SpaceX’s Moon and Mars Timeline Keeps Getting Bolder — and Keeps Slipping

Elon Musk’s latest timeline for SpaceX is among the company’s boldest yet: astronauts back on the Moon within two to three years, a lunar base supporting thousands of people within a decade, and the first crewed Mars mission within five years. He laid out the plans during an interview with Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

Musk said the company would first focus on returning astronauts to the Moon, then work to expand access beyond government-trained astronauts to ordinary travellers. He described a lunar base eventually supporting thousands, or even tens of thousands, of residents and visitors — a scale he admitted is hard to square with the current state of space travel, since only a small number of people have ever reached the Moon, all during NASA’s Apollo programme more than five decades ago.

Starship, SpaceX’s large reusable spacecraft built for missions beyond Earth orbit, underpins the plan. Designed to carry cargo and passengers, it is still being tested and has not yet completed a crewed flight.

Mars, Musk said, poses a tougher challenge due to the distance and length of the journey, but he still predicted the first human landing within five years, followed by thousands more people over the following decade — echoing his long-standing case that a Mars settlement would help humanity become multi-planetary.

The pattern is a familiar one. Musk predicted a Mars landing within a decade more than ten years ago, and in 2017 SpaceX said private passengers would fly around the Moon by 2018 — a flight that never happened. He also used the interview to point to a newer front for the company: launching its first artificial intelligence satellites as part of a push into space-based computing infrastructure.