摘要：美国有线电视新闻网（CNN）2025年9月12日刊登长篇分析报道，长期以来，宇宙一直是创意人士的灵感画布，他们畅想人类在星辰间生活的未来。如今，人类正处于将这些宏伟愿景转化为现实的关键节点。虽然这一过程可能既费力、昂贵又充满风险，但一些富豪却在积极推进。
马斯克与美国航空航天局拟建造的人类火星殖民地构想图
美国有线电视新闻网（CNN）2025年9月12日刊登长篇分析报道，长期以来，宇宙一直是创意人士的灵感画布，他们畅想人类在星辰间生活的未来。如今，人类正处于将这些宏伟愿景转化为现实的关键节点。虽然这一过程可能既费力、昂贵又充满风险，但一些富豪却在积极推进。
在西方世界，对这一未来如何实现的影响力，或许无人能及埃隆·马斯克与杰夫·贝佐斯。作为全球最富有的人，他们均拥有商业太空公司，合计净资产超过6300亿美元，这一数字还在不断增长，已逐渐接近美国国家航空航天局（NASA）66年历史中获得的总拨款额。
对于人类太空未来的样貌，马斯克与贝佐斯有着不同设想，但两人的愿景并非相互排斥，而且都面临着技术、资金、政治及伦理层面的独特挑战。
近年来，无论从文化还是技术层面来看，马斯克对太空探索的个人影响力或许都是最大的。他早已明确表示自己唯一的关注点是火星，畅想这颗红色星球终将成为人类大型聚居地的那一天。
与此同时，贝佐斯在太空领域的影响力因旗下火箭公司的缓慢发展节奏而有所受限，他的关注点更贴近地球。他大力宣扬“将重工业与污染产业迁出地球”的愿景，或许将这些产业转移到旋转的在轨实验室，而人类聚居群体将在那里全职生活和工作。
在贝佐斯设想的未来中，地球将专门用于居住和度假，或许会被永久保护起来，如同国家公园一般。
中佛罗里达大学行星物理学家菲尔·梅茨格表示：“能生活在这个时代太不可思议了，仿佛有人专门为此写了剧本。”但他补充道，在太空生活“从伦理层面而言可能对人类文明有益”。他说：“我认为若能妥善推进，我们定能创造一个无比光明的未来。”
马斯克与贝佐斯均将自己的地外探索事业标榜为慈善之举，称地外聚居地是一种“生命保险”。若自然或人为灾难导致地球不再宜居，地外聚居地将保障人类的生存。但在宇宙居住的构想上，两人存在显著差异。
马斯克聚焦于移民火星
二、马斯克聚焦殖民火星
自2002年创立太空探索技术公司（SpaceX）以来，马斯克就表示该公司的核心使命是在火星建立一座可自给自足的城市。这一愿景包括先派遣机器人车队，再输送人类前往封闭栖息地居住，地点可能选在火星的阿卡迪亚区。在那里，支撑聚居地运转的水资源可能埋藏在红色沙尘地表下不足1英尺处。
马斯克表示，他最终希望火星能经历一个名为“地球化改造”的过程：人类通过向火星大气中注入气体，创造更温暖的温度和模拟地球的水循环，让这颗红色星球更接近地球的环境。
然而，科学家们对于地球化改造在物理层面是否可行尚未达成共识。
美国国家航空航天局火星探索计划首席科学家迈克尔·迈耶表示。“我认为《全面回忆》的思路是对的。”他指的是1990年的电影《全面回忆》一片中利用一件古老的地外人工制品在火星制造出可呼吸的空气。迈耶称：“这需要借助某种外星技术。”
戈尔曼表示，她认为其他星球的生态环境无论是否存在生命，都应保持原样并加以保护。戈尔曼说：“行星或卫星的表面能保存所有过往事件的痕迹……我们可以通过表面所见，重建太阳系的历史。”
贝佐斯聚焦建立轨道工厂和空间站
三、贝佐斯聚焦建立轨道工厂和空间站
贝佐斯于2000年创立蓝色起源，他认为人类根本无需在另一颗行星上建立聚居地，甚至将这类想法称为“行星沙文主义”。
他的观点与已故物理学家、普林斯顿大学教授杰拉德·奥尼尔提出的理念一致。奥尼尔认为，人类应致力于生活在巨型空间站中。这类空间站在靠近地球的轨道运行，并通过旋转产生模拟重力。2021年的纪录片《高远边疆》便聚焦于奥尼尔的这些理念。
贝佐斯在2019年关于其太空愿景的最详细演讲中表示，这类被称为“奥尼尔殖民地”的结构宽度可达数英里，每个可容纳多达100万人。这位蓝色起源创始人在20世纪80年代就读于普林斯顿大学时，奥尼尔正是该校的教师。
