The crew of Artemis II set a record Monday for the farthest distance humans have traveled from Earth, as the spacecraft swung around the far side of the moon.
Shortly after traveling 248,656 miles away from Earth, breaking the record set by Apollo 13 in 1970, Artemis mission specialist Jeremy Hansen said he and his crewmates “choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived.”
NASA and its partners in the commercial U.S. space industry are counting on the Artemis mission to break records and garner enough popular support to help usher in a new era of space exploration, one that is fueled by a thriving space economy.
Why We Wrote This
The Artemis II crew made history Monday, reaching the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth. NASA and its commercial partners aim to also pioneer a new space economy through the Artemis missions.
To accomplish that goal, NASA is testing a strategy of relying more heavily on public-private partnerships. For Artemis II, that has meant partnering with traditional contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. For future Artemis missions, partnerships are to include SpaceX and Blue Origin and other newcomers, like Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based private space company that successfully landed a spacecraft on the lunar surface in March 2025.
Where once only governments could afford the eye-watering sums associated with reaching outer space, private companies like SpaceX have helped turn rocket launches into a (relatively) cheap, profitable business. Meanwhile, companies like Firefly are designing rovers and landers for NASA – and other customers – to explore the lunar surface and help build a permanent lunar outpost in the near future.
Firefly Aerospace is one of thousands of private space companies that now make up the commercial space industry. As of 2021, there were over 10,000 companies in the industry, Forbes reported, with a total value in excess of $4 trillion.
NASA is hoping that the future of space exploration is built on public-private partnerships with several of these companies.
The Artemis program, which will involve partnerships with multiple private companies in future missions, is a glimpse into that future. However, while the commercial space sector has certainly grown, it is not as big or as profitable as NASA officials hoped it would be by this point. The lunar economy could be worth around $170 billion over the next two decades, according to a 2021 analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers. But as it stands today, there are some hard economic realities, like lack of current profitability, standing between private industry and that kind of lucrative space economy, according to experts.
Still, there is excitement – particularly following NASA’s announcement in late March of a new plan to gradually build a permanent base on the moon, starting with returning humans to the lunar surface in 2028 with Artemis IV. The landing spacecraft for that mission are being built by private companies.
When the Blue Ghost touched down last year, “it felt like starting something new,” said Kevin Scholtes, a future systems architect at Firefly Aerospace, in an interview on Monday.
“It felt like we were getting the tremendous privilege, with a lot of help from NASA, to start a new chapter in space exploration.”
Successes, and warning signs
The government paving the way for private industry to turn a profit has happened previously. The most apt comparison might be the settlement of the American West, which the government facilitated through friendly contracts with railroad companies.
A similar trend has happened in low Earth orbit. During the Apollo era in the 1960s and ’70s, only NASA (or put another way, taxpayers) could pay the cost of entry into space. Private companies – led by billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX – have helped slash the cost of launches by about 70% through developing reusable rockets and lighter payloads.
Now, private rocket launches into low Earth orbit are routine. But these launches often serve one purpose: to deploy new communications satellites into orbit.
“Now we’re incredibly dependent on” satellite communication, says Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines.
But if the space economy is going to be worth trillions of dollars in the future, he adds, “you’re going to have to get more” revenue streams.
Other ventures once seen as building blocks for a space economy have fallen flat. The market for space tourism, for example, seems to have dried up amid high costs and a lack of demand.
At an event in late March announcing the agency’s pivot to focusing on a moon base, NASA officials bemoaned the slow progress of private efforts to create a commercial space station in low Earth orbit. (The agency has been planning to decommission the International Space Station by 2030.)
“This is a real challenge; this is a real problem,” said Amit Kshatriya, NASA associate administrator, at the event, a week before the Artemis II launch.
“Having our presence in [low Earth orbit] is a national imperative,” he added. But “the current industry that we have that’s proposing to build destinations does not have the direct experience with that, or the resources, to go do it.”
Mining the moon
The economic viability of commercial operations in cislunar space – meaning the region extending from Earth’s atmosphere to the lunar surface and beyond – might be even more remote. For one, the moon is 100 times farther away from our planet than low Earth orbit. Secondly, as of right now there is no profit to be found.
Surveys have found potentially useful resources on the lunar surface. Rare earth elements, used to power many modern devices, have been found on the moon. So has helium-3, an isotope that could be used in nuclear fusion, cryogenics, and quantum computing. Extremely rare on Earth, helium-3 has been scattered across the moon by solar winds for billions of years.
Potentially the most valuable lunar resource is water ice, a resource that is chemically different from ice on Earth and could be vital for human missions and settlements. Found mostly on the lunar south pole, in permanently shadowed craters, the deposits could (in theory) be turned into rocket propellant and oxygen for breathing. Finding a way to efficiently mine and process this lunar ice could (in theory) turn the moon into a self-sustaining gas station for deep-space exploration.
“You can then start lowering the transportation costs,” says Dr. Abbud-Madrid. “Then you start opening up cislunar space.”
But if that is to become reality, a lot of science has to happen first, experts say – science such as what Artemis II conducted with its lunar flyby Monday, when the crew became the first humans to directly view some areas of the far side of the moon in daylight. The crew spent the roughly seven-hour flyby photographing and cataloging features of the surface in detail. They had 35 targets for 10 science objectives, including identifying potential future landing sites.
“We need more scientific characterizations of the moon,” says Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “There’s water on the moon, but that’s like saying, ‘There’s gold in the West.’”
Several private companies are gearing up for a gold rush. Three companies – Interlune, Black Moon Energy, and Magna Petra – are focused on helium-3 mining. Colorado-based Lunar Outpost is building vehicles it says could support the construction and operation of a permanent lunar base.
Conversations and “friendly” competition
While these possible ventures have major financial question marks around them, there are also legal, environmental, and even moral consequences, analysts say.
For example, what would be the rules for a lunar economy? The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 says the moon cannot be taken over by any nation, but it doesn’t explicitly ban mining of its resources. The Artemis Accords – a U.S.-led guidance on “best practices” for “the civil exploration and use of outer space,” signed by 61 nations – affirms that resource extraction in outer space is lawful, provided certain conditions are met.
China and Russia, which are planning to build a permanent base together at the moon’s south pole, are not signatories to the Artemis Accords.
This doesn’t mean a lunar turf war is inevitable, experts say. The International Space Station has proved that foreign governments can collaborate in space despite tensions on Earth, but a space station is very different from a planetary body with potentially lucrative resources.
“If everyone wants to go [to the south pole] and everyone wants to have a base there, there’s going to have to be some conversation,” says Dr. Abbud-Madrid.
“And this is a good time to do it,” he adds. “All of these things have to be addressed before we start on a massive scale.”
In the meantime, Artemis II has begun its journey back to Earth. The crew is scheduled to splash down off the coast of San Diego on Friday.
2026 is also scheduled to be a busy year for commercial moon shots. Three companies – in partnership with NASA – are scheduled to land scientific payloads on the lunar surface, including a second Blue Ghost mission by Firefly Aerospace.
Mr. Scholtes describes the competition between all these companies as “a friendly rivalry.”
“We compete over the same contracts; we compete over the same missions,” he says. “But ultimately, we’re in the same industry.”
“All ships are going to rise and sink with the tide,” he adds. “We love it when our competitors succeed because it means more opportunity for everyone.”