Musk Says He Plans to Build Factories on the Moon

Elon Musk's pivot from Mars to the moon is recent, but he's not short on enthusiasm. He told xAI staff Tuesday the company, which he has merged with SpaceX, "has to go to the moon" and build a lunar factory to crank out AI satellites—and a giant catapult to fling them into space. The moon-based production line, he said in an all-hands meeting heard by the New York Times, would feed enormous computing power into xAI's systems and help the firm outmuscle rivals. Musk described the moon as a way station: first a "self-sustaining city" there, then Mars, then other star systems in search of alien life.

Musk spoke of building a "mass driver" electromagnetic catapult, a concept from science fiction that Futurism describes as "essentially a coilgun for launching payloads instead of deadly projectiles." On Sunday, Musk said SpaceX's longstanding goal of building a city on Mars was on the back burner and the company had "shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon." In a blog post announcing the SpaceX-xAI merger earlier this month, Musk set out plans to build a "constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers" and said "factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space."

Musk offered no details on how the lunar facility would actually be built. Steve Dent at Engadget notes that there are a few "tiny steps" required. "That starts with orbiting the Moon and eventually landing on the surface," he writes. "Then you'd need to build a colony, followed by a factory, all of which would require a large number of manned and unmanned expeditions. As a reminder, we haven't been to the moon for over 50 years and none of the colony or factory stuff has ever been done."

Former SpaceX execs tell the Times that the moon has never been a main focus for the company before now. Musk himself described lunar missions as a "distraction" from Mars as recently as last year.