<\/p>\n “We are going to land a lot of tonnage on the moon,” he said. “We’re going to build the factories on the moon. The robots will be helpful with that.”<\/p>\n This is not a newly revealed vision; Musk first laid it out in February, in a blog post<\/a> that announced SpaceX’s purchase of xAI, a company that the billionaire entrepreneur founded in 2023. But Musk doubled down on it this week, showing investors that off-Earth manufacturing is very much front-of-mind for SpaceX.<\/p>\n The factories in question will build SpaceX’s Starmind AI satellites, if all goes according to plan. The company aims to operate a million-strong Starmind constellation<\/a> in Earth orbit in the coming years, and then go farther afield with the craft after that.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Eventually, SpaceX wants to launch locally made Starmind satellites off the lunar surface using electromagnetic mass drivers<\/a> \u2014 basically, extremely powerful rail guns.<\/p>\n “Using robots on the moon to scale up manufacturing on the moon \u2014 which, I know it sounds, like, super sci-fi right now, but it’s going to happen \u2014 will enable us to build the mass accelerator on the moon,” Musk said.<\/p>\n “And if you have a mass accelerator on the moon, and you have solar and radiator production on the moon, you can \u2014 I know this sounds totally nuts \u2014 but you can you can probably scale to 1,000 times the economy of Earth in terms of intelligence launched to space, but probably, you know, maybe even a million times,” he added.<\/p>\n “Solar and radiator production” refers to the manufacture of key Starmind<\/a> satellite components: solar panels to power them and radiators to dump the large amounts of heat they’ll produce into the vacuum of space.<\/p>\n \n A rendering of one of SpaceX’s planned “Starmind” AI satellites in orbit. (Image credit: SpaceX)<\/p>\n Musk didn’t provide details about the robotic lunar labor force. But he’s presumably counting on Optimus, a humanoid robot built by another one of his companies, the carmaker Tesla. Musk has previously said that SpaceX will launch some Optimus units to Mars<\/a> in the near future, to help pave the way for human settlement of the Red Planet.<\/p>\n What to read next<\/p>\n Those robots will fly on Starship<\/a>, SpaceX’s fully reusable next-gen megarocket, which is currently gearing up for its 14th test flight<\/a>. Indeed, Starship is key to most of the company’s plan’s both in Earth orbit and beyond.<\/p>\n “Starship aims to quadruple payload capacity and reduce launch costs by 10 times compared to our Falcon 9<\/a> rocket, unlocking significant capabilities across all of our business segments,” SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said during Tuesday’s earnings call.<\/p>\n “We continue to make progress building the infrastructure required to support thousands of Starship launches per year, including accelerating Raptor and launch vehicle production, the buildout of our gigabays, and making significant progress towards activating multiple launch pads at Starbase and in Cape Canaveral<\/a> at Pad 39A and Pad 37,” he added. (Raptor is the engine that powers Starship, and Starbase is SpaceX’s South Texas site, which serves as the current hub of Starship manufacturing, testing and launch activities.)<\/p>\n Tuesday’s call was a landmark for SpaceX \u2014 its first as a publicly traded company. Musk founded SpaceX as a private concern in March 2022 and took it public this past June, via the richest IPO in history<\/a>.<\/p>\n The IPO raised $86 billion and valued SpaceX at $1.77 trillion. Only six American companies had higher market capitalizations at the time \u2014 NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon and the semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom. (Market caps fluctuate all the time, going up and down with companies’ stock prices.)<\/p>\n![\"Space\"](\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/media\/img\/spc-logo-w.svg\"){kind=logo}
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