OPINION: Why the moon may matter before it pays
By Robert A. Edgell
Discussions about cislunar development are usually dominated by hardware: habitats, power, communications, logistics and launch systems. But if history is any guide, the challenge is not just technical. It is how the system organizes action: who governs, who finances, who bears risk and how actors coordinate over time.
Future commercial lunar gateways are best understood as a broader class of lunar platforms and hubs. They are not isolated projects, but part of a longer transition in space activity — from early spaceflight foundations to long-duration orbital operations to today’s interplanetary ambitions. A gateway can become a platform for science and industry, providing staging, refueling, repair and coordination across missions and actors.
But beneath that promise lies a harder reality: Market creation beyond Earth-facing space remains deeply challenging. Business cases are fragile, and the most plausible near-term path is still hybrid public-private rather than purely private.
That is why lunar gateways should not be framed as engineering projects alone. Infrastructure in space does not endure simply because engineers make it possible. It endures when technical systems and their corresponding superstructures — the social contracts embedded in governance, regulatory and organizational arrangements — are aligned well enough to survive uncertainty, cost, delay and competing interests.
We have seen this before. Early space development was never just about rockets and spacecraft. It was also a story of governments creating institutions, regulations, funding capacities and organizing forms that could absorb uncertainty. The first era laid the foundation, the second matured orbital operations and the current era remains fundamentally hybrid.
The moon raises the stakes. Lunar infrastructure will involve long time horizons, fragile demand, unsettled governance, harsh operating conditions and persistent tension between public purpose and private return. A gateway is part of a larger sociotechnical system made up of contracts, regulations, incentives, standards, political commitments and shared expectations. Who pays for assets that are essential, but not immediately profitable? Who governs access, interoperability, maintenance and expansion? What happens when scientific, geopolitical and commercial priorities diverge?
The deeper concern is business-model fragility. Beyond Earth orbit, the economics remain thin. Market creation in deep space is marked by high uncertainty, enormous costs and returns that are difficult to foresee. Outside of portions of the satellite and related transportation sectors, commercial space activity remains driven primarily by large-scale government spending rather than by ordinary consumer or business demand. As the rise and collapse of the asteroid mining startup Planetary Resources reminds us, private actors alone face high barriers to entry, extreme venture risk, precarious demand, legal uncertainty, lack of shared infrastructure and time horizons far longer than most investors tolerate.
But that fragility should not be mistaken for a case against going. Rather, it is a sign of where we are in the transition. In Earth-facing space, commercial activity has developed through six decades of effortful institutional superstructure-building, shared infrastructure and costly public-private experimentation, from Comsat-Intelsat to the ISS and beyond. Launch, communications and orbital services now operate atop that thick accumulated base.
But in cislunar space, infrastructure remains thin, customers few and the economics unforgiving. Government still serves as the anchor customer and market maker. We are dealing not with mature markets, but with market formation under extreme uncertainty.
The absence of strong lunar business models today is not an argument for delay. It is an argument for pragmatic collective action. Markets emerge when infrastructure, superstructural arrangements, operational experience and strategic commitment reduce uncertainty. If we wait for mature markets to justify lunar presence, we may wait forever. If we invest, build, experiment, fail, learn and coordinate, we improve the odds that real markets eventually follow.
Some argue the answer is to shield private firms from regulation and assume markets will work efficiently without the institutional work needed to support them. For the cislunar frontier, that is a red herring.
Firms do not excel simply because rules are stripped away. They excel when the surrounding system is constructed well enough to make excellence possible and necessary. The real challenge is not simply having fewer rules, but having the right ones.
Comsat-Intelsat did not succeed because government stepped aside; it succeeded because superstructural arrangements, including governance, standards, and public-private structures, were built that made public investment legitimate, coordination possible and the broader system fair enough to endure. Regulation, done right, is not a barrier to commercialization, but part of what enables durable commercialization.
The more plausible path forward is a hybrid government-industry consortium path. A sustained multinational public-private enterprise that invests in shared cislunar infrastructure, backed by collectively created superstructural arrangements — governance, common standards and interoperability rules — will be strong enough to reduce uncertainty over time and allow markets to develop.
If lunar gateways succeed, it will not be because technology alone made them possible. It will be because societies, through considerable organizational effort and substantial resource commitments, learned how to build durable systems around technology before the market was fully ready. That is how the moon may begin to matter before it pays.
Robert A. Edgell is a professor of technology management at SUNY Polytechnic Institute and principal investigator for the Sustainable Aerospace Energy Center. His work examines the sociotechnical challenges of space commercialization, with a particular focus on public-private organizing, governance and long-horizon innovation beyond Earth.
