Why would someone so smart propagate such stupidity about how this virus spreads and harms? Perhaps because Musk faces a challenge that had preoccupied previous managers of grand space enterprises: maintaining a skilled, loyal workforce in the service of some really far-fetched notions. In this wildly expensive and deadline-driven business, it always has been crucial to sustain the dream in order to maintain the bottom line.
One early space pioneer who knew this very well was Wernher von Braun, the registered Nazi and S.S. officer who designed Hitler’s death-dealing V-2 rockets and went on to help lead America’s space program. In wartime Germany, von Braun made use of slaves placed at his disposal, 20,000 of whom died building his rocket.
For America’s postwar space effort, he proposed a different labor-supply solution: The campaign to explore Mars, he wrote in 1962, would entail lockstep organization. Von Braun needed an elaborate network of human machinery made of dutiful cogs. “Great numbers of professionals from many walks of life, trained to co-operate unfailingly, must be recruited,” he explained. “Such training will require years before each can fit his special ability into the pattern of the whole.”
Von Braun’s schema reflected the times: a booming America flowing its middle class into government and corporate bureaucracies. Musk’s rebel capitalist persona fits this different era of entrepreneur worship. (It’s doubtful von Braun would have jokingly tweeted he enjoyed the video game “Call of Booty,” as Musk did.)
But the two men share certain key traits. They are obsessive and grandiose. They combine tremendous technical facility with a cartoonish grasp of the human condition. They have even less of any workable idea of how we’d all get along on other planets. They founded and inspired ambitious macho geek cultures. And their overweening instinct for self-promotion inevitably has interlocked them with the two great mechanisms for lifting the American dream into the heavens—popular media and the military.
In this second Gilded Age, Musk is but one of several men so enriched by techno-capitalism that they can seed-finance their own space programs. Like Trump touting his United States Space Force, they have melded the stuff of science fiction into a reality television show. We watch agape as they claim to race one another to put humans on Mars and then colonize the universe.
In their respective marketing initiatives, Musk and von Braun share one more key instinct. The two immigrants to the United States show a deft command of the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny—the creed insisting that white settlers were divinely ordained to occupy all of North America, in the process displacing and killing off indigenous peoples. Musk invokes the core precepts of Manifest Destiny when he says, “The United States is a nation of explorers” for whom going to Mars is “not a question of how. It’s a question of will.”