Musk Embraces the Moon
Just 12 months after convincing President Trump to use his inaugural address to extol the vision of sending people to Mars, Elon Musk is changing course. Mars is still the long-term goal, but Musk now acknowledges that is years away. His near-term ambition is a “self-growing city” on the Moon, a planetary object he earlier eschewed as a distraction, that would be home to a manufacturing base for AI satellites and a mass driver to send them into deep space. [Updated, February 11, 2026.]
Musk’s long-standing passion to send millions of people to Mars to ensure humanity’s survival in case a catastrophe destroys Earth is well known. That’s been the focus of his space business for more than a decade, first enunciated in detail at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress in Mexico and constantly reiterated.
As he was sworn into office for a second time at the U.S. Capitol a year ago, Trump endorsed Musk’s enthusiasm saying “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” Standing near Trump’s youngest son, Barron, Musk cheered the news.
🇺🇸🇺🇸 AMERICA IS GOING TO MARS 🇺🇸🇺🇸
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 20, 2025
Trump’s comments prompted concerns that he might direct NASA to focus on Mars instead of the Moon, much as President Barack Obama did in 2010. Even though the Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon began during his first term, Trump showed his interest in Mars even back then. When his FY2026 NASA budget request included a $1 billion boost “to put the nation on a path to land the first humans on Mars,” worries grew that the Moon program was imperiled.
But over the past year, the drumbeat in Washington to get American astronauts back on the Moon before Chinese taikonauts arrive has intensified.
Musk is a critical link in doing that. NASA gave SpaceX a $2.9 billion fixed price contract in 2021 to build the Human Landing System (HLS) to get astronauts from lunar orbit down to and back from the surface using his Starship space transportation system. At the time, the goal was 2024. That date has slipped year over year in part because Starship is well behind schedule. The 11 test flights so far have had mixed success and all were suborbital. Orbital flights and demonstrating in-space propellant transfer needed for Starship to travel beyond earth orbit have been repeatedly delayed.
NASA signed a second HLS contract with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin in 2023 with a first flight at the end of the decade. NASA recently asked both companies to assess what could be done to accelerate their schedules.
How much any of that played into Musk’s statement on Sunday, February 8, that SpaceX is shifting its focus to the Moon is unclear, but it’s a surprising development. It wasn’t too long ago that Musk said he would send five uncrewed Starships to Mars in 2026 and the first crewed missions in 2028. Now it’ll be “about 5 to 7 years” before the first flights depart.
For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.
The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars.
It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the Moon every 10 days (2 day trip time). This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city.
That said, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster. — Elon Musk
The Moon no longer is a distraction, but a nearer-term solution to preserving humanity’s future: “SpaceX will build a system that allows anyone to travel to the Moon. This will be so insanely cool.”
Threats to our planet are usually cast as either natural, like an asteroid impact, or human-induced, such as nuclear war or climate change. The future of a city on the Moon or Mars that could exist independent of supplies from Earth remains the realm of science fiction, but Musk is onboard with both. The Moon may be his near-term quest, but Mars still beckons. He envisions them proceeding in parallel.
The Moon would establish a foothold beyond Earth quickly, to protect life against risk of a natural or manmade disaster on Earth.
We would continue to launch directly from Earth to Mars while possible, rather than Moon to Mars, as fuel is relatively scarce on the Moon.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2026
The Moon pivot comes against the backdrop of an upcoming SpaceX IPO. Musk is the founder and CEO of SpaceX, which is the parent of Starship and the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, the Crew and Cargo Dragon spacecraft, the Starlink and Starshield broadband Internet satellite systems, and recently announced plans to put one million AI data centers in Earth orbit. SpaceX acquired Musk’s AI business, xAI, which owns the social media platform X, earlier this month.
Musk added more context during a February 11, 2026 meeting with xAI employees posted on X (@xAI). While the majority of the event is about xAI’s reorganization, at the very end Musk connects the dots between SpaceX, xAI, and his zeal to extend “the light of consciousness to the stars.”
Since xAI was formed just 30 months ago, the small and talented team has made remarkable progress.
The future has never looked more exciting! pic.twitter.com/QZ73H2mpBj
— xAI (@xai) February 11, 2026
After describing plans to launch as much as a terawatt per year for earth-orbiting data centers, he laid out a longer term vision for lunar manufacturing facilities with a mass driver “shooting AI satellites into deep space.”
The next step beyond Earth data centers is our earth orbital data centers and we’ll be launching with SpaceX orbital data centers at the 100 to 200 gigawatt per year level. Not cumulative, I mean per year. And ultimately we see a path to maybe launching as much as a terawatt per year….
But what if you want to go beyond a mere terawatt for a year? In order to do that, you have to go to the Moon, by having factories on the Moon and building AI satellites and having a mass driver — which is the kind of thing you only read about in science fiction, but we’re going to make it real — we’re actually going to have a mass driver on the Moon. …
I really want to see the mass driver on the Moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space … just one after the other.
I can’t imagine anything more epic than a mass driver on the Moon and a self-sustaining city on the Moon, and then going beyond the Moon to Mars, going throughout our solar system, and ultimately being out there among the stars and visiting all these star systems. Maybe we’ll meet aliens. Maybe we’ll meet and see some civilizations that lasted for millions of years, and we’ll find the remnants of ancient alien civilizations. But the only way we’re going to do that is if we go out there and we explore, and this is the path to making it happen. — Elon Musk, February 11, 2026
This article has been updated.
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