Episode 6 of NEXUS looks at the emerging cislunar economy and how commercial companies will—must—build the core infrastructure that will sustain the space industry’s buildup on the Moon.

Guests Kelli Kedis Ogborn of Space Foundation, Walter Schroeder of CisLunar Industries, and Ron Birk from Aerospace share insights from the panel they delivered at the 2025 Payload Lunar and Mars Economy Summit in Houston.

“There absolutely is a space economy. And we can quantify it now in terms of its current value,” said Kedis Ogborn. “For the year of 2024, we looked at $613 billion is what we’ve had in the economy, and that’s broken down into 12 different subsectors.” She emphasized that “when governments and industry invest in shared infrastructure together, it’s going to make governance easier. It’s going to de-risk technology to a lot private capital. And really what it’s going to do is get more visible signals for growth to potential customers and markets that this is real.”

Schroeder described the business case for lunar operations: “When looking at the resources on the moon, you’re looking at the things that enable an economy, which is for example, fueling spacecrafts, but also what can you do with recycled materials or resources that you find on the moon to increase the infrastructure on the lunar surface.”

Birk noted the growing digital engineering community interested in developing the cislunar ecosystem, which will require 12 core infrastructure layers including power, communications, and navigation. “Over 200 people joined that [initial] discussion, and we cataloged over 30 discrete digital engineering environments that were being developed for the cislunar domain,” he said. Now, “The total community is up to over 800 people.”