Great stories help us envision what’s possible and illustrate the promise of progress in ways we can all understand. This awareness can lead to funding for more research, government support and consumer enthusiasm. So was the case for NASA in 1969, and so today is the case for Elon Musk.

Like Walt Disney and the Moon marketers before him, Elon is good at telling stories, using them to bring attention to his most ambitious projects.

For inventors like Elon, much of the task in building novelty is convincing others the construction is worth their attention. In the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, "If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

And that’s what Elon does. Through storytelling, he’s taken the world to unconventional horizons of thought, encouraging them to long for the endless immensities of space travel, sustainable energy and better transportation.

When he first set his eyes on Mars, he developed a story to inspire wonder among the public and get them on-board his vision for Mars colonization. He believed that if he could plant a small, green garden on Mars (“Mars Oasis”), the visual would be compelling enough to prove that life could take root on the red planet.