{"id":63877,"date":"2026-08-07T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/?guid=1fc99556fd7bf6a7bc405865df78a7f9"},"modified":"2026-08-07T21:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T21:00:00","slug":"spacex-serious-about-building-factories-on-the-moon-its-going-to-happen-elon-musk-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/2026\/08\/07\/spacex-serious-about-building-factories-on-the-moon-its-going-to-happen-elon-musk-says\/","title":{"rendered":"SpaceX serious about building factories on the moon: &#8216;It\u2019s going to happen,&#8217; Elon Musk says"},"content":{"rendered":"\n                            \n                            <article>\n                                <p>As usual, SpaceX is dreaming big.<\/p><p>The company plans to build factories on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/55-earths-moon-formation-composition-and-orbit.html\"><u>the moon<\/u><\/a>, using robots to do much of the heavy lifting, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/18849-elon-musk.html\"><u>Elon Musk<\/u><\/a> said on Tuesday (Aug. 4) during <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/18853-spacex.html\"><u>SpaceX<\/u><\/a>'s first-ever quarterly earnings call. <\/p><p>\"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><iframe src=\"https:\/\/content.jwplatform.com\/players\/ofJsilGS.html\" id=\"ofJsilGS\" title=\"Elon Musk: How SpaceX is Revolutionizing Space, Internet, and AI\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"auto\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><p>This is not a newly revealed vision; Musk first laid it out in February, in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.spacex.com\/updates#xai-joins-spacex\" ><u>a blog post<\/u><\/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><p>The factories in question will build SpaceX's Starmind AI satellites, if all goes according to plan. The company aims to operate a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/space-exploration\/satellites\/elon-musk-wants-to-put-1-million-ai-satellites-in-space-heres-how-spacex-could-do-it\"><u>million-strong Starmind constellation<\/u><\/a> in Earth orbit in the coming years, and then go farther afield with the craft after that.<\/p><p>Eventually, SpaceX wants to launch locally made Starmind satellites off the lunar surface <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/astronomy\/moon\/elon-musk-wants-to-put-a-satellite-catapult-on-the-moon-its-not-a-new-idea\"><u>using electromagnetic mass drivers<\/u><\/a> \u2014 basically, extremely powerful rail guns. <\/p><p>\"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><p>\"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><p>\"Solar and radiator production\" refers to the manufacture of key <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/space-exploration\/launches-spacecraft\/another-star-is-born-spacex-names-ai-megaconstellation-starmind\"><u>Starmind<\/u><\/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><figure class=\"van-image-figure  inline-layout\" data-bordeaux-image-check ><div class='image-full-width-wrapper'><div class='image-widthsetter' style=\"max-width:2000px;\"><p class=\"vanilla-image-block\" style=\"padding-top:56.25%;\"><img id=\"Y2b9XP3PZ2w8rCDW9psmjS\" name=\"SnFQu7juUwVJA9cYdjtYem\" alt=\"A rendering of one of SpaceX's planned \"Starmind\" AI satellites in orbit.\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net\/Y2b9XP3PZ2w8rCDW9psmjS.jpg\" mos=\"\" align=\"middle\" fullscreen=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1125\" attribution=\"\" endorsement=\"\" class=\"inline\"><\/p><\/div><\/div><figcaption itemprop=\"caption description\" class=\" inline-layout\"><span class=\"caption-text\">A rendering of one of SpaceX's planned \"Starmind\" AI satellites in orbit. <\/span><span class=\"credit\" itemprop=\"copyrightHolder\">(Image credit: SpaceX)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure><p>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/space-exploration\/private-spaceflight\/elon-musk-says-spacex-will-launch-its-biggest-starship-yet-this-year-but-mars-in-2026-is-50-50\"><u>launch some Optimus units to Mars<\/u><\/a> in the near future, to help pave the way for human settlement of the Red Planet.<\/p><p>Those robots will fly on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/spacex-starship-super-heavy.html\"><u>Starship<\/u><\/a>, SpaceX's fully reusable next-gen megarocket, which is currently <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/space-exploration\/launches-spacecraft\/spacex-wants-to-launch-next-starship-this-month-and-catch-it-too-elon-musk-says-in-1st-earnings-call-since-historic-ipo\"><u>gearing up for its 14th test flight<\/u><\/a>. Indeed, Starship is key to most of the company's plan's both in Earth orbit and beyond.<\/p><p>\"Starship aims to quadruple payload capacity and reduce launch costs by 10 times compared to our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/18962-spacex-falcon-9.html\"><u>Falcon 9<\/u><\/a> rocket, unlocking significant capabilities across all of our business segments,\" SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said during Tuesday's earnings call. <\/p><p>\"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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/33926-cape-canaveral.html\"><u>Cape Canaveral<\/u><\/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><iframe src=\"https:\/\/content.jwplatform.com\/players\/wp6VrJEi.html\" id=\"wp6VrJEi\" title=\"SpaceX Starship's epic splashdown from drone and rocket cams \u2013 Still floating!\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"auto\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><p>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/space-exploration\/private-spaceflight\/spacex-to-go-public-with-a-mind-bogglingly-historic-ipo-today-the-space-industry-may-never-be-the-same\"><u>richest IPO in history<\/u><\/a>.<\/p><p>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><p>The main point of Tuesday's call was to discuss SpaceX's <a href=\"https:\/\/s21.q4cdn.com\/184289198\/files\/doc_financials\/2026\/q2\/SpaceX-Reports-Second-Quarter-2026-Results.pdf\" ><u>first-ever earnings report<\/u><\/a>, which covered the second quarter of this year. The company's revenue over that stretch was $7.8 billion, a 92% increase over the same period in 2025, according to the report. SpaceX lost more money than it made during Q2 2026, but the shortfall was considerably smaller than in Q2 2025 \u2014 $541 million versus $1.0 billion.<\/p>\n                                                            <\/article>\n                            \n                        ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SpaceX plans to build factories on the moon, using robots to do much of the heavy lifting, Elon Musk said on Tuesday (Aug. 4) during SpaceX&#8217;s first-ever quarterly earnings call.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":587,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[404,477,2905],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-solar-system","category-the-moon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63877"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/587"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63878,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63877\/revisions\/63878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}