This is illegal under the Outer Space Treaty. I'm tempted to say it's a joke but Elon may be able to outmaneuver whoever would enforce that treaty.

The space force will enforce the USA needs on the Martians!

Also the us military assisted spaceX in its development. There’s a reason spaceX has ITAR compliance needs.

ITAR compliance is a requirement for anything which could be repurposed for certain classes of weapons. Working on an aircraft autopilot requires ITAR compliance.

Kind of a joke, but honestly there's not much someone on Earth could do to enforce their will on Mars. In practical terms they are on their own regardless.

Yes there is just like it’s done on earth at the point of a gun, all laws are enforced at the end of the day by gunpoint.

Except that it takes about 6 months for a gun from Earth to get to Mars. It's hard governing a place you can't easily reach.

And if a Mars colony really is self sustaining, stopping supply runs also doesn't do as much as you'd maybe like. Sending a gun(ship) might also be prohibitively expensive.

There's probably a lot of fiction written about exactly this topic. Maybe the Martians could buy their independence with Epstein drives.

It's likely enough that the Mars end of the service would enjoy being able to communicate with the ground stations on Earth.

The Outer Space Treaty is a treaty between governments. As a rule, treaties only apply to governments. So SpaceX can say whatever they like in a document, as it's legal to do so in the US and then act upon it based on US law. From my understanding this means that they can claim it all they like, but if they tried to enforce that claim against anyone it wouldn't work.

I beleive a number of European countries are now covering Starlinks costs in keeping Ukraine connected.

This might just be my distaste of Musk showing, but whilst under most other circumstances I’d assume that this was entirely a joke but in this case it does seem consistent with Musk’s libertarian space fetishism.

The extraterrestrial pecking order has zero chance of being independent of Earth’s. I find it hard to believe that Musk would be all for holding hands and singing kumbaya if things started swaying away from…anarcho-capitalism.

Yeah, a contract is totally going to stop government from forcing them to do something in the future. Absolutely.

Very naive. A planet without a single monopoly on violence (aka a government) will quickly get one or have N competing groups fighting to become one. There is a reason why we called countries without a functioning government a “failed state”.

Oh there will be government on Mars... and Elon wants it to be him.

Yep. He will control the flights to and from Mars. That’s a lot of power.