SpaceX is reshuffling its interplanetary ambitions, with Elon Musk now putting a self-growing city on the Moon ahead of the company’s long-touted Mars push. The pivot reframes near-term human spaceflight around a closer, more accessible world, even as Musk keeps Mars in view as the ultimate destination for a multiplanetary civilisation.
The shift raises a practical question that goes beyond hype: can a lunar settlement that expands using local resources become the proving ground that finally makes deep space colonisation technically and financially viable?
From Mars-first rhetoric to a Moon-centric roadmap
For more than a decade, Musk cast Mars as the primary goal, describing the Red Planet as humanity’s insurance policy against catastrophe on Earth. Now he is telling followers that SpaceX will prioritise a self-growing city on the Moon, a change that effectively inverts his earlier claim that the lunar surface risked distracting from Mars. In public comments, Musk has framed the new focus as a way of securing the future of civilisation while still keeping Mars on the horizon, a recalibration that acknowledges both ambition and constraint in the same breath, as reflected in his remarks about Mars.
The new priority is not just rhetorical. Musk has said that SpaceX will concentrate resources on building a self-growing city on the Moon and has signalled that this will come before any comparable settlement on Mars. In reports citing his comments, he is described as making clear that the Moon will come first while Mars can wait, a message that has been reinforced in investor briefings and social media posts. One account of his remarks notes that he explicitly tied the lunar focus to the idea that a robust presence beyond Earth is essential for securing civilisation’s long term, even as he acknowledged the practical limits of pushing directly to Mars right now.
Investor pressure, IPO timing and a delayed Mars shot
Behind the scenes, the Moon-first strategy is also a financial story. Musk’s rocket firm has told investors that it will give priority to a lunar trip and postpone a Mars journey, according to people briefed on those discussions. That message, delivered as the company weighs a potential public listing, suggests that the near term business case for a lunar programme is stronger than for a risky, schedule-slipping Mars mission, a point underscored in reports that Musk’s team has already pushed back a planned Mars flight.
As a possible SpaceX IPO Nears, the company has strong incentives to showcase a roadmap with nearer term revenue and clearer milestones. A lunar city concept can be tied to contracts for cargo runs, crewed landings and infrastructure support, including work linked to NASA’s Artemis programme, while a Mars mission remains a high risk, long duration bet. In that context, telling investors that a Mars launch this year is possible though unlikely, as reported from ISTANBUL, sounds less like hedging and more like a recognition that the company must sequence its boldest projects to keep capital flowing.
Why the Moon is a more practical testbed than Mars
Strategically, the Moon offers advantages that even Musk now concedes are hard to ignore. Missions to Mars depend on planetary alignment that occurs roughly every 26 months and require a six month journey each way, which makes every launch window a high stakes, infrequent gamble. By contrast, the Moon is only about three days away, with frequent launch opportunities and easier abort options, a reality that Musk himself has highlighted when contrasting the logistics of lunar flights with the long cruise to Mars.
The concept of a self-growing city also depends heavily on in situ resource utilisation, and here too the Moon is a more forgiving laboratory. Water ice in permanently shadowed craters, abundant regolith for construction and the ability to test closed loop life support relatively close to Earth all make a lunar base a logical stepping stone. Musk’s recent comments about shifting focus from sending Americans to Mars toward building up a lunar presence reflect that logic, with one report quoting him as saying that the company will now prioritise a self-growing city on the Moon and explicitly describing this as a shift from Follow through on earlier Mars centric promises.
Technical muscle: Starship, xAI and NASA’s lunar agenda
Technically, the Moon-first plan leans on hardware and software that SpaceX has been maturing for years. The fully reusable Starship system is central to both lunar and Martian ambitions, but a series of flights to the Moon, including cargo and crewed landings, would allow the company to iterate on reusability, refuelling and life support in a less punishing environment than interplanetary space. The company has already tied its future to a broader ecosystem of advanced software, noting in a recent update that xAI has joined SpaceX to Accelerate Humanity and its Future, a move that hints at how artificial intelligence could be used to manage autonomous construction and operations on the lunar surface.
The pivot also dovetails with NASA’s own priorities. Reports indicate that SpaceX has delayed a Mars mission to focus on a NASA lunar landing, a decision described as a notable shift from Musk’s earlier habit of dismissing the Moon as a distraction. By aligning more closely with the agency’s Artemis schedule, SpaceX can secure steady revenue and technical collaboration while still pursuing its own vision of a self-expanding settlement. One account of the change notes that the decision reflects a sober assessment of the challenges inherent in interplanetary travel and the need to prove out key systems in cislunar space before committing crews to the long journey to Mars.
Rewriting Musk’s Mars narrative without abandoning the Red Planet
Musk’s willingness to pivot is striking given his history of bold Mars timelines. In 2016 he said passengers could be sent to the Red Planet within a decade, a target that has repeatedly slipped as technical and regulatory hurdles mounted. Recent reporting notes that he has blown through several previous estimates on when he could feasibly put humans on Mars, and that his latest comments effectively acknowledge that the Moon must now come first. One analysis of his remarks points out that SpaceX is explicitly shifting focus from Mars to the Moon, even as Musk continues to describe the Red Planet as the ultimate goal for a self sustaining civilisation on the Red Planet.
At the same time, Musk is not abandoning his broader narrative about humanity’s destiny in space. In public posts and investor conversations, he has reiterated that the aim is still a multiplanetary species, but he now casts the Moon as the first self-growing node in that network. Reports quoting his latest social media comments describe him stating that SpaceX has shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon and that this will take precedence over immediate Mars missions, a message repeated in coverage that cites his Sunday posts and in summaries that note how he framed the change in an X post highlighted by Reuters.
