Moonshot Pivot: Inside Elon Musk’s Audacious Plan to Build a Factory on the Lunar Surface — and What It Means for the Space Race
For years, Elon Musk painted Mars as humanity’s destiny — the red planet where civilization would plant its second flag and become multiplanetary. He spoke of it with the fervor of a prophet, sketching timelines that put boots on Martian soil by the late 2020s and a self-sustaining city by mid-century. SpaceX’s entire corporate identity was built around the premise: the company’s name, after all, is shorthand for Space Exploration Technologies, and its founding mythology centers on Musk’s obsession with making life interplanetary. But in a dramatic strategic reversal that has sent shockwaves through the aerospace industry, the defense establishment, and global capital markets, Musk has told SpaceX employees to shift their near-term focus from Mars to the Moon — and not merely to land there, but to build a factory on the lunar surface. The directive, delivered in an internal company meeting and subsequently confirmed in public statements, represents the most sign...