Every founder asks who will buy. Mars founders have to ask it in order — because the first customer of a new world is never the person who eventually lives there. Ask a room of space fans who the customer for Mars is and most will point at the end of the story: settlers, tourists, researchers in habitats, kids born under a pink sky. They are not wrong. They are just last. No new market in history has started with its final customer. Aviation did not start with holiday flights

Every frontier has a first generation — the people who believed before there was proof. They are not an audience waiting to be entertained. They are a market waiting to be recognized. There is a moment in every big build when the believers outnumber the evidence. Mars is in that moment now. No one has landed there. No ticket has been sold, no hotel booked, no cargo delivered. And yet the belief is already an economy: people watch cargo ships dock at dawn, argue about radiatio

No customer has ever bought a ticket to Mars. So who is writing the checks that are building the road there? Follow the capital stack. Every Mars headline is secretly a finance story. A rocket rises, and underneath it sit four different kinds of money, stacked in layers, each with its own motive. Understand the stack and you understand why Mars is moving now — after decades of paper studies — and who gets paid along the way. This is the pillar piece for The Money: the map we