Earlier this week, Elon Musk posted online that his company SpaceX has “shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon”, and that his work on Mars would be a longer-term project. For years, reaching Mars had been a plan for the South African multi-billionaire. Having advocated for the advanced colonisation of the planet since at least 2001, Musk had long stated a goal to settle humans there. SpaceX has consistently been involved in plans for this colonisation, with an aim of making humanity multi-planetary.

Musk is making a huge mistake. It is impossible to build a self-growing city on the Moon because the materials required to support life are either absent or prohibitively difficult to extract. Even where they exist, they are found in forms vastly less accessible than on Earth — or even Mars.

We are carbon-based life forms. We are made of carbon compounds, as is everything we eat or wear, and most of the things that we use. There is no carbon on the Moon. The other essential components of life are water and nitrogen. Aside from ice trapped in ultracold (–230°C), permanently shadowed craters near the lunar south pole, water exists on the Moon only in parts-per-million concentrations within the regolith. Nitrogen is effectively absent, as are concentrated mineral ores.

The Moon does contain oxygen, but only chemically bound in rock. Extracting it requires complex, energy-intensive industrial processes operating at extremely high temperatures. This would sharply increase the cost and drastically shorten the operational lifespan of the necessary equipment.

In contrast, the materials necessary to support life and civilisation — including carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, water and enriched mineral ores — are widely available in readily useable forms on Mars.

The Mars-to-Moon shift has other significant flaws. While the Moon is indeed closer to Earth, the rocket propulsion requirement to travel one way from Earth to the lunar surface is 50% greater than that needed to go to Mars. The return leg would be even more challenging: producing propellant on the Moon is far more difficult than doing so on Mars, effectively tripling the propulsion requirements for a round trip.

I know Musk personally, and I am confident he is aware of most of the facts outlined above. Where he appears mistaken is in the relative difficulty of the technologies required to convert lunar versus Martian materials into usable resources. Even so, he plainly understands the propulsion constraints and the Moon’s lack of the basic ingredients for a viable settlement.

In short, Musk’s tweet is nonsense. Whatever his reasons for talking up the Moon, they are almost certainly not about building a self-sustaining city there. A more plausible ambition is a vast AI data centre there, with the resulting returns used to bankroll the settlement of Mars.

That is the Musk playbook. He moves in stages, with each success underwriting the next. PayPal provided the capital to found SpaceX. Falcon 9 became a reliable cash generator and made Starlink possible. Starlink has not only made him far richer, but conferred a level of power and leverage unmatched by almost any other businessman. A lunar AI data centre could be the next step in that progression.

Or it might be where his winning streak ends. Musk certainly thinks big, and most of his ventures have succeeded. But why put an AI data centre on the Moon? True believers claim that by building these centres in space, we will have access to unlimited solar power. But space solar power is vastly more expensive than solar power on Earth, which itself is not fully competitive with fossil fuels, hydro, or nuclear.

With spectacular expenditure of cash, focus, and time, Musk can probably build a giant AI data centre on the Moon. But if it can’t compete with much cheaper alternatives on Earth, it could prove a financial disaster that collapses his credibility, and with it his entire corporate empire.

Napoleon, like Musk, was a genuine genius who won repeatedly by defying expectations. Success bred a sense of invincibility. The march on Moscow followed, not from necessity, but from overconfidence, and it ended in catastrophe.

Brilliance does not preclude folly. Indeed, it often invites it. The Moon may yet prove to be Musk’s Moscow.

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Dr. Robert Zubrin is an aerospace engineer, president of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Mars and most recently of The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet.

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