Lunar and exploration mission insurance

Lunar and exploration mission insurance designates the emerging cover for missions to the Moon, Mars and deep space, driven by the renewed public and private space activity and projects of exploration and exploitation beyond Earth orbit. These missions present an extreme risk profile: highly technically difficult landings illustrated by several recent failures of private modules, hostile environments, long durations, absence of recourse in case of failure, and above all a near-absence of loss history that makes pricing largely exploratory. The insurance market positions itself cautiously on this segment, often through bespoke cover and limited capacity, owing to technical uncertainty and the difficulty of modeling success probabilities on unprecedented missions. For the underwriter, these missions represent both an innovation frontier and a fundamental challenge: how to insure a rare risk, with very high potential severity and no law of large numbers. Lunar insurance illustrates the gradual extension of the insurable perimeter as space activity pushes its frontiers.