A view of Earth, partially obscured by the Moon, taken from the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT (22:41 GMT) on April 6, 2026, just three minutes before the Orion spacecraft and its crew went past the Moon and 40 minutes before the Artemis II crew emerged on the other side during the Moon’s flyby.
NASA reuters
People will live and work on the Moon within the next decade, according to space tech company boss Voyager Technologies.
“By the end of the 2020s we will have humans on the Moon, and we will have some lunar base — it will probably be an inflatable habitat with some life support,” company President and CEO Dylan Taylor said, speaking at a panel at CNBC’s Converge Live in Singapore on Thursday.
“In the depths of the 2030s, 2032, 2033, you’ll be able to sit on your porch in upstate New York and look at the moon, and there will be lights on the moon, because there will be people living and working on the moon,” Taylor said.
According to Dave Cavosa, president of the Commercial Space Federation, the US is “by far” the global leader in commercial space, while the “moon economy” is set to grow rapidly, according to a note from Deutsche Bank in February. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is contacting analysts this week ahead of planning one of the most anticipated IPOs in history, and the company is now focusing on “manufacturing its own,” sources say. city ​​on the moonAccording to Musk in a February social media post, that could happen in less than 10 years.
Meanwhile, Blue Origin announced in January that it would pause its suborbital space tourism flights to focus on establishing a “permanent, sustained” spaceflight. lunar presence“
“Space has never been hotter,” Taylor said on Converge Live. He described the field as “just getting started” in light of the anticipated “unprecedented amount” of funding from the US government.
As we start landing on the Moon, as we start moving toward Mars, these are things that will continue to make people feel excited.
justin trudeau
Former Prime Minister of Canada
On April 3, US President Donald Trump asked Congress to increase defense spending by $1.5 trillion, and on April 21, the US Air Force and space force Requested a budget of more than $300 billion for the 2027 fiscal year.
Voyager went public in June and is widely known for starlab The project is set to replace the International Space Station, which is scheduled to shut down in 2030.
Taylor’s comments come after former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described the recent Artemis II mission – which saw the first Canadian flight around the Moon – as a “big, big deal.” Speaking on Converge Live on Thursday, Trudeau said it was an “inspiration” to see people come together and work with incredible potential, in a world where he said recently there has been a “celebration of ignorance.”
“As we start landing on the moon, as we start moving toward Mars, these are things that make people feel excited,” Trudeau said.
Space is becoming home to critical infrastructure such as telecommunications satellites low earth orbit – which NASA defines as the expanse of space at an altitude of 2,000 km or less – attracted investments of more than $45 billion in 2025, up from $25 billion in 2024.
Taylor said he expects data centers to be operational in space within five years, though he noted the technical challenges of removing heat from them, while Gregory Smyrin, president of space systems firm Muon Space, said some data center capabilities already exist in space. “We’re already seeing this kind of inference phase where we’re looking at our systems that are doing AI analytics today,” Smyrin said during a panel on CNBC’s Converge Live.
— CNBC’s Tessa McCann, Liz Napolitano and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
