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Watch Fortune Daily, our new video show that brings you inside the Fortune newsroom and the boardroom

Watch Fortune Daily, our new video show that brings you inside the Fortune newsroom and the boardroom

Watch Fortune Daily, our new video show that brings you inside the Fortune newsroom and the boardroom

Watch Fortune Daily, our new video show that brings you inside the Fortune newsroom and the boardroom

Watch Fortune Daily, our new video show that brings you inside the Fortune newsroom and the boardroom

Watch Fortune Daily, our new video show that brings you inside the Fortune newsroom and the boardroom

Watch Fortune Daily, our new video show that brings you inside the Fortune newsroom and the boardroom

Watch Fortune Daily, our new video show that brings you inside the Fortune newsroom and the boardroom

‘Pure insanity’—Elon Musk details SpaceX’s plan to turn the moon into its newest manufacturing site

“I know this sounds totally nuts,” CEO Elon Musk told investors midway through SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company on Tuesday. The remark came after Musk shared an overview of his bold plans to deploy a robot workforce on the moon to scale up SpaceX’s manufacturing capacity.

According to Musk, the plan calls for SpaceX building a mass accelerator after shipping the necessary components to the regolith layer of the moon via Musk’s colossal Starship rockets.

Ultimately, Musk’s goal is to build AI compute satellites at scale on the moon in a way Earth-based factories could never sustain, before shifting his sights to Mars. Once plans for the red planet are in place, Musk plans to use the experience SpaceX has garnered from its moon operations to build a human colony on Mars of a million inhabitants.

“We are going to land a lot of tonnage on the moon,” said Musk. “We’re going to build the factories on the moon. The robots will be helpful with that.”

The plan is also outlined in detail throughout SpaceX regulatory filings that preceded its record-breaking IPO in June. The language used in the official documents is less colorful than what Musk evoked on the earnings call, but both describe the same goals.

Namely, a major pillar of SpaceX’s strategic plan hinges on establishing lunar-based manufacturing, including “factories to produce large-scale AI compute satellites.” The goal would be to mine the moon’s regolith—its dusty surface layer of debris—to obtain raw minerals including aluminum, titanium, and silicon for satellite construction. Chips and other materials would be shipped from Earth but the bulk of new satellites would be sourced locally on the moon. 

From there, installing the satellites would rely on a “lunar mass driver,” which SpaceX defines as an electromagnetic launcher that........

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