Elon Musk's SpaceX shifts focus from Mars to moon city. Here's why

• Elon Musk said establishing a human presence on the moon is more feasible in the short term than reaching Mars.
• SpaceX's Starship rocket, central to these plans, will also support NASA's lunar landing under the Artemis 3 mission.
• The change in focus does not mean the Mars colonization dream is dead, but a lunar city can be established faster.

Elon Musk is putting his dreams of colonizing Mars on hold.

Instead, the world's richest man said SpaceX, his commercial rocket company, will turn its attention a little closer to home: the moon. The news represents a significant shift for Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the stated goal of helping humanity reach Mars and "make life multiplanetary."

But the moon, where even NASA aims to return astronauts as early as 2028, appears to have become a much more feasible target destination for Musk – at least in the short term.

"SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the moon," Musk said Sunday, Feb. 8 in a post on social media site X, which he owns. The billionaire tech mogul added that setting up a sustained human presence on the moon is achievable in the next decade, or about half the time he projects it would take to get established on Mars.

Here's everything to know about Musk's vision of setting up a lunar colony, and how SpaceX's Starship rocket – due to make its 2026 debut in March in Texas – will play a role.

What is SpaceX? Does Elon Musk own it?

SpaceX is the commercial spaceflight company that Elon Musk, the world's richest man, founded in 2002. Musk, a former close adviser of President Donald Trump, is also the chief executive of SpaceX.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 – the most active rocket in the world – is used on a variety of missions, including deployments of the company's Starlink internet satellites from both Florida and California. With nearly 10,000 satellites in its growing orbital constellation, Starlink has become a lucrative part of Musk's business empire, serving millions of customers around the world.

SpaceX additionally benefits from billions of dollars in contracts from the Department of Defense by providing launch services for classified satellites and other payloads. The Falcon 9 rocket also helps launch NASA's human spaceflight missions to the International Space Station.

Where is SpaceX based in Texas? Starship launches from Starbase

Musk has often spoken about his vision of colonizing other worlds in our solar system to ensure humanity's survival in the event of an extinction-level even on Earth.

And it's SpaceX's gargantuan Starship that is the centerpiece of Musk's hope of sending humans further out into space than ever before.

SpaceX has been launching the 400-foot Starship on a series of test flights since 2023 from its Starbase headquarters in South Texas, located about 180 miles south of Corpus Christi. A new more powerful version of the rocket is due to debut in March 2026.

Will Starship send humans to Mars?

In the years ahead, Starship is due to help NASA astronauts land on the moon under the U.S. space agency's Artemis program. That mission, Artemis 3, would occur in the years after NASA completes its upcoming Artemis 2 venture that as early as March 2026 could send four astronauts on a 10-day trip circling the moon.

Starship is also the vehicle Musk's SpaceX has long been developing to transport the first humans to Mars.

Musk has often reiterated his goal of launching a Starship rocket as early as 2026 on a pathfinding trip to Mars without a crew on board. That timeline by the end of the year would have coincided with an orbital alignment around the sun that would shorten the journey between Earth and Mars.

Under that plan, crewed trips would then have followed in the early 2030s – with the first humans on the red planet tasked with laying the groundwork for a self-sustaining civilization, Musk has previously claimed.

Musk says SpaceX now focused on moon

Now, though, Musk is saying SpaceX has shifted its focus to setting up a city on the moon.

The plan appears to resemble that of NASA's, which is planning to send astronauts to the moon to establish a lunar outpost that would make the agency's first crewed trip to Mars possible. It's a marked shift for Musk, who before has expressed skepticism of the U.S. space agency's moon-to-Mars approach in favor of a straight shot from Earth to the red planet.

That doesn't mean Musk's dream of colonizing Mars is dead – just that he believes establishing a lunar city will take much less time than setting up a Martian civilization. While Mars and Earth align once every 26 months to allow for interplanetary travel, trips to the moon can take place every 10 days, Musk claimed.

"This means we can iterate much faster to complete a moon city than a Mars city," Musk said on X. "The overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the moon is faster."

Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at [email protected]