Top 7 Industries That Will Emerge in an Early Moon Colony
It is well known that “Space is hard.” There are challenges in every aspect. In material science, experts must design special alloys that are suitable for extremely high and low temperatures and pressures. In engineering, experts must design structures that withstand forces from opposing vectors when launching from earth’s deep gravity well.
But it’s not just the physical challenges that stand in our way. Space poses an interesting economic challenge: All of that science and engineering is very expensive! How can we possibly fund ambitious space projects such as establishing a self-sustaining colony on the moon?
Below we explore the proverbial tip of the iceberg with seven potentially profitable industries that could host a plethora of companies vying to make money from the moon’s first colony.
Transportation Between the Earth and Moon
The transportation industry in space exploration is the first one to go private. This industry is pretty well known to us, as SpaceX has championed rocket innovation over the past two decades. Of all the industries in this list, this one is the most mature. There is a good reason for that: we can’t do anything in space without getting there. Besides SpaceX, other significant players are Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Relativity Space. There are many other startups making significant progress on rocket technology, and we will see some succeed in getting payload to space and the moon, and others give up and dissolve into history.
So, it stands to reason, that the first revenue generating industry to come from colonizing the moon is transportation in order to get people and cargo to the moon Colony. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have contracts related to transporting people and cargo to the surface of the moon, as part of NASA’s Artemis program.
Lunar Real Estate Development
Following the thread of logic here, once an intrepid explorer gets to the moon, they will need a place to stay. Calling this “Real Estate Development” is admittedly a very terrestrial way of describing this industry. Earthbound real estate developers don’t need to deal with any of the challenges presented by the moon like airlocks, fine particle dust, or radiation. On the other hand, lunar real estate developers can have much lighter structures because the force of gravity acting on the structure is much less.
In an early Lunar Colony, permanent structures are a necessity. The leading player in this space structures is Sierra Space, who picked up the old TransHab technology from Bigelow Aerospace after they folded. Sierra Space is developing the LIFE Habitat module for the Orbital Reef space station. While the LIFE Habitat is being designed for zero-g, a variant could be developed for the Moon’s 1/6th g environment.
To that end, let me offer this as a possibility as well, SpaceX could land a Starship on the moon, and have subsequent Starship missions deliver hardware to install in the tank sections of the first Starship. This could be a way to get a lot of habitable volume on the moon.
It is unlikely that Sierra Space or SpaceX would fund real estate missions. Most likely, real estate ventures would be driven by a government program like Artemis, and contractors would be selected in a similar process to the Human Landing System (HLS) Contract. Alternatively, space entrepreneurs building an ambitious startup, offering lodging on the moon to governments, private citizens, or other private organizations could start soliciting concepts to potential customers. However at the time of this writing, no such private organization exists.
Science and Research on the Lunar Surface
Maybe to the readers of this article, this seems interesting, but Science and Research on the moon probably has the least broad appeal and paradoxically the broadest impact to human life anywhere. Just checkout the NASA Spinoff Technologies Wikipedia article to read about a ton of examples of every day tech and products that originated from NASA.
Science and Research in our colony would be driven by Earth-Based government organizations like NASA, JAXA, ESA, ISRO, etc. We would expect them to spend a lot of money on Science and Research on the moon.
When the price comes down far enough, we should expect universities to have campuses in our colony, also conducting scientific research. As soon as one institution has a lunar campus, others will have to follow suit in order to remain competitive. What will governments and universities require in order to conduct Scientific Research on the moon? Real Estate for research space and Transportation to get there.
In Situ Mining, Manufacturing, and Food Production
While the Colony is developing, real estate development companies will be shipping materials from earth. But as the colony develops, it will make sense to source the materials on site. More likely than not, the companies that will tackle mining and manufacturing will actually be private startups. Customers of these startups would be Lunar Real Estate Developers, but also space hardware companies that might be able to source hardware for space stations and satellites for cheaper in space. Some examples of materials mined from the moon would be silicon, aluminum, and water ice. Manufactured products would include construction materials (like bricks, aluminum I-Beams, and glass), Solar Panels, computer chips, and possibly even spaceships.
Without Mining and Manufacturing, our colony is more akin to a lunar base. In order to qualify as a colony, producing physical goods is an essential milestone.
