Why is Elon Musk really going to the Moon?

After 25 years of obsessing over Mars, Elon Musk announced that SpaceX has shifted focus from invading the Red Planet to invading the Moon. He claims he will build a self-sustainable lunar metropolis in less than a decade—a sharp contrast to his proposed Mars colony, which he says would now take at least 20 years. Both timelines are as fictional as Star Trek, but at least now his plan makes sense.

It is a jarring plot twist from January 2025, when Musk dismissed the Moon as a “distraction.”  Now, he says, the satellite is the “overriding priority” to secure civilization. Musk argues a lunar base is necessary because a “natural or man-made catastrophe” on Earth could cut off the supply lines a Mars colony would need to survive.

Musk might actually be making sense this time. As Harvard physicist Avi Loeb points out, Musk is right to pivot. The Moon is closer, making it faster to get to, and it aligns with the geopolitical objectives of the United States (the government pays a lot of SpaceX’s bills). It makes sense financially, opening the opportunity for the return of investment that may come from mining the lunar surface and orbiting asteroids, as well as his absurd plan to put one million AI satellites in orbit (made and launched from the Moon, no less).

The financial aspect is the key. Really, it’s the whole end game. By choosing a target that’s more accessible—and lucrative—than Mars, Musk is crafting a realistic illusion for investors and bull analysts. He needs to inflate the immediate financial expectations of SpaceX, so his company can get as much money as possible in its programmed 2026 IPO.

Hard limits

The unavoidable fact that forced him to pivot from Mars is, above everything, basic physical limitations. “[The Moon] is much more practical to bring people back and forth,” Loeb told NewsNation. Musk described his “self-growing city” on X as a settlement that would be capable of expanding rapidly using local resources. It’s not something that that has ever been demonstrated. Still, Loeb argues that “the moon makes much more sense” before we attempt to leap into the deep void of the solar system.

The physics of space travel don’t care about Musk’s marketing tweets. The Moon is simply a more forgiving target. Musk says that SpaceX can launch to the Moon every 10 days, allowing for rapid iteration; whereas Mars missions are shackled to planetary alignments that only occur every 26 months. 

The commute is also drastically different: a two-day hop versus a six-month deep-space haul exposed to radiation and all sorts of space dangers. As Quentin Parker, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Hong Kong, points out: “If you have some issue or emergency, you’re a few days away from Earth. You’re months away if you’re on Mars.” That’s the difference between a rescue mission and a lot of funerals. 

Whenever it is ready, Starship’s massive capacity to haul over 110 tons of cargo makes it a powerful workhorse to send everything Musk needs to build his fabled city as fast as possible.

Base alpha and lava tubes

Musk is calling his proposed self-sustaining lunar city “Moon Base Alpha,” a direct homage to the 1970s British-Italian science fiction television series Space: 1999. In the show, Moonbase Alpha is a high-tech scientific research center located in the lunar crater Plato.

Musk city’s hardware is radically different from the series’ shiny sets and spaceships. The workhorse for his plan is the Starship Human Landing System, a modified version of the regular Starship stripped of its heat shield and flight flaps since it will never need to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. Instead of massive engines at the base, this ship uses smaller hull-mounted thrusters for touchdown to avoid blasting a crater into the landing zone and kicking up lethal dust.

Once landed, a massive elevator would lower crews and cargo from the high-altitude cabin. The sheer volume of a Starship offers nearly 35,000 cubic feet of pressurized space—dwarfing the Apollo Lunar Module’s cramped 160 cubic feet—which allows for actual living quarters rather than just survival pods.​ SpaceX also envisions landing and tipping Starships horizontally and burying them under five meters of regolith to shield crews from cosmic radiation. 

Powering this buried city requires overcoming the lunar night, which lasts for two weeks of freezing darkness. For that, SpaceX will need nuclear reactors like those designed by Kilopower, 10-kilowatt fission units that can run continuously for a decade—rather than relying solely on solar. The city will still need solar arrays, especially in the initial phase. NASA and SpaceX are developing Vertical Solar Array Technology (VSAT)—32-foot-tall masts designed to capture sunlight that grazes the horizon at the lunar South Pole. 

To move around, astronauts won’t just be walking; they will live inside pressurized rovers, essentially mobile habitats that allow them to explore for weeks without returning to base.

But the ultimate goal is to go underground. Musk’s engineers are exploring another old idea for lunar bases: lava tubes. These massive natural tunnels were formed millions of years ago by ancient lunar volcanic flows. They offer ready-made protection with stable temperatures of around 63 degrees.Inside these subterranean cathedrals, SpaceX can build habitats using regolith-based 3D printing tech, like those imagined by 3D-printing construction companies Luyten and Icon. Giant rovers can also weave fibers from moon dust to construct inflatable module supports inside the lava tubes.

However, the chasm between rendering and reality remains vast. SpaceX targets a 2026 orbital refueling test for Starship—a critical prerequisite for any lunar mission—a date that has been pushed repeatedly and doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. Aside from part of its elevator, the company hasn’t delivered most of the hardware for Starship HLS. It’s all on the drawing board, which is why NASA reopened the bids for the lunar lander in 2025 after SpaceX failed to progress on their promised milestones. 

Icon’s lunar construction system is still in R&D, and the Kilopower nuclear reactors, while promising, are still in the ground-testing phase with deployment unlikely before the 2030s. Musk’s “less than a decade” timeline assumes a flawless convergence of technologies that, right now, exist mostly on paper.

