The company plans to build factories on the moon , using robots to do much of the heavy lifting, Elon Musk said on Tuesday (Aug. 4) during SpaceX 's first-ever quarterly earnings call. But Musk doubled down on it this week, showing investors that off-Earth manufacturing is very much front-of-mind for SpaceX. The factories in question will build SpaceX's Starmind AI satellites, if all goes according to plan. "Using robots on the moon to scale up manufacturing on the moon — which, I know it sounds, like, super sci-fi right now, but it's going to happen — will enable us to build the mass accelerator on the moon," Musk said. Those robots will fly on Starship , SpaceX's fully reusable next-gen megarocket, which is currently gearing up for its 14th test flight .