Elon Musk has announced SpaceX’s pivot to prioritizing the construction of a permanent, self-sustaining city on the Moon, with an estimated cost between $100-500 billion, requiring thousands of Starship launches and a decade of autonomous construction in the harsh lunar environment. The engineering plan, targeting the resource-rich south pole, involves an initial robotic phase where dozens of uncrewed Starships would deliver and deploy solar arrays, nuclear reactors, and ice-mining rigs to produce water, oxygen, and rocket propellant from lunar ice deposits. This in-situ resource utilization is the critical inflection point, drastically reducing Earth-bound supply needs and enabling the base to “self-grow” through compound logistics, with crewed rotations beginning around 2030 and a permanent population exceeding 100 by the mid-2030s. Despite major unsolved challenges like abrasive lunar dust, extreme radiation, and the physiological effects of low gravity, SpaceX is betting that mastering lunar logistics will provide the essential testbed and playbook for its ultimate goal of colonizing Mars.
Then the obvious question: who pays for a Moon city, and how does it ever make money?
The obvious question: who pays for a Moon city, and how does it ever make money?
The honest answer is that right now, nobody has closed a business case. Lockheed Martin’s space exploration architect said exactly that in May 2025. Intuitive Machines, the only U.S. company to… https://t.co/yzCax7bgET
— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) February 9, 2026
The honest answer is that right now, nobody has closed a business case. Lockheed Martin’s space exploration architect said exactly that in May 2025. Intuitive Machines, the only U.S. company to soft-land on the Moon since 1972, generated $228 million in revenue last year with an operating margin of negative 100%. PwC projects the lunar economy reaches €142 billion by 2040. That’s a massive gap between where the market is and where it needs to be.
So where does the revenue actually come from?
The second business is helium-3. The Moon’s regolith contains this isotope at 1.4 to 15 parts per billion from 4 billion years of solar wind. Earth has about 100 kg of recoverable supply total. Current price: $20 million per kilogram. The near-term buyers aren’t fusion reactors. They’re quantum computing companies that need helium-3 to cool superconducting systems to near absolute zero. Interlune, co-founded by Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, already has signed contracts with the DOE and Maybell Quantum. At $20 million per kg, even tens of kilograms annually generates hundreds of millions.
The third business scales everything: becoming the gas station between Earth and everywhere else. Every Mars-bound Starship that refuels with lunar oxygen instead of hauling it from Earth saves 4-10 tanker launches per mission. At SpaceX’s long-term cost target of $2 million per Starship flight, that’s $8-20 million saved per Mars departure. When you’re sending fleets every 26 months, the savings compound into the backbone of an interplanetary supply chain.
The fourth business is already real: government contracts. NASA’s CLPS program, Artemis, DARPA’s LunA-10 study, Pentagon cislunar operations. Casey Dreier at the Planetary Society said it clearly: once human space programs hit a tipping point, they last decades. The shuttle ran 30 years. The ISS has been occupied for 25. Artemis funding survived the 2026 budget cuts that tried to cancel it. That institutional momentum is the floor under every lunar business plan.
The pattern is familiar. The transcontinental railroad didn’t have a closed business case at groundbreaking. The interstate highway system cost $500 billion in today’s dollars and nobody modeled the revenue from suburban malls, logistics networks, and commuter economies it would create. Starlink didn’t have paying customers when SpaceX started spending billions on satellites.
The trillion-dollar SpaceX valuation is a bet that lunar infrastructure follows the same curve. Government contracts fund the buildout. Propellant creates the first self-sustaining revenue. Helium-3 adds margin. Each new customer adds demand for the logistics network SpaceX already operates. The company that controls the only rocket capable of landing 100 tons on the lunar surface collects rent on every kilogram of cargo and every liter of propellant for the next several decades.
The revenue model won’t look like a SaaS company. It will look like a port authority that owns the harbor, the fuel depot, and the railroad. And the harbor is 384,400 km from the nearest competitor.