{"id":476680,"date":"2026-02-13T05:36:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T05:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/476680\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T05:36:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T05:36:12","slug":"musk-needed-a-new-vision-for-spacex-and-xai-he-landed-on-moonbase-alpha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/476680\/","title":{"rendered":"Musk needed a new vision for SpaceX and xAI. He landed on Moonbase Alpha."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cJoin xAI if the idea of mass drivers on the Moon appeals to you,\u201d CEO Elon Musk proclaimed<\/a> yesterday following a restructuring that saw a stream of former executives exit the AI lab<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is an interesting recruitment strategy after the company\u2019s merger with Musk\u2019s rocket maker, SpaceX, and the combined company\u2019s anticipated IPO. You might think that xAI employees ought to be fascinated with achieving AGI, using deep learning models to disrupt traditional software companies, or simply bad wordplay like \u201cMacrohard.\u201d But instead, Elon is going to the moon.<\/p>\n

After outlining plans to build AI data centers in orbit<\/a>, the primary synergy between the two companies, Musk took the idea further. \u201cWhat if you want to go beyond a mere terawatt per year?\u201d Musk asked. \u201cTo do that, you have to go to the moon\u2026I really want to see a mass driver on the moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"New year, new dreamImage Credits:SpaceX<\/p>\n

In Musk\u2019s telling, the step beyond data centers orbiting Earth is even larger computers in deep space. And furthermore, Musk says the best way to achieve that is to build a city on the moon to manufacture space computers and hurl them into the solar system using a big maglev train.<\/p>\n

If that all feels a bit much, veteran Musk watchers know there\u2019s a clue about where the discussion appears in a video of an all-hands meeting<\/a> xAI shared with the public. The slide describing the moon base comes at the end of the presentation deck, where, during SpaceX pep talks, Musk typically shares renderings of SpaceX rockets landing on Mars and waxes rhapsodic about the future of multi-planetary humanity.<\/p>\n

Notably, the moon base comes just after SpaceX has publicly backed away from its long-held goal of colonizing Mars. Now, with xAI in the corporate fold, Musk needs a new science fiction metaphor for the future: In this case, the Kardashev Scale<\/a>, a theoretical measure of galactic civilizations coined by the eponymous Soviet astronomer in the 1960s. The idea is climbing the scale of energy usage \u2014 early civilizations figure out how to leverage all the power sources on their planets, and then (hypothetically) go to space and build infrastructure to capture the energy of the sun.<\/p>\n

With the moon base, Musk says the company could harness \u201cmaybe even a few percent of the sun\u2019s energy\u201d to train and operate AI models. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about,\u201d he told his staff, \u201cbut it\u2019s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBoston, MA
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJune 23, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

In the nine years since Musk unveiled his plan for Martian exploration and colonization, the vision has been an effective hiring tool for SpaceX: The founding tale of Musk\u2019s interest in the Red Planet offered a long-term vision that united the company\u2019s various development efforts, and signaled the company\u2019s ambition among other space contractors that settled for incremental work on government priorities. \u201cOccupy Mars\u201d t-shirts offered a visible symbol of SpaceX\u2019s aspirations.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where the hypothetical moon base fits in \u2014 part of a long history of Musk wrapping his companies in a powerful narrative. It\u2019s one million people living on Mars, but now catering to a future where AI is the most interesting thing. Martian mission creep became apparent less in Musk\u2019s May 2025 Starship update<\/a>, when the presentation ended with a now-cancelled vision of Tesla Optimus robots clomping across the Red Planet.<\/p>\n

\"\"Poor robotImage Credits:SpaceX<\/p>\n

There was just one problem with SpaceX and Mars: No one wanted to pay them to go there. Plans announced in 2016 to repurpose the company\u2019s Dragon spacecraft as a Mars lander were abandoned the next year after the technical challenges became too costly. And since Musk unveiled<\/a> the vehicle that would become Starship in 2016, its capabilities, initially intended for Mars colonization, have been scaled back to focus on two more remunerative tasks: launching satellites for the Starlink comms network and $4 billion worth of contracts to land astronauts on the moon for NASA.<\/p>\n

Unlike a multi-planetary civilization, there may be some logic in having SpaceX purchase a money-burning AI and social media to build data centers in Earth orbit, particularly if forecasts of rising demand and costs on the ground come true. Experts suggest that it might be possible in the 2030s.<\/p>\n

Hypothetically, building satellites on the moon would require a lot more of Musk\u2019s other dreams coming true first. Scientists and startups are experimenting with building chips<\/a> and other precision components in space. But mass-producing many tons of advanced computers on the moon means we\u2019re living in a universe where it is dramatically cheaper to get to space, which is the central requirement for those technologies, getting all the raw materials for such an effort to the moon, plus whatever is required for a \u201cself-sustaining city.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a sense, that\u2019s the point: This is the, uh, stretch goal. If meme-happy retail investors buy the argument, they could turn SpaceX shares into the next Tesla. The engineers, AI or aerospace, who Musk needs to achieve his goals may find the shift jarring. But the vision is one way to explain what xAI is about, other than an LLM perhaps best known as a pervert<\/a>. As one of the company\u2019s departing executives said<\/a> on his way out the door, \u201call AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it\u2019s boring.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mass-producing a solar system-scale supercomputer on the moon is many things (I\u2019m going to get emails for not using the word \u201cinsane\u201d), but it is not the exact same thing, and it is not boring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cJoin xAI if the idea of mass drivers on the Moon appeals to you,\u201d CEO Elon Musk proclaimed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":476681,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,3120,242668,128,285,5437,42593,3123],"class_list":{"0":"post-476680","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-elon-musk","11":"tag-moon-base","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-space","14":"tag-spacex","15":"tag-the-moon","16":"tag-xai"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}