Elon Musk Has Shifted SpaceX's Focus From Its Mars Base To Somewhere A Bit Closer

When Elon Musk founded SpaceX (which is currently one of the most valuable private companies in the world), he did so with the dream of setting up colonies on Mars. A lofty goal, mostly because we've really only sent rovers to take pictures of mars. But now Musk wants SpaceX to change gears and instead colonize the moon. This significant shift in goals came out of left field and is at odds with prior plans; in early 2025, he stated on Twitter/X that the moon was nothing more than "a distraction."

On February 8, 2026, Musk took to Twitter/X to proclaim that SpaceX had "shifted focus" to instead build a "self-growing city" on the moon. These goalposts were allegedly altered because it would simply be quicker to set up a moon colony. According to Musk's math, a city on the moon would take about 10 years to build, whereas a city on Mars would require double the amount of time. This also takes into account launch windows and travel time — Musk claims it takes six months to travel to Mars, and we can only launch every 26 months, whereas moon trips take two days and can launch every 10 days. However, NASA calculates that trips to Mars instead take anywhere between seven to 10 months. Still, this change in direction sounds much more tenable, and now we can say that SpaceX is shooting for the moon — in a more literal sense.

When Elon Musk made the announcement regarding SpaceX's future moon plans, he closed out by stating the company would eventually pick up the original goal of colonizing Mars. According to Musk's calculations, SpaceX would resume this plan in five to seven years from now.

While we previously stated that setting up a lunar colony sounds much more realistic than a city on Mars, if we're being realistic, history has not been kind to Musk and his dreams. He has an unfortunate tendency to produce timetables for SpaceX that never come to fruition. Remember when he wanted to send rockets to Mars as soon as 2018, followed by manned Mars missions in 2024? But on the off-chance SpaceX can establish a base of operations on the moon, the lunar base could eventually help mankind set foot on Mars. A recent update to the SpaceX website details Musk's plans to turn the moon city into a manufacturing plant that churns out satellites that can "harness a non-trivial percentage of the sun's power." Then again, Musk wants to harness that power to fuel "space-based data centers" for AI.

To make matters worse, Musk's plans for the moon (and eventually Mars) hinge on SpaceX's Starship rocket, which so far has a poor track record — around half of its launches have ended in explosive failure. While SpaceX's engineers have allegedly fixed many of the issues with Starships V1 and V2, if the rockets keep blowing up, SpaceX will never make it to Mars or the moon, let alone colonize them.