MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: The Interlocking Genius of Elon Musk.”

They should’ve sent a poet. So beautiful… beautiful… so beautiful, so beautiful. I had no idea.” — Astronaut Dr. Ellie Arroway, humanity’s first interstellar traveler, on viewing the cosmos through the portal of an alien transport in the film version of Carl Sagan’s “Contact.”

We don’t have friendly aliens to share their blueprints for an interstellar spaceship so, here in the real world, we’ll have to make do with the interlocking genius of Elon Musk — and that might just be enough to start humanity on our way to the stars… or at least to that fourth rock from the Sun: Mars.

It’s the interlocking part that will make it work if anything can — and the poetry I’ll come back to shortly.

“I want to die on Mars, just not on impact,” Musk joked more than a decade ago. Getting there is easy, relatively speaking. Building a colony large and wealthy enough that an elderly man could immigrate there to die there of old age… that’s the tricky part.

“Why Mars?” you might ask, and I’ll answer that a bit further down. For the moment, it’s the HOW? that you’ll find most intriguing.

Much more at the link for our VIP subscribers.