What if a lunar race for helium-3 opens a new frontier?
A lunar resource race is primarily a defense-budget read: Lockheed, Northrop and RTX firm on order-book optimism, with a faint industrial-demand tag. No deliverable supply for years, so it's a contractor-sentiment and policy-funding story, not a metals-price event. Rhymes with prior space-program funding waves (Artemis appropriations) that lifted primes on backlog visibility. Forward angle: helium-3/rare-earth lunar economics are speculative, so this is a multi-year optionality theme for defense/space primes, not a near-term commodity trade.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 3–10 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A rare-earth / helium-3 lunar resource race opens a new strategic frontier. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Defense spending ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.