Elon Musk says SpaceX will shift focus from Mars to the Moon

SpaceX is putting its longtime focus on sending humans to Mars on the backburner to prioritize colonizing the moon, founder Elon Musk said Sunday.

The South African-born billionaire’s space company has seen huge success as a NASA contractor, but critics have for years panned Musk’s Mars colonization plans as overly ambitious.

The move aligns Musk with US President Donald Trump’s move away from sending Americans to Mars.

“For those unaware, SpaceX is already focused on building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can achieve it in less than 10 years, while Mars will take 20+ years,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform he bought in 2022.

Difficulties in reaching out Mars includes the fact that “Mars is only possible to travel to when the planets are conjoined every 26 months”.

“We can launch to the moon every 10 days,” he said.

Kasturi has blasted several previous estimates of when humans could potentially be placed on the Red Planet.

In 2016, Musk said that if the financing and other planning aspects for his rockets fall into place, passengers could be on their way to Mars by 2024.

That prediction came after he told the Wall Street Journal in 2011 that SpaceX astronauts would reach Mars “best case, 10 years, worst case, 15 to 20 years.”

In an executive order on US space policy late last year, Trump said he wants to get Americans to the moon by 2028 under NASA’s Artemis program, for which SpaceX is the contractor.

It marked a shift from Trump’s previous announcement that he wanted to plant the American flag on Mars before the end of his four-year term.

The Americans are currently slated to return to the lunar surface on the Artemis 3 mission in mid-2027, but the timeline has been repeatedly pushed back.

Industry experts say it will probably be delayed again because the lunar lander under development at SpaceX is not ready.

Easier access to the moon “means we can iterate much faster to complete a lunar city than a Mars city,” Musk said Sunday.

But SpaceX isn’t giving up on its Mars plans, he said, adding that it will “work hard to build a Mars city and start doing that in about 5 to 7 years.”