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Moon

SpaceX Prioritizes Lunar 'Self-Growing City' Over Mars Project, Musk Says (reuters.com) 157

Posted by EditorDavid from the to-the-moon dept.
"Elon Musk said on Sunday that SpaceX has shifted its focus to building a 'self-growing city' on the moon," reports Reuters, "which could be achieved in less than 10 years." SpaceX still intends to start on Musk's long-held ambition of a city on Mars within five to seven years, he wrote on his X social media platform, "but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster."

Musk's comments echo a Wall Street Journal report on Friday, stating that SpaceX has told investors it would prioritize going to the moon and attempt a trip to Mars at a later time, targeting March 2027 for an uncrewed lunar landing. As recently as last year, Musk said that he aimed to send an uncrewed mission to Mars by the end of 2026.
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SpaceX Prioritizes Lunar 'Self-Growing City' Over Mars Project, Musk Says More

SpaceX Prioritizes Lunar 'Self-Growing City' Over Mars Project, Musk Says

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  • Nazi lunar base. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09, 2026 @04:38AM (#65977116)

    Thankfully one already exists on the far side of the moon.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • Make that 50 years or longer (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @04:40AM (#65977120)

    Musk has no clue and he is not an engineer. Even only keeping out the Regolith dust (which will be survival critical) will take longer to figure out than those "10 years".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This speaks volumes about Musk's predictions. He said they were going to skip the moon to go to Mars, as all that 'research' on the moon was pointless, and he wanted to 'back up' the human race on Mars.

      Now he says they're going to the moon instead. He also claims it'll take less than 10 years.

      I suspect in humankind collectively decided to build a city on the moon in 10 years, we could probably do it. Musk's companies are all buying each other to hide losses - but by any measure they're bigger than most comp

      • Human beings get unwell living in very low gravity for extended periods. The ISS showed that. Space cities need artificial gravity, such as spinning torus. A space city on the moon is nonsense.

      • I suspect in humankind collectively decided to build a city on the moon in 10 years, we could probably do it. Musk's companies are all buying each other to hide losses - but by any measure they're bigger than most companies, but still comparatively small on the "nation state scale". it feels unlikely that even if he spent every last cent he could lay his hands on that he'd be able to do what he says in 10 years.

        I suppose it depends on the size of the nations. Musk net worth, according to a DDG AI search and other countries GDP:

        As of 2025, Elon Musk's net worth is approximately $384 billion. Countries with GDPs lower than this amount include those with GDPs below $384 billion, such as countries like Greece and Portugal, which have GDPs around $300 billion and $250 billion, respectively.

        Now obviously we don't see those two countries or those with lower GDPs sending people to space, so maybe they don't count as "real" countries.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Comparing GDP to net worth is a very strange thing to do. Even more strange than comparing countries to people.

    • Re:Make that 50 years or longer (Score:4, Funny)

      by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @07:20AM (#65977276)

      Come on, the fat ketamine Nazi has all the pieces of the puzzle.

      Electric cars that need no air to combust - check.
      Tunnel-digging machinery that can create congestions - check.
      Spaceship that can also do fireworks - check.
      Robotaxis in the millions - check.
      An angry "AI" to throw rocks at Earth - check.

      It is a done deal, basically, with blackjack and hookers.

      • It is a done deal, basically, with blackjack and hookers.

        As a matter of fact, forget the whole moon thing.

    • It took him longer than ten years to figure out human flight to ISS.

    • We should invite a new unit of time, the "Musk year." However, this unit exists in a superposition state. Only when the project is complete and the actual time is observed, do you know the length of a Musk year.

    • What he is, is a liar and master stock manipulator. That's all this is. No need to look for any science in it, or to dig any further (no regolith joke implied).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tragedy ( 27079 )

      Musk has no clue and he is not an engineer. Even only keeping out the Regolith dust (which will be survival critical) will take longer to figure out than those "10 years".

      While I don't have any confidence in Musk at this point to think it would be considered, it's not really that hard to do. You either wash it off before you come inside from the airlock, or you don't bring the suit inside and leave the dust on it. Washing it off can be a simple matter of showering off with soapy water in the airlock once it is pressurized (the shower system and tank, etc. can be self contained inside he airlock). The water gets sucked up from under the grate at the bottom, the dust is filter

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        No. That is amateur-level thinking. It will not work for the Moon. This is very fine dust and it is electrically charged. And you cannot simply "filter it out" either.

  • I know you're going to be a trillionaire soon, but damn. Your projections started out grandiose, but now they're just humorous. You blew past unreasonable so quickly we didn't even notice it.

    • I know you're going to be a trillionaire soon, but damn. Your projections started out grandiose, but now they're just humorous. You blew past unreasonable so quickly we didn't even notice it.

