Elon Musk says a city-size Moon base could be built in ten years

11 February 2026

Elon Musk, in his capacity as CEO of SpaceX, wants to build a “self-growing” city on the Moon. He thinks the task will take about ten years to complete.

Establishing a permanent base on the Moon seems like a worthwhile goal, but is not without significant challenges, as Aakash Gupta writes:

The unsolved problems are real. Lunar dust is electrostatically charged and sharp as broken glass. It shreds seals, clogs machinery, and embeds in lung tissue. Nobody has a long-duration fix. Radiation on the surface runs 200x Earth’s dose. Regolith shelters and water shielding help but add enormous construction overhead. The 14-day night drops temperatures to -173°C and kills all solar power, and the only flight-ready nuclear reactors produce 1-10 kW, far below what a growing base demands. What years of 1/6 gravity do to human bone density and cardiovascular systems is completely unknown.

I would like to wave away these difficulties by uttering something like “nothing ventured, nothing gained”, but fear I would somewhat be oversimplifying matters.

RELATED CONTENT

current affairs, science, space exploration