I want to set up the journey we're going to take today.

And to do that, I actually want to play this exchange I had on the show not too long ago.

This was at the beginning of February.

It was a couple of weeks into the Trump presidency and Elon Musk's project to radically alter the federal government.

And I was speaking with post-reporter Fes Siddiqui about what Musk was doing with his new power

through the U.S. Doge Service.

Thinking about what all this means, like, what is Musk's goal here?

You said that he wants to extremely curtail the amount of spending in the federal government,

that he wants the number of people in the federal government to be smaller, that he wants to

kind of weed out Democrats or loyalist to anyone other than Trump from working in the federal

government. But to what end? What is he trying to achieve here? So I'll start with, to what end? Mars.

Really? I am not joking. I mean, he has said very plainly that he believes this sort of strangulation

by regulation is limiting the potential scope of humanity's achievements and preventing us from ever

getting to Mars. And that can be seen as

sort of like the high-level goal. I kept coming back to that exchange. And then I thought about what

President Trump said on January 20th, after taking the oath of office.

We'll pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts,

to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.

This isn't the first time that a president has talked about going to Mars.

I mean, it's something almost like a rite of passage because it's ambitious, it's hopeful, it's optimistic.

There's an adventure. It's about science. It's about exploring.

Chris Davenport covers the space industry for the Post.

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