiency.
Kelly points toward alternatives drawn from restorative justice, maritime law, and tightly knit communities. These systems focus less on isolation and more on repair, accountability, and reintegration. They are imperfect. They are also the only approaches that acknowledge the reality of life in a habitat where everyone’s survival is interconnected.
The goal is not leniency. It is sustainability.
Designing Against Ourselves
Perhaps the most hopeful idea to emerge from this conversation is also the most humbling: governance does not begin with constitutions or elections. It begins with design.
If oxygen systems are distributed rather than centralized, power fragments. If habitats are modular, authority becomes harder to hoard. If exit pathways exist, even imperfect ones, coercion weakens. Architecture becomes politics. Engineering becomes ethics.
Mars forces clarity. It strips away the illusion that systems emerge naturally or benignly. Every choice will encode values. Every shortcut will have consequences.
Signal Received
Mars will not save us from ourselves. But it will expose us to ourselves in ways Earth never quite does.
Governance on Mars will not be a philosophical exercise. It will be a lived experience measured in breath, trust, and time. The question is not whether mistakes will be made. They will. The question is whether we are honest enough, now, to study our past and design with our failures in mind.
If humanity is going to build a second home, it will need more than rockets and courage. It will need restraint. Memory. And the humility to admit that the hardest problems are not technical at all.
Mars is not a blank slate.
It is a mirror. *
Adapted from Joe Sweeney’s interview with Dr. Kelly Weinersmith for the Aspiring Martians: Everyday Mars on 25 November 2025.