SpaceX's founder shocked the space world when he said he's freezing his crusade to begin building a human colony on Mars to instead foster “a self-growing city on the Moon.” Shown here is the 'Transparent Solar System,' including the twin planets Earth and Mars, in an illustration produced by Britain's James Reynolds & Sons around the year 1860. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

SSPL via Getty Images

Elon Musk’s bombshell X post that he is freezing his longstanding crusade to begin building a human colony on Mars after his Starship super-capsule is perfected, in favor of fostering “a self-growing city on the Moon,” is a cosmic mistake, says the world’s top scholar on Mars.

Musk’s thunderbolt pivot could decimate his role as future leader of independent interplanetary space treks, predicts Robert Zubrin, the aerospace engineer who created the globe’s foremost masterplan to terraform Mars, or generate an Earth-like biosphere around the Red Planet, turning the orb blue as its original oceans and atmosphere are recovered.

Dr. Zubrin told me in an interview that if Elon Musk genuinely follows through on his pledge to divert future flotillas of Starships to the Moon, SpaceX’s chief designer could be following in the footsteps of his fellow genius Napoleon Bonaparte, whose ill-starred march on desolate Moscow ultimately led to his meteor-like crash.

Giddy with his past triumphs and power, like Napoleon, Musk might be headed for a pyrrhic lunar victory that defeats his Mars campaign, Zubrin predicts.

SpaceX has incorporated vast portions of the designs and strategies sketched out in Dr. Zubrin’s masterwork book “The Case for Mars,” on reengineering Mars to host a new branch of civilization, into its grand schemes for Mars.

Zubrin’s opus spells out how to produce methane and oxygen rocket propellants on the surface of Mars while lofting gigantic mirrors into orbit to melt its reservoirs of frozen H20 and warm the entire planet. Elon Musk designed his methane-burning Starship spacecraft, and Mars missions architecture, around The Case for Mars, including the planned deployment of AI-enhanced robots to begin assembling the first human outposts.

Mars savant Robert Zubrin and Mars colonization neophyte Elon Musk first met back in 2001, when Musk, a new convert to the cause of transforming Mars, donated $100,000 to the Mars Society founded by Zubrin as a globe-spanning design studio to map out hyper-tech settlements to be constructed across the orange-red Martian sandhills.

Musk was briefly appointed to the Martian studio-think tank’s board of directors - and it was at a Mars Society convention, in the summer of 2001, that he first sketched out his dream of rocketing explorers to Mars.

“Of all the things that we can do that are important – creating a human civilization on Mars and helping humans go from being a one planet species to multi-planet species is very important,” he told the Mars gathering, after being introduced by Zubrin.

“A million years from now, when most of what we see is forgotten, the point at which humans were no longer limited to one planet will be remembered.”

A year later, Musk would found SpaceX, and change the future of spaceflight and the potential for a twin-planet civilization.

Since then, Dr. Zubrin, who designed an early prototype of NASA’s Space Launch System super-rocket, has acted as a mentor to Elon Musk, heralding his space-tech breakthroughs with the remarkable reusable Falcon 9 booster, and the futuristic Starship, but also providing negative feedback on diversions like the suspended flight plans for Mars.

When SpaceX’s commander shocked the space world with his new campaign to create a city on the lifeless Moon, Zubrin responded with twin open letters to Musk, in the form of dual Op-Eds published in the British-American magazine UnHerd and the Australian publication Quillette, blasting the abandonment of Mars.

With only minuscule deposits of water and oxygen, and devoid of any atmosphere to protect astronauts from super-speed cosmic rays and meteors, Dr. Zubrin says, it is inconceivable, deploying even the most advanced technologies of this century, to create an ever-expanding metropolis around the craters and deserts of the Moon.

In contrast, he told me during our interview, Mars is rich with all of the elements needed to develop a second foundation for human civilization, with continent-size deposits of water beneath the Martian dunes, reservoirs of frozen H2O above both poles, oxygen that can be captured from the water and from the carbon dioxide atmosphere, and the potential to build experimental Gardens of Eden beneath vast crystalline geodesic domes filled with photosynthetic life.

Since SpaceX started testing prototypes of its Starship, the most technologically advanced spacecraft ever designed on Earth, its founder has been sketching out details of his blueprints to rocket one million adventure-seeking nomads to Mars by the year 2050 to form the first Martian cosmopolis.

Then, out of the blue, Musk told his 200 million followers on the platform X recently that he now aims to construct his celestial city around the frigid airless impact craters of the Moon, where the sun’s rays disappear for two weeks at a time, and temperatures can dip to –200° Celsius.

“SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years,” Musk scribbled across X, astounding legions of his Mars acolytes.

“It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the Moon every 10 days (2 day trip time).”

“This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city."

Musk never explained why these differing flight times for trips to the Moon and for Mars, which have existed for aeons, had suddenly changed his mission goals, but he added: “The overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.”

But Dr. Zubrin says the barren Moon could not be transformed into an independent sanctuary for civilization, at least for centuries into the future.

And Musk himself has in the past dismissed the potential for the black and silver orb to serve as a haven for humanity if the home planet encountered some cosmic catastrophe.

Since Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. personally threatened him that if Ukrainian resistance fighters used his Starlink navigation technology to launch attacks on Kremlin commandos, Moscow could respond with tactical nuclear weapons, the head of SpaceX has been speeding up his race to develop fleets of Starship arks to shuttle part of humanity to an off-world asylum on Mars.

The creator of SpaceX - the globe’s first independent space superpower - presented his vision of Mars as a celestial sanctuary during a fantastical overview he outlined at his Starbase launch center, the massive rocket skunkworks he’s expanding, at bullet-speed, just off the turquoise seas of the Gulf of Mexico.

