Martian Businesses with Jim Cantrell

When we dream of Mars, we often picture the big stuff: rockets, habitats, astronauts planting flags. But what about the day-to-day grind of running a business on another planet? In this special Everyday Mars episode, I spoke with aerospace veteran Jim Cantrell—one of the original team members at SpaceX and now the CEO and co-founder of Phantom Space Corporation—about what it’s going to take to build not just a civilization, but an economy, on Mars.

Jim brings decades of experience launching real ventures, from moon landers to microsats, and now he’s turning his entrepreneurial gaze toward the Red Planet. We explore what kinds of businesses will come first, what investors need to understand about Martian logistics, and what lessons we can borrow from Earth's startup ecosystem. We also dig into launch windows, robotic middle class, quitting our job after being at sea for a month, Martian bakeries, the importance of the frontier, Jim's tips to future Martian entrepreneurs, why building a business might be harder than building a satellite, and how walking the walk is more important than talking the talk.

A huge thank you to Jim Cantrell for joining me today and bringing his trailblazing perspective to the conversation, to Nick Thorburn for our high-flying theme music, to Ceci Giglio for the beautiful graphics, to RDan, Leila, Inka, and Carl for admining the Facebook group, and to my family for supporting this vision—even when my browser tabs are full of asteroid mining articles.