Musk changes course on Mars quest and shoots for moon – again | The moon
Barely a year ago, the Moon was “a distraction” for Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX then focused on his ridiculously ambitious project to build an autonomous city on Mars within 20 years.
Why bother returning to the piece of orbiting rock humanity conquered half a century ago, he thought, when the Red Planet’s greatest prize was within reach of his company’s powerful Starship rockets?
Fast forward to February 2026, and the world’s richest man appears to have had an epiphany of sorts. In a sudden reversal of its long-announced plans, Mars is suddenly put on hold. And bringing American astronauts back to the lunar surface before the end of Donald Trump’s second term in three years is now the priority, as is keeping them there.
“For those who don’t know, SpaceX has already focused on building a self-sustaining city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve this in less than 10 years, while Mars would take over 20 years,” Musk wrote Sunday on X, the social media platform he also owns.
“SpaceX’s mission remains the same: to extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars. SpaceX will also work to build a city on Mars and will begin doing so in approximately 5 to 7 years, but the top priority is ensuring the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.”
The message contained no mention of Trump, his occasional friend and political ally from Musk’s chaotic tenure as head of the president’s “Department of Government Effectiveness” (Doge) last year, which upended many federal agencies without delivering the $2 trillion in savings he had promised.
But it’s difficult to separate Musk’s about-face from the US president’s futile quest, delivered in a December executive order titled Ensuring American Space Supremacy, to see the American flag planted on the Moon during his presidency.
Such an achievement would, to put it mildly, be a huge ask. Budget overruns and technical problems have significantly delayed NASA’s Artemis program, and the Artemis 3 moon landing, the first since the last Apollo mission in 1972, has been repeatedly pushed back from its original goal of 2024 to “by 2028.”
Musk’s maneuver allows his company to devote more immediate resources to this mission, for which SpaceX has been contracted to provide the Human Landing System (HLS) component.
Despite this, there is work to be done.
A leaked internal document, reported by Politico in November, revealed a timetable at odds with NASA’s, predicting a “boots on the moon” mission no earlier than September 2028, and only then “hopefully” with preparatory missions.
These missions include an in-orbit fuel transfer between vehicles and an uncrewed moon landing in 2027 using a SpaceX Starship rocket. As space.com noted in November, despite a series of promising test flights in 2025, Starship has yet to successfully complete an orbital test flight.
“The launch is the easiest part of it. Getting things into space, that’s the easy part. Landing is much harder, especially landing on a different celestial body,” Casey Dreier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society, told the Guardian last month.
Ultimately, NASA, now under the leadership of billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman, Musk’s friend and ally, is expected to abandon the troublesome and expensive Space Launch System (SLS) that will power the space agency’s next two Artemis missions. Artemis 2 is currently on its Cape Canaveral launch pad in Florida, awaiting liftoff with a crew that will circle the Moon, but not land, as early as next month.
This will open the door to an even closer partnership with private space companies, and Musk is considering future contracts for his own fleet of reusable spacecraft that he plans to eventually travel between Earth, the Moon and Mars.
For many, this financial incentive alone could be enough evidence to explain its shift in focus to the Moon. But the entrepreneur also fears losing ground to his biggest rival, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his booming company Blue Origin.
Blue Origin, which holds a $3.4 billion contract with NASA to provide the lander for the Artemis 5 mission planned for 2030, has made enormous progress in recent months. It made a statement in November with the first successful test flight of its New Glenn space rocket and announced two weeks ago that it was suspending its tourism suborbital spaceflight program to redirect resources toward its lunar ambitions.
Eric Berger, space expert and senior editor for Ars Technica, said Blue Origin was “the only company with the potential to seriously challenge SpaceX in spaceflight over the next decade.”
In an analysis published this week questioning why Musk seemed to have abandoned Mars, Berger wrote: “Blue Origin could land humans on the moon before Starship, a threat coming from Starbase.” [the company’s Texas headquarters] say SpaceX is starting to take it seriously.
Berger also highlighted Musk’s growing obsession with artificial intelligence, exemplified by his $1.25 billion merger earlier this month of SpaceX with xAI, which includes the Grok chatbot and social media platform X.
“One of Musk’s main goals will be to build orbital data centers to provide enormous computing resources for his vision of humanity’s online future,” he said.
“By focusing on the Moon, Musk is making a decision that benefits NASA and the United States. Because for all of Blue Origin’s promise with a slimmed-down lunar lander, Starship offers a promising path to returning humans to the Moon in the near term.”
