As regular, SpaceX is dreaming huge.
The corporate plans to construct factories on the moon, utilizing robots to do a lot of the heavy lifting, Elon Musk stated on Tuesday (Aug. 4) throughout SpaceX‘s first-ever quarterly earnings name.
“We’re going to land numerous tonnage on the moon,” he stated. “We’ll construct the factories on the moon. The robots will probably be useful with that.”
This isn’t a newly revealed imaginative and prescient; Musk first laid it out in February, in a weblog submit that introduced SpaceX’s buy of xAI, an organization that the billionaire entrepreneur based in 2023. However Musk doubled down on it this week, displaying traders that off-Earth manufacturing may be very a lot front-of-mind for SpaceX.
The factories in query will construct SpaceX’s Starmind AI satellites, if all goes in accordance with plan. The corporate goals to function a million-strong Starmind constellation in Earth orbit within the coming years, after which go farther afield with the craft after that.
Ultimately, SpaceX needs to launch domestically made Starmind satellites off the lunar floor utilizing electromagnetic mass drivers — principally, extraordinarily highly effective rail weapons.
“Utilizing robots on the moon to scale up manufacturing on the moon — which, I do know it sounds, like, tremendous sci-fi proper now, however it may occur — will allow us to construct the mass accelerator on the moon,” Musk stated.
“And when you have a mass accelerator on the moon, and you’ve got photo voltaic and radiator manufacturing on the moon, you may — I do know this sounds completely nuts — however you may you may most likely scale to 1,000 instances the economic system of Earth by way of intelligence launched to area, however most likely, , perhaps even 1,000,000 instances,” he added.
“Photo voltaic and radiator manufacturing” refers back to the manufacture of key Starmind satellite tv for pc parts: photo voltaic panels to energy them and radiators to dump the massive quantities of warmth they’re going to produce into the vacuum of area.
Musk did not present particulars in regards to the robotic lunar labor pressure. However he is presumably relying on Optimus, a humanoid robotic constructed by one other one in every of his corporations, the carmaker Tesla. Musk has beforehand stated that SpaceX will launch some Optimus models to Mars within the close to future, to assist pave the way in which for human settlement of the Crimson Planet.
These robots will fly on Starship, SpaceX’s absolutely reusable next-gen megarocket, which is at the moment gearing up for its 14th take a look at flight. Certainly, Starship is vital to a lot of the firm’s plan’s each in Earth orbit and past.
“Starship goals to quadruple payload capability and scale back launch prices by 10 instances in comparison with our Falcon 9 rocket, unlocking important capabilities throughout all of our enterprise segments,” SpaceX Chief Monetary Officer Bret Johnsen stated throughout Tuesday’s earnings name.
“We proceed to make progress constructing the infrastructure required to assist hundreds of Starship launches per 12 months, together with accelerating Raptor and launch automobile manufacturing, the buildout of our gigabays, and making important progress in direction of activating a number of launch pads at Starbase and in Cape Canaveral at Pad 39A and Pad 37,” he added. (Raptor is the engine that powers Starship, and Starbase is SpaceX’s South Texas web site, which serves as the present hub of Starship manufacturing, testing and launch actions.)
Tuesday’s name was a landmark for SpaceX — its first as a publicly traded firm. Musk based SpaceX as a personal concern in March 2022 and took it public this previous June, by way of the richest IPO in historical past.
The IPO raised $86 billion and valued SpaceX at $1.77 trillion. Solely six American corporations had increased market capitalizations on the time — NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon and the semiconductor producer Broadcom. (Market caps fluctuate on a regular basis, going up and down with corporations’ inventory costs.)
The principle level of Tuesday’s name was to debate SpaceX’s first-ever earnings report, which coated the second quarter of this 12 months. The corporate’s income over that stretch was $7.8 billion, a 92% improve over the identical interval in 2025, in accordance with the report. SpaceX misplaced more cash than it made throughout Q2 2026, however the shortfall was significantly smaller than in Q2 2025 — $541 million versus $1.0 billion.
