![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/elon-mars.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Elon Musk tweet at 6:24 pm ET on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Credit:
\n X\/Elon Musk<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
This is simultaneously a jolting and practical decision coming from Musk.<\/p>\n
Why it\u2019s a jolting decision<\/h2>\n
A quarter of a century ago, Musk founded SpaceX with a single-minded goal: settling Mars. One of his longest-tenured employees, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell, described her very first interview with Musk in 2002 to me as borderline messianic.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was talking about Mars, his Mars Oasis project,\u201d Shotwell said. \u201cHe wanted to do Mars Oasis, because he wanted people to see that life on Mars was doable, and we needed to go there.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was not alone in this description of her first interaction with Musk. The vision for SpaceX has not wavered. Even in the company\u2019s newest, massive Starship rocket factory at the Starbase facility in South Texas\u2014also known as the Gateway to Mars\u2014there are reminders of the red planet everywhere. For example, the carpet inside Musk\u2019s executive conference room is rust red, the same color as the surface of Mars.<\/p>\n
In the last 25 years, Musk has gone from an obscure, modestly wealthy person to the richest human being ever, from a political moderate to chief supporter of Donald Trump; from a respected entrepreneur to, well, to a lot of things to a lot of people: world\u2019s greatest industrialist\/supervillain\/savant\/grifter-fraudster.<\/p>\n
But one thing that has remained constant across the Muskverse is his commitment to \u201cextending the light of human consciousness\u201d and to the belief that the best place to begin humanity\u2019s journey toward becoming a multi-planetary species was Mars.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
Until Sunday night.<\/p>\n
Why it\u2019s a practical decision<\/h2>\n
We cannot know Musk\u2019s full rationale for pivoting to the Moon, at least in the near term. Only a year ago, he referred to the Moon as a \u201cdistraction.\u201d But now, apparently, it\u2019s not. What we can do is look at what has changed in the last 13 months.<\/p>\n
The first change is that the one company with the potential to seriously challenge SpaceX in spaceflight over the next decade, Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, has finally started to deliver. The company has now flown and landed its New Glenn rocket. Multiple sources have told Ars that Bezos has told his team to go \u201call in\u201d on lunar exploration. This includes the development of a crew transportation system, Blue Moon Mark 1.5, that does not require orbital refueling. This raises the possibility that Blue Origin might land humans on the Moon before Starship, a threat sources at Starbase say SpaceX is beginning to take seriously.<\/p>\n
The other major change is Musk\u2019s obsession with artificial intelligence and his view that AI and space are increasingly intertwined in their ambitions. SpaceX and xAI recently merged, and a major focus of Musk going forward will be to construct orbital data centers to provide enormous computing resources for his vision of humanity\u2019s online future.<\/p>\n
He has also spoken increasingly of becoming a Kardashev-level civilization, a reference to a Soviet astronomer who conceived that humanity would advance by first being able to tap and store all energy sources available on its planet, and then by directly collecting a star\u2019s energy through technology like a Dyson sphere. Musk has also made frequent references on social media to building a \u201cmass driver\u201d on the Moon.<\/p>\n
All of this may sound like it\u2019s straight out of the pages of a science-fiction novel, and it pretty much is. But the reality is that the Moon has reliable stores of oxygen and silicon, and building a catapult-like mechanism on the airless world would be an efficient way to move materials into space to build large orbital factories, data centers, solar farms, or even O\u2019Neill cylinders.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
In this, Musk is starting to sound a lot more like Bezos when it comes to his vision for human habitation in space, rather than the Mars-first advocate he has always been.<\/p>\n
One other sobering thing to think about in terms of a lunar mass-driver: it is potentially an extremely potent weapon to threaten Earth with large projectiles. We cannot know if Musk has had any conversations with US military officials about this, but anyone who has read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress<\/em> by Robert Heinlein will understand Luna\u2019s position as the ultimate high ground. And the US Space Force is not ignorant of this.<\/p>\n In the short term, it does not mean a whole lot. To anyone paying attention, SpaceX was not on track to send a Starship to Mars in 2026, and the 2028 window was looking rather unlikely as well. Mars was always in the distance, and now it will remain so.<\/p>\n By focusing on the Moon, Musk is making a decision that benefits NASA and the United States. Because for all of Blue Origin\u2019s promise with a slimmed-down lunar lander, Starship offers a promising avenue to return humans to the Moon in the near term.<\/p>\n Another advantage of Starship is its enormous payload capacity, able to bring 100 metric tons or more of cargo down to the Moon. For anyone seeking to build a commercial business on the Moon, Musk\u2019s 180-degree pivot represents an enormous opportunity.<\/p>\n For Mars advocates, however, Musk\u2019s turn is a bitter pill to swallow. There have long been many dreamers who spoke of settling Mars, but only Musk actually built the hardware and financial war chest to make such dreams a reality. And it is true that, in the long term, Mars offers a more favorable (although still inhospitable) environment for human settlement, with a thin atmosphere, water ice both on the surface and beneath the ground, methane, and more.<\/p>\n But those dreams are now deferred as Musk has bowed to a harsh reality: The Moon may be hard, but it is a lot easier to develop than Mars, which is only accessible every 26 months when the planets align.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As more than 120 million people tuned in to the Super Bowl for kickoff on Sunday evening, SpaceX founder Elon Musk turned instead to his social network. There, he tapped out an extended message in which he revealed that SpaceX is pivoting from the settlement of Mars to building a \u201cself-growing\u201d city on the Moon. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44070,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[367,625,8942,21,316],"class_list":["post-44068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-mars","tag-moon","tag-musk","tag-space","tag-spacex"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44068"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}So what does all this mean?<\/h2>\n