Billionaire Predicts Humans Will Live and Work on the Moon by the 2030s
Voyager Technologies founder and CEO Dylan Taylor predicts that humans will commute to the moon in the early 2030s, joining tech leaders Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman in forecasting a future where people live and work in space.
The 2030s Moon Base Timeline and Labor Realities
In an interview with Fortune, Taylor outlined a timeline that places commercial moon bases and routine space commutes in the early 2030s. “We’ll have a moon base, people living and working on the moon,” Taylor stated. “You’ll be able to look up at the moon and see lights on the moon.”
While a small fraction of humanity has lived and worked aboard the International Space Station for 26 years, the commercial space sector is now building the infrastructure to scale operations for the general public.
As the commercial space race accelerates, industry leaders are detailing the specific labor markets that will emerge beyond Earth orbit. Taylor noted that early off-world employment will center on resource mining, orbital data centers, and power grid construction. He argued that these tasks cannot be fully automated by artificial intelligence or humanoid hardware. “You’re not going to be able to program Optimus to do everything on the moon,” Taylor explained. “You’re going to have to have humans to figure it out.”
Financial Backing and Public Market Valuation
Taylor’s market outlook is anchored by his own entrepreneurial footprint within the aerospace sector. Having made millions before age 30 through ventures in electronics, finance, banking, and real estate, he returned to the sector in 2007 as an angel investor in Space Adventures and an early investor in Relativity Space alongside Mark Cuban. In 2017, he founded Space For Humanity, a nonprofit purchasing commercial spaceflight seats for non-traditional astronauts. Two years later, he launched Voyager Technologies.
That bet culminated last year when Voyager went public on the New York Stock Exchange, achieving a $3.8 billion valuation that elevated Taylor to billionaire status at age 53, a financial milestone verified by Fortune through a review of his records. Voyager is currently developing the replacement structure for the International Space Station under multiple NASA contracts. Taylor himself experienced the operational reality of commercial flight during a 2021 Blue Origin mission, becoming the 606th human in space.
Contrasting Strategies for Mars Colonization
While the moon serves as the primary commercial stepping stone, Mars remains a secondary, risk-mitigation objective for industry billionaires. Taylor views the Red Planet as a backup plan rather than an immediate residential hub due to massive transit distances and severe radiation hazards. “Just because it’s so much further away. Radiation is so much more of a bigger problem,” Taylor noted. He shares SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s perspective regarding planetary diversification against potential cosmic disasters, though he cautioned that terraforming Mars remains a distant horizon.
Musk, co-founder and CEO of the $1.8 trillion SpaceX, has targeted Mars human missions as early as 2028, though historical projections have faced delays, including a 2016 target for 2024 that was not met. Meanwhile, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos predicted at Italian Tech Week 2025 that millions of people will live in space by 2045, with automated systems handling surface operations on the moon. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has similarly projected that upcoming college graduates will secure high-paying, specialized careers in the space sector within the decade.