SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Sunday told “those unaware”—which would seem to be anyone outside the company, its investors, and perhaps Musk’s inner circle—that SpaceX has “already shifted focus” away from colonizing Mars in favor of building a “self-growing city” on the moon.
The Wall Street Journal on Friday reported that SpaceX told investors it would place its Mars plans—which the company has touted for well over a decade—on the back burner. It will instead shift its primary focus toward an uncrewed moon landing in 2027, per “people familiar with the matter.”
That trip could lay the groundwork for NASA’s Artemis III mission, which is planned to use a human landing system (HLS) variant of SpaceX’s gargantuan Starship rocket to deliver four astronauts to the lunar south pole. NASA aims to launch Artemis III by 2028, in line with President Donald Trump’s December executive order calling to return Americans to the moon before the end of his second term.
Musk in January 2025 wrote that the moon is a “distraction” and that SpaceX is “going straight to Mars.”
During a bombastic announcement the following May, he said Starship has a “50/50 chance” of landing on Mars by November or December of this year. Per SpaceX’s website, the company envisions launching 2,000 Starships to Mars—as many as 10 per day—during future mission windows.
Musk Shares New Plans
Musk elaborated on what the Journal reported in posts on social media platform X this week.
On Sunday, he wrote that building a lunar city first makes sense “as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.”
He also noted constraints on Mars launch windows, which he estimated will be open only “when the planets align” every 26 months. Mars missions, he wrote, would take about six months, “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,” Musk wrote.
The SpaceX chief believes a lunar city could become “self-growing” in less than half the time it would take on Mars.
He added that a planned Version 4 (V4) Starship tanker could deliver more than 200 tons of propellant per flight, necessicitating only five or six trips to an orbital depot designed to refuel Starship en route to the moon. For years, SpaceX has said missions to Mars will require the powerful rocket to fuel up in Earth orbit, but that “shouldn’t be too much of a problem if we’re doing >10k flights/year,” Musk wrote.
Musk on Monday reposted an animated video depicting dome-shaped lunar abodes accompanied by Tesla-branded vehicles and robots, commenting “Civilization on the Moon!” He later made crude comments in response to a post by Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos. Bezos shared what appears to be an image of a tortoise—several of which are featured on the SpaceX rival’s coat of arms—without comment.
In yet another post, Musk said SpaceX will continue pursuing a Mars city “in parallel with the Moon, but the Moon will be the initial focus.” Doing so, he wrote, would more quickly achieve the “overriding priority” of “securing the future of civilization”—a challenge SpaceX in the past has argued will require human settlements on the Red Planet.
Musk estimated missions to colonize Mars could launch as early as 2031. Those missions, he added, would launch directly from Earth rather than using the moon as a waypoint, “as fuel is relatively scarce on the Moon.”
“The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars,” he wrote Sunday.
SpaceX Changes Course
The prioritization of lunar settlements represents a drastic change for SpaceX.
Musk in 2011 told the Journal that the company could land astronauts on Mars in “best case, 10 years, worst case, 15 to 20 years.” During a speech at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress, he said the first Mars-bound passengers could lift off in 2024, estimating it would cost $10 billion to develop a rocket capable of transporting them (later revealed to be Starship).
At the 2018 South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, Musk said a Martian settlement would be “more likely to survive than a moon base.” The year prior, he wrote in a paper that colonizing the moon would be “challenging…because it is much smaller than a planet.”
“In general, Mars is far better-suited ultimately to scale up to be a self-sustaining civilization,” he wrote.
Musk in a 2024 social media post said NASA’s Artemis moon mission architecture—which relies upon the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion crew capsule—is “extremely inefficient.”
“Something entirely new is needed,” he concluded.
Musk’s comments this week come just months after U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy—the interim NASA chief before administrator Jared Isaacman’s December confirmation—vowed to reopen SpaceX’s Artemis III HLS contract. As of May, NASA had paid out about 65 percent of the approximately $4 billion it owes for that project.
SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin in November each submitted fresh plans that they claim could accelerate NASA’s timeline. Isaacman has indicated that he intends to follow through on Duffy’s comments and open the competition to other firms such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.
