It is not unbeknown to the public that NASA, for over a decade now, has been working to get humans back on the Moon. This has been a long and challenging journey that has successfully culminated in the Artemis II launch to the Moon this year. On the other side of the aisle, SpaceX and Musk have publicly stood ground on their desire to push the journey just a few kilometers further to Mars instead. However, on 8 February 2026, via X (formerly, Twitter), Musk announced:

“[…] SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years […] That said, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.”

(emphasis added)

The phrasing matters. Musk did not describe a “base,” a “camp,” or even a “permanent presence.” He chose “self-growing city” a term that, in space systems language, implies a settlement that can expand its own capacity faster than Earth can sustain it through resupply. In other words, the decisive milestone is poised to be the point at which the city can manufacture, repair, and reproduce the core inputs of life and industry on-site, with Earth shifting from a lifeline to a partner.

This emphasis on speed is also crucial. In the expanded announcement, Musk explicitly contrasted lunar cadence with Martian cadence because the former provides frequent launch opportunities and short transit times allowing rapid iteration, while Mars imposes long windows between optimal departures and months-long transfers. The Moon, in Musk’s framing, is simply the faster pathway to the larger objective, reducing the risk that a disruption on Earth can strand an off-world population before it is self-sufficient.

What a “self-growing city” would actually mean

A credible “self-growing” settlement is less a single project than a layered stack of capabilities that compound over time.

First, a survivable envelope or atmosphere. A city would begin with pressurized volume, radiation protection, thermal control, and redundancy. On the Moon that likely means habitats that are either buried, barriered, or shielded with regolith. Engineering for sustained occupancy is necessary to turn temporary infrastructure into long-term habitat.

Second, reliable power at city scale. Early lunar outposts can run on solar with storage; a city that grows needs power that is both scalable and resilient through lunar night, dust, and operational contingencies. That can mean distributed solar fields, large-scale storage, and, notably, nuclear surface power (see more on the plans for this here). The commercial point is that power becomes the first utility market of the lunar economy, and everything else prices off it.

Third, closed-loop life support and food production. “Self-growing” implies that water, oxygen, and consumables are not flown in as a permanent operating model. A settlement can still import specialty components, medicines, and high-value electronics but it cannot depend indefinitely on routine shipments of basic life inputs without remaining fragile by design.

Fourth, industrial metabolism by extraction, processing, and manufacturing. This is where “city” plays a critical role in an envisioned lunar economy. A lunar settlement that grows must be able to produce increasing quantities of:

• structural materials (regolith-based bricks, sintered surfaces, composites),
• spare parts and tools (additive manufacturing),
• propellants and volatiles if polar ice is exploited, and
• replacement infrastructure (power hardware, pressure shells, mobility platforms).

In practical terms, “self-growing” means establishing an industrial base: each new machine, habitat module, or power unit increases the settlement’s ability to build the next one.

Fifth, governance by logistics. A lunar city will function as a managed system: inventory control, redundancy planning, maintenance cycles, and emergency protocols will be as central as rockets. The romantic imagery of flags and footprints matters less than the operational question of whether the settlement can survive a sustained interruption of Earth resupply.

Why the Moon becomes strategically attractive

Musk’s core argument is speed. The Moon is close enough to allow rapid learning cycles (launch, land, test, fix, repeat) on timelines that resemble industrial development rather than expeditionary exploration.

That matters because establishment of a large-scale settlement will not be a single “mission.” It will be an accumulation of failures and successes: life support anomalies, dust mitigation, thermal shock, power reliability, human factors, medical contingencies. A two-day transit and frequent windows change the economics of failure.

It also matters because NASA’s own lunar return effort remains on a near-term timetable. As of early February 2026, NASA indicated Artemis II is targeting no earlier than March 2026 following issues identified during a fueling test. Against that backdrop, a public SpaceX narrative that the Moon is the near-term priority signals an alignment with where the most immediate institutional demand sits.

What this shift means for the industry

If SpaceX truly prioritizes a lunar city three effects follow across the market.

1) The lunar economy becomes real and fast.
A city implies persistent demand for cargo, construction, power, comms, navigation, mobility, and surface operations. That demand creates bankable markets for companies that are not launch providers: mining and excavation, robotics, thermal systems, pressure vessel manufacturing, radiation shielding, surface mobility, and autonomous operations.

2) “Cislunar logistics” becomes the main arena of competition.
A high-value advantage of establishing a lunar settlement is cadence. Any actor that can move mass routinely will set the tempo for everyone else. Musk’s own commentary places “millions of tons” and scale at the center of the ambition. The competitive response will not only come from rival launch systems, but from anyone building cislunar transportation, depots, tugs, and surface freight capacity.

3) Regulation, liability, and contract standards will tighten.
A city forces the legal questions to mature. Risk will address launch and reentry, but expand to long-duration habitation, industrial activity, and sustained operations in proximity to other actors. That pushes regulators and contracting authorities toward stricter requirements on safety cases, mission assurance, spectrum discipline, debris and traffic coordination, and insurance coverage tailored to continuous lunar operations.

It also changes the commercial posture of space law. The legal work shifts towards operational governance rather than mission approval: how activity is coordinated, how safety zones are treated in practice, how responsibility is allocated across operators and contractors, and how disputes are resolved when operations become continuous rather than episodic.

Conclusion

This is not a retreat from Mars so much as a recalibration of sequencing. Musk still describes Mars as a continuing objective, with work beginning in the five-to-seven-year range, but with the Moon as the overriding priority because it is faster.

If the Moon becomes the proving ground for genuine self-sufficiency via energy independence, industrial reproduction, and survivable logistics, then the lunar decade will be the architectural foundation for everything that follows.

So that means that we are all heading to the Moon, SpaceX included.