The long-awaited filing for SpaceX’s potential $1.75 trillion stock market listing contains several items not normally found in an IPO prospectus: a detailed discussion of asteroid mining, Moon factories and the possibility of humanity becoming a “Kardashev Type II” civilisation.
Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company uses large sections of its S-1 filing to outline futuristic industries it believes could emerge from cheaper access to space, including “passenger and cargo transport to the Moon and Mars”, “energy production on the Moon and Mars” and “asteroid mining”.
Such activities help the company to back up its claim to have "identified the largest actionable total addressable market in human history", with a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion.
In the future markets section, the company says it plans to “pursue asteroid mining operations to extract metals and other critical resources from near-Earth and main-belt asteroids”.
The filing argues that continued advances in reusable rockets, robotics and in-orbit infrastructure could eventually create entirely new market opportunities beyond Earth, ranging from industrial manufacturing in space to large-scale AI computing powered by solar energy collected off-planet.
SpaceX also says establishing a permanent lunar presence could enable “terawatt-scale annual AI compute growth” and help create a civilisation on Earth's nearest planet – one of founder Musk's longest-held dreams.
Perhaps the most striking passage for a Wall Street IPO document references the Kardashev scale, a theory developed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev to classify advanced civilisations according to energy use.
SpaceX says humanity could one day reach “Kardashev Type II status – a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of our Sun”.
Risk factors
The prospectus does not mention extraterrestrial life or alien intelligence directly.
But it does acknowledge that many of the markets it describes “do not currently exist” and may never develop, including orbital AI computing, Moon cargo transport and asteroid mining.
The risk factors range from fairly conventional aerospace concerns to things that sound closer to speculative science fiction.
The filing also admits that in-orbit refuelling of Starship – described as essential to its Mars and asteroid ambitions – has “not yet” been demonstrated.
Elsewhere, the company said that cheaper terrestrial energy sources, including advances in nuclear power, could undermine the economics of orbital AI infrastructure.
The possibility is broadly acknowledged that humanity simply never becomes multiplanetary enough for the business model to work.
SpaceX repeatedly references lunar industrialisation, Mars settlements and asteroid resource extraction as future trillion-dollar markets, while conceding many remain entirely theoretical.