Commercial Space Is Humming Along. Let’s Get Ready For Hyperdrive.

When railroads expanded across the United States, the economic story was ultimately about everything they enabled: manufacturing, agriculture, mining, logistics, and entirely new regional economies. The same was true for container shipping, commercial aviation, and the internet backbone. Transportation infrastructure serves as the platform on which larger economies emerge, and SpaceX is leading the development of space transportation infrastructure.

And they’re doing it faster than everyone else. 

Most of the conversation about the SpaceX S-1 (the mandatory filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a private company preparing to go public) has centered on the massive potential for the AI business, the absolute founder control provisions, Starlink’s enormous subscriber growth, and the unique, staggered lockup structure for pre-IPO investors and employees. For the broader industry, however, even more significant is the vision for a lunar economy, in which the Moon is the center of development for the AI infrastructure of the future.

In the section titled “Establish the Lunar Economy," SpaceX paints a picture of the Moon as the first industrial economy established beyond Earth. They plan to use the Moon to support mining, extraction, and processing of lunar materials to produce solar power systems, fuel, water, and manufacturing inputs directly on the lunar surface. The company describes the Moon as the future site for factories capable of producing large-scale AI compute satellites, using lunar raw materials for most of the physical structure while importing only higher-value components, such as semiconductor chips, from Earth.

Importantly, the S-1 also explicitly states the “opportunity to commercialize the harvesting and exportation of rare materials, which is estimated to be present on the Moon in quantities exceeding one million tons and has potential applications in future nuclear energy and quantum computing systems.” In other words, helium-3.  SpaceX says that once lunar resource extraction becomes technically and economically feasible, the Moon will become a vertically integrated industrial and export economy.

Yes, exactly

This is precisely the reason we founded Interlune. 

Sustained operations on the Moon haven’t happened yet because getting there has been too expensive. Businesses operating on the Moon require transportation costs to come down significantly; therefore, government support for the initial stages of lunar commercial activity will be needed until transportation becomes routine and cost-effective. 

Reusable heavy-lift transportation being developed by SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others changes that equation. Once we can get to the Moon reliably and affordably, what we do once we’re there becomes the next big opportunity. The SpaceX IPO will pour rocket fuel onto the race to reduce those transportation costs.

SpaceX reportedly intends to raise approximately $80 billion through the IPO, roughly four times NASA’s annual budget, to get to the Moon reliably and affordably. The first-order effects of capital at that level are obvious: launch and lunar landing services, satellite deployment, communications infrastructure, and national security applications. The second-order effects are even more transformative, giving rise to entirely new industries once the transportation problem is solved, including surface-level mobility like landers and rovers, space-based manufacturing, construction, energy production, and things we haven’t yet imagined.

Productive co-dependence and the importance of Artemis

Even with SpaceX's commercial success, NASA’s Artemis program is still key. Artemis will return humans to the Moon, establish a sustained long-term presence there, then continue on to Mars. This requires developing new landers, rovers, power systems, and other infrastructure to support the establishment of a moon base. 

Interlune is building alongside Artemis by leveraging the rapidly emerging ecosystem of lunar transportation, infrastructure, and commercial services that NASA has helped catalyze, while developing and scaling technologies required for long-term industrial operations on the Moon. The SpaceX IPO will accelerate this.

Our flagship technology is a four-step system for harvesting natural resources from space, beginning with helium-3, and then growing to support refueling, manufacturing, and other lunar activities. The ability to excavate and process industrial quantities of lunar soil, or regolith, is fundamental to harvesting resources, as well as site preparation and construction for any project on the Moon, Mars, or other planetary bodies. Interlune’s core IP also includes enabling robotically operated machinery to operate in the extreme environments of the Moon and space. As such, we’re developing highly specialized regolith simulants and testing protocols for hardware on Earth, as well as dust-mitigation and thermal control systems for operating on the Moon.

A tipping point

There is a tendency during major technological transitions to underestimate how quickly adjacent industries emerge once foundational constraints are removed. Very few people looking at early railroads anticipated the modern industrial economy that followed. Early internet investors did not predict cloud computing, streaming, or social networks. What mattered was that a foundational layer had become economically viable. Space infrastructure is entering a similar phase.

Investors do not fund science projects indefinitely. They reward scalable systems, recurring demand, recurring revenue, and infrastructure with expanding economic utility. A successful SpaceX IPO next month suggests investors increasingly believe space has crossed into that category. It will establish valuation benchmarks, reduce perceived sector risk, help institutional investors distinguish between speculative concepts and emerging industrial capabilities, and broaden the pool of capital available to adjacent businesses. 

The implications extend beyond commercial markets. Nations increasingly understand that leadership in space will influence communications, defense, energy systems, and technological competitiveness throughout the 21st century. Whoever helps build the operational backbone of space infrastructure will hold enormous strategic influence over time.

Emotions and economics

Whether in the public markets or among the general public, excitement around the SpaceX IPO hasn’t come out of nowhere. Over the past few years, we’ve seen many new companies enter the space economy, and just a few short weeks ago, Artemis II successfully returned astronauts to lunar orbit for the first time in 50 years. Even Interlune’s $300 million sale of helium-3 broke through to the airwaves of late-night television.

For people inside the industry, especially those like me who have dedicated decades of their lives to it, the reaction to the SpaceX IPO is wonderfully gratifying. We always knew this day would come, but now the rest of the world gets it: the birth of a new economy is at hand.

For companies like Interlune, the conditions we have been preparing for have finally arrived. This historic offering will open the world’s eyes to what industries will be built on top of it and how both will change human existence as we know it. Welcome to the party.

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