First Mars, now the Moon: Musk changes course

SpaceX shifts priorities, Jeff Bezos speeds up with Blue Origin, while Nasa’s Artemis program slows down. And Beijing looms.

BY EMILIO COZZI

Becoming a multiplanetary civilization is no longer a priority for Elon Musk. Even a natural satellite can prove useful.
At the beginning of February, the founder of SpaceX publicly admitted what many observers had argued for some time: Mars can wait, the Moon cannot. After years of bold statements about colonizing the Red Planet, Musk announced on X a radical shift in priorities: “For those who don’t know, SpaceX has already shifted its focus to building a self sufficient city on the Moon […] we could achieve it in less than ten years, whereas Mars would require more than twenty.”

The technical reasons behind the rethink

The motivations cited by Musk are the same ones the scientific community has raised for years in criticizing his visionary announcements: the launch window to Mars opens every 26 months, when planetary alignment allows a journey lasting at least six months, whereas the Moon can be reached every 10 days with, more or less, a 72 hour transfer. This substantial difference allows engineers to “iterate much faster,” Musk explained, while omitting another critical factor: exposure to cosmic radiation during the long months of interplanetary travel, one of the main obstacles to human migration to the Red Planet.

The shift appears even more significant considering that only a year ago, in January 2025, Musk himself dismissed the Moon as “a distraction,” reaffirming SpaceX’s intention to go “straight to Mars.” The change of course coincided with SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI, a deal that created an entity not yet publicly listed and valued at over one trillion dollars, but above all with growing pressure from the Trump administration to achieve tangible results by the end of the second presidential term in 2028, when the United States will have to demonstrate it has not ceded space leadership to China.

Starship’s delay

It should also not be forgotten that SpaceX is behind. The words of former Nasa acting administrator Sean Duffy, spoken in October 2025, effectively summarize the current status of the Starship program. The new launch system, tasked with carrying the first astronauts to the lunar surface during the third mission of the Artemis program, has not lifted off since October 13, 2025, when it completed its eleventh flight test. The system’s next launch, in an updated version, is scheduled for March, almost five months after the previous one. This interval is difficult to reconcile with Musk’s stated ambitions of rapid iteration.

This year’s schedule includes long duration flight tests, since Starship has never completed an orbit around Earth, and above all the crucial demonstrations of orbital refueling, an operation essential for transporting, as promised, payloads of up to 100 tons to the Moon. The main milestone remains final certification: a complete mission to the Moon, including landing and liftoff without a crew, demonstrating the system’s reliability for human transport. In light of the delays accumulated so far, launching Artemis III by the end of 2027 increasingly appears to be a mirage, despite the nearly three billion dollar fixed price contract that SpaceX signed with NASA, which requires the company to complete key milestones before receiving payment.

The strategy of the tortoise

A few hours after Musk’s post, Jeff Bezos published on X an image of a tortoise emerging from the shadows. For those less familiar with Blue Origin, Bezos’s space company, the firm’s iconography is rich in tortoises, a tribute to Aesop’s fable in which steady slowness surpasses inconsistent speed. Bezos was not commenting. He was signaling that he could win the lunar race “Gradatim Ferociter,” as the company motto states, step by step but relentlessly.

Behind the provocation lies a concrete plan: on February 16, Blue Origin released images of MK1, the prototype of the lander scheduled to be launched in the coming weeks on a demonstration mission to the Moon. A modified version of the vehicle, less futuristic than Starship but potentially more functional and reliable, could host astronauts even before 2029, giving Bezos a real chance to outpace both SpaceX and China in the new race to Earth’s natural satellite. It is no coincidence that Duffy himself had announced his intention to reopen the Human Landing System contract to competition: “They keep pushing deadlines further forward, and we are in a race against China. I will reopen the contract and allow other space companies to compete with SpaceX.”

The paradox is evident: Blue Origin holds a contract for Artemis V, not Artemis III, which would represent an advance of at least three years compared with the original planning. The acceleration will weigh on taxpayers, certainly, but the economic cost could make the alternative less acceptable: watching a taikonaut plant Beijing’s red flag before seeing someone do the same with the stars and stripes.

Artemis is struggling

Nasa’s Artemis program continues to accumulate delays that threaten its entire architecture. Just days ago Artemis II, the crewed mission intended to fly around the Moon, was postponed to April despite the success of the launch rehearsal, the so called wet dress rehearsal. During the night following the test, which had not revealed serious issues, an interruption in the helium flow in the second stage of the Space Launch System was detected. The SLS rocket was therefore returned to the Vehicle Assembly Building for maintenance work, yet another setback for a launcher meant to represent the backbone of the United States’ return to the Moon.

The timeline of shifting forecasts in Musk’s plans is emblematic of the optimistic, some would say unrealistic, approach with which the billionaire confronts the challenges of space exploration: in 2016 he promised a human landing on Mars as early as 2018; in 2020 he declared himself “highly confident” of reaching the Red Planet by 2026; and in more recent announcements in March 2025 he pointed to human missions in 2029. This series of unfulfilled promises fuels skepticism within the scientific community, without diminishing the visionary appeal Musk continues to exert on the public and especially on investors.

The competition within the competition, Musk versus Bezos, both against Beijing, all under the watchful eye of an administration that has made space leadership an essential political objective, makes the geopolitical picture more compelling but no less risky. Between headline grabbing announcements, constantly shifting strategic priorities and still unresolved technical problems, the overall credibility of the United States space program is at stake. And time, the traditional enemy of every extraterrestrial program, continues to pass while China observes, plans and advances toward goals that increasingly appear more achievable than those of the West.