Moon launches are having a moment. But can you make money off the lunar frenzy?

By William Gavin

The moon rush is on: Artemis II is ready to fly, as Musk, Bezos and NASA race to make the lunar economy a reality.

The U.S., now in a space race with China, has once again made returning to the moon a priority.

Elon Musk wants to go to the moon. Jeff Bezos wants to go to the moon. China wants to go to the moon. And as soon as Wednesday, NASA plans to send astronauts to fly past the moon for the first time in 54 years.

In the first half of this decade, more than $9.5 billion was invested in the cis-lunar economy - meaning ventures that aim to take place in the part of space between the Earth and the moon - according to PitchBook. Another $88.5 billion is expected to be invested in the lunar part of that economy over the next 25 years, PWC forecast in January.

That doesn't account for the investment frenzy that is expected to come with SpaceX's initial public offering, loosely slated for this summer, which experts say will further put a spotlight on the space sector. SpaceX is reportedly attempting to raise more than $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation, which would easily make it the biggest IPO the universe has ever seen.

That cash is expected to help fund SpaceX's expensive plans, including a bet on space-based data centers that SpaceX CEO Musk says will rely on a lunar-based factory and cost trillions of dollars to pull off. Musk plans to create a "self-growing city" on the moon and catapult satellites into orbit from the lunar surface.

See: Nasdaq paves the way for SpaceX and OpenAI to quickly join a premier index after IPOs

A city on the moon would undoubtedly be an incredible accomplishment. Nobody has set foot on the moon since 1972, the year Musk celebrated his first birthday.

"Nothing about the moon is practical," said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that aims to advance space science and exploration. He added that the current market is focused on ventures that could benefit people on Earth, such as satellite communications or defense systems.

But as soon as Wednesday, the Artemis II mission is scheduled to attempt the first crewed fly-by of the moon since 1972.

Researchers and a growing number of companies say that space promises to deliver astronomical benefits. Robert Ambrose, a former senior NASA official who currently leads artificial intelligence and robotics at the consultancy Alliant, notes that manufacturing in microgravity conditions could help produce new medicines, because some ingredients crystallize differently in space.

Microgravity manufacturing has been studied for decades, and several companies, such as Varda Space Industries, which successfully made an HIV medicine in orbit, plan to commercialize it. Launch costs, however, are still a major obstacle holding firms back from producing at scale in orbit, as well as from pursuing other ventures.

"Stuff like lunar mining, asteroid mining in space [and] resource utilization, that's like 10, 15 years out," said PitchBook analyst Ali Javaheri, who recently wrote a report detailing the "moonshot" promise of a cis-lunar economy.

Specialist investors, Javaheri said, understand that the industry is still developing the infrastructure for its plans, and they know how to balance long-term plays with short-term holdings. But "tourist" investors may be unaware and mistakenly expect big returns in just a few years, he added. Javaheri pointed to the hype around SpaceX, which took more than 20 years to reach its current valuation.

And those years weren't easy. SpaceX, according to Musk, almost collapsed at least three times. In 2021, he reportedly told some employees that the company faced a "genuine risk of bankruptcy" if it couldn't ramp up engine production. It also neared bankruptcy in 2008 before it was awarded a big contract by NASA.

Plus, much of the interest in the sector is driven not just by hope for a literally out-of-this-world future, but by a series of "what ifs."

"What if we can get to the moon and stay permanently? What could we do if we can get to Mars and stay permanently? Where there's even more gravity capability, where there's even more exploration capability, where there's even more resources that we haven't yet identified and we haven't yet mined?" said Saleem Miyan, a private-equity investor turned space company co-founder and CEO.

"That's what gets certain types of investors very excited. And I think that's why you're seeing very significant investment getting made in space," Miyan, the CEO of Max Space, told MarketWatch.

'Landing on the moon is extremely hard'

In the winter of 2024, Houston-based Intuitive Machines (LUNR) sent its Odysseus lunar cargo lander to the moon attached to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The 14-foot-tall, six-legged hexagonal cylinder wrapped in silver and gold weighed about 4,200 pounds when fully loaded with fuel.

