Are Elon Musk’s Mars plans lastly coming again right down to Earth?

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.

“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.”

There are also good scientific reasons to visit the Moon, such as learning about the formation of the solar system. There are even proposals to put telescopes there, taking advantage of the lack of atmosphere to allow much greater power from a smaller telescope compared to those on Earth.

But the most pressing motivations to return humans to the Moon are largely geopolitical, with China seeking to expand its human space program and stake out a presence there within the next decade and the US unwilling to be beaten to the punch.

Similarly, SpaceX’s guiding motivation may be less philosophical and more classically capitalist, as the company engages in some old-fashioned competition with its rival Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos’ company is developing its own lunar lander for NASA and could potentially leapfrog SpaceX to become a significant lunar partner for NASA.

“It’s maybe just basic business rivalry,” Whitman Cobb said. “That has been the hallmark of Blue Origin versus SpaceX for decades now.” There’s also the matter of SpaceX’s looming IPO and the need to show investors what a realistic plan for making money might involve.

Whatever the motivations of those involved, and for all the frustration with Musk’s off-the-cuff approach to announcing space policy, there is a hope that having him come around to supporting a practically achievable Moon mission is a positive step.

“I find it encouraging, because it is more realistic,” said Kyler Kuehn, acting director of Science at Lowell Observatory. “Even if the timescale is maybe still unrealistic.”

Even now, Musk is claiming that, following Moon missions, SpaceX will be building a city on Mars “in about 5 to 7 years,” a hilariously optimistic timeline given that Starship has not even been proven flightworthy yet. You might recall Musk previously claiming that humans would be on Mars by 2022, or 2024, or 2029.

He has also discussed making cities on Mars “self-sustaining,” an even more ambitious and unrealistic goal for the near future, as well as sci-fi ideas like terraforming Mars and building spaceports there. It’s not that these grand plans could never be realized by humanity, but they certainly won’t be happening in any of our lifetimes, and pretending that they’ll enable human life on Mars within the next few years is delusional at best and downright deceptive at worst.

After all, it’s easy to make an announcement, but much harder to grapple with the careful, incremental process of technological development — especially when there are human lives at stake. Under these conditions, experts aren’t surprised when space project timelines continually slip.

“When you go from marketing to the actual engineering, this is always what was going to happen,” said Kuehn.

And, he points out, there is value in being upfront about the scale of the challenges ahead: “If people understood that these problems are hard and it’s going to take decades — they might not like to hear it, but they would get a better idea of how this really works, and in some ways, that can be inspirational. It’s a multi-generation problem: I am not going to get to go to Mars, but maybe my daughter will.”

However, as the gulf between the tech bro marketing speak and the slow, expensive, careful reality of space exploration widens, “there’s a risk that the public will get jaded by this, at the time when NASA and other space agencies need the public to get behind them,” said Byrne.

As the face of space exploration to much of the public, Musk’s words still carry weight and therefore responsibility: “There comes a point where the public is either going to lose interest or just start to think that this is a scam and it’s not ever going to work.”