The Cislunar Economy: Infrastructure Needed Between Earth and Moon

For most of the Space Age, the region between Earth and the Moon (loosely defined as "cislunar space," extending from low Earth orbit to roughly the Moon's sphere of influence) was a transit corridor rather than a domain. Apollo missions crossed it in three days. Nothing stayed. That is changing. The combination of national programs like NASA's Artemis, commercial lunar ambitions, and growing strategic competition is creating the conditions for a sustained cislunar economy, but only if the necessary infrastructure gets built.

What Cislunar Space Actually Is

Cislunar space encompasses not just the 384,000-km straight-line distance to the Moon but a three-dimensional dynamical environment governed by the combined gravity of Earth, Moon, and Sun. The key orbital regimes within it include:

• Geostationary orbit (GEO): 35,786 km, already heavily utilized for communications and weather satellites
• Highly Elliptical Orbits (HEO): Molniya and Tundra orbits used for high-latitude coverage
• Earth-Moon Lagrange points: L1 (between Earth and Moon) and L2 (beyond the Moon) are dynamically stable locations suitable for relay stations or propellant depots
• Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO): A highly elliptical near-polar orbit around the Moon selected for the Lunar Gateway, offering stable operations with relatively low station-keeping costs
• Low Lunar Orbit (LLO): 100 km altitude, analogous to LEO but around the Moon; requires more station-keeping due to lunar gravity anomalies (mascons)

The Infrastructure Gap

Earth-to-LEO infrastructure is mature: dozens of launch providers, thousands of operational satellites, global ground station networks, and maturing in-orbit servicing capabilities. Cislunar has almost none of this. The infrastructure required to support sustained operations between Earth and the Moon includes:

Communications and Navigation

GPS signals weaken significantly beyond roughly 36,000 km and do not extend to the lunar surface. The Moon has no positioning infrastructure equivalent to GPS. NASA's LunaNet architecture and ESA's Moonlight initiative are designing lunar communication and navigation service constellations, but neither has yet achieved sustained operational status. Without reliable position knowledge and communications relay, crews and autonomous systems operating on or near the Moon face significant operational constraints.

Propellant and Logistics Depots

The delta-V to travel from LEO to low lunar orbit is approximately 4 km/s, comparable to the cost of reaching LEO in the first place. Vehicles carrying propellant all the way from Earth's surface pay a steep penalty. Propellant depots in cislunar space, ideally fed by water extracted from lunar polar ice deposits and electrolyzed into liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, could dramatically reduce the cost of cislunar transportation. Orbit Fab and other in-space refueling startups are developing the technology; the missing piece is a reliable lunar resource extraction and processing chain.

In-Space Transportation

Efficient cislunar logistics require vehicles optimized for this environment: capable of aerobraking at Earth for return trips, carrying meaningful cargo mass, and operating repeatedly without returning to Earth's surface for refurbishment. SpaceX's Starship, NASA's Human Landing System variants, and future purpose-built cislunar tugs are all part of the envisioned architecture, but no reusable cislunar vehicle has yet demonstrated routine round-trip operations.

Surface Infrastructure

Lunar surface operations require power (solar plus possibly fission-based systems for the two-week polar night), in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) for water extraction and oxygen production, habitation, and surface mobility. NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program and Artemis surface missions are incrementally building this capability, but sustained operations require continuous surface presence rather than periodic short missions.

Economic Drivers

The near-term cislunar economy is primarily government-funded, driven by Artemis commitments, Space Force interest in domain awareness, and international competition with China's lunar program. Longer-term commercial drivers include:

• Lunar helium-3 extraction (potential fusion fuel, though commercial fusion remains unproven)
• Lunar rare earth and platinum group element mining
• In-space manufacturing using lunar feedstocks
• Tourism and scientific access services

Track cislunar mission progress and emerging commercial players through the SpaceNexus Cislunar module and the launch manifest.