The Space Economy Gets Cis-Lunar Love in Las Vegas

CES has been working to incorporate Space Tech companies into its annual massive show in Las Vegas for the past three years, with each iteration bringing a bit more reach, if not numbers, to the event. It’s been a rough road, all the more challenging due to historic perceptions of the event being focused on TVs and PCs rather than the challenges of the emerging space economy.  

Novaspace’s latest Space Economy Report released at CES this year estimates the global space economy will grow from $596 billion to $944 billion by 2033. With these amounts of money in play and the continued incorporation of space technology such as GPS and satellite broadband, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the trade association that operates CES, recognized the necessity to incorporate space into its largest event.  

The inaugural launch CES’ Space Tech efforts in 2022 featured a Sierra Nevada (now Sierra Space) pavilion in front of the Las Vegas Convention Center displaying a full-sized Dream Chaser mockup and highlighting its work on the Orbital Reef commercial space station. Few people saw it due to last-minute cancellations around a potential COVID surge at the end of the pandemic. 

At CES 2023, Sony featured its “STAR SPHERE space inspiration project,” a 6U CubeSat earth observation satellite built by the University of Tokyo and featuring a modified Sony camera and optics.  Part Sony technology showcase and part STEAM inspiration through collaboration with five artists producing work inspired from images and video delivered by the camera, STAR SPHERE didn’t reach its full potential due to a problem in its attitude control system.  

CES 2023 also included panels on investing in space, space technology, and technology development in low earth orbit, including a discussion with P&G about developing a version of Tide for use in space for astronaut laundry.  

Fast forward to CES 2025, where Toyota casually announced during its press conference that it is putting over $44 million into Interstellar Technologies Inc., a Japanese startup developing orbital launch vehicles. “We are exploring rockets too, because the future of mobility shouldn’t be limited to just earth or just one car company, for that matter,” a Toyoda executive said according to a CNBC report.  

Interstellar’s press release says it will incorporate Toyota’s expertise into its rocket manufacturing to make it a high-quality, cost-effective, and scalable process, one necessary to contribute its services for Japanese government targets for a domestic launch capability of around 30 launches annually by the early 3030s. The startup has been collaborating with Toyota since 2020 with personnel exchanges, with suitable progress presumably leading to the auto company’s investment.  

Beyond launch, first-time exhibitor Komatsu unveiled a conceptual robotic lunar construction excavator that could be used for construction and mining tasks to support a crewed base on the Moon. Development of the machine, currently in the modeling stage, is being funded by the Japanese government. If built and sent to the lunar surface, it would presumably be an in-kind contribution to a multi-national exploration effort and support commercial resource mining operations when those opportunities emerge.  

But while Komatsu’s big machine stood out on the Las Vegas Convention Center’s exhibit floor, younger companies also had their eye on commercial opportunities for lunar and general space operations, patiently grinding away a few miles distant at CES’s Eureka Park section, located in the Venetian’s Convention Center’s drab low-ceiling basement area.  

Eureka Park is not a place for the weak. Eager start-ups and larger companies floating new ideas on the cheap are packed into rows of 10x10 booths separated by narrow aisles, resulting in crowd congestion and muttered complaints in dozens of different languages as attendees from all over the world move from one exhibitor to another, usually at less than a walking pace in the deeper parts of the mazes.  

Based in Reno, Nevada-based Ecoatoms was showing its A.N.I.M.A. (Apparatus for Nominal Integration with Minimal Adaptations) payload interface system to facilitate plug-and-play integration for launch. A.N.I.M.A. is designed to take physical and biological payloads from suborbital to lunar with minimal adaptations. In June 2004, Ecoatoms was one of three winners of NASA’s TechLeap Price – Universal Payload Interface Challenge.  

Having flown suborbital payloads on a Blue Origin New Shepard, Ecoatoms will fly suborbital and orbital missions each quarter in 2025, clocking more flight time to increase the TRL and paving the way for potentially flying A.N.I.M.A. containers to the moon by leveraging available commercial space on an Artemis robotic lander, including Lunar Ecosystem for Terrestrial Organisms (L.E.T.O.), an Ecoatoms payload that houses different microorganisms for exposure to lunar conditions.  

Also representing space tech in Eureka Park was Miami-based Mission Space, a company providing real-time space weather monitoring and forecasting. The first two Zohar satellites of a planned 24-satellite constellation to collect data for more precise forecasting will be launched in 2025.  Space weather plays a key role in affecting everything from stable electricity delivery to launch operations and the longevity of satellites and personnel in orbit and on the Moon. 

Before readers go and start planning trips to CES 2026 in earnest, they should realize that the vast majority of news cranked out by an estimated 5,000 or so journalists was around consumer devices and services. It may be quite a few years before CES builds sufficient exhibiter mass and sessions in space tech to merit a January trip to Las Vegas with 130,000 or so other attendees.

For the immediate future, you’ll find more cis-lunar subject matter experts and commercial space economic discussions together in Orlando at the end of January for SpaceCom. But, CES will continue to bare watching in the years to come.  

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