贝佐斯还表示，未来的太空殖民地必须依靠从月球获取的资源（如冰水）来支撑。目前，蓝色起源正在研发一款名为“蓝月”的月球着陆器，该着陆器或将助力此类资源的开采。
相较于尝试火星旅行，他更倾向于这种近地空间站方案。他在2019年指出，月球“距离地球仅3天路程，且不存在火星那样的发射限制”。火星的最佳探测时机每两年才出现一次，即“发射窗口期”内火星与地球轨道对齐之时。贝佐斯称：“前往月球几乎可以随心所欲，不受时间限制。”
除马斯克和贝佐斯外，另一位亿万富翁、谷歌前首席执行官埃里克·施密特近期收购了一家自己的火箭公司，他一直在暗中支持“将数据中心迁出地球”的想法。施密特在4月的国会听证会上表示：“人们正在规划10吉瓦规模的数据中心，能源需求已成为日益逼近的危机。这些数据中心的产业规模是我这辈子从未见过的。”
梅茨格与戈尔曼均表示，相较于马斯克的构想，他们更支持贝佐斯对人类太空探索未来的愿景。他们解释道，太空文明留在地球附近是明智之举，因为这能为早期聚居地提供便捷的补给通道。戈尔曼还表示，靠近地球居住可能会给居民的心理健康带来难以估量的益处。
尽管存在分歧，马斯克与贝佐斯的愿景都基于一个相似的核心观点：人类很快将在太空生活和工作，而宇宙终有一天会成为经济活动的主要舞台。
佛罗里达州肯尼迪航天中心的蓝色起源“新格伦”火箭首次发射前的画面
四、贝佐斯选择循序渐进
然而，这两位亿万富翁已明确表示，他们的计划推进时间表截然不同。
贝佐斯承认，建造和部署奥尼尔殖民地所需的技术目前尚未问世，且他无意亲自监督其建设过程。他在2019年表示：“我们该如何建造奥尼尔殖民地？没人知道。我不清楚，在座的各位也都不清楚。这需要留给后代去解决。”
在此期间，蓝色起源的主要精力集中在研发“先导技术”上：这些技术成本效益高，且有助于推动创新，但未必能实现突破性的新成果。
例如，蓝色起源的“新格伦”火箭是该公司已推出的技术最先进的产品。其设计初衷主要是与太空探索技术公司的“猎鹰”系列火箭竞争。通过以远低于旧技术的成本，将卫星及其他货物送入地球轨道。
马斯克将迅速解决星舰发射问题作为紧迫挑战
四、马斯克将迅速解决星舰发射问题作为紧迫挑战
另一方面，马斯克的行动则带着强烈得多的紧迫感。太空探索技术公司目前正试图攻克物理定律的限制，全力完善“星舰”的设计。这是有史以来规模最大的火箭系统。截至目前，这款近约121米高的飞行器已进行了10次亚轨道试飞，成功率参差不齐，其中6次试飞任务中，星舰的部分组件出现故障或在空中爆炸。
但马斯克希望，未来五年内，星舰能为火星聚居地的初步建设做好准备。在5月的一次演讲中，马斯克公布了一项基本计划：明年年底先向火星发射多艘货运航天器；两年后的2028年，再输送人类前往；此后数年，将有数百艘航天器组成的车队陆续抵达，运送“约100万吨”的基础设施物资。
南加利福尼亚大学航天工程教授加勒特·赖斯曼指出，太空探索技术公司要让星舰成为现实，必须克服巨大的技术障碍。赖斯曼曾是NASA宇航员，目前担任SpaceX顾问。
赖斯曼表示：“他们可能正面临一些极其棘手的工程难题。我认为，星舰最终可能无法成功，也可能彻底改变人类未来的所有太空活动。”
马斯克长期以来一直表示，星舰庞大的规模和强大的动力有望实现全新类型的任务，包括搭载人类群体前往火星，以及部署新型大型太空望远镜。
美国公布重返月球战略：2020年开建月球基地
五、美政府试图借私人公司力量抢在中国之前重返月球并建立资源开发霸权
美国政府已成为怀揣太空探索野心的亿万富翁们的重要盟友。由于自身目标高远且预算有限，美国国家航空航天局越来越多地寻求与贝佐斯的蓝色起源、马斯克的太空探索技术公司等私营企业合作，尤其是在华盛顿的鹰派议员明确表示，在与中国争夺太空领域主导权的竞争中，太空探索已被视为国家优先事项的背景下。
马斯克与贝佐斯各自投入数十亿美元私人资金研发新型太空技术催生了一种新态势：过去，NASA是此类探索的主要资金提供者和目标制定者；而现在，由亿万富翁主导的公司在新技术研发中扮演着同等重要（甚至更重要）的角色。
这种态势在NASA的“阿尔忒弥斯计划”中体现得最为明显。该计划旨在让宇航员自1972年“阿波罗计划”结束后首次重返月球。
