Unable to Reach Mars, Musk Does the Most Musk Thing Possible
Musk is giving up on Mars because his claims of saving humanity by creating a Martian city have become so transparently laughable that even his normal fanbois are losing interest.
The old grift has gotten stale, so he creates a new one.Elon Musk built SpaceX on his dream of colonizing Mars. For decades, he kept the company on a strict path toward achieving that goal, arguing just last year that using the Moon as a stepping stone to the Red Planet would be a “distraction.” Now, he’s singing a very different tune.
In an X post on Sunday, Musk said SpaceX has “shifted focus toward building a self-growing city on the Moon.” Achieving this new goal, he said, will potentially take less than a decade, whereas colonizing Mars would take more than 20 years.
As usual, it's rally all about getting government money to further enrich himself.
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This pivot comes as SpaceX is racing against Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin to deliver a lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, which will be the first to land astronauts on the surface of the Moon in over 50 years. NASA awarded SpaceX the contract in 2021, but that never stopped Musk from criticizing the agency’s Moon-to-Mars trajectory.
NASA originally planned to launch Artemis 3 in 2024 but has since pushed the mission to 2028, partly due to uncertainty over when a crew lander will be ready. SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System (HLS) has faced significant developmental delays in recent years, prompting the agency to reopen the contract in October. Now, Musk has apparently gotten on board with the whole Moon-to-Mars thing.
Considering the basic architecture of Musk's moon lander, it's no wonder that Bezos is nipping at his heels.
The lander weighs 6 times that of the Apollo LEM and requires multiple in orbit refuelings, and his rockets are still blowing up and their payload capacity seems to be shrinking with each new test.
His rockets are unlikely to make it to either the Moon or Mars.
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