Lunar Commerce and Economics

The main activities of the Working Group on Lunar Commerce and Economics (LCE) are related to the production of a “Lunar Commerce Portfolio” (LCP), which is envisaged to be an ongoing document, published both in hard copy and digital versions, with the first version ready for public release around Summer 2022.

The LCP will be a comprehensive document, describing the commercial potential of Lunar activities, produced by a dedicated group of volunteer analysts, without bias, using fully-referenced objective international data sources, and agreed by consensus to be the best, commonly agreed assessment of Lunar commercial potential. It will, moreover, offer transparency, reproducibility, and opportunities for inclusion and collaboration. To our knowledge, it will be the only such source.

It is intended that providing this document will deliver benefits to a range of players in the international Lunar exploration community. It will certainly be beneficial to existing and prospective businesses, investors and insurers, considering engagement in Lunar commercial market activity. Such entities will be looking for a “best in class” source for underwriting their planning activities. Also, in the international space regulatory fora, there will be a need to understand the scope of potential lunar businesses, and aspects of scarce resource management, and requirements for surface space and boundaries of the proposed businesses. Furthermore, even at the national level, this material will be an important input to the planning and budget departments of national space agencies, whose rhetoric increasingly refer to a sharing of development on the Moon with commercial players. They need to understand something of the range of uncertainties of potential commercial revenue streams, and also to obtain some insight into the extent to which the national agencies can help remove obstacles to commercial progress.

In order to make this possible, the analysts in the LCE Working Group are exploring nine specific market segments, designed between them to span all foreseeable commercial lunar markets, without overlaps or double-counting. Furthermore, the team is working with an agreed set of common driving assumptions, and will be conducting the forecasting work within clearly stated future environmental scenarios. The ultimate quantification will be in terms of ranges of revenues (not profitability) and will focus on true market demand (not supply-driven hopes). There will be a particular focus to differentiate to what extent the customers for the projected services will be truly commercial, rather than merely governmental (under various guises). For the LCP, all analysis will be recorded transparently, and care is being taken to ensure clarity in thinking about all stages of the lunar commercial business developments.

Apart from the eventual quantification, each individual market section of the Lunar Commerce Portfolio will contain a great deal of other useful material, designed to be helpful to the diverse range of potential future users of the document. Each market sector will include, in addition to the eventual quantified revenue potential data, information on market description, potential customers, value chains, market drivers, market constraints, and potential suppliers. The contents of the Lunar Commerce Portfolio will be derived to be representative in two distinct time periods; the “Early Phase”, representing the activities of the decade of the 2020’s though to 2030, and then the “Mature Phase”, which is targeted at that time period when there will be a permanent presence on the Moon, self-sustainable with the necessities of life, and not dependent for them on a logistical supply chain of deliveries from Earth. It is not expected that the “Mature Phase” will commence before at least 2040.