尽管NASA已投入超过400亿美元，为载人登月任务研发专属航天器和火箭，但该机构几乎在任务的所有其他方面都在寻求私营企业的帮助。例如，蓝色起源和太空探索技术公司均获得了数十亿美元的合同，用于研发月球着陆器：即能将宇航员从NASA建造的航天器运送至月球表面的交通工具。
对SpaceX而言，其研发的着陆器正是星舰。考虑到理论上完全投入使用的星舰动力足以独立完成载人登月任务，这一方案令人瞩目。不过，NASA计划让星舰至少在初期与该机构自研的“太空发射系统”和“猎户座”飞船协同工作。
NASA已与星舰项目签订一份价值30亿美元的合同，委托其执行阿尔忒弥斯计划的首次载人登月任务，该任务最早定于2027年年中进行。
这笔交易凸显出，NASA已开始根据私营企业能提供的资源来规划自身项目，而非反过来让私营企业配合自己的计划。
梅茨格表示，这未必是件坏事。如果SpaceX专为火星研发的火箭同时能帮助NASA实现“抢先中国登月”的目标，“NASA应充分利用这种协同效应”。
Two billionaires have very different — and equally wild — visions of a future in space. Is either possible? By Jackie Wattles on CNN. September 12, 2025.
The cosmos has long been a canvas for creatives who imagine a future where people live among the stars. Now, humanity stands at a pivotal juncture as the laborious, expensive and high-stakes process of attempting to convert such grand visions into reality is actually underway.
In the Western world, perhaps no one has more influence over how this future may be realized than Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Two of the world’s richest men, both of whom own commercial space companies, they have a combined net worth that tops $630 billion, a sum that is growing to rivalthe amount of money NASA has been allocated over its entire 66-year history.
Musk and Bezos have different ideas of what humans’ future in space should look like, and their visions are not mutually exclusive. But each presents its own challenges — technically, financially, politically and ethically.
Musk has had perhaps the largest impact of any one person on space exploration in recent years, from both a cultural and technological standpoint. And he has long made known his singular focus on Mars, envisioning a day in which the red planet hosts a sprawling settlement of people.