Musk said that as the specter of mushroom clouds darkens the fate of the Earth, “There’s a high urgency to making life multi-planetary.”

“The overarching goal of the company is to extend life sustainably to another planet - Mars is the only option really - and to do that ideally before World War III.”

“We want to just get Mars to be a self-sustaining civilization as quickly as possible.”

Speedily building an oasis for humans on Mars is all-important, Musk said, before “there’s something that takes out Earth - like let's say there's a World War III - global thermonuclear warfare.”

An advanced colony on the Moon could not protect humanity’s future, he forecast, because a nuclear power launching its intercontinental ballistic missiles would “probably throw a few nukes at the Moon.”

“It’s way harder to shoot Mars with nuclear,” he predicted. “Mars would see it coming and probably have some time to stop the inbound missiles.”

Musk has proposed creating the first utopian city-state on Mars within 20 years, via flotillas of massive Starship lifeboats that depart Earth every two years, when the planets are optimally aligned. Each Starship could accommodate 100 settlers, and 10,000 flights would foster a flourishing SpaceX cosmopolis of one million first-generation Martians.

Echoing Dr. Zubrin’s blueprints to reanimate Mars as a waterworld, Musk added: “We can warm up Mars and we can densify the atmosphere.”

“There would be a liquid ocean on about 40 percent of the surface so we could make it an Earth-like planet long-term.”

In a sequel talk last summer, Musk told the world he aims to transfigure Mars into an expanding haven for life forms that now flourish across the globe.

Musk said one goal in his quest to redesign and occupy the Red Planet is to transplant “life as we know it” to a mirror-world sanctuary.

In the future, as SpaceX races to build colossal fleets of Starship arks, they would be deployed to shuttle botanical and zoological gardens between the planets, he said.

“We will be landing ships on Mars in the future,” Musk said, “building greenhouses and life on Mars, and ensuring the long term survival of life as we know it.”

The new vow to speed the globe’s flora and fauna to a second-world citadel represented a remarkable philanthropic expansion of Musk’s overarching Mars missions.

But now this quest to airlift humans and giraffes, parrots and dolphins to a new Elysium on another world is in a state of suspended animation.

If the creator of the Starship casts away his Mars voyages, Zubrin says, he would be betraying not only his myriad Mars followers, but also his own innermost raison d’être.

Having known Musk for a quarter-century now, Dr. Zubrin says he is driven by a burning passion for what the Greek philosophers of Homer’s era called “kleos,” or achieving immortal glory by performing heroic deeds that change the world.

Since the beginning of the new millennium, Musk strove to present an eternal gift to humanity by making it interplanetary.

But now, perhaps entranced by Moon Sirens promising a lunar gold rush, or by the prospect of becoming the planet’s first trillionaire with the launch of the SpaceX IPO, the great SpaceX navigator seems to have lost his way in the celestial sphere.

While NASA has already awarded SpaceX twin contracts, paying out $4 billion-plus, to shuttle its astronauts to the Moon’s surface, and the space agency has proposed establishing a small human base on Earth’s ancient satellite, NASA has never offered funding to construct a lunar cosmopolis. That means SpaceX itself would have to finance this astronomically priced endeavor.

If Elon Musk jettisons his masterplan to colonize Mars, Dr. Zubrin predicts, another dynamic torchbearer in the crusade to create a dual-world spacefaring civilization will emerge.

While Zubrin will likely be immortalized in the space chronicles of the future as the master architect of designs to transform Mars into a fantastical New World for human explorers across the third millennium, Elon Musk might be relegated to a footnote in these epics, described as a sensational spacecraft creator who almost launched the first human discoverers to Mars.

If that future emerges, Zubrin says, another inventor will begin crafting Starship-class capsules to spearhead the invasion of Mars.

Could billionaire space pilot Jared Isaacman, the independent aeronaut who now heads NASA, become one of the new lodestars in the quest to colonize Mars?

Aerospace scholar Isaacman, who is also an incredible philanthropist, told me in an earlier interview that the experimental spacesuits and futuristic helmets, and the specially adapted capsule that he navigated across two sensational orbital missions, were all aimed at testing out the space technologies that millions of spacefarers could depend on in odysseys to Mars in times ahead.

The techno-utopian Isaacman says that as Mars is recreated in the Earth’s image, the twin planets could become mutually protective arks of life and civilization, ready to rescue the other if some world-shattering catastrophe were to strike.

“Isaacman is certainly passionate about space and he has tremendous business capability and he has personal wealth,” Zubrin says.

“He could become a major leader of this [quest to colonize Mars], especially if Musk should skate off the edge of the ice here.”

At the same time, Dr. Zubrin tempers his critique of Musk’s current Moon meanderings with accolades for leading the revolution in reusable rockets that has upended and democratized spaceflight.

“If we’re talking about space he [Elon Musk] is certainly a very powerful creative force.”

“At this point what Musk has done is proven two things: one is that it’s possible for a small well-led entrepreneurial team to do things in space previously it was thought that only the government superpowers could do.”

“Number two, he [Musk] has shown that reusable rockets can be made to work and work well.”

“So with those two things proven even if Musk disappeared tomorrow other people are going to step up.”

“There’s going to be entrepreneurial money.”

“There’s going to be creation of launch companies based on reusable rockets, including large ones comparable to Starship or bigger.”

“And look,” Zubrin muses, “it is very plain that the place where humans can settle is Mars and so this is going to happen whether Musk leads this or whether he drops out.”