A view of Earth, partially hidden by the Moon, photographed through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT (22:41 GMT) April 6, 2026, just three minutes before the Orion spacecraft and its crew went behind the Moon and lost contact with Earth for 40 minutes before emerging on the other side during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon.
NASA | Reuters
People will be living and working on the moon within the next decade, according to the boss of space tech company Voyager Technologies.
“We’ll have humans on the moon by the end of the 2020s, and we’ll have some lunar base — it’ll probably be an inflatable habitat with some life support,” said the firm’s chairman and CEO Dylan Taylor, speaking on a panel at CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE in Singapore on Thursday.
“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’ll be lights on the moon, because there’ll be people living and working on the moon,” Taylor said.
The U.S. is “by far” the global leader in commercial space, according to Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Space Federation, while the “moon economy” is about to boom, per a Deutsche Bank note in February. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is this week courting analysts, sources say, ahead of plans for one of the most anticipated IPOs in history, and the company is now focused on “building a self-growing city on the Moon,” which could happen in under 10 years according to Musk in a February social media post.
Meanwhile, Blue Origin announced in January that it would pause its suborbital space tourism flights to focus on establishing a “permanent, sustained lunar presence.”
“Space has never been hotter,” Taylor said on the sidelines of CONVERGE LIVE, describing the sector as “just getting started,” in light of an anticipated “windfall” of funding from the U.S. government.
As we start landing on the moon, as we start stretching towards Mars, like those are the things that are going to keep people feeling excited.
Justin Trudeau
Former Prime Minister of Canada
On April 3, U.S. President Donald Trump asked Congress to boost defense spending to $1.5 trillion, and on April 21, the U.S. 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 its Starlab project that is set to replace the International Space Station, which is slated to be retired in 2030.
Taylor’s comments come after former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described the recent Artemis II mission — that saw the first Canadian fly around the moon — as a “big, big deal.” Speaking at CONVERGE LIVE on Thursday, Trudeau said it was an “inspiration” to see people “come together and do things with incredible competence,” in a world where he said there has been a recent “celebration of ignorance.”
“As we start landing on the moon, as we start stretching towards Mars, like those are the things that are going to keep people feeling excited,” Trudeau added.
Space is becoming home to critical infrastructure such as telecommunications satellites and Low Earth Orbit — which NASA defines as the stretch of space at an altitude of 2,000 km or less — attracted more than $45 billion worth of investment in 2025, up from $25 billion in 2024.
Taylor said he expects data centers to be operational in space in five years, though he noted the technical challenges of radiating heat away from them, while Gregory Smirin, president of space systems firm Muon Space, said some data center capabilities already exist in space. “We’re already seeing the kind of inference stage, where we’re seeing our systems that are up there today doing the AI analytics,” said Smirin during a panel at CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE.
— CNBC’s Tessa McCann, Liz Napolitano and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
