From missions to systems: The architecture enabling a sustained lunar economy
The conversation around humanity's return to the moon usually runs through launches, landers, and national programs. Paul Tilghman wants to reframe it.
"If we want humans to endure beyond Earth, we have to start building systems that last," said Tilghman, chief technology officer at Voyager Technologies. "Every habitat, every airlock, every system we deploy must be designed to scale, adapt and sustain life far from Earth."
That is the infrastructure pitch, and it is getting louder in commercial space circles. Voyager is not alone — the broader argument is that the moon is graduating from a destination you visit to a platform you build around. Habitations, logistics nodes, power systems, in-space computing: connecting LEO, cislunar space, and the lunar surface into a single operational architecture. At Voyager, that means drawing on decades of life-support, airlock, and orbital operations experience from ISS operations to apply to lunar surface systems.
The hard part is not selling the vision. It is building for conditions that make durability non-negotiable.
Succeeding on the moon requires systems designed for constant radiation, extreme temperature swings, abrasive regolith, intermittent power, and autonomous operation. It means integrating habitation, logistics, power, computing, and mobility into an expandable system — a departure from the one-off mission architecture that defined Apollo. Voyager's pitch includes radiation-hardened electronics, scalable life-support architectures, and in-situ computing designed to reduce dependence on Earth-based operations. The reasoning: future crews will need local processing capability comparable to what they have on the ground, and communications latency to Earth makes round-trip data delays unacceptable for real-time operations.
No single company can build the lunar economy alone. Voyager's recent collaboration with Max Space — announced March 9 — illustrates the partnership model. Max Space makes expandable habitat modules that address a core launch constraint: volume and mass. By combining inflatable structures with Voyager's life-support systems and airlocks, the partnership aims to deliver habitable volume without exceeding what a rocket can carry to the surface.
"There is an acceleration that is palpable," Tilghman said at the conference. "The energy in the room is that we are in a new Apollo moment. What is critical to that inflection point is the measurement of being able to actually go in and create these durable economies that drive commercial interest and are eventually self-sufficient."
The Trump administration has put a target date on the table: initial elements of a permanent lunar outpost by 2030. Voyager's framing is that lessons from LEP — the commercial space station program it inherited through acquisitions — are meant to compress the timeline for building successive economies rather than treating each program as a standalone project.
The hardware is not yet in orbit. Starlab, Voyager's planned commercial space station for research, manufacturing, and long-duration habitation, has not launched. The Max Space partnership is a strategic investment, not a contracted delivery. "Durable economies" is still a thesis.
But the people building for it are pointing to the infrastructure they are designing now — and arguing that the next time humans land on the moon, something permanent should follow.