Job postings from the moon may sound like science fiction, but Voyager Technologies founder and CEO Dylan Taylor says they’re closer than most people think. Taylor told Fortune that humans will “definitely” be living and working on the moon by the early 2030s, backing similar predictions from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman.
Taylor said the industry is already scaling up from the handful of astronauts aboard the International Space Station, which has hosted humans continuously for 26 years, to something far larger.
“We’ll have a moon base, people living and working on the moon,” he said, adding that people on Earth will eventually be able to look up and see lights from lunar settlements.
He expects resource mining, orbital data centres and power grid construction to be among the first jobs, work he argues humanoid robots like Optimus cannot fully replace on their own.
Taylor’s confidence comes from experience rather than speculation. He made his fortune in electronics, finance and real estate before restarting his career at 37 to pursue space full-time, founding Space For Humanity in 2017 and Voyager two years later.
Voyager’s public listing last year pushed its valuation to $3.8 billion and made Taylor a billionaire at 53. He has since flown to space himself, on a 2021 Blue Origin flight, becoming the 606th person to leave Earth’s atmosphere.
Unlike the moon, for Taylor, Mars is more of a contingency than a destination due to the vast distance and radiation issues.
Nevertheless, he agrees with Musk regarding the need for “diversification” against dangers like an asteroid collision with Earth, but the moon may not offer sufficient distance from Earth. However, he thinks that a sufficient number of people will possess his “adventurer gene” and be able to settle a small colony on Mars in the future, even as the idea of terraforming is too distant.
Even though Musk missed his deadline for 2024, set back in 2016, he now predicts manned missions to Mars starting 2028. For Bezos, millions of people will be living in space by 2045, all thanks to robotics. On the other hand, Altman states that the current batch of college graduates can have “super well-paid” jobs outside the earth and that his generation will seem backward by their standards.
