Once dominated by government agencies like NASA, the space-race ecosystem is increasingly run by private companies including Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin. Now, billions of dollars are flooding into the red-hot sector, with the World Economic Forum predicting that it will be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035.
According to two space tech executives speaking at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah, on Wednesday, the budding industry is not just an opportunity for profit. Getting back to the moon is also a "moral obligation," said Jaret Matthews, the founder and CEO of Astrolab, a planetary logistics startup recently awarded a contract by NASA that could be worth nearly $2 billion. "To survive as a species, we need to move out among the stars," he said.
