Moon To Mars | Stories From Space Podcast With Matthew S Williams

0:00RSA C-2026 conference, where insights drive action, solutions emerge, and community connections spark innovation. Be there March 23rd through March 26th. Secure your spot at rsaconference.com forward slash ITSPMAG26. The author has acknowledged that this podcast was recorded on the traditional unseated lands of the Lacongan peoples. Good afternoon, and welcome back to another episode of Stories from Space. I'm your host, Matt Williams, and today's topic, the recent controversy and questions surrounding the big pivot by Elon Musk, man who created SpaceX back in 2001 with the sole purpose of engineering rockets and reducing launch costs so that humanity could jumpstart the exploration of Mars, which he saw as something that was inevitable, but had been a dream deferred.

1:01And for the past 25 years, he's been working constantly towards that goal, incrementally building up a rocket fleet, reducing the cost of launches through reusable rockets and ride shares, and ultimately, it all came down to the development of the Starship. The vehicle that was going to replace, oh, the other Falcon rockets. From which Elon Musk envisioned, launching regularly from Earth, a thousand at a time, he once said, that would be able to carry a hundred tons of cargo or a hundred passengers each. And that with this iteration with all this equipment and supplies and people being sent to Mars, you would have the ability to build a self-sustaining city of 80,000 people. So many people are now wondering why this sudden pivot. As he announced on February 8th on X, coinciding with the Super Bowl, for those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the moon, as we can potentially achieve

2:05that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20 plus years. The mission of SpaceX remains the same, extend consciousness in life as we know it to the Stars. He included, as a caveat at the end, that SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about five to seven years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the moon is faster. And as already mentioned, this represents a huge departure for Elon Musk. And he cited several very practical reasons as to why SpaceX should be focusing its efforts on building a lunar base first, but the bigger question remains, why now? What exactly conspired to convince Elon to stop saying that the moon was a distraction, and Mars was the real goal, to start focusing on a moon to Mars mission architecture, which is precisely what NASA has been doing for the past two decades.

3:07And in terms of him saying the moon was a distraction, these were remarks that he made as recently as last year. So let's change in the meantime, well, quite a few things. But first, it bears mentioning all the practical reasons for this switch. And why it is that NASA, among other space agencies, had been looking to the moon as the first step on a journey to Mars, rather than focusing on Mars direct plans. And as we explored in a previous episode, the idea of a Mars direct mission architecture, this is something that Robert Zubrin, the founder of the Mars Society and Astronautical Engineer, and a long time advocate for the exploration of Mars, this was something that he pitched to NASA back in the late 1990s. And it's something he's been advocating for ever since. In fact, years ago, when I had a chance of engaging him in a Q&A panel discussion, I asked

4:08what specifically it was about the Moon to Mars mission architecture that he thought was impractical or infeasible. And he specifically mentioned orbital refueling, which speaks to what Elon Musk is planning to do with his fleet of rockets. Orbital refueling is not only a key part of his proposed architecture for getting to Mars, but also for the Artemis program with the Starship Human Landing System, which is we also explored in a previous episode, would require up to 20 refueling tankers to refuel a single Starship, so it could break from orbit and actually make it to the moon. In contrast, Zubrin has gone on record as saying that we could send missions directly to Mars by ensuring that these splises end advance, and that this could be done with the space launch system or the constellation program's original workup for the Aries 1 and 5 rocket,

5:09the Aries 5 being the basis for the space launch system. Nevertheless, NASA has been on the same page for all that time since the constellation program back in 2005-2006. And their architecture was, we head back to the Moon first, we build infrastructure there that would allow us to send missions to Mars, and that this same infrastructure would allow for more rapid resupply missions sent from the Moon rather directly from Earth, and also would allow for follow-up missions mounted on a semi-regular basis. And that is precisely what the infrastructure that they have planned to build in orbit around the Moon and on the lunar surface would be for as well, allowing regular follow-up missions with a frequency of about one per year. And the reason is for doing things this way, it comes down to logistics and timing plain simple.

