Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The space race among U.S. billionaires is heating up, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX planning to build a moon base and Jeff Bezos pushing the ambitions of Blue Origin, which aims to return humans to the moon ahead of China’s planned mission in 2030.
SpaceX CEO Musk has said in recent podcast interviews and company meetings that he wants to build an “Alpha moon base” and place satellite launchers on the lunar surface, with plans for an initial public offering this year. A lunar base would help build what he envisioned would be an artificial intelligence computing network of up to a million satellites.
Musk’s increasing focus on the moon has shifted SpaceX’s focus away from the Mars colonization mission he has been promoting since he founded the company in 2002. As recently as last summer, Musk said he wanted to launch an unmanned Starship mission to the Red Planet, calling the moon a “distraction.”
In recent weeks, Bezos’s space company Blue Origin has also focused more on its own moon plans, shutting down its suborbital space tourism operations and shifting those resources to the Blue Moon lunar lander program before planning an unmanned lunar mission this year.
Musk now hopes to convince investors that SpaceX will remain a dominant force in space ahead of a planned IPO later this year that could value the company at more than $1 trillion. The company launched its latest astronaut mission to the International Space Station for NASA on Friday.
This week, after Musk posted a series of posts on X about “pivoting” to the moon, Bezos posted a black-and-white photo of a tortoise, reminiscent of Aesop’s fable, in which the slow and steady tortoise wins a race against the fast but impulsive hare. Blue Origin embraces this parable in its motto, “Gradatim Ferociter” (Latin for “Step by step, ferociously”).
Executives at other space companies say they also hope to benefit from increased spending by the U.S. government and its two major space contractors on new moon landing programs.
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Blue Origin’s unmanned lunar mission this year is a precursor to astronaut landings as part of NASA’s Artemis program, which also relies heavily on SpaceX’s Starship.
Seattle-based Blue Origin’s lander was shipped to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas last week for thermal and vacuum testing, a key development step in its launch process.
Blue Origin and SpaceX are using billions of dollars in funding from NASA to build lunar landers, and NASA aims to use them to conduct a series of astronaut landings on the moon, starting with SpaceX’s Starship. NASA sent the first humans to the moon in 1969, and as part of the Apollo program, which ended in 1972, a total of 12 American astronauts landed on the moon.
NASA sees returning to the moon as a practical possibility for future missions to Mars. The agency has urged the companies to speed up the development of lunar landers to win the space race with China, which aims to land astronauts on the moon by 2030.
Musk said this week he wanted to go a step further and build a “self-growing city” on the moon and launch artificial intelligence satellites from the lunar surface – part of his broader goal to expand artificial intelligence computing into space following SpaceX’s acquisition of Musk’s xAI this month.
“If the moon becomes a strategic starting point and it’s important to SpaceX, if they can get there first or early and build the infrastructure, they may have a say in how it is used and how it is used,” said Andrew Chanin, chief executive of space specialist investment firm ProcureAM.
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SpaceX’s Starship rocket hasn’t put anything into orbit yet, but it has launched 11 times since 2023 and is set to test upgrades in a month. The rocket’s upper stage serves as a lunar lander, with a planned manned lunar landing date of 2028, a date many in the industry believe will be difficult to achieve.
SpaceX has many steps left in the development of Starship as a lunar lander, from practicing its novel refueling process in orbit with another “tanker,” Starship, to landing reliably on the moon’s rugged surface ahead of a crewed lunar landing.
Kathy Lueders, who led NASA’s human space operations division before moving to SpaceX to oversee its Starship development base in Texas, said the urgency of SpaceX’s competition with Blue Origin could help NASA compete with China as Musk now focuses more on the moon.
“With Elon making these statements, the company is now focused on returning to the moon,” added Lueders, now an independent industry consultant.
The Musk-Bezos rivalry is spreading to other corners of the nascent U.S. moon industry.
“I’ve had 20 investors contact me this week,” said Justin Cyrus, CEO of Lunar Outpost, which has launched lunar rovers to the lunar surface ahead of future plans to build a range of lunar infrastructure.
“There has been a very clear change in the mentality of the lunar surface investment community over the past two years, and I think Elon’s announcement makes that change even more urgent,” he said.
(Reporting by Joey Roulet; Editing by Joe Brock and David Gregorio)