Meanwhile, Bezos, whose influence in the space industry has been somewhat tempered by his rocket company’s slower pace, has kept his focus a bit closer to home.
He has touted a vision of moving “heavy industry and polluting industry off Earth” — perhaps onto spinning spaceborne laboratories where colonies of humans live and work full time.
In Bezos’ imagined future, Earth is reserved for living and vacationing, perhaps preserved indefinitely as a national park.
“It’s a crazy time to be alive; it’s almost like somebody wrote this as a script,” said Phil Metzger, a planetary physicist with the University of Central Florida. But, he added, living in space could be “ethically good for our civilization.”
“I think if we do it right, we could create a really bright future.”
Phil Metzger, University of Central Florida
Creating in-space settlements, however, is not a moral imperative, argues Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist and associate professor at Australia’s Flinders University. And the stories Musk and Bezos tell about our future may ring differently to people across different socioeconomic classes.
“I would say there are probably more people concerned by the impacts of climate change on Earth right now than are looking forward to a future in space,” Gorman added.
Musk and Bezos have billed their extraterrestrial pursuits as philanthropic, saying that off-Earth colonies are a form of life insurance that will guarantee humanity’s survival if a natural or human-made catastrophe leaves our home planet uninhabitable.
But there are significant differences between their ideas of cosmic habitation.
Chasing Mars
Since founding SpaceX in 2002, Musk has said the company’s guiding mission is to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars. That vision includes sending convoys of robots and then people to live within enclosed habitats, perhaps in Mars’ Arcadia region. There, water to sustain such a colony may be trapped less than a foot beneath the dusty red surface.
SpaceX’s concept of a future Mars colony. SpaceX
Eventually, Musk has said, he hopes to put Mars through a process called terraforming, in which humans make the red planet more Earth-like by pumping gases into the atmosphere to create warmer temperatures and a water cycle that mimics that of our home world.
Scientists, however, do not agree on whether terraforming is physically possible.
“I think ‘Total Recall’ has the right idea,” Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, previously said to CNN, referencing the 1990 movie in which an ancient extraterrestrial artifact is used to create breathable air on Mars.
“You’d need to use some alien technology,” Meyer said.
Gorman said that she believes ecological environments on other worlds are worth protecting as they are — even if no life-forms exist there.
“The surface of a planet or moon can preserve evidence of everything that happened. … We can reconstruct the history of the solar system from what we see on the surface,” Gorman said.
‘Planetary chauvinism’
Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000, does not believe humans need to pursue a settlement on another planet at all — even referring to such ideas as “planetary chauvinism.”
His view aligns with ideas put forth by Gerard O’Neill, the late physicist and Princeton University professor who posited that humans should aspire to live in gargantuan space stations that orbit close to home and spin to provide simulated gravity. O’Neill’s ideas were the subject of the 2021 documentary, “High Frontier.”
Referred to as “O’Neill colonies,” these structures would be miles wide and each hold up to 1 million people, said Bezos in 2019 during his most detailed presentation about his space ambitions to date. The Blue Origin founder was a student at Princeton in the 1980s when O’Neill taught there.
Artist renderings show Blue Origin’s vision of a future O’Neill space colony. Blue Origin
Bezos has also said that future space colonies must be supported by resources such as frozen water that can be harvested from the moon. And Blue Origin is developing a lunar lander called Blue Moon that could aid such resource extraction.
He has expressed his preference for this approach over attempting Mars travel, noting in 2019 that the moon is “three days away, and you don’t have constraints on launch that you have with Mars,” which is best accessed only every two years when the planet better aligns with Earth during a “transfer window.”
“You can go to the moon just about any time you want,” Bezos noted.
Metzger and Gorman said they favor Bezos’ vision of our spacefaring future over Musk’s.
It’s wise for space-based civilizations to remain near Earth, they explained, because it would provide an easy pathway to resupply the settlements in their early days. And sticking close to home may pay untold dividends for inhabitants’ mental health, Gorman said.
