Trillionaire Elon Musk aims to have rockets blast off from Earth before the end of 2026, sending the first materials to the moon and Mars to start building colonies.

The world’s first trillionaire is then planning to send robots to prepare the infrastructure needed for humans to survive.

Musk said recently he has shifted Space X’s focus as it is closer and “much faster to complete a moon city,” with a timeline of getting it established in the next 10 years. However, he is optimistic he can also start sending material to the red planet within seven years too.

This week, Musk also filed applications with the Federal Communications Commission for the next stage of his plan: sending a “constellation” of 100,000 satellites into space.

SpaceX said this will improve communications between earth and space and provide the computing power needed for billions of AI-powered devices — at home and on the moon.

“If you’ve got a really capable AI system, are you going to embed that in every robot?” he asked. “No, you’re going to have centralized compute — that’s what these satellites are for,” SpaceX founding team member Jim Cantrell told The Post.

“The robots build the settlement before the humans show up,” he added. “And unless Musk does something stupid or somebody kills him, [he’ll live to see it all].”

The plan progressed Thursday, when SpaceX launched 29 Starlink satellites into low earth orbit using its Falcon 9 re-useable rocket, which has so-far made 36 return flights.

However, to launch the heavy machinery needed to build settlements beyond earth, Musk has also said on X he’s planning to engineer a much bigger transport rocket than even his Starship model.

His latest forecast is that the first self-sustaining cities will be up and running on the red planet between 2045 and 2055. 

Here’s how the plan is set to unfold — and the challenges it still faces.

Space transportation

Getting millions of tons of goods out of the earth’s atmosphere and into space is not going to be easy. 

Starship — SpaceX’s fully reusable, super heavy-lift rocket — has demonstrated it can launch, return and stage separations, but has not yet successfully demonstrated orbital refueling.

“Affordable, round-trip transportation capabilities [are one of the first big challenges],” said Les Johnson, formerly the Chief Technology Officer at NASA’s George Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. 

Once those benchmarks are met, the vehicle still needs to prove itself reliable enough to accomplish the kind of heavy freighting necessary for colonization. Undeterred, Musk has said he wants to make launches every few days.

Colonizing the moon 

Musk’s ultimate goal is to colonize Mars, but the moon will be his proving ground. For one, it’s a lot easier to reach, as the trip takes about three days, rather than the estimated six months to reach our next closest planet.

“If something goes wrong, people can get home quickly and you can get spare parts quickly,” Johnson said. “You go through all those learning processes on the moon so you don’t have to worry when you get to Mars,” said Johnson, who is also a sci-fi author.

Those processes are extensive. After transporting the cargo, there is unpacking it, generating power — easy via solar panels, but only while on the part of the moon facing the sun —setting up water and oxygen and constructing habitats. 

“A lot of the things they’re going to do on the moon translate directly to Mars,” Johnson said. “Not everything, but a lot.”

Launching the robots

Most of the above will be completed by Tesla’s Optimus robots, because people are much more difficult to keep alive and robots don’t have families. 

“Humans eat, defecate, consume and exhale water — we’re complicated. Robots just need sunlight for electricity and the occasional lubrication for their joints,” said Cantrell, the CEO of Phantom Space Corporation.

Musk has spent years developing artificial intelligence through xAI and humanoid power for his Optimus robots, and Cantrell says those efforts will come together in a way we’ve never seen before in the colonization strategy. 

Making it habitable

People need power, water, oxygen, fuel and a habitat — to name just the essentials. Scientists will have to decide what we’re bringing with us and what we’ll make while there.

Johnson said power is relatively easy — “You could launch a nuclear reactor so all people have to do is set its solar panels when they get there,” — but water is a little trickier: “Mars has some, but it’s probably underground and frozen, so you’d have to drill for it robotically.”

Other robots could work on manufacturing rocket fuel using the Martian atmosphere, should people need to return to Earth. Other robots will focus on recycling oxygen through electrolysis, a system which has been in operation and effective on the International Space Station since its launch in 1998.

After all this is accomplished, what will life look like for the first human settlers?

“I think it will be simultaneously exciting, boring and terrifying,” Johnson said. “Exciting because you’re living on Mars, boring because you’re stuck inside your habitat all the time and terrifying because on the other side of your aluminum skinned building is instant death.”