      Well, there was the whole "hyperloop" thing.

  • Idiocrat (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @04:54AM (#65977142)

    It wouldn't work for "securing the future of civilization," even if they were able to overcome the mountain of difficult and expensive engineering challenges.

    Any sort of calamity that put human life on Earth in peril would mean the lunar colony would stop receiving support from Earth and would die off long before the last holdouts Earthside.

    There's an incredibly long list of things they'd need shipped up to survive, none of which are needed on Earth. Because on Earth you can survive by primitive means if necessary.

    • Re:Idiocrat (Score:4, Informative)

      by ctilsie242 ( 4841247 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @06:13AM (#65977224)

      This isn't "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". It is hard to make a moon colony self-sustaining. Just the loss of core materials due to daily use have to be replenished from Earth, otherwise the colony will eventually become a tomb.

      At the minimum, it will take multiple, redundant sources of iron and other materials, a source of oxygen, water (which means hydrogen, and there isn't much of that in the moon's atmosphere.)

      It isn't just an engineering hurdle. This is a resource hurdle and providing things that are already hard to get on earth, and already need extremely modern supply lines to make and get into a usable thing in the first place.

      Instead, the best hope is trying to get mines up and go 100% robotic until we can get stuff piled in areas that are usable. This combined with a cheaper propellant source because moving stuff out of Earth's gravity well isn't cheap.

      • Re:Idiocrat (Score:5, Informative)

        by Rei ( 128717 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @12:11PM (#65977740) Homepage

        Iron, oxygen and water are not hard things to acquire at the moon's poles. It's like you were trying to make a list of the things that are easiest to acquire on the moon.

        Your biggest problems will be the extreme paucity of both nitrogen and carbon, things essential en masse for all life. Beyond that, chlorine and fluorine are also very rare, zinc is about 2 orders of magnitude less common than on Earth (also lead, bismuth, thallium and cadmium), etc. Also, beyond general abundances, is the lack of many of the sort of enrichment processes that create rich mining deposits on Earth. At best you'll get some of the volcanic enrichment processes (incompatible elements in pegmatites), but not much beyond that, and even then you're going to deal with lots of overburden. And hard rock mining and processing on the moon will be far more difficult than on Earth.

        But iron, water, and oxygen are basically the easiest things you could get on the moon. Respectively, half a percent of regolith is (magnetic) iron dust; water, while rare globally, is seemingly abundant in polar craters; and oxygen can not only be made from water, but over 40% of the mass of lunar regolith itself is oxygen, which can be freed via a variety of (albeit energy-intensive) processes.

        (Even "getting the minerals" isn't really the big challenge anyway in gaining full independence from Earth. It's the mind-bogglingly immense length of production chains needed to fully sustain even a minimized-set of required technologies ("consumables", both feedstocks and maintenance), and all of the transport along the way. You can whittle down how much you need to import per-capita by orders of magnitude, but getting rid of all of it is a big ask)

    • A very fancy, very rich one, but a marketdroid with money to spend nonetheless. His skills are in bullshitting about maybes, pure and simple. Sometimes he gets it right with EVs and rockets, sometimes when he attempts to be a futurologist without understanding the engineering and biological issues he just sounds like an idiot. This is one of those times.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by shilly ( 142940 )

        i always remember the impression he made on me when i first watched a Tesla keynote he did, years and years ago. I remember thinking to myself "how can he be so shit at this compared to Jobs?" I know Steve Jobs was a phenomenal presenter, but Musk was just such a *shit* presenter. I couldn't believe that other people thought he was good at it.

        • i always remember the impression he made on me when i first watched a Tesla keynote he did, years and years ago. I remember thinking to myself "how can he be so shit at this compared to Jobs?" I know Steve Jobs was a phenomenal presenter, but Musk was just such a *shit* presenter. I couldn't believe that other people thought he was good at it.

          I always thought they were two sides of the same coin. Jobs always struck me as a narcissist too. I've worked with people who behave like this - they make a cute presentation, then the only thing they know how to do in the real workplace is yell at people.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by shilly ( 142940 )

            Jobs was undoubtedly very self-assured and possibly a narcissist, although he public apologised for various fuckups several times, which is not something narcissists do. But there are too many stories of his insight and acuity to dismiss him as someone who only knew how to yell at people in the workplace.

    • It wouldn't work for "securing the future of civilization," even if they were able to overcome the mountain of difficult and expensive engineering challenges.

      Any sort of calamity that put human life on Earth in peril would mean the lunar colony would stop receiving support from Earth and would die off long before the last holdouts Earthside.

      There's an incredibly long list of things they'd need shipped up to survive, none of which are needed on Earth. Because on Earth you can survive by primitive means if necessary.

      Someone clearly didn't watch the documentary "Space: 1999."