6:11And Musk of course mentioned all these in his post, but to go into them in a bit more detail. For one, launch windows to Mars occur only about every 26 months. And this coincides with Mars being at opposition in the night sky. Which basically means that Mars and the Sun are on opposite sides of planet Earth. They are opposed rather than being in conjunction. And this point, reaching Mars using conventional propulsion would take six to nine months. Now that's based on robotic missions that have been sent there in the past. Sending crude vessels, they would need to have a real high velocity rating in order to make it there in that same amount of time in order to break free of reserve and conduct a transmars injection. And a key point that he mentioned there was iteration. It's not just about getting there, it's about getting the spacecraft back, getting them

7:13refueled so you can send more payloads, more people. And between that launch window and the distance, it's going to take a really long time to actually build up a base in a self-sustaining city there. So he was absolutely right in saying that it's easier to do this on the moon. Not only are launch windows a lot more accommodating, you can launch several times a month rather than every 26 months. And as the Apollo missions demonstrated, it takes only about three days to get to the moon. Which means that if anyone on the lunar surface there, any bases, any habitats, if they're in any kind of trouble, things break down, they're running out of food and got a limited supply of water and air, they can be resupplied in a matter of days. And for spacecraft that are then returning to Earth, the turnaround time, getting to the moon, landing, offloading, and possibly taking on stuff to bring home, like resources,

8:16the turnaround time would be about 10 days. So that's pretty attractive, return on investments right there. And far more attractive from a build up, an iteration point of view, right? With every flight, you're able to add more equipment, building materials, etc. onto the lunar surface, and you can look forward to a much more rapid timeline there for developing a self-sustaining city. And as I mentioned, spacecraft returning from the moon, they could be hauling back resources as part of a growing lunar economy. And in terms of what kinds of resources this has been explored in great depth for many decades. For one, there's the prospect of mining helium-3 on the moon. And helium-3 is relatively abundant on the moon, at least compared to Earth, because of the constant solar wind bombardment of its surface.

9:18And given that helium-3 is the ideal isotope for use in fusion reactors, its extraction could fuel a emerging fusion economy. And of course, there is the extensive mineral wealth. As scientists have known ever since the Apollo astronauts brought back the moon rock samples, the Earth and Moon have very similar compositions. It's basically silicate, crust and mantle over top of a metallic core. And also like Earth, its surface has been bombarded by meteorites and asteroids since the very beginning of the solar system. And so the surface itself is littered with trace metals from all of that bombardment. So yes, much like as we explored in the last episode on asteroid mining, there is an abundance of iron and nickel, as well as precious metals and rare earth elements that could in theory be extracted from the lunar crust and soil, and that these would help fuel a

10:24growing space economy, and help usher in an age of post-scarcity. Not, of course, that's the optimistic appraisal, and there are a number of very sticky legal issues that absolutely have to be worked out before any of this can be done. Now there have been statements made and international agreements signed, but they're kind of broad in their scope and a little general in their language. So from a legal standpoint, yes, the details, which are always crucial, does a lot of work that still needs to be done on that. For example, you have the outer space treaty of 1967, and the moon treaty, or moon agreement of 1979, and this treaty, as I'm sure I've mentioned in previous episodes, it establishes that the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit, and in the interest of all countries, and shall be the province of all mankind. And that is the original language in which the agreement was written, but of course it

11:27refers to all humanity. So to boil it down, it's basically stating that space is for everyone, and when it comes to the moon, and the question of mining and harvesting resources and the rights of commercial entities, articles 26 and 11 really stand out. Article 2 establishes that outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation or by any other means. In other words, no one has a right to claim any part of space, and that would include the moon. Whereas Article 6 establishes that the parties to the treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space. And last, Article 11 indicates that signatories must agree to inform the Secretary General of the United Nations, as well as the public and the international scientific community of the nature, conduct, location, and results of their activities in space.

12:29However, there were many people in the international community who felt that the outer space treaty was a bit ambiguous when it came to the issue of property rights on the moon, mainly because the treaty spells out that no nation has the right to claim sovereignty of anything in space, but it did not specifically mention private corporations. So the moon treaty was an attempt to amend that by saying that the moon is part of the collective heritage of humanity, and that any economic activities on the moon, and what that yielded in terms of resources or research breakthroughs even, that these were to be shared equitably and under the auspices of international law. Unfortunately, none of the major space agencies of the world signed on to this treaty, whereas the outer space treaty has over a hundred signatories today, while a handful of countries signed on to the moon treaty.

13:30And what's more, in recent years, with the economic landscape shifting, with the booming growth in the commercial space sector and the idea of prospecting of mining asteroids and other off-world resources, there have been a lot of major legal decisions that have many worried. For starters, you had the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, designed by the Obama administration that established a framework for our U.S. citizens to own and sell resources extracted from other celestial bodies. And more to the points, you had the executive order signed by the first Trump administration in 2020, titled, Encouraging International Support for Recovery and Use of Space Resources. And this order was much more explicit in its purpose and its intent. It mentions the moon treaty by name, saying that the United States never signed it.

