Maybe you’ve heard, but Elon Musk is apparently a Moon fan now. He has historically been the ultimate cheerleader for human missions to Mars, and as recently as last year, he said his aim was to go straight to the red planet and that the Moon was “a distraction.” Now, he has apparently changed his mind, announcing that SpaceX has shifted focus to building a city on the Moon.
Within the space science community, this news about the Moon has largely been met with eye rolls, primarily because so many have become jaded toward Musk’s overly ambitious plans and wildly unrealistic time scales.
“It was hard for me to take those Mars plans seriously,” said space policy expert Wendy Whitman Cobb of the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. She has kept an eye on SpaceX’s job postings in recent years and pointed out that the company has shown no interest in hiring roles related to Mars technologies. This suggests there has long been a disconnect between the actual work that SpaceX is doing in its development of Starship versus the grandiose way that Musk has talked about future colonization plans.
“It was hard for me to take those Mars plans seriously.” — space policy expert Wendy Whitman Cobb
“I’m not sure SpaceX, the company, was ever focused on Mars. I think that was largely [Musk],” she said.
Even among the most ardent Mars enthusiasts, there is an acknowledgement that the technical challenges standing between humanity and a crewed Mars mission are significant. Building habitats, growing food, protecting against radiation, and other issues of infrastructure and procedure are significant obstacles that have to be overcome, not to mention challenges such as in-space refueling of rockets and launching a rocket from another planet — which comes with its own challenges related to the extremely thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and the lack of a launchpad to use as a stable base.
These are all potentially solvable issues, but they require the development and testing of new technologies, which will take years or, more likely, decades. And when you are looking for a testing ground, the Moon — a few days away from Earth, with evacuation possible in an emergency — is significantly more appealing than Mars, where astronauts would be on their own for months at a time.
This has been NASA’s approach in recent years under its Moon to Mars program. First, the logic goes, we use the Artemis program to test and practice putting astronauts on a lunar base for a period of weeks or longer, then we use that knowledge to send future explorers on longer-term missions to Mars.
“The Moon is the most natural place in the world to me, to start in terms of a long-term, sustained presence in deep space,” said astronomer Paul Byrne of Washington University in St. Louis. It would have been easier to do this building directly from the Apollo missions in the ’60s and ’70s, when institutional knowledge was still available, but it can still be done: “The best time to do it was after Apollo, but the second best time to do it is now.”
The Moon is significantly more appealing than Mars, where astronauts would be on their own for months at a time
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