But if Musk is successful in establishing a Mars settlement, that will likely make it far easier to one day realize O’Neill colonies as well. “A rising tide will float all boats,” Metzger said.
Neither Blue Origin nor SpaceX responded to email inquiries from CNN for this story.
Regardless of their differences, both Musk’s and Bezos’ visions are underpinned by a similar thesis: Humans will soon live and work in space, and the cosmos will one day become the main stage for the economy.
Divergent timelines
The billionaires, however, have made clear they’re operating on vastly different timescales.
Bezos has admitted that the technology required to build and deploy an O’Neill colony does not yet exist, and he has no intention of personally overseeing its construction.
“How are we gonna build O’Neil colonies? Nobody knows. I don’t know. Nobody in this audience knows. That’s for future generations to figure out,” he said in 2019.
In the meantime, Blue Origin is focused largely on developing precursor technologies that are cost effective and could help spur innovation — but they don’t necessarily accomplish new things.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, for example, is the most technologically advanced offering the company has debuted. And it’s mostly designed to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon rockets by hauling satellites and other cargo to Earth’s orbit at a fraction of the price of older technologies.
Starship’s urgent challenge
Musk, on the other hand, operates with a far greater sense of urgency.
SpaceX is currently battling the laws of physics as it attempts to hash out the design for Starship — the largest rocket system ever constructed. So far, the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) vehicle has launched on 10 suborbital test flights with varying degrees of success. (Pieces of the Starship have failed or exploded in flight during six of those test missions.)
But Musk is hoping Starship will be ready to enable the initial setup of a Martian colony within the next five years.
During a speech in May, Musk mapped out a basic plan that begins with launching several cargo-carrying spacecraft to Mars late next year. Humans would follow just two years later in 2028, and convoys of hundreds of spacecraft would arrive in the years after, delivering “about a million tons” of infrastructure.
However, the technological hurdles SpaceX must surmount to bring Starship to fruition are immense, noted Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut and SpaceX consultant who is a professor of astronautical engineering at the University of Southern California.
“They might just be butting up against some very intractable engineering problems,” Reisman said. “I think it could end up never working, or it could end up revolutionizing our entire future of activities in space.”
Musk has long said Starship’s sheer size and power could make brand-new types of missions possible, including carrying groups of humans to Mars and deploying massive new space telescopes.
The politics of exploration
The US government is proving to be a valuable ally to billionaires with extraterrestrial ambitions.
Faced with its own lofty goals and budget constraints, NASA has been increasingly encouraged to partner with private-sector companies like Bezos’ Blue Origin and Musk’s SpaceX — particularly as hawkish lawmakers in DC have made clear that they view space exploration as a national priority amid a race with China for dominance in the field.
The fact that today Musk and Bezos are each pouring billions of private-sector dollars into creating new space technologies has introduced a new dynamic: Whereas NASA used to be the primary bankroller and goal-setter for such efforts, billionaire-led companies are now playing an equal if not greater hand in developing new technologies.
Nowhere is that more evident than in NASA’s Artemis program, an effort to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
While NASA spent more than $40 billion developing its own spacecraft and rocket for a crewed moon-bound flight, the agency is turning to the private sector for help with almost every other aspect of the mission. Blue Origin and SpaceX, for example, have both received multibillion-dollar contracts to develop lunar nders, or vehicles that will ferry astronauts from their NASA-built spacecraft to the moon’s surface.
For SpaceX, the lander in development is Starship — a stunning proposition considering that a fully operational Starship will theoretically be powerful enough to accomplish a crewed lunar landing mission all on its own. However, NASA intends to have Starship work alongside the space agency’s own SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, at least initially.
NASA awarded Starship a $3 billion contract to conduct the first crewed Artemis landing, slated for as soon as mid-2027.
The deal highlights how NASA has begun shaping its own programs around what the private sector has to offer, rather than the other way around.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, Metzger said. If SpaceX’s rocket that is purpose-built for Mars also helps NASA achieve its goals of beating China to the moon, “NASA should get whatever synergy they can from that.”
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