Space Expert Elon Musk Confuses Moon and Mars on Social Media

Elon Musk at Model Y announcement
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SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk was mocked on Twitter recently for mistaking the moon for Mars in a tweet. The tweet was a meme reading “occupy Mars,” but mistakenly featured an image of a blood moon instead of the red planet.

Elon Musk, the founder of space exploration company SpaceX and CEO of electric car manufacturer Tesla, recently tweeted a photo reading “Occupy Mars” with a picture of the Moon instead of Mars, and was quickly corrected by a number of users, Business Insider reports. Musk’s meme featured a photo of the July 2018 lunar eclipse, which turned the moon red due to a phenomenon known as the blood moon.

The tweet from Musk can be seen below:

One user quickly replied, “thats the moon,” to which Musk responded with two laughing emojis before later adding “moon too,” implying that SpaceX was also hoping to perform moon exploration activities. Musk later added more credence to these suspicions stating: “Moon 1st, as it’s only 3 days away & u don’t need interplanetary orbital synchronization.”

The move by Musk may have been an attempt to troll his followers or just generate some more publicity for him and SpaceX in general. SpaceX has been using the “Occupy Mars” slogan since 2014 alongside an actual photo of Mars which can be purchased on a T-shirt and a number of other forms of merchandise.

Musk stated Sunday that he will be accelerating the development of Starship and people should be able to reserve places on the Mars exploration shuttle after it returns from its first orbit around the planet earth. Musk has previously stated his intention to launch a cargo mission to Mars by 2022 and a crewed mission to the red planet by 2024.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com

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