The Space Economy: Launch, Satellites, Defence and the Race Beyond Earth

The space economy is every dollar earned from putting things into orbit, building them, operating them, and selling what they do. That includes rockets and satellites, but also the much larger set of businesses that use satellite signals: navigation chips in phones, satellite television, weather data, and military communications. Counting all of it is a matter of definition, which is why different trackers publish different totals.

The Space Foundation, a US non-profit, released its latest State of the Global Space Economy report on 21 July 2026 and put the 2025 total at $686 billion, up 12% from 2024 and a five-year compound growth rate approaching 10% (Space Foundation, as summarised by Payload, 22 July 2026). Its earlier report, published 22 July 2025, had put 2024 at a then-record $613 billion. Novaspace, a European consultancy, puts 2025 at about $626.4 billion in the 12th edition of its Space Economy Report and projects the market will pass $1 trillion by 2034 (Novaspace, as reported by industry press, 2025). The roughly $60 billion gap between the two 2025 totals is a scope and method difference, not a disagreement about facts, but the sources reviewed here do not itemise it.

The Space Foundation counts $544.3 billion of 2025 revenue as commercial (79% of the total) and about $141 billion as government space budgets across 53 national budgets, up 7.4% year on year. The United States accounts for 57% of that government spending. The remaining dollars sit with China, Europe, Japan, India, Russia and a growing list of smaller states; the report summary reviewed here does not give a dollar split for China or Europe, and Chinese figures are in any case hard to verify.

Inside the commercial total, the single biggest block is positioning, navigation and timing, known as PNT. GPS and its competitors (Europe's Galileo, China's BeiDou, Russia's GLONASS) tell phones, aircraft, ships, farm machinery and financial networks where they are and what time it is. The Space Foundation puts PNT at about 41% of commercial revenue, and with the ground equipment that uses it, more than three quarters. In plain terms, the space economy is mostly the economy of using space signals on the ground, not the economy of launching things.

That matters for investors and readers because the glamorous end of the business, launch, is small. Launch is the fastest-growing category in the Space Foundation data in 2025 (up 49.4%), but from a small base. Satellite manufacturing grew 67.2%, and in-space servicing and space situational awareness (tracking objects in orbit) each grew 42.9%.

Government spending is the anchor customer for launch, exploration and security satellites. In the Space Foundation summary, global military space spending is projected to pass $150 billion for the first time, and non-US military space spending is projected to nearly double in 2027 to $31.5 billion, partly because Germany has pledged about $41 billion in defence spending through 2030 (the summary links this to space, but the exact scope of that pledge is not spelled out, so treat it as indicative). A US national security space figure of roughly $126 billion for fiscal 2027 is also quoted in the same coverage; it appears to be a broad measure that includes classified and missile-defence lines, and it is not the same as the Space Force budget alone.

Private capital is also flowing. The Space Foundation reports more than $12 billion of private investment in 2025 and expects 2026 to exceed it. The 2026 listing of SpaceX on the Nasdaq (covered in chapters 2 and 9) changed the scale of the public market for the sector in a single day.

• Definitions differ. Novaspace and the Space Foundation draw the boundary around the space economy in different places, so compare trends within one source rather than levels across sources.
• Revenue is not profit. Most of the $686 billion is revenue from products and services that use space, including ground equipment, and is spread across thousands of firms.
• Government figures mix budgets (planned) and spending (actual), and currencies and purchasing power differ by country.
• Chinese and Russian figures are estimates based on limited disclosure.

A useful mental model is three layers. At the bottom is the access layer: rockets, launch sites and the companies that build and fly them. In the middle is the infrastructure layer: satellites, constellations, ground stations and stations in orbit. At the top is the application layer: the navigation, communications, imagery, weather and defence services that customers actually pay for. Money is largest at the top and growth is fastest in the lower two, which is where the next chapters spend their time.

A second feature of the structure is who the customers are. A large share of non-government demand is derived from a handful of consumer-scale businesses: satellite broadband (Starlink), satellite television and radio, and phone navigation. A large share of government demand comes from the defence and intelligence budgets of a few countries. That concentration on both sides shapes the risk discussion in chapter 8.