Follow the money

But we know Musk’s pivot isn’t about practicality. It’s about business and valuation. 

On February 2, SpaceX merged with Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, xAI, creating a corporate titan valued at $1.25 trillion. Sources indicate SpaceX is preparing for a mid-June 2026 IPO that could target a valuation as high as $1.5 trillion, potentially the largest listing in history. Investors love many fast catalysts, not multi-decade pipe dreams. 

Musk wants to dominate AI, and he knows he needs raw power so he plans to build orbital data centers to feed this AI obsession, allegedly bypassing the power and cooling constraints of terrestrial facilities. 

Musk’s narrative is selling the idea that the only way to put one million xAI servers in orbit is to exploit the Moon’s resources. Mine it for silicon and oxygen. Build the factories to make the servers. Build a magnetic cannon system to launch the servers into Earth orbit. The Moon becomes the construction site for the “vertically-integrated innovation engine” he promised during the xAI merger announcement.​

Musk appears to believe he can build this infrastructure before his life ends. It doesn’t matter that multiple experts think that’s impossible. It doesn’t matter that he’s basically proposing building a potential weapon of mass destruction—a cannon satellite launcher—on the Moon. It doesn’t matter that he wants to put a one-million satellite orbital minefield around Earth. And it doesn’t matter that thermodynamics makes his idea of cooling xAI servers in space extremely hard. 

Space is not “the cheapest place to put AI in 36 months or less,”as Musk has said. In fact, according to Lluc Palerm, research director for satellite at consulting firm Analysys Mason, Musk’s plan to make money out of space servers has the same magnitude of challenge as a Mars mission. 

Still, building a lunar city aligns perfectly with NASA’s Artemis program—which recently saw the SLS rocket lift off for the first time in 50 years—and offers immediate revenue potential through government contracts that a distant Mars colony simply cannot match.

The Bezos threat

Which brings us to the second player in this Moon race: Musk is suddenly battling a competent Jeff Bezos. For years, SpaceX’s factory in Texas stood unrivaled. But Blue Origin has finally started delivering. It’s landing its New Glenn rocket and planning a Blue Moon Mark 1.5 lander that doesn’t require complex orbital refueling. That’s competition to Musk in terms of actual Earth dollars. 

“Multiple sources have told Ars that Bezos has told his team to go “all in” on lunar exploration,” writes Ars Technica’s space editor Eric Berger. This creates a genuine threat that Blue Origin could put humans on the lunar surface before Starship gets there.

Bezos isn’t just playing catch-up either. He is building a parallel industrial machine. Blue Origin has successfully tested Blue Alchemist, a technology that melts lunar regolith to autonomously manufacture solar cells and transmission wire without needing any materials from Earth. The company has also launched Project Oasis, a mission to map lunar water ice and helium-3 using low-orbit satellites equipped with neutron spectrometers. To cut costs, Blue Origin is developing Project Jarvis, a reusable stainless-steel upper stage for the New Glenn rocket, mirroring the reusability of Starship. 

Bezos’s vision is not to build underground cities on the Moon but to build O’Neill colonies, massive orbiting habitats. He sees the Moon not as a colony, but as the mine that will build them (again, a crazy long-term plan). 

So Musk’s pivot appears to be a calculated move to seize the commercial opportunity of the Moon before his rival does. 

Red Moon rises

While Musk tweets about future cities and Bezos powers up, the most dangerous enemy for the United States’ space hegemony is on a fast collision course. China is the last part of Musk’s wild turn.

The Asian giant is executing a concrete, century-long roadmap. On January 29, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) officially launched the Tiangong Kaiwu program, a massive national plan named after a 1637 Ming explorer’s encyclopedia to extend Chinese industrial dominance across the solar system. The plan treats space not as a scientific frontier, but as an economic zone. 

According to academic Wang Wei, who architected the proposal, the goal is to secure strategic minerals from near-Earth objects to fuel Earth’s sustainable development. According to the regime’s official China Space Daily, “among the 1.3 million asteroids in our solar system… about 700 are relatively close to Earth and estimated to be worth over $100 trillion U.S. dollars each. Taking technical feasibility and cost-effectiveness into consideration, 122 of them are economically suitable for mining and use.”

This is a four-stage industrial conquest. CASC’s roadmap dictates that by 2035, China will establish a lunar resource development system and begin mining near-Earth asteroids. By 2050, operations will expand to Mars and the main asteroid belt. The timeline extends to 2075 for the exploitation of Jupiter and Saturn, aiming for a fully operational solar-system-wide resource network by 2100. Unlike Musk’s private ventures, this is state policy: verify feasibility by 2030, build the supply chain by 2035, and dominate the market by mid-century. 

China has already poured concrete for this launchpad. They have successfully deployed the Queqiao satellite constellation—including the recently launched Queqiao-2—creating the world’s first permanent communication relay for the lunar far side. This network is the backbone for future autonomous mining operations. 

Furthermore, the plan includes a gigawatt-class space-based digital infrastructure that integrates cloud computing and space debris monitoring, essentially creating a space traffic control system that China intends to manage. While Musk is pivoting his company to catch up, Beijing’s machine has been methodically laying the tracks for decades. And it has a plan to catch up and surpass the U.S.

While Musk may want us to believe that only he has the key to our future and that his new Moon plan is now what we all need, there are clearly other people on the planet who think otherwise. For now, what we really have is yet another erratic plot twist, a radical course change masquerading as “The New Way to Save Humanity” while he makes lots of money in the process.