In 2016 United Launch Alliance released their plan for 1,000 people living and working in Earth-moon space roughly 30 years from now. Called the “Cislunar 1,000 Vision”, the plan is based on the simple idea that transportation from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to anything beyond Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) can have significant cost savings if the fuel necessary to transfer the payload from LEO to the desired orbit is delivered to LEO from the Moon (e.g. down the gravity well) rather than from the Earth’s surface up (e.g. up the gravity well).

ULA envisions four major steps:

The interesting development in the past year has been that ULA has publicly acknowledged what many in the industry had only heard as rumors: that the company had signed MOUs for fuel at LEO for the first stage of the plan for around $1 billion. The company felt strongly enough about the plan that it was willing to act as a ‘market maker’ by signing agreements with fuel developers that those developers could use to raise funds.

Regardless of whether ULA’s vision unfolds as they are planning, their economic statement has already affected national space policy and how money is being deployed in the commercial sector. The best summary of ULAs plan can be found in a Youtube video they produced last year: