The intermingling of Earth infrastructure and space development has never been more tangible, as countless technological, ideological, and research-based breakthroughs drive the space industry to unprecedented levels of discovery. In an economic sense, space holds revolutionary implications for industrial expansion and transformative growth in Earth’s most vital sectors.
The burgeoning cislunar economy is one critical subdivision of this advancement. This concept broadly refers to the economic utilization of cislunar space, or the region of space between Earth’s atmosphere and the moon’s orbit (about 550,000 kilometers of altitude). This region comprises orbits including, but not limited to, Earth orbits, lunar orbits, lunar transit orbits, and Lagrange orbits – collectively representing a major opportunity within humankind’s ongoing journey for economic and infrastructural innovation.
Cislunar space’s economic viability stems from its myriad market opportunities, cost implications, and benefits for resource extraction and transportation logistics. As cislunar activity increases, the potential for infrastructural activities like high-level satellite servicing and spacecraft refueling grows in tandem – as well as the establishment of new space stations and waystations to facilitate more seamless transportation between Earth, the moon, and, potentially, deeper-space locations.
Meanwhile, as more federal and corporate entities offer support for cislunar development, space-related resource identification, extraction, and utilization may benefit immensely. An economic presence in cislunar space suggests a clearer path to processes like lunar mining and cislunar asteroid mining, which could yield crucial resources like rare metals, water ice, and helium-3. These materials, in turn, can fuel prevailing concepts like fusion power and closed-loop life support while lending new layers of safety and efficiency to future space missions – all for a fraction of the environmental impact.
These implications reflect a wide array of drivers spurring the global cislunar infrastructure market, which stands to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.94 percent by 2033. Demand for lunar resources has increased as on-Earth processes – like the aforementioned – have become more advanced while emphasizing sustainability and efficiency. In turn, federally funded lunar missions have increased in scope, with a recent IDA review estimating a federal budget of roughly $63 billion for such activity between now and 2040.
With these notions in mind, economic development within cislunar space will undoubtedly come to fruition in the coming decades; this would be a historic stepping stone for humankind’s space presence, pushing the boundaries of possibility for deeper transportation networks, more intuitive research, and more sustainable resource utilization. These factors will remain crucial variables for both space industry innovation and economic stability on Earth.