An orbital launch is a rocket flight that places a payload into orbit around the Earth or beyond. SpaceNews, republished by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics on 5 January 2026, counted 324 orbital launch attempts worldwide in 2025, a record, excluding five Starship test flights that did not reach orbit and three suborbital Electron HASTE flights. Jonathan McDowell's launch catalogue, which includes those five Starship flights, lists 329 launches, 318 successes and 11 failures. Either way, about one launch a day.

By rocket family the picture is even more concentrated. SpaceX's Falcon 9 flew 165 times in 2025 with no failures, about half of all launches worldwide. China's Long March family flew 69 times. Rocket Lab's small Electron rocket flew 18 times. The remaining Western rockets fly rarely: Atlas V five times, Vulcan once, Ariane 6 four times, and Blue Origin's New Glenn twice.

Two features of 2026 stand out. First, McDowell's catalogue lists 256 orbital launch attempts from 1 January to 31 October 2026, with 249 successes and 7 failures (counting Starship flights, as it does for 2025), which is on pace for a year similar to or slightly below 2025. Second, the Falcon family's 121 launches so far is below its 2025 pace. SpaceX's quarterly report shows 110 Falcon launches in the first nine months of 2026 against 124 a year earlier, with fewer customer launches (29 against 36) and fewer internal Starlink launches (81 against 88), and does not say why. One plausible factor, which is an inference and not a sourced fact, is SpaceX shifting Starlink deployment toward its Starship vehicle.

The big change in launch is that the most expensive part of the rocket, the first stage with its engines, now lands and flies again. SpaceX landed its first orbital booster in December 2015 and reflew one in March 2017. SpaceX's prospectus reports that by 31 March 2026 Falcon 9 had flown about 620 times with a mission success rate above 99%, over 570 booster landings and more than 540 launches on flight-proven rockets, and that its boosters are qualified for up to 40 flights (SpaceX Form 424B4, 12 June 2026). Cadence reached about three Falcon 9 missions a week by May 2026.

What is striking is that SpaceX's published list price has not fallen. SpaceX's Capabilities and Services page lists $74 million for 2026, up from $70 million in 2025 and $67 million in 2022 (as reported by Spaceflight Now, 24 February 2026). What fell is the cost per kilogram relative to the past, and SpaceX's cost to itself, which it does not publish. Dividing the 2026 list price by the payload to low Earth orbit gives roughly $3,360 per kg expended (the 22,000 kg SpaceX lists for a fully expendable Falcon 9) and roughly $4,230 per kg at the 17,500 kg that Elon Musk called a Falcon 9 payload record on X on 26 February 2024. Those are the reader-derived list-price numbers, not SpaceX's internal cost, and they are an upper bound for the company's real costs. For context, the Space Shuttle is commonly estimated at tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram, though this review did not verify a precise figure.

• Rocket Lab (US/New Zealand): Electron is a small-satellite rocket, flying 18 times in 2025 and 16 times in 2026 to 31 October (orbital launches only). The larger, partly reusable Neutron (about 13,000 kg to low Earth orbit when reused, per Rocket Lab's annual report) was delayed again on 14 October 2026, after small voids were found in carbon composite layers in the first stage's forward propellant dome; Rocket Lab now expects the first launch in 2027 (Rocket Lab release and Form 8-K, 14 October 2026; Light Reading).
• Blue Origin (US): New Glenn reached orbit on its first flight in January 2025 and on its second flight on 13 November 2025 landed its booster at sea, the first non-SpaceX orbital booster landing. In 2026 it suffered a failed upper stage on 19 April (the AST SpaceMobile BlueBird 7 satellite was lost) and a static-fire explosion on 28 May that damaged its Cape Canaveral pad. Blue Origin said in August that the cause was the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines and that modified valve hardware was being made (Blue Origin update, 5 August 2026).
• United Launch Alliance (US): the Boeing and Lockheed Martin joint venture flew six times in 2025 (one Vulcan, five Atlas V) and Vulcan has flown once in 2026 to 31 October. Long-time chief executive Tory Bruno resigned on 22 December 2025 and was reported to have joined Blue Origin. ULA won 19 national security missions worth about $5.4 billion in the April 2025 NSSL Phase 3 Lane 2 awards (U.S. Space Force).
• Arianespace (Europe): Ariane 6 flew four times in 2025 and four times in 2026 to 31 October, including its first four-booster Ariane 64 variant on 12 February 2026 carrying 32 Amazon Leo satellites. Amazon has raised its total Ariane 6 purchases to 24 launches.
• China: 92 launches in 2025 and 76 in 2026 to 31 October, with state rockets (Long March) and a growing private sector. Zhuque-3 reached orbit and landed its first stage on 18 August 2026 (UTC), and Long March 10B made its maiden flight on 10 July 2026, with its first stage caught by cables on an offshore barge (McDowell's launch log; Spaceflight Now, 19 August 2026).
• India: five launches in 2025 and four in 2026 so far, including a PSLV failure in January 2026. Skyroot's private Vikram-1 reached orbit on 18 July 2026. ISRO's LVM3 launched AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 6 in December 2025.

