After years of promising Mars, Musk took a more realistic goal – the Moon

Why is the moon more realistic?

That’s why the tone that Musk has chosen himself has been interesting lately. Instead of Mars, the emphasis has shifted to the Moon: Musk says that the Moon can be visited often, practically all the time, while Mars windows are rare and trips are long. The Moon is two to three days away and relatively “close” to logistics, while Mars is months away and any mistake becomes more expensive and dangerous. In this logic, the Moon becomes a training ground for everything needed for colonization, but without the level of risk that Mars carries.

There is also cold business math. SpaceX moreć has a huge contract and pressure related to NASA’s Artemis program, where the Starship in the HLS version needs to do part of the work to return people to the moon. Recently, NASA has moved the deadlines, and Artemis III is being mentioned more and more as a mission that will be difficult to survive before 2028. When you are the main supplier. for a project like that, it’s hard to push the public at the same time to plan a trip to Mars, especially when Starship is still going through tests and iterations that drag on.

In other words, the move towards the Moon is not just PR. This is also a result of the reality of hardware development. Starship must prove reliable flights, re-landings, orbit, and what is crucial for both the Moon and Mars: orbital refueling. Without it, there is no lunar lander in practice, let alone Mars logistics. The moon as a priority makes sense because SpaceX can build step by step, with shorter training periods and more attempts.

A ‘fairy tale’ about a colony on Mars

So what does Musk’s sentence about a “self-growing city” on the moon mean? It is, of course, not a ready-made urban plan, but only an idea of ​​an infrastructure that can expand by itself: energy, communications, shelters, on-site production of basic parts and regular freight transportation. In recent statements, Musk suggests that this is achievable in less than ten years, while for Mars he says that the time horizon is more realistically 20+ years. It’s a huge change in tone from when Mars was in the “soon, almost not” phase.

Musk never said that he had given up on Mars, but that the priority was shifting. Mars is still the “final goal” in the SpaceX story, but it no longer looks like the next station, but rather a project after the Moon has served as a test site and logistics base. However, Musk is a businessman, so it should be taken into account that any public acknowledgment that he is unable to fulfill his main goal would greatly affect the perception of his other projects and companies, and his personal perception (if anyone still retains it) as a pioneer of space research. The moon is still closer, it is easier to return home, it is easier to send help. and it is easier to build the “rhythm” of the launch.

So, in spite ofč after all, we cannot claim with 100% certainty that “Musk has changed his mind”, but with this we want to show what he probably realized himself: how such a vision hits physics, deadlines and contracts. Mars is more romantic and a bigger symbol, but the Moon is more realistic for the 2026-2030 period. Faster flights, faster return of information, lower risk and a clearer institutional framework through Artemis are the main arguments for this. If SpaceX really does what it needs to do for the Moon in the next couple of years, it will automatically be the strongest argument that Mars one day is not just a story.