Elon Musk postpones his dream of colonizing Mars: “Building a city on the Moon is SpaceX’s new priority” | Science | EUROtoday

In the center of the SuperBowl, whereas Bad Bunny triumphed and Donald Trump despised him on his Truth community, the richest man on this planet used his personal social platform X to announce that he was backing out of his nice dream: colonizing Mars. “For those who don’t know, SpaceX already has a new priority: building a city on the Moon that can grow on its own, since we can potentially achieve it in less than 10 years, while Mars would take more than 20 years,” declared Elon Musk within the early hours of this Monday, with out offering any additional particulars that specify how he plans to attain that aim.

Musk has made this announcement lower than a 12 months earlier than the deadline he gave himself to launch his first fleet of spacecraft to Mars, profiting from the following launch window to the purple planet, which opens on the finish of 2026 and lasts just a few months. When the formidable roadmap of sending 5 of its Starships to Mars was proposed a 12 months and a half in the past, that massive area shuttle had a superb streak of progress in its take a look at flights. And since then, it has not managed to mark any extra milestones, accumulating a number of explosions in a row within the first half of 2025. And in 2026, it has nonetheless not carried out any assessments. Under these circumstances, fulfilling the promise of sending unmanned spacecraft to Mars this 12 months—and with astronauts, in 2029, in the course of the subsequent window—is unfeasible.

Musk has acknowledged the difficulties that also exist right this moment in reaching Mars, the aim with which he based SpaceX in 2002. “It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (a trip that lasts half a year), while we can go to the Moon every ten days (a two-day trip). This means that we can work much faster to complete a lunar city than a Martian city,” declared the know-how magnate in the identical X publication. In addition, he harassed that he’s not giving up his martian dream “That said, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and will begin doing so in about five to seven years, but the main priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.”

For the primary time, Musk acknowledges that bases should first be established on the Moon. “No, we will go directly to Mars. The Moon is a distraction,” he replied in early 2025 to an area analyst who doubted the viability of his plans. Weeks later, Trump assumed Musk’s dream in the course of the inaugural speech of his second time period, for which the American president promised to “send astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes.” [en referencia a la bandera de EE UU] on the planet Mars.”

The White House proposals in the beginning of Trump’s second presidency made clear that intention to reorient NASA’s area race from the Moon to Mars. But lastly, the US Senate imposed the continuation of the Artemis missions to the Moon. The second flight of that area program is predicted to take 4 astronauts to the Moon within the coming months, 54 years after the final Apollo mission. And for Artemis 3 — which ought to fly earlier than 2030 — NASA already employed SpaceX years in the past, commissioning it to fabricate the ship with which the astronauts will descend to the lunar floor.

However, the event of the Starship is so delayed that NASA has begun to contemplate the thought of ​​reopening the Artemis 3 contract to different suppliers, akin to Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ area firm. Just every week in the past, Bezos introduced that he was specializing in the area race to the Moon, and that he would put into his area tourism flight program for that goal. Musk is now making a change in technique in the identical path, proposing a much less formidable and extra short-term goal, which can please his traders; And it does so just some months after SpaceX’s IPO.