In the US national security launch programme (NSSL Phase 3 Lane 2), awarded in April 2025 for about 54 missions worth about $13.7 billion, SpaceX received 28 missions, ULA 19 and Blue Origin 7 (U.S. Space Force, Space Systems Command, 4 April 2025; SpaceX prospectus). In 2026 to 31 October, Falcon accounts for 121 of the 151 US launches counted, about 80%. That is a dependency the US Space Force has long worried about, and is part of why it keeps ULA and Blue Origin in the programme even though both have had slower cadence.

SpaceX's Starship is the fully reusable super-heavy rocket intended to cut cost per kilogram again by an order of magnitude and carry the next generation of Starlink satellites. Flight 12 on 22 May 2026 was the debut of the V3 vehicle, and Flight 14 on 28 September 2026 was the first to reach orbit, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites (one ship engine shut down early, and mission managers brought the ship down early north of Hawaii) (Space.com, May 2026; Spaceflight Now, 28 September 2026). Whether Starship becomes a routine and cheap launcher is the central unknown of the whole industry: ship-to-ship refuelling in orbit, which the Moon landing plan requires, was not described in the sources reviewed here.

A constellation is a large group of satellites working together as one network. In low Earth orbit (a few hundred to about 2,000 km above the surface), a satellite crosses the sky in minutes, so thousands are needed to give continuous coverage. Starlink, SpaceX's network, had over 11,100 satellites in orbit in October 2026 (SpaceX Form 10-Q, 22 October 2026), and SpaceX's prospectus put its share at roughly 75% of all active manoeuvrable satellites as of 31 March 2026.

Subscribers have grown from 2.3 million in December 2023 to 13.6 million by September 2026. Service is sold in 167 countries, territories and other markets (SpaceX Form 10-Q, June 2026). Average monthly revenue per user fell from $99 in 2023 to $81 in 2025, $66 in the first quarter of 2026 and $69 in the third quarter, reflecting cheaper plans and more customers in lower-income markets.

Starlink's economics changed the sector. SpaceX's Connectivity segment, which is mainly Starlink, had revenue of $7.6 billion and operating income of $2.0 billion in 2024. In 2025 it reported $11.4 billion of revenue and $4.4 billion of operating income, and for the third quarter of 2026 it reported $5.25 billion of revenue and $2.37 billion of operating income (SpaceX Form 424B4, 12 June 2026, and Form 10-Q, 22 October 2026). By contrast, SpaceX consolidated reported 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion, an operating loss of $2.6 billion and a net loss of $4.9 billion, after the February 2026 all-stock merger with its xAI artificial intelligence business was reflected in the segment reporting (see chapter 9).

• Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper): 396 production satellites launched by 2 July 2026 against an FCC-authorised 3,236, with early service expected but no confirmed general launch date. The FCC originally required half the constellation (1,618) by 30 July 2026; in early June 2026 it waived that milestone but said it would temporarily demote the spectrum priority of satellites launched after the deadline. Amazon bought about 92 launches for over $10 billion across ULA, Arianespace, Blue Origin and SpaceX and added more in 2026. It announced in April 2026 that it will acquire the satellite operator Globalstar, with closing expected in 2027; one source put the price at $11.57 billion, which was not confirmed from a primary source.
• Eutelsat OneWeb (Europe): 656 first-generation low-orbit satellites launched between 2019 and 2024 (McDowell's launch log), alongside the group's geostationary fleet. The group reported revenue of about 1.24 billion euros for the year to 30 June 2026, an operating loss of about 220 million euros and a net loss of about 457 million euros (Eutelsat results release, 7 August 2026). After the 2025 capital increase the French state is its largest shareholder at 29.65%, followed by Bharti (17.88%) and the UK government (10.89%) (Eutelsat, November 2025). Its strategic value to European governments is as a sovereign alternative to Starlink, not as a profit engine.
• China: Guowang (China SatNet) plans over 13,000 satellites and had launched 231 low-orbit satellites by 25 October 2026 (McDowell's launch log), with 126 launched in 2025 and 95 in 2026 so far. A second network, Qianfan or Thousand Sails, had launched 257 satellites in 17 launches by the same date. Chinese constellations rely on Long March rockets and are still far from continuous global coverage.

Traditional satellite broadband needs a dish. Direct-to-cell lets an ordinary phone talk to a satellite, which requires radio spectrum that phones already use. SpaceX started with T-Mobile in the US using T-Mobile's mid-band PCS spectrum and text messaging only, then rebranded the service Starlink Mobile in March 2026. In September 2025 SpaceX agreed to acquire EchoStar's AWS-4 and AWS-H spectrum; press coverage in April 2026 described the deal as about $17 billion. In October 2026 it announced it would buy nationwide 800 MHz spectrum from Grain Management (price not disclosed in the sources reviewed).

AST SpaceMobile is the independent rival. It had BlueBirds 1 to 5 in orbit from 12 September 2024, launched BlueBird 6 on an Indian LVM3 rocket in December 2025, and lost BlueBird 7 on 19 April 2026 when the New Glenn upper stage placed it in too low an orbit and it had to be deorbited. It lists AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone and Saudi Arabia's stc group as partners, expects long-term access to up to 45 MHz of lower mid-band (L-band) spectrum in the US and Canada under its Ligado agreement, subject to regulatory approval, reported 2025 revenue of about $71 million and a net loss of about $461 million, and plans more than 60 Block 2 satellites, with about 45 targeted for early 2027 (AST SpaceMobile Form 10-K and Form 10-Q). The business model is wholesale: carriers sell the service.

Spectrum is the choke point. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) allocates frequencies, and national regulators such as the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) license operators and impose deployment milestones. Spectrum rights near phone frequencies are scarce and valuable, which is why a satellite company would pay billions for them. The FCC waiver for Amazon Leo shows the regulator both enforces milestones and can soften them.

A constellation is expensive to build, launch and replace (satellites last roughly five to seven years), so the model works only if cost per launched satellite falls and revenue per satellite rises. Starlink has both a cost edge (its own rockets) and scale. Rivals pay a market price for launch, many from competitors, which is why Amazon booked launches on four different providers. A constellation that cannot reach scale has high fixed costs and little revenue, which explains the heavy losses at the smaller operators.

Earth observation (EO) satellites take pictures and measurements of the planet: optical images, radar images that see through cloud, radio-frequency signals and thermal data. The raw output is cheap to take and hard to turn into answers. The business is therefore shifting from selling images to selling subscriptions, analytics and monitoring services, with governments as the largest and most reliable customers.

Customers use EO for national security (watching military build-ups, tracking ships and aircraft, battle damage assessment), for commodities (oil storage, crop health), for insurance and climate risk, for infrastructure and mapping, and for disaster response. The Ukraine war made the value of frequent commercial imagery very visible to Western governments, which increased interest in buying it from commercial vendors.

Planet operates a large fleet of small imaging satellites that photograph the whole land surface of Earth daily. For its fiscal year ended 31 January 2026, Planet reported record revenue of $307.7 million, up 26%; backlog of about $900 million, up about 79%; adjusted EBITDA of $15.5 million; free cash flow of $52.9 million; and a GAAP net loss of $246.9 million that it attributed mainly to warrant revaluation (Planet Labs, fourth-quarter and fiscal 2026 results, 19 March 2026, filed with the SEC). Guidance for fiscal 2027 is revenue of $415 million to $440 million.

