Marketplace Morning reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. The path to a lunar economy seems to be going through Colorado. From American public

media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

Colorado's front range is home to a bunch of the state's big cities like Denver, Boulder,

and Colorado Springs, and the region has the densest concentration of space industry workers

in the country. That's in part because of Colorado's long history with military aerospace

development, which has helped seed a thriving space start-up scene. In the last decade commercial

rocket companies like SpaceX have dramatically brought down the cost of going into space,

like by as much as 90 percent. And that's meant brand new opportunities for small niche companies

that want in on this emerging market as Colorado Public Radio's Dan Boyce reports.

Not too many Coloradans have spent an afternoon lounging at crater beach in the city of Arvada.

That's probably because it's inside a warehouse filled with about 30 tons of sand and artificial

boulders. On this day, a mini lunar rover about the size of a shoe box rolls around the fake beach.

It's testing autopilot software and was developed by a space start-up called lunar outpost.

30-year-old Justin Cyrus is the CEO. His career started with commercial space giant Lockheed Martin.

But I wanted to be in an area of space where we can innovate more and move a little bit quicker.

Lunar outpost has about 70 employees and it's one of many small companies competing for a slice of

the industry. Bob Cone is the chair of the Colorado Space Business Roundtable. To me, it's a

renaissance in space right now. He's been in the field for more than three decades.

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