14:31And therefore, people have a right to declare property rights on the moon. However, NASA came back at this with the Artemis Accords, which as I've said before, did seem like an attempt to do a bit of an end run around the Trump administration and its attempts to basically say, have outer boys when it came to the moon and property rights and resource extraction. As NASA specifically stated in the Accords, that its purpose was to reinforce that space resource extraction and utilization can and will be conducted under the offices of the outer space treaty with specific emphasis on articles 2, 6, and 11. But there are those articles again. And in particular, Article 11 Section 3, this really addresses the question of surface activities and it says that neither the surface nor the subsurface of the moon nor any part thereof or natural resource in place shall become the property of any state, international,

15:34intergovernmental or non-governmental organization, national organization or non-government entity or of any natural person. So yes, while it doesn't specifically say companies can't do this, the language is pretty clear. So coupled with the Artemis Accords and what it states about commercial interests, they're basically saying you can extract resources but you're not going to own the land you're on. You don't have property rights to it and what you're doing has to accord with international law. So we'll be interesting to see how that plays out. In any case, there has been a fair bit of speculation as to why Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX with the sole mission of jump-starting Martian exploration and building a city on Mars, why he would now do this turnabout. And there have been some interesting developments in the last few years that might provide some

16:36insight there. One of which includes the ongoing feud between Musk and Bezos, who he views as his chief rival and chief competitor and of course Bezos certainly returns to the favor. And while SpaceX has enjoyed a virtual monopoly now for many years, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's commercial space firm, it has emerged in the last little while as a new competitor and it's making some very impressive strides. The new shepherd launches, for example, even though they are routinely criticized as being nothing more than PR stunts for rich people, they nevertheless, they've achieved even in launch cadence that is really quite impressive. But more importantly than that is the development of the new Glenn rocket. And this began with the first launch test of the new Glenn, which managed to make it to orbit without problem. And in fact, was able to deploy its payload, which was the Blue Ring Pathfinder, a technology

17:41demonstrator, to a medium-earth orbit. So as the company had been lagging behind SpaceX severely in terms of getting rockets to orbit, which was something Musk made fun of in a tweet typically, the inaugural launch of the new Glenn actually made it higher than Low Earth orbit, which is a pretty big deal in a very impressive accomplishment for this rocket on its very first flight. And the second launch, which took place in November 2025, they not only launched a NASA payload, the two escapade spacecraft, and a communication satellite, to the Sun Earth L2 Lagrange point, and that's where the satellite went, and the escapade mission was established in orbit around Mars. And on top of that, on the second flight, they were able to retrieve successfully the booster, thus demonstrating reusability. And so far, that's only two flights, but Blue Origin hopes to do four more this year,

18:42and the rather rapid progress they're making, that's certainly something that Musk would not have failed to notice. In addition, there's their Blue Moon Lander, which NASA has contracted for the uses part of the Artemis program, specifically for the Artemis 5 and 6 missions. And this, of course, is in the spirit of competition, and not awarding contracts to single providers, as NASA has typically maintained, but SpaceX still have a lock on the all-important Artemis 3 mission, a long-awaited return to the moon. They were going to supply the human landing system, the Starship HLS. However, before he was replaced by Jared Isaacman, netting administrator Sean Duffy said in October last year that they were opening up the competition again for an Artemis 3 HLS, specifically because Gordon concerns that the Starship would not be ready in time, and that the Chinese might actually beat NASA to the moon, and they are currently planning

19:46on sending the first Tycanauts to the moon by 2030. And Sean Duffy even intimated during an interview that Blue Origin was likely to be a frontrunner in securing the Artemis 3 contract, and Musk, true to fashion, was really not pleased in starting seeing some very petty and childish things on his platform X. What's more, Musk has become a rather vocal critic of NASA in recent years, which included getting into a very one-sided childish flame war with an astronaut, aboard the ISS, who dared to correct him on some details regarding their return mission. And as if name color wasn't enough, he also began saying that the ISS should be deorbited and destroyed sooner than 2030 as planned. So it is possible that Musk has decided to shift his focus because he believes that his full attention is needed if he's going to secure the lucrative

