SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced Sunday that his company had “shifted focus” from taking humans to Mars to building a “self-growing city on the Moon,” something he said could be achievable in less than 10 years.
He said his company had not abandoned its plans to colonize Mars, but stressed that “the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.”
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“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). This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city,” Musk said on X.
“The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars,” he said.
Read More: Astronauts Are Going Back to the Moon For The First Time in Half a Century
This isn’t the first time Musk has shifted his timeline, overpromised, or otherwise changed his mind on building humanity’s next home.
As recently as January last year, Musk said, “No, we’re going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.”
A brief history of Musk’s shifting Mars plans
Musk has long said he would build a self-sustaining colony on Mars, declaring it to be SpaceX’s guiding goal since the company was founded in 2002.
In 2016, Musk unveiled plans to send at least a million humans to Mars and establish a self-sustaining city there, estimating that the first human mission could take place in 2024.
He said a new rocket fleet would travel to Mars approximately every two years, when Mars and Earth come closest to each other.
“What I really want to do here is to make Mars seem possible—make it seem as though it’s something that we could do in our lifetimes, and that you can go,” Musk said.
In 2017, Musk had even penciled in 2024 again as an early date that the first humans could land on Mars, at a time when NASA’s estimate for its own manned Mars mission was 2034.
Speaking at an event announcing SpaceX’s plans to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars, Musk said the first unmanned missions could take place in 2022.
“That’s not a typo, although it is aspirational,” he told the conference, referring to the 2022 date. “I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars,” he added.
In 2020, the SpaceX CEO reiterated his belief in the mission, saying he was “highly confident” that the company would land humans on Mars by 2026.
“If we get lucky, maybe four years,” Musk said, speaking on an award show webcast from Berlin in December. “We want to send an uncrewed vehicle there in two years.”
In Musk’s interview with TIME Magazine for 2021 Person of the Year, he reaffirmed his Mars goals, telling TIME that he would “be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years,” even as experts questioned the feasibility of his ambitious timeline.
And that timeline evidently shifted in recent years, with Musk writing on X in March 2025 that an unmanned Starship would soon depart for Mars, paving the way for human-led missions.
“If those landings go well, then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely,” he said in one post.
In September 2025, he reiterated that SpaxeX would build a “self-sustaining” colony on Mars, which he said was possible within 30 years.
TIME has reached out to SpaceX for comment regarding Musk’s predictions and priorities around Mars.
A space race
Musk’s announcement comes as NASA plans to send four astronauts around the Moon on a crewed flyby in the Artemis II mission scheduled for this year, marking the first crewed deep-space flight in over 50 years. That mission will be followed by Artemis III, which will utilize Artemis II as a pathfinder.
For these missions, SpaceX has a nearly $3 billion contract to build NASA’s lunar lander—the vehicle that will ferry the crew from their spacecraft to the moon’s surface. This lander, SpaceX’s Starship, is still in early development and has not reached orbit.
In the past year, Musk and the U.S. government have been at odds regarding space priorities, with Musk calling missions to the moon a “distraction” last year.
Trump’s Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who briefly served as NASA Administrator, threatened late last year to sideline SpaceX from the landing mission in favor of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
“They push their timelines out, and we’re in a race against China,” Duffy told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in October 2025. “So, I’m going to open up the contract. I’m going to let other space companies compete with SpaceX.”
In a separate interview with Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” in October, Duffy said he was in the process of opening up the Artemis lunar landing contract to other companies.
Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin announced just last month that it is pausing its space tourism—the kinds of programs that sent celebrities like William Shatner, Michael Strahan, Katy Perry and around 90 others to the edge of space—in order to focus on NASA contracts and the moon landing. Although Blue Origin was originally slated to build a lander for the Artemis V mission, which was not expected to launch until at least 2030, it is now competing with SpaceX for the Artemis III lander.
Bezos appeared to respond to Musk’s moon colony announcement with a post of his own on X, featuring an image of a tortoise, likely a reference to Blue Origin’s motto of “gradatim ferociter,” Latin for “step by step, ferociously,” and its logo featuring two tortoises. That philosophy stands in stark contrast to Musk’s often-repeated motto: “fail fast.”
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