You thought tech was the newest Seattle job-grower. But you were wrong! It’s space. Mars, to be specific.

In an interview with Bloomberg, rocket and PayPal entrepreneur Elon Musk revealed more about his plans for a satellite engineering office in Seattle. Commercial satellites built here, he said, will help him build a future colony on Mars.

Last year, Musk and Google’s Greg Wyler detailed a plan to build a fleet of small satellites to help humans communicate across hundreds of millions of miles. The Seattle office would be the Plymouth of this adventure, employing "several hundred people, maybe a thousand people," Musk said. (That's so many new jobs that the governor gave a shout-out to the Mars colonization effort in his State of the State speech today.)

Musk’s SpaceX and Boeing won a $6.8 billion NASA contract last fall to bring commercial crews of astronauts to the International Space Station—a major development for American crews, since they’ve been relying on Russian rockets to take them to space for the last four years. Jeff Bezos, another major supporter of the private space industry, plans to help Boeing build a new kind of engine through his space startup, Blue Origin.

"It’s like our Superbowl," Commercial Spaceflight Federation president Eric Stallmer told me on the day of the NASA announcement. (The Government Accountability Office upheld the contract last week.)

A colony on Mars still faces loads of technical challenges, not to mention human and psychological ones. Space agencies across the world are actively studying what it would take to make human life viable on the red planet. Would the isolation make us nuts? Could being surrounded by plants make us feel better? Being able to Snapchat from space might help.