Photo: Ganapathy Kumar / Unsplash I have only a fuzzy memory of the US moon landing in 1969. I was too young to understand the grandeur of the accomplishment, achieved with not much more compute power than a high-end calculator today. But grand it was, entering the pantheon of great feats of human ingenuity, where it has sat for a long while, quiet and a little neglected.
And now, somewhat suddenly, everyone wants to go back. Why?
On 9 February 2026, which was Super Bowl day in the US, Elon Musk posted a tweet which started with this:
“For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.”
What now? Musk had been extolling Mars exploration for years. Wasn’t it the founding obsession of SpaceX? Just 13 months earlier, hadn’t he called the moon “a distraction”?
Musk wasn’t alone. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin had already announced moon plans years earlier, but with squishy schedules and without much oomph. A few days after Musk’s tweet Bezos simply posted a striking black-and-white image of a tortoise on X, tagging Blue Origin, with no accompanying text. The meme was clear – SpaceX was a mere flibbertigibbet hare to his more deliberate and presumably winning tortoise.
A few days later Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp really laid down the gauntlet: Blue Origin “will move heaven and Earth” to get to the moon before SpaceX, he told Bloomberg Television.
And then, on Friday, 27 February, the newly appointed administrator of Nasa, Jared Isaacman, was interviewed on CBS where he publicly unveiled the recently refurbished Artemis programme to send astronauts back to the lunar surface. Artemis is a series of scheduled launches starting with the uncrewed Artemis I, already launched in 2022, and leading up to Artemis IV which will bring astronauts to the lunar surface in 2028.
I listened to Isaacman on the Interesting Times podcast recently. He is the first astronaut to head Nasa, having flown twice for SpaceX. Also the first billionaire and (famously) the only Nasa administrator who dropped out of school at 16.
In any event, that he is articulate and knowledgeable is not a surprise. That he has the enthusiasm and fervour of a country preacher is. For him, getting to the moon and building an operating environment to support scientific and commercial space endeavours and onward exploration is the highest calling he can imagine.
Apollo 17 (the last Apollo) splashed down in December 1972. The intervening decades brought robotic visitors: orbiters, landers, a succession of probes that indicated the presence of water ice in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar south pole, finally confirmed by Nasa’s LCROSS mission in October 2009. That discovery mattered enormously; it was the pivot for the urgent renewed interest – we’ll get back to that presently.
But technology alone doesn’t send humans anywhere. It takes politics, money and – perhaps most of all – a credible threat. That’s where China comes in.
China’s plans are the product of Project 921, a strategic space initiative backed by the Chinese Communist Party since 1992, executed with the kind of methodical patience that tends to unsettle Western observers accustomed to start-again, stop-again democratic budget cycles. They have landed on the moon, uncrewed, six times since 2013, each foray more ambitious than the last. They have also targeted their first crewed lunar landing for 2030. No one in the US doubts that they will be successful.
“The countries that get there first will write the rules of the road for what we can do on the moon,” former Nasa associate administrator Mike Gold told a recent US Senate hearing. Those rules cover everything from where to land to who controls the water ice to how resource extraction gets regulated. The moon, in this framing, isn’t just a science project. It’s a jurisdiction waiting to be claimed.
That framing has concentrated minds in Washington. Isaacman put it more plainly: “With credible competition from our greatest geopolitical adversary increasing by the day, we need to move faster, eliminate delays and achieve our objectives.” He wasn’t talking about scientific milestones. He was talking about winning a crucial geopolitical race. (It should not escape anyone’s notice that this race against China into the space economy parallels the AI race, currently under way).
So, what are they going to do on the moon?
The core idea is learning to live off the land rather than shipping everything from Earth. The discovery of water ice was the game-changer – it can be electrolysed into hydrogen and oxygen – rocket propellant and breathable air.
This is perhaps the most strategically important idea. If you can manufacture rocket propellant on the moon – where gravity is one-sixth of Earth’s – launching missions deeper into the solar system becomes vastly cheaper than lifting everything out of Earth’s gravity well. The moon becomes a petrol station for Mars missions and beyond. Isaacman has explicitly framed this as the foundation of the orbital economy.
And this – China’s Chang’e 8 mission in 2028 is specifically designed to test 3D printing structures using lunar regolith (soil), a precursor to printing machines and habitats on the moon.
Also, Nasa and the Department of Energy have announced plans to put a nuclear fission reactor on the surface by 2030 to provide continuous power independent of sunlight. If you can make fuel and generate power on the moon, the economics of everything beyond change dramatically.
For instance, the moon’s surface has been bombarded by solar wind for billions of years, embedding Helium-3 in the regolith. Helium-3 is extraordinarily rare on Earth but potentially valuable as fuel for nuclear fusion reactors. Whether fusion ever becomes commercially viable is still an open question, but if it does, lunar Helium-3 will be required. This is one of the longer-term resource extraction plays.
Musk has talked about factories on the moon manufacturing satellites, launched via electromagnetic mass drivers into deep space, powering orbital data centres. This is very far out, but the underlying logic is that manufacturing in low gravity with solar power and lunar raw materials could be cheaper than doing it on Earth and launching the results.
Less publicly discussed but very real, Isaacman called space “the high ground” at his confirmation hearing. The Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defence initiative is reportedly part of the reason both SpaceX and Blue Origin have pivoted to the moon so abruptly. Lunar-based infrastructure sits far beyond the reach of most anti-satellite weapons, offering durable communications, surveillance and sensing capabilities. This pegs the moon as a strategic military asset.
Further down the track – lunar hotels, research stations funded by private clients and manufacturing materials that are difficult or impossible to produce in Earth’s gravity. The broader vision of the orbital economy is that government missions seed the infrastructure, and eventually commercial activity becomes self-sustaining.
Much of this is still genuinely speculative. The immediate programme – Artemis IV landing in 2028, China by 2030 – is really about proving you can get there reliably, keep people alive and begin testing various technologies. The space economy is a 20-to-50-year proposition, not a 2030 one. The near-term reality is expensive flags-and-footprints missions justified by geopolitical competition, with the hope that the infrastructure built in the process eventually pays for itself.
But if we are really honest, Nasa and Musk and Bezos are going to the moon because they don’t want China to get there first and set the rules, and because they believe – with varying degrees of conviction – that the first nation or company to build permanent infrastructure there will have an extraordinary strategic and economic advantage for the rest of the century. DM
Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg and a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick. His new book, It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership, is published by Maverick 451 in South Africa and the Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now.