  • It took him a while, but he finally seems to have found a sea [wikipedia.org] that is "not too choppy" [x.com] for a Cybertruck to drive across.

  • IA + IRSU = Fast and "cheap" development (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LoadLin ( 6193506 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @06:16AM (#65977232)

    I remember the document "Affordable, rapid bootstrapping of space industry and solar
    system civilization"

    https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.032... [arxiv.org]

    A decade ago it was proposed about develop the Moon with the assistance of AI. It's not about human colonization. Not yet. And more about robot colonization.

    I think it's a great idea. Low risk (human missions are a lot more expensive), finally develop local resources, with a fixed cost per time, develop an exponential infrastructure.

    The thing is, this proposition was developed before AI revolution, so I think now has more sense than ever.

    Once you industrialize the Moon, create an true near self-sustaining, redundant and growing outpost become a lot more easier and logical.

    Don't start with human colonization. Let's focus on robot colonization (instead of exploration) now.
    And the Moon has lots of advantages in that regard. Relatively "high" gravity (in comparison with most rock bodies of the Solar System). Nearly real-time communication (just a pair of seconds apart). Some good metal reserves. Spots with near 24x7 light (in the poles, a bunch of solar groups of interconnected panels can reach that goal). Some ice to build fuel. A potential space elevator.

    Not ideal for human colonization, but great for robot colonization, and we probably should start that way.
    Manned program requires elevate the security and will raise the cost too much.

    • Politics says no. Even with robots, there are at least 3 major world powers able to send robot missions to the moon today. They will not let the other powers build factories there. It would lead to war above, and war down here. Best case scenario: the moon is like Antarctica, a deliberately unexploited wilderness.

      Then there's the Kessler syndrome. Thanks to Elon and his ilk, we are well on our way to filling up an unregulated layer of space junk at the low earth orbital regions of space. When critical mas

  • By civilization Musk means himself and a tiny group of humans to entertain him.

  • Only pivoting the message (Score:3, Insightful)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @08:23AM (#65977330)
    Spacex's Mars plans are way behind schedule, so, rather than admit failure there, they're putting out this pivoted Moon First message.

    I think Starship will not be man-rated as quickly as BO's lander, so the latter will get the glamorous lunar orbit to lunar surface part of the DEI Artemis 3 mission, but Starship will carry all the stuff they need on the moon for that mission, maybe act as an emergency return vehicle, and then take more equipment and then men there to build a base. By that time, the Mars mission engineering will be ready for testing.

    It's possible Musk thinks they can accelerate Starship's man-rating in time for Artemis 3, but I doubt that will work.

    I love how any post mentioning Musk brings out all the Slashdot geniuses whose much better skills have somehow only netted them a millionth of that "terrible engineer's" wealth.
  • If this goes anything like the hyperloop he'll be building a bunker on Earth soon. I'm guessing an underwater hotel or a mountain bunker, either will somehow be revolutionary.

  • Space colonies musk, space colonies (Score:3)

    by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @11:27AM (#65977630)

    Self sustaining space colonies are the only way to escape earth's politics, and most importantly, the pull on the soul of the gravity.
    Also "musk" is a pretty dumb surname, i consider changing to something more nice, more space like, like "Deikum"

    Also not related at all, but if you ever think on doing giant robots, consider only using only one big red eye, and giving em axes that heat up the edge. it will tell earth everything they need to know.

    • Self sustaining space colonies are the only way to escape earth's politics

      Not really. A vengeful dictator could launch a missile at say a Mars colony to finish it off.

      A safer option would be a long-term nuclear ship going at least 0.1c that stops broadcasting. In short, get the f$ck away from this solar system, change course often, and STFU. Might also need to shut the engines off once 0.1c reached to not leave a heat signal.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z80a ( 971949 )

        I'm talking specifically about the o'neill space tubes
        You can't missile something you don't even know where it is

  • One thing I've learned about science articles with "could" in the headline - it's almost always science fiction and worth nobody's time to read
  • I think his dream is to be the evil megacorp from just about any space dystopia.
  • Moon base, sure that's easier to pull off than a Mars one. Still doesn't provide the "Why" go to the high expense and danger of doing this to a satisfying degree. Pretty much every answer I've heard to that question so far could be done more safely and cheaper with robotics.
    • Because the financialized house of cards needs some vague reason to keep spending money and taking public funds even if the reason is pointless. The could've stopped at cheaper launches, but no, they want to become Omnicorp because that's how trillionaires get more money and power.

  • I've maintained for years that establishing a moon base would be the best first step. much faster than round trips to mars. you can work out allot of logistical issues there first, and when you're really ready to goto mars, the technology will be much more mature.

  • They will be able to drive around in Tesla Roaderts by then too....in Hyperloops all powered by Tesla Solar roofs.

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