Musk changes course on Mars quest and shoots for moon – again | The moon

Barely a year ago, the moon was “a distraction” to Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX then fixated on his ludicrously ambitious project to build a self-sustaining city on Mars within 20 years.

Why bother returning to the orbiting chunk of rock humanity conquered half a century ago, he reasoned, when the greater prize of the red planet lay tantalizingly in reach for his company’s mighty Starship rockets?

Fast forward to February 2026, and the world’s richest man appears to have had something of an epiphany. In an abrupt reversal of his long-stated plans, Mars is suddenly on the back burner. And getting US astronauts back on the lunar surface before the end of Donald Trump’s second term of office in three years’ time is the priority now, as well as keeping them there.

“For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years,” Musk wrote Sunday on X, the social media platform he also owns.

“The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars. SpaceX 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 post contained no mention of Trump, his on-again, off-again friend and political ally from Musk’s chaotic tenure as head of the president’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) last year that upended numerous federal agencies without delivering the $2tn in savings he promised.

But it is hard to separate Musk’s volte-face with the US president’s vainglorious quest, delivered in a December executive order titled Ensuring American Space Supremacy, to see the Stars and Stripes planted on the moon during his presidency.

Such an accomplishment would be, to phrase it mildly, 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 final Apollo mission in 1972, has been pushed back several times from its original target of 2024 to “by 2028”.

Musk’s maneuver allows his company to direct more immediate resources to that mission, for which SpaceX is contracted to supply the human landing system (HLS) component.

Even so, it has its work cut out.

A leaked internal document, reported by Politico in November, revealed a timeline at odds with that of Nasa, predicting a “boots on the moon” mission no earlier than September 2028, and only then “if all goes well” with preparatory missions.

Those missions include an in-orbit fuel transfer between vehicles, and an un-crewed moon landing sometime in 2027 using a SpaceX Starship rocket. As space.com noted in November, despite a series of promising test flights during 2025, Starship has yet to complete a successful orbital test flight.

“The launch is the easiest part of all of this. Getting things into space, that’s the easy part. Landing is a lot harder, particularly 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 stewardship of the billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman, Musk’s friend and ally, is expected to ditch the troublesome and expensive space launch system (SLS) that will power the space agency’s next two Artemis missions. Artemis 2 is currently at its Cape Canaveral launchpad in Florida, awaiting liftoff with a crew that will travel around the moon, but not land, as early as next month.

That will open the door to an even closer partnership with private space enterprise, and Musk is eyeing future contracts for its own reusable Starship fleet that he envisions eventually traveling between Earth, the moon and Mars.

For many, that financial incentive alone might be evidence enough to explain his switch of attention to the moon. But the entrepreneur is also wary of losing ground to his biggest rival, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his burgeoning Blue Origin company.

From being streets behind Musk, Blue Origin – which holds a $3.4bn Nasa contract to supply the lander for the Artemis 5 mission scheduled for 2030 – has made huge strides in recent months. It made a statement in November with the first successful test flight of its New Glenn deep-space rocket, and announced two weeks ago that it was suspending its program of suborbital tourist space flights to shift resources to its lunar ambitions.

Eric Berger, a space expert and senior writer for Ars Technica, said Blue Origin was “the one company with the potential to seriously challenge SpaceX in spaceflight over the next decade”.

In an analysis published this week questioning why Musk appeared to have given up on Mars, Berger wrote: “Blue Origin might land humans on the moon before Starship, a threat sources at Starbase [the company’s Texas headquarters] say SpaceX is beginning to take seriously.”

Berger also noted Musk’s increasing obsession with artificial intelligence, exemplified by his $1.25tn merger earlier this month of SpaceX with xAI, which includes the Grok chatbot and X, the social media platform.

“A major focus of Musk going forward will be to construct orbital datacenters 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 US. Because for all of Blue Origin’s promise with a slimmed-down lunar lander, Starship offers a promising avenue to return humans to the moon in the near term.”