Odysseus touched down in the Malapert A crater, some 300 kilometers from the moon's south pole, becoming the first commercial lander to touch down on the moon. But the landing was not perfect. The lander's leg got caught on the surface and broke, tipping the lander over. Intuitive Machines declared Odysseus dead a few weeks later.

Almost exactly a year later, in the winter of 2025, Intuitive Machines attached its Athena cargo lander to another Falcon 9 rocket, but when the lander descended to the moon, it missed its mark by more than 800 feet. Athena ended up in a frigid crater and tipped over, leaving its solar batteries unable to charge. It also died.

"I think we can all agree, particularly today, that landing on the moon is extremely hard," Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said at a press conference after Athena landed.

But progress is being made. Firefly Aerospace (FLY) landed its Blue Ghost lunar lander on the moon just days before Athena and survived for more than 14 days. Firefly and Intuitive Machines each plan to send another lander to the moon this year. A Pittsburgh company, Astrobotic Technology, is also attempting a mission this year after a failed attempt in early 2024.

Those are all uncrewed landers. It's been more than 50 years - or 19,460 days - since Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan became the last human to walk on the moon. NASA wants to change that.

The U.S., now in a space race with China, has once again made returning to the moon a priority. NASA is projected to spend more than $100 billion on the Artemis program, which aims to return the U.S. to the moon by 2030, based on federal reports and funding allocated by Congress.

The Artemis program depends on technology provided by commercial partners, such as Axiom Space and Northrop Grumman (NOC). The billionaires Musk and Bezos, through their respective companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin, are rushing to complete lunar landers for the program by 2028.

In February, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the space program would postpone its first attempt at a lunar landing to 2028 from 2027 and change the Artemis III mission to a low-Earth orbital test.

Isaacman last week said NASA will invest about $20 billion over the next seven years and dozens of missions to develop infrastructure necessary to sustain humans on the moon. The agency envisions building a lunar base across three phases through 2036, each of which is expected to cost on the order of $10 billion and is planned to feature permanent habitats, science laboratories, sophisticated communications and multiple sources of power.

"The goal is not flags and footprints. The goal is to stay," Isaacman said. "America will never again give up the moon."

'No one company is going to get all of that business'

While investors' appetite for space has grown in recent years, NASA, through its contracts, remains a major backer of everything from satellite makers to launch companies. The agency has begun issuing requests for information and proposals on its lunar plans, giving companies the chance to make their case for potential new contracts.

Over the last 15 years, NASA has embraced its role supporting companies developing new space technologies, the Planetary Society's Dreier told MarketWatch.

The agency issued about 4,800 contracts in 2025, according to the Planetary Society, and Isaacman has said he wants NASA to rely more on commercial partnerships. More than $53 billion has been spent on the Artemis program alone over the last four years, and billions more have been allocated to the Commercial Lunar Payload Services and Lunar Terrain Vehicle programs.

While NASA's goal is to establish more of an outpost dedicated to expanding the reach of the U.S., others are planning something straight out of the works of Andy Weir or Robert Heinlein: colonization. It's been a dream of space enthusiasts for decades, many of whom have their own ideas of what it could look like.

See: Why SpaceX is putting a 'self-growing' city on the moon over Elon Musk's Mars dreams

Foundation, a company that has sent its Phantom humanoid robots to the front lines of the war in Ukraine, plans to leverage its technology to build a new city on Earth, then develop additional cities on the moon and Mars. Musk and SpaceX also aim to develop a city on the moon, along with factories and a satellite launcher. Then there's the upstart GRU Space, created just last year with the goal of building hotels on the moon.

"You're not going to get to the point of being able to have warehouses in space or big footprints or moon bases in space without having some very transformative, revolutionary technology," Max Space's Miyan told MarketWatch.

Max Space, which recently notched a multimillion-dollar investment from Voyager Technologies, is developing space habitats designed to fit on launch vehicles and then expand to up to 20 times their compact size.

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04-01-26 1005ET