The contest between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is only going to get more heated now that the two are directly competing for the moon.
After years of charting a path to Mars, Musk surprisingly announced this past week that SpaceX is pivoting to the moon, where he wants to build a “self-growing city.” That puts him in the same space camp as rival Bezos, who has bet that focusing on the moon would give his rocket company, Blue Origin, an advantage. The Amazon founder has long extolled the benefits of a lunar base, including setting up factories there.
The direct competition promises to stoke an even hotter 21st-century space race—this time between this era’s real superpowers: billionaires.
Generations ago, the rivalry between the U.S. and then-Soviet Union to reach the moon was a spectacle of science that grew out of the Cold War. The desire to win on both sides fueled the costly projects.
For years, Musk and Bezos have competed to build their own reusable rockets, win National Aeronautics and Space Administration contracts (including ones for the moon) and grab attention for whose ideas for the stars were more exciting. Their favored land spots helped divide the wider space community between the moon and Mars.
In many ways, it seemed as though Musk was winning. SpaceX has built a dominant launch business and low-Earth-orbit satellite network. A mission to Mars was supposed to happen this year.
A little more than a year ago, Musk was publicly advocating the case for Mars, just ahead of President Trump’s starting a second term and renewed talk about NASA’s moon priorities. “We’re going straight to Mars,” Musk posted on X at the time. “The Moon is a distraction.”
Elon Musk has recently spoken about building factories on the moon. BRANDON BELL/REUTERS
But Musk’s position appears to have changed as SpaceX prepares to go public later this year and as Washington politics have shifted toward returning astronauts to the moon by 2028. Musk needs a business case for why public investors, who tend to look at things on a quarter-by-quarter basis, will be excited for a company that has yet to demonstrate it can send a rocket to the red planet. It isn’t clear what the price/earnings ratio will be for creating a real-life Terminus, which could take decades at best.
Musk has assured that Mars is still in the works but, for now, he seems more focused on the idea of a Moonbase Alpha.
Like Bezos, Musk is now talking about building factories on the moon. It’s part of Musk’s broader idea to build artificial-intelligence data centers in outer space and the reasoning behind merging his cash-eating AI startup, xAI, with SpaceX.
Founded in 2002, SpaceX was Musk’s gambit to reignite the space industry that lost its luster after the Cold War wound down.
He thought that developing reusable rockets would lower the cost of launches and make space travel more affordable. Eventually, Musk wanted to reach Mars with his often-stated goal of making humanity a multiplanetary species.
There are only so many more windows for Musk to set up a civilization on Mars in his lifetime. The alignment of the planets for the quickest trip only comes around about every 26 months.
SpaceX has plans to go public this year. STEVE NESIUS/REUTERS
After missing multiple self-imposed deadlines, Musk in 2024 targeted this year’s so-called transfer window between the planets for the company to send five unmanned ships ahead of launching human crews in 2028.
All of that has been contingent on the company’s developing the technology to pull it off.
Though it has had several promising test flights, SpaceX hasn’t yet sent its giant rocket called Starship fully into orbit. Then there is the issue of orbital refueling—transferring the fuel the rocket will need to reach Mars after leaving Earth.
All the while, SpaceX apparently let slip its obligations to NASA’s moon effort. In October, then-acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy said SpaceX had fallen behind in its work to develop a moon lander. Later, SpaceX said it had pitched a simplified plan.
Taken together, it is, perhaps, not surprising that the company is further delaying efforts to try to reach Mars.
This past week, Musk acknowledged some challenges. “The priority shift is because I’m worried that a natural or manmade catastrophe stops the resupply ships coming from Earth, causing the colony to die out,” Musk posted on X. “We can make the Moon city self-growing in less than 10 years, but Mars will take 20+ years due to the 26 month iteration cycle.”
Building a moonbase is no small task either—from dealing with radiation from the sun to wild swings in temperatures. Plus, there’s the need to transport materials for building out a civilization. Musk says getting supplies to the surface shouldn’t be a problem with future versions of Starship, suggesting he’ll be conducting more than 10,000 flights a year.
SpaceX did 165 launches last year. Blue Origin has only done a fraction of that since its founding in 2000.
Jeff Bezos leans toward a slow and steady approach to Blue Origin’s goals. SAUL MARTINEZ/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Bezos’ pace has drawn ridicule from Musk. “The rate of progress is too slow and the amount of years he has left is not enough,” Musk told the New York Times a few years ago in one of many jabs he’s taken at his rival.
For his part, Bezos has reveled in his measured approach, adopting tortoise as his company’s mascot. “We believe slow is smooth, and smooth is fast, and we have to do everything one step at a time,” Bezos said in 2016.
The big payoff for Blue Origin’s steady approach is supposed to come soon. The company has plans to land its first cargo flight on the moon early this year and has also shifted resources away from suborbital tourism to focus more on the moon.
On Monday, as SpaceX’s pivot to the moon gained attention, Bezos appeared vindicated, posting a picture of a tortoise on X.
The post, without any caption, drew several responses from Musk. “They might land something on the Moon before SpaceX and that’s fine by me,” he wrote, adding, “However, what really matters for the future is being able to land millions of tons of equipment and people to build a self-growing city on the Moon. In this respect, perhaps we are … more the tortoise than the hare for now.”
The race is on.
