The Road to Mars Is Paved in Blood
… giving new meaning to the “Red Planet.” A guest post from my friend Devin Kellis.
This is the first guest post of this newsletter. It’s written by a good friend and colleague of mine, Devin Kellis, a medical student who’s worked with groups like the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. In 2022, Devin sat in on my “Ethics of Human Extinction” course — the first-ever university course on the topic, to my knowledge! — and since then we’ve co-hosted reading groups on extinction ethics and co-authored a paper published in the AMA Journal of Ethics.
What follows is an urgent call to boycott SpaceX, given Musk’s termination of USAID (among other things). We’re hoping this catches on, and are actively pursuing signatures and endorsements from prominent people and organizations. My favorite line from Devin’s piece: “The road to Mars is being paved in blood, giving new meaning to the ‘Red Planet.’” Brilliant!
I’ll have my own article on SpaceX’s IPO and Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire — which really feels epochal — out (probably) on Tuesday. It argues that Musk should be seen as a mass murderer of world-historical proportions. I do not hold back!
Without further ado, here’s Devin’s excellent piece:
SpaceX is an American aerospace, satellite, social media, and artificial intelligence (AI) company founded by Elon Musk in 2002. The company was created to colonize Mars and build the commercial space industry. In 2015, SpaceX announced its entrance into the satellite business via Starlink. Then, in 2026, SpaceX expanded to social media and AI by acquiring X (formerly Twitter) and xAI (now SpaceXAI), respectively. Yesterday, on Friday, June 12, 2026, SpaceX transitioned from private to publicly traded company via the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history, making Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
Alongside the SpaceX IPO, our moment includes the “Great Aid Recession,” an ongoing period initiated in part by Musk and defined by nation states’ mass withdrawal from global health spending. As CEO of SpaceX and de facto head of the U.S. Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), Musk played a key role in abruptly dismantling one of the most cost-effective, life-saving humanitarian aid organizations in history: the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Beforehand, while USAID was investigating its use of Starlink satellites in the Russo-Ukrainian War, Musk implied that DOGE deregulation would help SpaceX. Notwithstanding conflicts of interest, what is most important is that ending USAID is causing immense suffering and death for real, human beings.
Journalists are sharing those people’s stories with us. Reports include: Peter Donde (age 10), Evan Anzoo (age 5), and Achol Deng (age 8) died from loss of access to human immunodeficiency (HIV) medications; Gy Gael (age 8) died from an infection without access to antibiotics; Babagana Bukar Mohammed (age 7) died from complications of sickle cell disease amidst health clinic closures; and Yamah Freeman, a mother of two, bled to death amidst ambulance delays due to fuel shortage while expecting her third child. Analyses on the health effects of ending USAID by the former Acting Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID, Impact Counter, the World Health Organization, the Center for Global Development, Lancet, and Lancet: Global Health suggest that Musk’s approach to cutting USAID has already led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths like those reported above, with millions of lives still at risk through 2030. In addition, research in Science suggests that cutting USAID may have increased deaths from violent conflict. A new outbreak of the Ebola virus, which kills people by causing hemorrhagic fever, is also being made worse by USAID’s absence. The road to Mars is being paved in blood, giving new meaning to the “Red Planet.”
These are enormous, century-defining harms. Understanding them requires us to recognize that, as the late psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton wrote,“[i]t is very difficult to kill large numbers of people without a claim to virtue.” Musk’s SpaceX S-1 filing to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) claims to aim to colonize space out of a desire for humanity to “avoid the same fate as the dinosaurs.” Yet, the same filing’s Risk Factors section fails to consider meaningfully whether SpaceX might increase the risk of human extinction. Musk himself has argued (in court, no less) that “AI may kill us all,” yet SpaceX’s S-1 filing devoted more than 90% of its total addressable market to AI.
This cherry-picking of extinction risk reduction arguments when it is convenient to business is projection that obfuscates a perception of reality wherein SpaceX and Musk themselves threaten humanity. The veil of virtue is undone in light of ending USAID with DOGE, eroding epistemic norms on X, allegedly breaking environmental laws with xAI, militarizing outer space via Starlink, and empowering the only U.S. president this century to call for a resumption of nuclear weapons testing. Together with the autocratic corporate governance of SpaceX, Musk’s ability to back political threats with trillion-dollar wealth bestows upon him an unacceptably concentrated power to develop, deregulate, and steer world-destroying technologies. Authoritarianism is growing amongst the “Agents of Doom.”
The upcoming mega-IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI (both companies that contributed to the sitting U.S. president’s inauguration fund) suggest that this is the rule, not the exception, of our times. The “Second Gilded Age” came from somewhere, and we must work to understand and address the underlying drivers which enable a small number of individuals or even one person to facilitate mass harm. That line of thinking suggests that the ethical response to the SpaceX IPO is not investment, but a principled refusal to participate. Companies, nations, and organizations alongside their constituents should consider and openly discuss boycotting SpaceX and no longer purchasing Starlink Internet, X premium subscriptions, and SpaceXAI infrastructure, among other services.
As always:
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you on the other side!
possibly one of the worst people in history in terms of wasted effort, money and resources.
Many thanks for this excellent and apt description of reality and its devastating consequences. As a supplement to this ... The ecolgical consequences of the burning of the disposable satellites and the mass, routine and commercial transport of payloads into space for the atmosphere are completely unclear. SpaceX (and others) abuses the atmosphere as a waste incineration plant.