Elon Musk just quietly rewrote his space dream—this time with a lunar address instead of a Martian ZIP code. As the Super Bowl kicked off Sunday, the SpaceX CEO posted on X that his company has "already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon," arguing that a permanent lunar settlement could be achieved in under a decade, while Mars would take more than 20 years, Ars Technica reports. That's a sharp turn for a company founded in 2002 around one idea: making humans a multi-planet species by starting with the Red Planet. For years, SpaceX facilities have been decorated as tributes to Mars, and Musk has described his life's mission as "extending the light of human consciousness" there.
Last year, Musk claimed that SpaceX would launch an uncrewed mission to Mars by the end of 2026, Reuters reports. And in response to a post on X in early 2025, he said that "we're going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction." In his post Sunday, however, he acknowledged the challenges. "It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the Moon every 10 days (2 day trip time)," he wrote. SpaceX, he said, "will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster."
The move comes as competition for lunar contracts heats up. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is pushing hard on lunar hardware, including a lander that doesn't need orbital refueling—raising the possibility that Blue Origin could put people on the moon before SpaceX's Starship does. The company that loses the race" would have to coordinate with the winner over future landing zones and resource usage and could face diminished support from NASA and investors," Gizmodo reports.
Musk is also increasingly fixated on artificial intelligence and energy-hungry orbital data centers, recently merging SpaceX with his AI venture xAI and talking up grand schemes like a moon-based "mass driver" to fling raw materials into space for factories, solar arrays, or massive habitats. In the near term, not much changes for actual Mars timelines—SpaceX wasn't on pace to hit its previously floated 2026 or even 2028 Mars windows, Ars Technica notes. But the pivot could be a win for NASA and US lunar ambitions: Starship's huge payload capacity could drop 100 tons or more onto the lunar surface, making it attractive for government and private customers eyeing industry on the moon.
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