Aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin criticized SpaceX leader Elon Musk on Feb. 12, 2026, because abandoning Mars for lunar settlement is a major misstep.
Zubrin Defends Mars Direct
Zubrin leads the Mars Society. He created the Mars Direct mission concept with a colleague in 1990, as reported by The Economist and Yahoo! News.
Zubrin welcomed Musk onto the board of the Mars Society in 2001. Musk pledged a $100,000 donation before he left the organization within months and founded SpaceX in 2002.
Zubrin wrote in a 2020 contribution that he was “one of those who persuaded him to aim for Mars,” according to Yahoo! News.
Musk Shifts to the Moon
Zubrin described Musk as “a hero in the Homeric sense, an Achilles-like existence,” driven by an ambition for eternal glory rather than money, though he said a pathological aspect drove that ambition, according to Yahoo! News.
Zubrin praised Musk’s entrepreneurial talent as “a wonderful asset for humanity,” but he maintained that the Mars mission should be an American state-led project rather than a personal venture.
The divide between the two figures widened in February 2026 after Musk posted on X that SpaceX would focus on building “a self-growing city on the Moon,” as reported by Yahoo! News.
In response, Zubrin published an article in the British media outlet UnHerd arguing that “abandoning Mars could be Musk’s greatest mistake,” pointing out that the Moon lacks carbon essential for life, suffers from scarce water and nitrogen, and demands 50 percent more propulsion for a one-way trip from Earth than a journey to Mars requires.
