Илон Маск

Vacuum. Silence so loud it could be heard in the beating of your own heart. Beyond the porthole — nothing. And everything. An endless, velvet-black cosmos strewn with diamonds that do not twinkle. They are cold, eternal, indifferent. And there, ahead, barely visible in the light of the distant Sun — a rusty disc. Mars.

It does not beckon. It waits. As if it has always been there, knowing I would come. And now I am here, alone in this metal capsule, halfway between the past and the future. Between what was and what must be. And in this silence, just before the final leap, memory catches up like gravity.

Chapter 1. The Boy with the Library of the Universe

My first memory is not my mother’s voice or my father’s smile. It was light. Not the warm light of a lamp, but the cold, furious light of an arc I accidentally created by short-circuiting wires in the garage. The shock threw me to the floor. The air smelled of ozone and fear. But through the fear broke wonder. I had touched something real — a force that moved the world.

School was an alien planet. The words of other children sounded like meaningless static noise. Their games seemed like primitive algorithms. I found refuge in the library. It was not merely a hall with books. It was my starship. I devoured The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Adams’ irony felt less like a joke and more like a survival manual for an absurd universe. The Lord of the Rings taught me about duty and the burden of being chosen. And Asimov’s Foundation … it became my bible.

I would lie on the floor of my room in Pretoria, staring at the cracked ceiling, and see not plaster but star charts. I imagined giant ships, like floating cities, sailing into nowhere, carrying the embryo of human civilization. But the thought brought not excitement, but a nauseating sense of defeat. Eternity on the road? To resign ourselves to the fact that we would never set foot on another planet in a single human lifetime? That was surrender.

One night, after the South African sun had already drowned behind the horizon, I stepped into the yard. The air was thick and sweet. I lifted my head. The Milky Way was a silver river spilled across the sky. And aimed at it like an arrow was a thin red dot. Mars.

In that moment something clicked. It was not mere desire. It was necessity. A physical law of my own existence. I did not simply want to fly to Mars. I had to make it possible. For everyone. To light a candle in the darkness before the wind of fate extinguished our flame forever.

Steel and Silicon

The path to the stars lay through code and steel. Silicon Valley became my proving ground. Zip2, PayPal… To the world they were startups. To me they were simulators. I learned to assemble teams, manage resources, and batter down walls of misunderstanding with a forehead bloodied from the blows. Money? It was merely fuel. A means, not an end.

When I sold PayPal, I had resources. I could have bought an island. Instead, I bought a dream. Or rather, I tried to buy a Russian rocket.

I remember the smell of that office in Moscow — cheap cologne, vodka, and the dust of faded imperial power. They looked at me, a young upstart from America, like some exotic creature.

“You want to send a greenhouse into space? A Martian cucumber?” Their laughter was coarse and smug.

“No,” I said. “I want to send people. Eventually.”

They stopped laughing. They looked at me with a mix of pity and contempt. “Young man, this is impossible. Too expensive. You will die.”

On the flight back, gazing at the endless snows of Siberia beneath the wing, I felt not disappointment but clarity. Crystal, cutting clarity. They could not see the future. They saw only the inertia of their past. If they could not or would not — we would do it ourselves.

I opened my laptop. A blank page. I wrote one word: Falcon.

Creating SpaceX was not a business plan. It was a declaration of war. War against gravity. War against cosmic inertia. War against the very idea of “impossible.”

I remember the first failures. The launch of Falcon 1 from Kwajalein Island. How that slender white candle rose into the tropical sky, carrying all our hopes. And how it fell. Again and again. We stood in the bunker as the screen showed nothing but static. The air left us like it was escaping a punctured spacesuit.

The third launch. The rocket rose. My heart stopped. And then — failure. Stage collision. Another fireball. I saw tears in my engineers’ eyes. Not from exhaustion, but from grief. Grief for the dream that had once again burned up in the atmosphere.

We had resources left for one final attempt. The last bullet in the chamber. The fourth launch. If it failed, there would be no SpaceX. No Mars. No future.

It rose. And it did not fall. When the first stage burned out and separated, when the second stage ignited and our small, ridiculous test payload reached orbit, silence fell over the bunker — the kind of silence you could cut with a knife. And then came the explosion. Not on the screen, but in the room. Shouts, embraces, sobs. We cried like children. That day we did not merely launch a rocket. We proved that the devil of gravity was not omnipotent. We had made a tiny hole in the wall of the impossible.

Red Dust

Years passed. Falcon 9, Dragon, Starship… Every step was a battle. Every success was a foothold for the next fight. We learned to land rockets, just as the fantasists of my childhood had predicted. We built a ship that was not merely a rocket, but the first true starship of Earth.

And then came the day. We named the mission “Phoenix.” Not after the mythical bird, but after the city on Mars that was yet to be built.

Saying goodbye to my children was the hardest part. Their embraces were stronger than the g-forces at launch. I looked into their eyes and saw the same wonder that had been in mine as a child when I gazed at the stars. I was doing this for them. For their future, where the stars would no longer be a destination, but home.

Launch. It cannot be described in words. It is not shaking or roaring. It is the universe deciding to crush you with its finger. It is the planet itself pushing you away like an unwanted guest. Everything burns. But you must remain cold. You must watch the data, listen to the reports, be part of the machine.

And then comes the silence. Weightlessness. You float in the capsule while beyond the porthole stretches the endless blue of Earth. She is so beautiful, so fragile, that it steals your breath. No borders, no wars. Just home. One for all.

The journey took months. Days blurred into a monotonous rhythm of exercises, system checks, and observations. I reread all of Asimov. I watched Earth grow smaller and Mars grow larger.

And then, the day of landing. Autonomous systems guided the ship. My only task was to observe and, in case of extreme necessity, take manual control. The atmosphere of Mars is treacherous and thin. “Seven minutes of terror,” as my engineers called it.

Friction. Vibration. A fiery vortex outside the window. Then silence. Retro engines. A slow, agonizing descent. Sensors screamed with streams of data. And finally — a soft, almost weightless jolt. Silence.

I unbuckled the straps and floated to the main porthole.

The world beyond the glass was not red as in the pictures. It was the color of rust, ochre, and copper. An endless, rolling wasteland beneath a pale pink sky. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And yet it was everything.

All that remained was to put on the spacesuit. The airlock cycle felt like eternity. The final door slid open with a quiet hiss.

I stepped onto the surface. My foot sank into the loose dust not with a firm thud but with a soft, muffled rustle. I took a few steps, leaving the first footprints in millions of years that the wind would not erase.

I ran my hand over the helmet and raised the visor. The air was cold and dry, smelling of oxidized iron and… nothing. Pristine purity.

I looked around, then turned back to see my ship — a silver cocoon against the vastness.

And then I lifted my head. Among the abyss of black sky hung a tiny blue dot. Home.

And standing there alone on the edge of this desert, under the cold sun, I understood. This was not the end. This was only the beginning. We had done it. We had become a multi-planetary species. And this memory — mine and all of humanity’s — had just gained a new chapter. A chapter we would write together.

The next ship with the main crew would arrive in two years. They would find a base here, built by Russian shift workers, and oxygen reserves. They would bring seeds, tools, and new dreams.

And I would remain here, the watchman at the gates of a new world. So that when they arrived, someone could say to them: “Welcome. We’ve been waiting for you.”

And to glance back at that pale blue dot in the sky that had once been everything we knew. And to smile.

This is the dream that visited me every night for almost twenty years. I knew this dream was prophetic. It will come true. All that remains is to wait and believe that it will be so.