Lessons for Lunar Extraction, Cislunar Governance, and Autonomous Frontier Economies
By George Pullen, Chief Economist, MilkyWayEconomy
For more than two decades, discussions of The Space Economy have been dominated by ambition rather than arithmetic. Launch cadence, national prestige, and speculative resource narratives have substituted for hard questions about cost, governance, and survivability. In this essay I advances a simple, corrective thesis: the Arctic is not a metaphor for the Moon; it is the economic rehearsal. Any actor that cannot operate sustainably in the Arctic will not succeed on the Moon or in cislunar space.
The Arctic compresses the realities that frontier economies cannot escape. Distance magnifies cost. Infrastructure decays faster than models predict. Labor is scarce, expensive, and unreliable. Energy is intermittent and unforgiving. Supply chains fail quietly, then catastrophically. These conditions are not unique to space. They already exist on Earth’s northern edge. The Moon does not introduce new problems; it removes the political, logistical, and psychological buffers that have allowed bad assumptions to persist.
The first lesson concerns resource extraction. Arctic history shows that geology rarely determines success. Logistics, energy availability, substitution risk, and downstream demand do. Romantic narratives about scarcity repeatedly collapse under cost curves and alternative supply chains. The same will hold true for lunar resources; whether water ice, regolith-derived oxygen, or speculative commodities like helium-3. Lunar extraction will only be viable where resources are consumed in situ to support operations, mobility, or manufacturing. If a lunar mining model requires sustained Earth-side justification, it is not an industrial strategy...it is a subsidy request.
Second, the Arctic clarifies the nature of governance in extreme environments. Flags, declarations and sovereignty rhetoric matter far less than maintenance authority, insurance frameworks, and traffic coordination. Governance emerges from infrastructure, not ideology. In cislunar space, power will accrue to those who define operating standards: refueling protocols, orbital traffic norms, liability regimes, salvage rules, and autonomous dispute resolution. Cislunar space will not be governed like territory. It will be governed like a network.
Third, the Arctic exposes the limits of human-centric economic design. Modern Arctic operations succeed by minimizing human presence, not maximizing it. Automation, remote supervision, and machine-led maintenance outperform labor-intensive models in cost, safety, and reliability. The Moon will extend this logic. Permanent lunar activity will be thinly staffed, machine-first, and operationally indifferent to sentiment. The Moon is not a settlement frontier. It is an operating system.
Fourth, energy is the economy. Arctic failures almost always trace back to fragile power assumptions: seasonality, storage shortfalls, or centralized dependence. The same constraint will dominate lunar economics. Power generation, storage, and distribution are not supporting functions; they are the value chain. Control energy autonomy, and everything else follows.
The Arctic–Lunar Continuum functions as a strategic filter. It distinguishes actors who understand frontier economics from those projecting terrestrial habits into hostile environments. The earliest lunar failures will not be technological. They will be economic misreads...imported assumptions about labor, markets, governance, and cost tolerance that Arctic history has already disproven.
The lessons are not speculative. They are already written...in ice.
GEORGE PULLEN’S OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER
This essay on the "Polar–Lunar Continuum" does not relate to my official position with the US Government. In accordance with 18 U.S.C. § 209 the teaching, speaking and writing around this collection of essays are not undertaken as part of my official duties. I was not invited by a related party to write on these topics, but rather took the initiative to write on the Polar-Lunar Continum given my personal interest, research and expertise in the topic and as a continuation of my research on Blockchain and The Space Economy. Members of the public should know clearly that this is not a product of any agency's official speech or official position but undertaken as the exercise of my free speech as a citizen of the United States.
Further, the content does not relate to my official duties because it is not a topic of my presently assigned duties as a Senior Economist for the CFTC or any of my duties within the past year. The information conveyed also does not draw upon nonpublic CFTC information or substantially on ideas or official data that are nonpublic information as defined in § 2635.