20:47contracts to bring NASA astronauts to the moon again, and it may even be that he senses he's going to be pushed out of the running and has instead decided that he's going to try and establish his own habitat on the moon to compete with NASA and the Artemis program. But it may also have something to do with Musk's recent shifts in terms of his priorities and his vision for various companies. For example, the merger between SpaceX and his AI company, XAI, and as part of this merger, Musk announced that the immediate focus would be the deployment of a constellation of up to one million satellites in the Earth orbit that would serve as AI processing stations. And this was meant to address two things. On the one hand, the rising electricity demand that AI processing stations are going to lead to. And of course, the need to keep them at operating

21:48temperature, which requires a lot of water, a precious and dwindling natural resource. And as he said at the time in a company statement, by directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will transform our ability to scale compute. It's always sunny in space. Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is the first step towards becoming a Kardashev 2 level civilization, one that can harness the sun's full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity's multi-planetary future. So, in essence, by shifting focus to the moon, Musk would have the ability, through SpaceX, to build up the necessary infrastructure to support this satellite mega constellation, and also to extend it to the moon, where yes, a future base, a self-sufficient city, where the internet is needed,

22:49and processing centers are available in orbit. So one could argue that this is part of Musk's current concerns with closing the loop between space-based solar power robots and the development of AI, all of which he views as absolutely intrinsic to commercializing space and building a space economy, and yes, creating a post-scarcity future, which is something Musk has expressed support for in the past. He's certainly aware of the futurist language and predictions, it's something he grew up with, and what he set out to address in many ways, did become part of. And it's also possible that Musk has seen all these developments happening, and he has come to feel like that by focusing on Mars, he might be left behind. He won't be able to carve out his part of this emerging space market, which as we know, from all of the behavior he's exhibited

23:53in recent years, this is something that is very important to him. He has got a very, very massive ego, and has some have ventured, he believes that only he can save the human race, and that he only really wants to see that happen if he can do it. Hyperbole maybe, but as the world's richest man, he surely feels like he's got something to prove here. And as I opined myself in a recent article I wrote about this historic pivot, that it may be possible that Musk has simply read the writing on the wall, by which I mean that for decades there has been an ongoing debate about what is the best way to reach Mars. And NASA's chosen mission architecture has always been the moon to Mars. And others like Robert Zubin, who have favored the Mars Direct approach, they have always disagreed with that. And Musk's past statements, saying that the moon is a distraction,

24:55these echoed what Zubin has said many times over, that Mars is where the future is, it's where the lucrative research is, it's where the challenge is, and that going back to the moon first is kind of a waste of time because there are limited opportunities there in comparison. And speaking of Robert Zubin, he was not too happy to hear about Musk's pivot, and he has penned in an op ed, and also stated in numerous interviews, that the moon is not suitable for human settlement, and that the idea of building a self-sustaining city there is likely to be Musk's greatest mistake. That's certainly one for history to decide. And it does seem though that for the time being, humanity's efforts in terms of crude space exploration and establishing a human foothold beyond earth, that they are focused on the moon first, that this is where commercial development needs to

25:56happen first, this is where exploration needs to happen first, renewed exploration in the case of NASA. And that ultimately, that is how we're going to get to Mars, using the gateway and similar space stations, and spacecraft that can make the journey between the moon and Mars, hopefully in a reasonable amount of time, so likely involving a nuclear thermal nuclear electric or bi-modal propulsion system. So whatever's reasons or motivations Musk has effectively said that he's on board with this overall mission architecture. But of course he also included that the company is not abandoning Mars, as he also noted, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about five to seven years. Now whether that meant five to seven years after building a self-sustaining city on the moon, which he's estimated would take 10 years, or whether or not the company is planning on doing things in parallel, that remains to be seen.

27:00However, knowing Musk, the timetables, no matter what, are optimistic, and they are likely to be subject to revision and delays as time goes on. In any case, all we can really do is wait and see how this unfolds, and it is sure to be interesting if nothing else. Here in the next time, when the subject will be at last, pan spermia, the notion that life is distributed throughout the cosmos through interstellar objects. And we'll also take a look at some new proposals, some new research breakthroughs, that offer the potential to measure cosmic expansion in a way that might actually resolve the Hubble tension, one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy and cosmology today. In the meantime, thank you for listening. I'm Matt Williams, and this has been Stories from Space. RSA C-2026 conference, where insights drive action, solutions emerge, and community connections

28:02spark innovation. Be there March 23rd through March 26th. Secure your spot at rsaconference.com forward slash ITSPMAG26.