The Moon, briefly relevant

Let's talk about the Moon for a second. I promise this will make sense.

The Moon's south pole has five, maybe six permanently shadowed craters that have been colder than Pluto for four billion years. Nobody put that cold there. Nobody maintains it. Nobody invoices anyone for it. That is, in the most literal sense, free infrastructure. Five craters.

For context: fewer good bagel shops than exist on a single New York City block. The race to claim them runs under a 1967 treaty forbidding ownership, led by one company with the only rocket that can get there.

What's interesting is how it arrived in public: as a quantum computing argument.

November 2025: Musk posts "Quantum computing is best done in the permanently shadowed craters on the Moon."
January 2025, for reference: "The Moon is a distraction. No, we're going straight to Mars."
February 2026: SpaceX shifts to a "self-growing city" on the Moon.
April 2026: SpaceX confidentially files for a $75 billion IPO at a $1.75 trillion valuation.

The physics is partially true. The polar craters stay around 40 Kelvin. Genuine vacuum, near-zero vibration, almost no electromagnetic noise. Measurably better than anything on Earth.

But...quantum computers don't need 40 Kelvin. Superconducting qubits, the kind IBM and Google run, operate at 10 to 20 millikelvin inside dilution refrigerators.

The Moon's craters are 2,000 times too warm for the chip. The refrigerator is still mandatory, still large, still power-hungry. And at roughly $1 million per kilogram to the lunar surface, the transport bill alone runs $500 million to $3 billion before hardware, shielding, or the 384,000-kilometer gap to your nearest technician.

That is not nature doing the work. That is renting the coldest storage unit in the solar system and discovering everything you actually need ships separately.

Tim Farrar, president of TMF Associates, at a January 2026 roundtable: "I think the only way you justify it is through belief in Elon Musk."

By February 2026, SpaceX had acquired xAI, then burning $1 billion per month, at a combined $1.25 trillion valuation. Orbital data centers. Lunar quantum computing. Space-based AI.

Together, they are the S-1 before the S-1 is written.

Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern valuation professor, to Reuters this month: "They've made the decision already that SpaceX is a great buy. Now they're looking for ways to justify it."

The US-China Economic Security Review Commission: "Whoever leads in quantum and AI will control the encryption of the digital economy." Five craters. One rocket. The Outer Space Treaty says no sovereignty. The Artemis Accords created "safety zones" that are definitely not sovereignty. China rejected the Accords.

Musk called the Moon a distraction in January 2025. By April 2026, SpaceX filed for a $1.75 trillion IPO. Somewhere in between, the Moon became physics.

And physics, once established, tends to come with a property line.