Musk retreats from his ambition to colonize Mars and starts betting on the Moon: “It’s faster”

Elon Musk says SpaceX is prioritizing building “a self-sustainable city” on the Moon, arguing that the goal can be achieved in less than a decade, while a similar project on Mars would take more than 20 years

Elon Musk’s ambition to one day establish a human colony on Mars seems to have taken a backseat for now to a closer and more achievable goal: sending people to live on the Moon.

In a post on the social network

“The absolute priority is to ensure the future of civilization, and the Moon is faster,” Musk wrote on

It’s unclear what exactly Musk meant by a “self-sustainable city” nor whether his plans are in line with similar NASA proposals for the Moon. CNN International contacted SpaceX for clarification.

Musk said the company remains committed to building a city on Mars and should begin doing so within five to seven years. Still in May last year, Musk had said that SpaceX was working to land the first unmanned Starship on Mars by the end of 2026.

This adjustment to Musk’s forecasts comes after SpaceX acquired XAI last week, in an operation that will merge two of its most ambitious companies, creating the most valuable private company in the world.

For more than a decade, Musk made a point of publicly highlighting that his main focus was establishing a colony on Mars, saying that this has been SpaceX’s guiding objective since its founding in 2002.

In speeches given at aerospace industry conferences and at events for SpaceX employees, Musk presented ambitious plans – although of doubtful viability – to establish a permanent human presence on the red planet, arguing that this step is necessary to guarantee humanity’s survival in the face of a possible apocalypse.

NASA, for its part, has focused mainly on its lunar ambitions, particularly since President Donald Trump’s first term, when then-Vice President Mike Pence abruptly declared that the United States would return to the Moon by 2024.

That ambitious plan did not come to fruition and NASA is currently working to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2028 – the schedule the agency already followed during the Obama administration. This return will mark the first time that humans have set foot on the Moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972.

Musk has criticized these efforts in the past, calling NASA’s lunar program, called Artemis, a “distraction” in an X post early last year.

“No, we’re going directly to Mars,” he wrote then. “The Moon is a distraction.”

Musk’s apparent shift in focus to the Moon comes at a time when the technology entrepreneur – whose companies receive large government contracts – has taken a much more vocal position in politics than in previous years. Musk invested around 290 million dollars in the US presidential election, supporting Trump and even holding a position in the White House, before the president’s abrupt departure. Last fall, he got closer to Trump again.

Lunar controversy

While NASA has already built the rocket and spacecraft designed to launch astronauts from Earth to lunar orbit, SpaceX has a nearly $3 billion contract to build the lunar lander — the vehicle that will transport the spacecraft’s crew to the Moon’s surface.

SpaceX plans to use its Starship system for that mission — the largest rocket and spacecraft system ever built and the vehicle that Musk says was designed specifically to take people to Mars.

However, Starship is still in an early stage of development and has frequently exploded during testing. It has never traveled to orbit or performed an operational flight, and SpaceX is expected to present a new line of Starship prototypes in early March.

Starship is an extremely ambitious project and its role in NASA’s lunar program has also been the subject of controversy.

Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who also served a brief stint as acting NASA administrator last year, publicly criticized SpaceX, warning that the company did not appear to be on track to have the lander ready in time for NASA’s lunar mission, in a race to surpass China’s lunar program.

Duffy even threatened to remove SpaceX from the lunar landing mission, known as Artemis III, and stated that he would evaluate whether the company’s main competitor, Blue Origin, could carry out the task more quickly.

Blue Origin, a space exploration company founded by Jeff Bezos, also has a multimillion-dollar contract with NASA to develop a vehicle capable of transporting astronauts from deep space to the lunar surface. Last month, it announced the suspension of flights of its suborbital space tourism rocket – which previously took Bezos, Katy Perry and William Shatner to space – to focus on developing the lunar lander.

Since the confirmation, in December, of NASA’s new administrator, technology entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, the agency has not publicly reevaluated the Artemis III mission landing module contract. Isaacman is considered an ally of Musk, having twice paid to fly SpaceX capsules into Earth orbit.

Musk’s statement that SpaceX will now focus on lunar exploration comes at a time when NASA is preparing to launch the first manned mission of the Artemis program, called Artemis II.

This mission foresees the launch of four astronauts on a journey that will circle the Moon, without landing, serving as a test for the more complex landing mission, Artemis III. The launch of Artemis II is scheduled for March.