Another day, another big revelation of how Elon Musk is thinking about a huge opportunity for SpaceX (SPCX): Space itself. (It’s in the name, after all.)
Yesterday Pioneer Labs announced an engineered bacterium that can make bioplastic from simulated Martian dirt, water, and air. (They’re calling it “the first microbe for Mars.”)
Anthropic’s Sholto Douglas reacted by noting that “terraforming mars will be one of the big quests starting in the 2030s” in a post on X.
Elon Musk’s response? “Maybe sooner.”
That tells us a great deal about how he’s aggressively pursuing the space opportunity, which SpaceX’s S-1 identifies as a $370 billion opportunity.
First steps
This isn’t just a “pie in the sky” post from Musk, either. He’s announced plans to launch up to five Starship V3s to Mars during the 2026 window (which opens in November), which will carry scientific experiments from the Italian Space Agency, cargo, and even Optimus robots from Tesla (TSLA).
And of course, given the distance and timelines for Mars, SpaceX is focusing far more resources on building what Musk calls a “self-growing city on the Moon” since that can happen even sooner. The window for sending flights to the Moon (when orbits sync up and it’s optimal to launch) opens every ~10 days, vs every ~26 months for Mars.
Musk and the SpaceX team more broadly (not to mention competitors like Blue Origin, and NASA for that matter) clearly see the Moon as a far easier proving ground for all the technology that could one day be used for Mars.
Of course, all that development doesn’t come free, or even cheap. SpaceX’s R&D costs are spiking, driven by investment in all of SpaceX’s businesses (AI, Starlink, and space).
And over the last twelve months, they’re even higher – over $12 billion.
The upshot
What’s interesting about SpaceX is that you have, broadly, three businesses:
- Starlink, which is proven out and scaling.
- AI, which is a curious mix of speculative (can Grok compete with the frontier labs?) and predictable (strong cashflows from renting out compute in the Colossus 1 data center to Anthropic and Alphabet (GOOG)).
- The broader “space” opportunity beyond Starlink, which is even more speculative but which has netted SpaceX plenty of big government contracts from the likes of NASA.
You don’t see a ton of expected contribution from space in analyst estimates so far…
Which you can read one of two ways – the charitable reading is that analysts don’t understand Musk’s vision or aren’t looking far enough in the future…
And the less charitable reading is that it’s just very, very unproven.
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