SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has his sights on the Moon, specifically building a city there. He announced that his company, SpaceX, has prioritized building a habitable settlement on the Moon, aiming for a time frame of less than ten years. Musk announced in a post on X on Sunday night.
“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 said in his post. “The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars.”
Musk has regularly expressed his ambitions in space travel, previously suggesting colonizing Mars. He explained human civilization’s potential need to do so during a 2023 virtual press conference on the topic. He said it could be a matter of survival for the human race.
“If there’s something terrible that happens on Earth, either made by humans or natural, we want to have, like, life insurance for life as a whole,” Musk said. “Then, there’s the kind of excitement and adventure.”
However, it appears he pivoted away from that objective, explaining in a Sunday social media post that the technical and logistical challenges would make Mars colonization extremely difficult to achieve.
“It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the Moon every 10 days (2 day trip time),” said Musk. “This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city.”
Then, as Musk has been prone to do, the former presidential adviser disregarded much of his previous explanation and said that building a civilization on Mars was still an option, just that building on the Moon is SpaceX’s current priority.
“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,” Musk added.
In Sept. 2025, Musk appeared much more resolute and confident about the prospect of humans living on the Red Planet. He predicted that humans would have a settlement on Mars by 2055.
“I think it can be done in 30 years, provided there’s an exponential increase in the tonnage to Mars with each successive Mars transfer window, which is every two years,” Musk said at the time regarding humans safely living on Mars.
“What really matters is that Mars is self-sustaining,” Musk said. “That we are truly a multi-planet species, such that we’ve achieved planetary redundancy.”
