Elon Musk has had another bright idea – catapulting satellites from the moon. Musk told staff at xAI, his start-up that recently merged with his rocket company SpaceX, about his plans to build a lunar AI satellite factory. The billionaire isn’t quite imagining astronauts wheeling out a wooden, medieval-style catapult – he wants to build a mass driver. The sci-fi-sounding space launcher, also called an electromagnetic catapult, would create magnetic pulses that shove payloads sky-high. According to The New York Times, Musk said at an all-hands meeting: ‘You have to go to the moon.’ The Tesla chief added that this is step one of a three-step plan: build ‘a self-sustaining city on the moon’, colonise Mars and then explore the cosmos to find aliens. Is it time to build on the moon? (Picture: Sam Lott/UPI/Shutterstock) ‘If you’re moving faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, you will be the leader, and xAI is moving faster than any other company — no one’s even close,’ Musk added. ‘Because we’ve reached a certain scale, we’re organising the company to be more effective at this scale. ‘And actually, when this happens, there’s some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages.’ He said in a post on X yesterday that some xAI staff were laid off as the company was ‘reorganised a few days ago’. While Musk spoke highly of lunar missions at the meeting, he has previously criticised them as a ‘distraction’ from going to Mars. No, we’re going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.Mass to orbit is the key metric, thereafter mass to Mars surface. The former needs to be in the megaton to orbit per year range to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars.