A view of Earth partially obscured by the Moon, taken through the window of the Orion spacecraft on April 6, 2026 at 6:41 PM EDT (22:41 GMT). The Orion spacecraft and its crew entered the far side of the moon just three minutes before losing contact with Earth for 40 minutes before emerging on the far side during a lunar flight by the Artemis II crew.
NASA | Reuters
Humans will be living and working on the moon within the next 10 years, according to the president of a space technology company. voyager technologies.
“By the end of the 2020s, we’ll be on the moon and we’ll have a lunar base, probably an inflatable habitat with life support,” Dylan Taylor, the company’s chairman and CEO, said Thursday during a panel discussion on CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE in Singapore.
“As we get deeper into 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 light on the moon, because there will be people living and working on the moon,” Taylor said.
The United States is “by far” the world leader in commercial space, according to Commercial Space Federation President Dave Cavossa, and the “moon economy” is about to boom, according to Deutsche Bank’s February note. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is courting analysts this week ahead of plans for the most anticipated IPO in history, sources said, with the company currently focused on “building a self-growing city on the moon,” which Musk said in a social media post in February could happen within a decade.
Meanwhile, Blue Origin announced in January that it would suspend suborbital space tourism flights to focus on establishing a “permanent and sustainable lunar presence.”
“Space is hotter than ever,” Taylor said on the sidelines of CONVERGE LIVE, adding that the field is “just getting started” given the expected “windfall” funding from the US government.
When we start landing on the moon, when we start stretching towards Mars, those are the things that will keep people excited.
Justin Trudeau
former prime minister of canada
On April 3, President Donald Trump asked Congress to increase defense spending to $1.5 trillion, and on April 21, the U.S. Air Force and Space Force requested more than $300 billion in fiscal year 2027.
Voyager went public in June and is widely known for its Star Lab project to replace the International Space Station, which is scheduled to retire in 2030.
Taylor’s comments came after former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the recent Artemis II mission, which made Canada the first person to fly around the moon, “a big deal.” Speaking on CONVERGE LIVE on Thursday, Trudeau said it was an “inspiration” to see people “coming together and doing things with incredible ability” in a world where he said there has been a “celebration of ignorance” lately.
“Like when we start landing on the moon, when we start extending toward Mars, those are the things that will keep people’s moods excited,” Trudeau added.
Space is becoming home to critical infrastructure such as communications satellites and low-earth orbit (defined by NASA as space below 2,000 km altitude), attracting more than $45 billion in investment in 2025, up from $25 billion in 2024.
Taylor predicted data centers could be operational in space within five years, but pointed to the technical challenge of radiating heat away from data centers, while Gregory Smilin, president of space systems company Muon Space, said some data center functions already exist in space. “We’re already at a sort of inference stage, where we’re seeing systems in operation today doing AI analysis,” Smilin said during a panel discussion on CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE.
—CNBC’s Tessa McCann, Liz Napolitano and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
