Space & Astronomy

Musk outlines plan for lunar 'mass driver' and possibility of meeting aliens

By T.K. Randall
February 14, 2026

Image: Elon Musk at the SpaceX CRS-8 post-launch press conference
Credit: Kim Shiflett / (PD) NASA It would be fair to say that Musk has made some rather ambitious predictions about the future in recent years, in particular those concerning the colonizing of other worlds.

Inevitably, many of his predictions about where technology will be by certain dates have failed to hit the mark, but that hasn't stopped him from dreaming bigger and bigger.

Recently, during a meeting with employees about the upcoming merger of his companies xAI and SpaceX, he outlined a vision of the future that is perhaps even more ambitious than anything he has said before.

The merger, he argued, would be instrumental in "accelerating humanity's future" and in "extending the light of consciousness to the stars."

Referencing his plans to set up orbiting data centers made up of a million or more satellites, he mentioned aiming for a "terawatt per year of compute" and then even more than that.To help achieve this, he is aiming to set up factories on the Moon, with a mass driver (a type of futuristic launch system) firing large numbers of AI satellites into space on a regular basis.

"I can't imagine anything more epic than a mass driver on the Moon, and a self-sustaining city on the moon, and then going beyond the Moon to Mars, going throughout our solar system, and ultimately being out there among the stars, and visiting all these star systems," he said.

"Maybe we'll meet aliens. Maybe we'll see some civilizations that lasted for millions of years. And we'll find the remnants of ancient alien civilizations."

"But the only way we're gonna do that is if we go out there and we explore."

"And this is a path to making it happen."

Source: Gizmodo

Tags: Elon Musk, Alien, SpaceX