Deloitte sees a $566 billion lunar economy by 2050

Woman in a blazer (Credit: Courtesy of Deloitte)

I was looking for a word to describe an unimagined market and the best fit I could find is terra incognita, or “unknown land.” Roman cartographers used the term to label mystery territories on maps for explorers.

This all came up because Deloitte just published its attempt at a value for the moon economy—and all the cascading unknowns that could flow from going there like finding rocket fuel, extracting minerals, and forming data center manufacturing hubs. The value of a lunar economy is $566 billion in an accelerated-growth scenario by 2050, and $343 billion under a more conservative scenario. But there’s a separate $541 billion that Deloitte pinned to the space-based potential stemming from scientific advances, new energy sources, and innovative commercial applications. That’s the terra incognita—what could come.