SpaceX Prioritizes Lunar 'Self-Growing City' Over Mars Project, Musk Says (reuters.com)
- Reference: 0180759350
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/02/09/0536231/spacex-prioritizes-lunar-self-growing-city-over-mars-project-musk-says
- Source link: https://www.reuters.com/science/musk-says-spacex-prioritise-building-self-growing-city-moon-2026-02-08/
> SpaceX still intends to start on Musk's long-held ambition of a city on Mars within five to seven years, he wrote on his X social media platform, "but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster."
>
> Musk's comments echo a Wall Street Journal report on Friday, stating that SpaceX has told investors it would prioritize going to the moon and attempt a trip to Mars at a later time, targeting March 2027 for an uncrewed lunar landing. As recently as last year, Musk said that he [2]aimed to send an uncrewed mission to Mars by the end of 2026.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/musk-says-spacex-prioritise-building-self-growing-city-moon-2026-02-08/
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/musk-aiming-send-uncrewed-starship-mars-by-end-2026-2025-05-30/
Make that 50 years or longer (Score:2)
Musk has no clue and he is not an engineer. Even only keeping out the Regolith dust (which will be survival critical) will take longer to figure out than those "10 years".
Re: (Score:3)
Nobody thinks he's doing all the work.
But we all see he's constantly making up bullshit without verifying it the people that are supposed to implement it because he's perpetually desperate for attention, and needs to keep promising new bullshit to keep the stock prices high.
Re: (Score:2)
We've all got first-hand knowledge of that because he keeps saying and doing things in public that confirm it. We don't need to have direct access to someone's inner mind to make reasonable inferences about their motivations. It's a completely normal thing to do, and you do it all the time, because humans can't function without it.
Re: Make that 50 years or longer (Score:3, Insightful)
The Elon is a total snake-oil seller, and anyone with a working brain can see that. But if you get paid well to work on a project you know will not work, then why not? Suck the Elon dry while there are still idiots who give him money.
What should *not* happen, is governments financing any of his idiotic trash projects (anyone remembers the hyperloop fiasco? The cybertruck fiasco? And on and on...).
There's one born every minute...
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. And maybe the engineers will come up with a breakthrough in some area of tech but if not - well its keeping a lot of highly educated people gainfully employed and if Musk wants to spend his - or more likely some gullible investors - money on their wages then he should be allowed to carry on doing it.
Re:Make that 50 years or longer (Score:4, Informative)
Musk has been making bad predictions for decades now. Boots on Mars in 10 years, about 15 years ago now. Full self driving in 6 months, a decade ago. Starship was supposed to be flying regular missions by now, the new Roadster should have been delivered years ago (with booster rockets, according to Elon).
Re: (Score:2)
And the new roadster is hardly pushing the engineering boat out either in 2026 , its easily doable with current tech as other companies are proving, so one can only assume he's lost interest in it.
Jesus Christ, Elon. Ease up. (Score:2, Insightful)
I know you're going to be a trillionaire soon, but damn. Your projections started out grandiose, but now they're just humorous. You blew past unreasonable so quickly we didn't even notice it.
Idiocrat (Score:4, Insightful)
It wouldn't work for "securing the future of civilization," even if they were able to overcome the mountain of difficult and expensive engineering challenges.
Any sort of calamity that put human life on Earth in peril would mean the lunar colony would stop receiving support from Earth and would die off long before the last holdouts Earthside.
There's an incredibly long list of things they'd need shipped up to survive, none of which are needed on Earth. Because on Earth you can survive by primitive means if necessary.
Re: (Score:2)
This isn't "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". It is hard to make a moon colony self-sustaining. Just the loss of core materials due to daily use have to be replenished from Earth, otherwise the colony will eventually become a tomb.
At the minimum, it will take multiple, redundant sources of iron and other materials, a source of oxygen, water (which means hydrogen, and there isn't much of that in the moon's atmosphere.)
It isn't just an engineering hurdle. This is a resource hurdle and providing things that ar
Musk is just an investing marketdroid (Score:2)
A very fancy, very rich one, but a marketdroid with money to spend nonetheless. His skills are in bullshitting about maybes, pure and simple. Sometimes he gets it right with EVs and rockets, sometimes when he attempts to be a futurologist without understanding the engineering and biological issues he just sounds like an idiot. This is one of those times.
Re: (Score:2)
i always remember the impression he made on me when i first watched a Tesla keynote he did, years and years ago. I remember thinking to myself "how can he be so shit at this compared to Jobs?" I know Steve Jobs was a phenomenal presenter, but Musk was just such a *shit* presenter. I couldn't believe that other people thought he was good at it.
It will be built by self driving cars (Score:1)
It will be built with fully autonomous self driving cars, but only with an upfront payment of 3Bn dollars.
Synergies (Score:2)
It took him a while, but he finally seems to have found a [1]sea [wikipedia.org] that is [2]"not too choppy" [x.com] for a Cybertruck to drive across.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mare_Tranquillitatis
[2] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1575508498430820352?lang=en
More Musk promises evaporate into vacuum. (Score:1)
More Musk promises evaporate into vacuum.
IA + IRSU = Fast and "cheap" development (Score:2)
I remember the document "Affordable, rapid bootstrapping of space industry and solar
system civilization"
[1]https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.032... [arxiv.org]
A decade ago it was proposed about develop the Moon with the assistance of AI. It's not about human colonization. Not yet. And more about robot colonization.
I think it's a great idea. Low risk (human missions are a lot more expensive), finally develop local resources, with a fixed cost per time, develop an exponential infrastructure.
The thing is, this proposition was devel
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03238
Nazi lunar base. (Score:4, Funny)
Thankfully one already exists on the far side of the moon.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky