WASHINGTON — Launching a new national political party in the United States may be more difficult than sending a man to Mars.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who last year was the nation’s biggest known political donor, now says that he is trying to do both.

But while the effort to achieve interplanetary travel has made slow progress for over 20 years, the past several decades of American politics are littered with abandoned attempts to disrupt the two-party system.

It remains to be seen how serious Musk is about the new political project, and whether it will evolve from musings on his social media platform to a fact of real life. While he declared on Saturday that “Today, the America Party is formed,” so far he has yet to register it with the Federal Election Commission.

As with many of his tweet-length proclamations, Musk’s plans for the new party are opaque. His private conversations about it so far have been conceptual and not focused on the details of what it would take to bring it to fruition, according to two people briefed on those talks. Some advisers to Musk involved in these early talks, however, appear more focused on those details and are soliciting more feedback from experts, according to one of the people.

Musk has said the America Party would be a new entity and would have the goal of disrupting the two major parties’ hold on the federal government.

Should he eventually tire of the idea, it would not be the first time he offered a grand pronouncement in a post on his social platform X before either walking it back or letting it wither as he moved on to a new pursuit.

Still, some notions that originated as seeming jokes by Musk — like his early purchase of shares in Twitter — have ended with world-altering investments.

Public opinion polling has long shown that Americans are hungry for an option beyond the two major political parties, though third-party candidates have seldom performed well in elections.

Should Musk make a sustained investment in his America Party project — either in monetary terms or by expending his political capital — it would face steep hurdles.

Musk boasted on Sunday that his plan to radically transform American democracy would not be difficult — suggesting he had spent little time studying state ballot-access and federal campaign finance laws.

Congressional candidates for a theoretical new party face a labyrinthine system of signature requirements that vary from state to state. The most restrictive laws are in Georgia, where candidates outside the two major parties must gather 27,000 signatures from their district. This hurdle has kept third-party congressional candidates from being on a general election ballot since the law was enacted in 1943, according to Richard Winger, the publisher of Ballot Access News, which has tracked election laws since 1985.

Qualifying a slate of 435 House candidates, were Musk to take his idea national, would require about three times as many petition signatures as putting a presidential candidate on the ballot in every state and could cost more than $50 million just in signature gathering, Winger said.

“I was on a Zoom call yesterday with people talking about this,” Winger said in an interview Monday. “A lot of them predicted that he’s the kind of person who, when he finds out how hard this is, he’ll give up.”

It is not yet clear which person Musk would designate to set up a new party on his behalf. Some people who are friends with Musk’s Republican advisers privately worry about those advisers’ career prospects should they attach themselves to an anti-Trump effort. President Donald Trump has punished Republican consultants who have joined or even tenuously linked arms with his opponents. The White House in recent days has been closely watching Musk’s allied operatives, a person briefed on the White House’s posture said.

That could leave Musk dependent, at least somewhat, on the mercenary types who populate the world of minor parties and ballot-access campaigns, and who may be willing to suffer reputational damage with national Republicans if the paycheck is big enough.

In recent days, cash-hungry ballot-access operatives have been conducting frenzied research and developing proposals with the hopes of getting them in front of Musk, according to one person doing just that.

Aside from minor parties like the Libertarians and Greens, which have been successful at qualifying for ballots and occasionally at spoiling general elections, American third parties have had a short shelf life.

The Reform Party, created by H. Ross Perot for his presidential campaign in 1992, petered out after Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota on its line in 1998 and Trump declined to run for president on its line in 2000.

Perot won 19 million votes in 1992 on a populist platform that in some ways preceded Trump’s rise.

Unite America, a 2010s project to put forward centrist candidates, stopped nominating candidates after the 2018 election and shifted its focus to pushing for changes in election laws that would make it easier for independent and third-party candidates to succeed.

On his social media site, Musk has floated the idea of holding an American Party Congress next month in Austin, Texas. He suggested that he would be interested in keeping a “laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts” in the 2026 midterms. And if those candidates were to win, he said, they would “caucus independently,” but “legislative discussions would be had with both parties.”

Musk’s team has not yet taken many operational steps to stand up the party, according to people in touch with them. On X, he has taken feedback about the effort.

Limiting his ambitions to just a handful of races might not fit with Musk’s often grandiose self-image, but it could leave him with a better return on his investment.

For all his talk about starting a new party, Musk may find it easier to work within the existing system.

There are still many Republicans in Congress who will privately express disgust with Trump, but few who have been willing to cross him in public. In recent weeks, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska announced they would not seek reelection next year, in part because of their inability to be committed to Trump’s agenda.

Musk has committed to support Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who is staring down a potential primary challenge from a Trump supporter.

Several veterans of minor parties said Musk might ally himself with an existing party that already has a ballot line, like Libertarians.