A growing group of tech and space executives has been publicly forecasting that human life and work will extend beyond Earth in the coming decades. The latest voice is Dylan Taylor, founder and chief executive of Voyager Technologies, who said in a Fortune interview that the next step after low-Earth-orbit operations will be a moon base in the early 2030s. Taylor said that shift could become visible to people on Earth, telling the magazine that observers would eventually be able to “see lights on the moon.”
Voyager’s forecast puts a timeline on lunar settlement
Taylor’s comments, published by Fortune in August 2026, are notable because they came from the head of a company already tied to NASA’s commercial space strategy. In the interview, Taylor said humans will “definitely” be living and working in space and that the moon, not Mars, is the next practical destination for that expansion. He placed that milestone in the “early 2030s,” according to Fortune, and said a moon base would support people living and working there.
The scale of today’s off-Earth workforce remains small. Taylor pointed to the International Space Station as proof that people are already working continuously in space, and NASA has long described the station as a continuously inhabited laboratory in low Earth orbit. That makes his lunar forecast less a statement about first presence in space than a prediction about moving from a government-led model to a larger, partly commercial one.
Voyager is part of that transition. NASA said in 2021 that Starlab, backed by Voyager and its partners, was selected under the agency’s commercial low-Earth-orbit destinations effort, and Voyager’s current materials say the project has received more than $217 million through a Space Act Agreement. NASA also announced in 2026 that it selected Voyager for a seventh private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, targeted no earlier than 2028.
Taylor’s “lights on the moon” remark was framed as a future sign of sustained human presence rather than a confirmed engineering plan. Neither Voyager nor NASA has announced a program specifically designed to create visible lunar lighting for Earth-based observers, and no public project timeline confirms when, or whether, artificial illumination on the moon would be noticeable without instruments. What is confirmed is that NASA’s Artemis program is aimed at returning astronauts to the lunar surface and building longer-term capabilities for exploration beyond low Earth orbit.
For U.S. readers, the immediate local impact is indirect but real. NASA’s commercial station work, private astronaut missions, and lunar planning support jobs tied to aerospace manufacturing, mission operations, research, and launch infrastructure, especially in states with established space industry footprints such as Florida, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, and California. Federal agencies and contractors have not released a single nationwide list connecting those jobs specifically to a future moon-base workforce.
The moon remains closer and operationally more reachable than Mars, which is central to Taylor’s argument. In the Fortune interview, he said Mars is farther away and presents greater radiation challenges, making the moon the more realistic near-term site for people to live and work. That position broadly aligns with NASA’s current sequencing, which treats lunar missions as part of the path toward eventual deeper-space exploration.
The context for Taylor’s remarks is a broader commercial shift in U.S. space policy. NASA has spent years trying to seed a private low-Earth-orbit economy that can succeed the International Space Station, while also using Artemis to push human exploration back to the moon. NASA’s commercial space station program says the goal is to maintain a continuous human presence in low Earth orbit even after the ISS era, creating infrastructure, suppliers, and operational experience that could later support missions farther out.
Taylor’s business sits directly inside that strategy. Voyager’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission describe Starlab as one of three NASA-funded competitors pursuing a commercial ISS replacement, and company materials present that work as part of a longer-term market for space infrastructure. In that sense, his comments were not a standalone forecast. They were also a public statement from an executive whose company’s growth depends on expanding human activity in space.
Other high-profile executives have made similar predictions, though on different timelines. Jeff Bezos said in 2025 that millions of people could be living in space by 2045, while public comments from Elon Musk and Sam Altman have also pointed to future jobs and settlements beyond Earth. For residents on the ground, the practical takeaway is that the moon-base idea remains aspirational today, but the commercial systems meant to make long-duration human space activity possible are already being funded, tested, and built.