Elon Musk is talking about going to Mars like it’s an Apple event

Elon Musk is holding a massive event today to reveal his plans to eventually travel to and colonize Mars, and while his real audience was NASA and the government, that didn’t stop him from going all-out in production value. Specifically, the similarities between Elon presenting his plans and the way Steve Jobs presented the technology decisions that went into various iconic Apple products was note-perfect — just look at how Elon compared the various options for propellants and how Jobs compared the various storage options available for the first iPod:

And here’s Musk presenting a spec sheet for Mars compared to Earth:

The trick here is to make hard technology choices seem both obvious and easy — when in fact Apple had to find and source a specific tiny Toshiba hard drive and build a revolutionary UI around it, and Musk has to, uh, launch cryogenically frozen rocket fuel into orbit to fill a Mars-bound spaceship without anything exploding, and then produce that same propellent on Mars.

Pretty much the same thing!