Between January 2024 and March 2025, three American companies tried to land spacecraft on the Moon under contract to NASA.
Astrobotic’s Peregrine never arrived. A propellant leak shortly after launch ended the mission before it reached lunar orbit, and the vehicle was directed back into Earth’s atmosphere. Intuitive Machines reached the surface a month later, the first American soft landing since Apollo, and then tipped over, ending up on its side with several antennas pointing the wrong way. Its second attempt, a year afterwards, also landed sideways, in a crater near the south pole. In the same week, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost came down upright and worked through a full lunar day.
That record is not a failure of the programme. It is the programme. Landing on the Moon has been done since 1966, but doing it repeatedly, cheaply, on schedule and by companies rather than states is a different problem, and the only way to solve it is to attempt it enough times to find out what breaks.
Buying deliveries instead of building landers
The mechanism behind those attempts is worth understanding, because it is a procurement change rather than a technological one.
Under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme, NASA does not design the lander. It buys a delivery. Companies bid to carry instruments to a specified location, the agency pays for the outcome rather than the development, and the contractor absorbs much of the risk of getting there.
The consequences follow directly. Individual missions cost a fraction of what an agency-built equivalent would. More of them fly. A larger proportion of them fail, which NASA accepted explicitly as the price of the model, on the reasoning that several cheap attempts teach more than one expensive one.
What this produces over time is not a triumphant mission but something duller and more useful: a set of companies that have landed, or nearly landed, and know why. Firefly’s success followed other people’s failures as much as its own engineering.
The infrastructure arrives before the resource
Most public discussion of lunar commerce concerns what might be extracted, particularly water ice in the permanently shadowed craters near the poles. Water can be drunk, breathed, and split into rocket propellant, which makes it the foundation of every speculative lunar economy anyone has sketched.
The gap between a resource existing and a business existing is very wide. Nobody yet knows how concentrated the ice is, how it is bound to the surrounding material, what machinery could excavate it at temperatures near absolute zero in abrasive dust, or who would buy the product at what price. Treating extraction as an imminent market is a category error.
The immediate opportunity is duller and considerably more solid. Every mission needs communications, and at present each one arranges its own link back to Earth, which becomes inefficient as the number of vehicles grows and impossible in places where the Earth is below the horizon. Every mission needs to know precisely where it is, which on the Moon is harder than it sounds, since there is no positioning system and landmarks are scarce. Both problems are solved by shared services rather than by each operator building its own. NASA has accordingly been defining an interoperability framework for lunar communications and navigation, and the European Space Agency has a programme intended to place a small constellation of relay and positioning satellites around the Moon. Neither is glamorous. Both are attempts to establish the standards before the traffic arrives, on the reasonable assumption that whoever sets them will be difficult to displace afterwards.
That is the familiar sequence of terrestrial infrastructure. Ports, roads and networks reliably outlast and often outearn the vehicles that use them, and they get built when enough traffic exists to justify them.
Power is the constraint underneath all of it, and it is more severe than the discussion usually admits. A lunar day lasts about a month, which means roughly fourteen Earth days of continuous sunlight followed by fourteen of darkness at temperatures that fall low enough to destroy most electronics. Blue Ghost worked through its daylight period and then stopped, as designed, because surviving the night requires either nuclear heat or a quantity of batteries nobody wants to carry.
Almost everything ambitious anyone proposes for the Moon assumes that problem is solved. Continuous operations, resource processing, anything resembling a base: all of it requires equipment that is still alive on the fifteenth day. At present, most lunar missions are scheduled around the sun in the way early aviation was scheduled around weather, and the companies working on surviving the dark are doing the least visible and most consequential engineering in the sector.
The problem with going first
Which raises the difficulty at the centre of this market.
Infrastructure needs customers. Customers wait for infrastructure. A company proposing to operate a lunar relay network has to fund it before the missions that would pay for it exist, and those missions are easier to plan once the network is there. Neither side can move first without accepting a risk the other does not have to take.
Government procurement is the bridge, which is also the vulnerability. A market whose anchor customer is a space agency depends on appropriations that shift with administrations, and a business model resting on public contracts is a business model with a political exposure that no engineering can hedge. The strongest positions are likely to belong to firms with several sources of demand rather than one, even if that means growing more slowly.
Why states care about plumbing
There is a strategic dimension that has little to do with prestige.
The capabilities involved in reaching, communicating with and operating around the Moon are useful well beyond any particular mission. More importantly, whoever supplies the shared services also tends to set the standards those services run on, and standards are how influence gets exercised quietly and for a long time. This is how it worked with satellite navigation, undersea cable and mobile telephony, none of which were understood as strategic assets by the public while they were being built.
International cooperation remains genuine in lunar programmes, and the legal framework still emphasises peaceful use. Infrastructure creates leverage regardless of intent. The organisations that define how lunar vehicles talk to one another will matter more than the ones that plant flags.
What to watch
The signal will not be a landing. It will be a second and third landing by the same company, on schedule, with the vehicle upright.
Repeatability is what converts an achievement into a service, and a service is what other people can build businesses on top of. Everything currently described as the lunar economy depends on that conversion happening, and it will be visible long before anyone extracts anything.