As our colony grows, we have a lot of residents we will have to feed. While some preferred food can be imported from earth as a luxury, our population will be too large to support solely via imports. Expansive greenhouses will be built to grow fruits and vegetables. On the moon, livestock won’t be an option as it is very wasteful. A company called Upside Foods has received FDA approval for growing chicken meat without growing a chicken. This kind of service would be provided to our colony via either an ambitious new startup or as Government Service. Our colony will also play host to Mom-and-Pop-Shops in the form of restaurants serving up cuisines crafted from local food products. Not to mention, for local moon colony residents, it’s not all work all the time, a night out on occasion is essential for keeping the spirits up!
Moon-Based Internet and Communications
In our modern era, the internet feels like this magic thing that comes out of the air, especially with automatic billing. But the amount of hardware on earth (and increasingly in space with technologies like Starlink), is staggering. Ships have literally crossed oceans laying thousands of miles of fiber optic cables on the sea floor to build a global internet. Seriously, the amount of underwater fiber optic cable is mind blowing!
With a rising population of private citizens on the moon, a stable and reliable internet is imperative. Laying two-hundred-fifty-thousand miles of fiber optic cable to the moon is not feasible, but a high bandwidth radio or laser based internet between the earth and the moon would do the trick.
However, that is not the whole story. Say we just launch a couple of batches of Starlink satellites to lunar orbit, we would be able to send a signal around the moon very quickly. But today, all websites are hosted on earth. So, if you tried to visit thebonfu.com from the moon at least 3 seconds is added to the site’s load time due to transmission delays. While this may not seem like a big deal, browsing the internet would be very slow. In order to have a real internet on the moon we will need a local data center that hosts a content distribution network (CDN) local to our emerging moon colony. Businesses that need their website and web apps accessible and highly useable will pay to host their apps on the moon.
Amazon is very suited to the task of building a lunar data center with their Amazon Web Services dominating the market. But literally anyone could be up to the task, from current providers of cloud services: Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like AT&T and Verizon. But you could see a new player here like SpaceX with their increasing interest in internet communications. Or you could even see a new startup emerge to fill this gap.
But who would construct a facility for an internet hosting company or an ISP to build out their data center? A Lunar Real Estate Developer!
Coming to You Live from the Surface of the Moon: Sports and Entertainment
Honestly, I am not a sports guy. I spend most of my time thinking about spaceflight and board games, but a lunar sports industry taking root in a moon colony, is the one I am most excited about. After all, sports are just board games in real life!
The moon offers a unique environment for sports to take place with its low gravity. There is an opportunity for a very unique type of sporting event that attracts attention from millions of earth-based viewers, featuring athletes with captivating personalities and athletic abilities that are not even possible on earth. In theory, athletes would be able to jump six times as high, and a ball would fall to the ground six times slower. Whatever sport is invented for the moon, it has the potential to attract a lot of attention, and thus a lot of revenue through ticket sales and advertising dollars. Just imagine, the stadium or arena, might be the biggest structure on the moon, drawing thousands of local colony residents on a Friday night to cheer on their team or athlete.
Organized Professional Sports in our colony is the culmination of all of these industries, because it relies on real estate developers to construct a stadium. The construction of a structure that big cannot rely on spaceships delivering all of the materials, and would require established mining and manufacturing in the colony. Those mining and manufacturing techniques won’t appear automatically, but will be developed through the science and research performed in the colony. In order to view the entertainment, you are going to need a robust communications infrastructure.
Tourism of the First Moon Colony
This article wouldn’t be complete without mentioning tourism. Somehow, tourism is one of the first things that people think of when they think of going to space, so much so that companies like Virgin Galactic have built their whole business model around space tourism.
In this article, it is last thing. Tourism cannot be reserved for the ultra-wealthy. A thriving tourism requires a volume of tourists. So it needs to be cheap, and it needs to be safe. And there needs to be something to see!
Definitely there will be a vehicle tour of the lunar surface that drives people from the habitable area to a nearby crater. Space walks will be a must-do activity, with special space suits that make EVAs easy and safe for tourists. Any tourist visiting our colony must see a game, get a tour of the training facilities, and meet the athletes. For every tourist visit to an exotic destination, on earth or on the moon,the local cuisine must be sampled.
Final Thoughts
After reading an article like this, it might be easy to think, “Well, what are we waiting for?!” while boiling over with impatient excitement. Colonizing the moon will be insanely hard. When will the technology be available? When will the human will power exist to drive this reality forward?
Artemis is a step in the right direction, with permanent human presence in mind, but isn’t eyeing self-sustaining human occupied moon colony just yet. If Starship makes good on its promise of high-tonnage and low-cost payloads to the surface of the moon (and mars) anything is possible.
So, when will it happen? In The Bon Fu!