Fly Me To The Moon
Lunar Startups In 2025
Happy Friday! This week we deep focus on the timely slew of deeptech activity under the radar of most people: lunar startups.
This Week’s Deep Focus: Lunar Startups
This week two separate spacecraft landed on the moon. Firefly Aerospace had a perfect landing with 10 NASA instruments on Sunday as seen above. The other landing was Intuitive Machines. It landed but appears to have tipped over (again) with rideshares that include a friend’s company Lonestar Data Holdings and my recent investment Lunar Outpost. Both are part of the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program to mimic the Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems (COTS) program that spurred sustainable cheaper space launch like SpaceX and Blue Origin. Many of these lunar startups have terrestrial commercializations of their technology in the near-term with the bigger future Total Addressable Market (TAM) of the lunar economy in their future. PwC estimated the lunar economy could be $170B by 2040.
But these are just two of five missions to the moon this year that include iSpace (Japan), Blue Origin, Astrobotic, and another one for Intuitive Machines. In 2026 beyond, we have even more planned lunar missions from the US, China, India, Europe, and Israel. So why all of this interest now?
First, regular and cheaper access to space via SpaceX and others has lowered the barriers to accessing the moon. Second, the moon has valuable rare earth minerals as well as Helium-3 for fueling fusion reactors. In 2020, China discovered a new lunar mineral (dubbed Changesite) that also contains Helium-3. But the confirmation of large amounts water ice in the shadowed regions in 2018 as well as the sunlit regions in 2020 meant the capability to create breathable oxygen and rocket fuel via electrolysis. Now the moon is a resource rich area that is economically viable to access with its own fuel depot. Third, space is the ultimate high ground. The moon is a geopolitical calculation. With the US freezing China out of the International Space Station years ago, the Chinese have pushed to make their own space station and a planned moon base. China is poised to explore the South Polar Region of the moon in 2026 where the largest quantities of water ice exist. In 2021, China and Russia announced a joint venture to create their own lunar base called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) to harvest and utilize lunar resources as well as to use the moon as an observation point. Phase 1 was focused on reconnaissance and ends in 2025. Next year Phase 2 begins with the construction of the moon base. With Chinese astronauts (aka Taikonauts) planning to land on the moon in 2029. So you can see why the US and others are clamoring for startups to find sustainable and low cost ways to “fly me to the moon!”
Deep Tech News & More
AI
The Inception of dLLMs: I missed this announcement while traveling for a launch party to the moon…but luckily I can just ask my friend Stefano Ermon about his startup making LLMs 10X faster via diffusion when I see him every week to play soccer together. 5 min read
LLM? No No VLM!: My friend Sara Hooker at Cohere For AI has released a multilingual multimodal Vision-Language Model (VLM) pushing the frontiers of what is possible. 4 min read
GPT 4.5 Launches: Like Grok 3, another data point that large scale can still add value for LLMs. 11 min read
Energy
New Era For Nuclear: The International Energy Association (IEA) shares a comprehensive report on the nuclear industry from the current state to how it will grow. 101 page read
Bellissimo Nucleare: Italy reverses its 1987 anti-nuclear power stance. 4 min read
Nuke Bali: Singapore’s Thorcon is building Indonesia its first nuclear reactor. 4 min read
Quantum
Quantum Computing Milestone: IonQ hits another milestone in making quantum computing scalable with high speed quantum gates. 3 min read
Quantum Security For Space Communication: A market map of the space-based quantum secure communications with a good breakdown of the leaders, challenges, and more. 6 min read
Quantum Frog: My friends over at the Quantum Biology Institute designed a first experiment to test small magnetic field effects on biology to tease out quantum mechanical biological implications. 14 min watch
Space
Space Economics: A great interview on the MECO podcast with the Harvard authors of “Space To Grow”, which is the textbook for their space economics course. 41 min listen
Finally No SLS: For anyone in the space industry, the Space Launch System (SLS) has always been an actual example of government waste (wildly over budget jobs program eating up large parts of the NASA budget) that will now free up cheaper alternatives like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others to make the Artemis program to the moon get going. 4 min read
Large Bio Structures In Space: The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is making plan to create massive biologically grown structures in space from everything to self-assembling and healing space stations modules to grid nets to deal with orbital debris. 2 min read
Synthetic Biology
CRISPR? I Hardly Know Her: You may have heard of the game changing CRISPR technique for gene editing but now we have TIGR could unlock more possibilities for gene therapy. 4 min read
Wooly (Mammoth) Mice: Colossal Biosciences has some great marketing with their attempts to resurrect extinct species while spinning out technology that makes money along the way. 4 min read
Bio Made Cheaper: My friends over at Arsenale Bioyards in Italy just raised $10M to continue their work to make biomanufacturing 90% cheaper. 3 min read
Your Future Career: Communities and Resources
You do not have to be a scientist to work at any of these companies. They need all kinds of skills like any company, especially with regards to commercialization. So don’t exclude yourself from an exciting career. For an overview and a whole host of resources for each of the deep tech areas, see this post and this other post of mine.
TWiML: I attended one the first events that This Week In Machine Learning (TWiML) ever ran and it was better than any other AI conference I had attended. Sam Charrington runs a wonderful podcast series as well as a community section with study groups on Slack.
Ignition News: Great easy to read resource for keeping up with what is going on in the nuclear industry. Plus they have announced their inaugural summit for May 20th in New York City.
Payload Space: It’s a great resource for space startups news in an easy to read format and they have events in different parts of the US.
Quantum Biology Speaker Series: Weekly speaker series hosted by my friend Prof Clarice Aiello on various topics in quantum biology.
Quantum Computing: My friend Marianna Bonanome at SandboxAQ has lots of resources from podcasts to explainers, including a new residency program for graduate students.
Space Ambition: Regular video office hours where they break down the business case for space tech for current and future founders and advisors.
Synbiobeta May 5-8 2025 in San Jose, CA: One of a few of my favorite communities run by my friend John Cumbers for synthetic biology with tracks including space medicine and brain computer interfaces. Highly recommend it if you are a student, a founder, or investor. Students can get reduced or free access if accepted to volunteer at the event or some sponsored tickets have been possible via my friends over at Nucleate. Many and increasing number of international groups including my friends over at the UK BioIndustry Association (BIA).
XPrize Design Studio: Do you have an idea of an XPrize to change the world? You can submit your idea and it might get selected to be funded by the XPrize. This year’s opportunity runs from Feb 18 to Apr 15.
XPrize Adventure Trip: My friends over at the XPrize have. a pretty cool deeptech adventure trip planned for Glasgow, Cambridge, and London. Very cool experience if you aren’t already a practionner plus the people that participate in these trips are great to know.