There is money to be made on the Moon, but you must hurry – the Earth’s natural satellite is getting a little crowded.

In the clean rooms of satellite manufacturer SSTL, based in Guildford, Surrey, a unique spacecraft is just coming together. The Lunar Pathfinder will be one of the first communications satellites built to make money on the Moon. The spacecraft, dreamed up by the pioneering British small satellite manufacturer in the mid-2000s, will be about as big as a fridge, weighing 300kg and orbiting the Earth’s natural companion in an elliptical orbit that will take it over the lunar poles. While the satellite will zip over the north pole in a few minutes only several hundreds of kilometres above the crater-riddled surface, it will linger for hours over the south pole during the distant part of its orbital ellipse thousands of kilometres away. That’s to provide the spacecraft with an extended view of a region where a permanent human colony may spring up in the next hundred years.