Elon Musk wants to build a satellite catapult on the moon | News Tech
Elon Musk had another brilliant idea: catapulting satellites from the Moon.
Musk briefed staff at xAI, his startup that recently merged with his rocket company SpaceX, about his plans to build a factory for AI-powered lunar satellites.
The billionaire doesn’t really imagine astronauts wielding a medieval-style wooden catapult – he wants to build a mass engine.
The science fiction-looking space launcher, also called an electromagnetic catapult, would create magnetic pulses that propel payloads skyward.
According to the New York Times, Musk told an all-hands meeting, “You have to go to the Moon.”
The Tesla chief added that this was the first step in a three-step plan: build “a self-sustaining city on the Moon,” colonize Mars, then explore the cosmos for aliens.
“If you move faster than anyone else in a given technology area, you will be the leader, and xAI moves faster than any other company – no one is close,” Musk added.
“Because we have reached a certain scale, we are organizing the business to be more efficient at that scale.
“And in fact, when that happens, some people are better suited to the early stages of a business and less suited to the later stages.”
He said in an article on X yesterday that some xAI employees were laid off because the company was “reorganized a few days ago.”
Although Musk praised lunar missions during the meeting, he has previously criticized them as a “distraction” from getting to Mars.
Elon Musk’s plans on Earth
Musk has Earth-related goals. The Times reported that it plans to launch an X banking app as well as a chat app.
“We will obviously give people reasons, compelling reasons, to use the app every day and have, I expect, well over a billion daily active users,” he said at the meeting.
X has approximately 557 million monthly users, making it the 15th most popular social media network, according to DataReportal.
The meeting comes just a week after Musk said the deal, which took the world’s most valuable company past $1.25 trillion, was made with the aim of bringing AI to the stars.
Musk said he wants to launch AI data centers in space to harness solar energy because “it’s always nice in space.”
He also wants to “create a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars”, but did not specify what he meant.
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