The backlog matters because a large part of it comes from multi-year government and sovereign contracts. Planet said that 37% of backlog applies to the next 12 months and 67% to the next 24 months. A backlog that large against $307.7 million of annual revenue is roughly three years of sales, but the company's own revenue recognition schedule shows it is not all near-term.

Maxar Intelligence, the successor to DigitalGlobe, flies the highest-resolution commercial optical satellites. Advent International took Maxar private in a $6.4 billion cash deal that closed in May 2023. On 1 October 2025, the intelligence business was rebranded Vantor and the satellite-building arm became Lanteris. Vantor's constellation includes the six WorldView Legion satellites, launched in pairs in May 2024, August 2024 and February 2025 (McDowell's launch log), alongside WorldView-1, WorldView-2, WorldView-3 and GeoEye-1 (Vantor). Because Vantor is privately held, it does not publish audited financials, so this report quotes no revenue figure for it.

Lanteris, in turn, was announced on 4 November 2025 to be bought by Intuitive Machines from Advent's Vantor Holdings for $800 million in cash and stock; the deal closed on 13 January 2026. That is a useful data point: the satellite manufacturing arm of a once-large public company was valued at under a billion dollars.

BlackSky (Nasdaq: BKSY) sells high-revisit imagery and analytics, with large reliance on government customers; the sources reviewed here did not return current financial figures for it, so none are quoted. Radar specialists such as Capella Space and Iceye, and radio-frequency sensing firms, address use cases where cloud cover or darkness defeats optical sensors. The tracking-layer satellites of the Space Development Agency, discussed in chapter 5, are military EO of a different kind, built to detect missile launches. EO is also an area where Rocket Lab and others are moving into spacecraft building, not only launch.

• Government concentration: a handful of buyers, such as the US National Reconnaissance Office, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and allied ministries of defence, account for a large share of revenue, and budget decisions can change quickly.
• Commoditisation: more satellites produce more pixels, and commodity imagery prices tend to fall.
• Analytics are the hard part: customers pay for answers, not pixels, and artificial intelligence tools lower the barrier for anyone to analyse imagery.
• Policy risk: governments can limit what commercial firms may sell, as happened to resolution and access in conflict zones.
• Capital intensity: satellites must be replaced, and delays in launch or manufacturing push out revenue.

The bull case is that governments want sovereign access to frequent imagery, which creates multi-year contracts. Planet's backlog growth is the clearest public sign of that in the data reviewed here. The bear case is that a high backlog is only worth what it converts into, and conversion depends on satellites reaching orbit, on government budgets and on competitive pricing.

The US Space Force was created on 20 December 2019 as the sixth armed service. Reporting on the fiscal 2026 defence appropriations bill by SpaceNews put the service at about $26 billion in discretionary funding and roughly $40 billion when mandatory money from the 2025 reconciliation law is included; other coverage cited up to about $42 billion (SpaceNews and Air and Space Forces, 2026). The Space Foundation summary quoted in chapter 1 says global military space spending is projected to pass $150 billion in 2026 to 2027.

Golden Dome is a planned multi-layer defence against ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles, announced by President Trump on 20 May 2025 after a January 2025 executive order. It would use thousands of satellites carrying sensors and space-based interceptors, which are weapons that destroy a missile soon after launch, while it is still in its boost phase. The White House first cited $175 billion and a three-year timeline. In March 2026 the programme head, General Michael Guetlein, said the estimate rose by $10 billion to $185 billion because of added space capabilities, for an objective architecture that delivers out to about 2035 (Defense One, 17 March 2026).

Funding enacted so far is smaller than the headline. The 2025 reconciliation law provided about $24.4 billion available through fiscal 2029, and Congress passed the fiscal 2026 defence appropriations bill on 3 February 2026 with about $13.4 billion for Golden Dome-related space and missile defence. SpaceNews reported that officials said the money is spread across Missile Defense Agency and Space Force programme elements, so tracking the total is hard.

Awards are secret or opaque in places. The Wall Street Journal reported on 31 October 2025 that SpaceX would receive about $2 billion for a 600-satellite constellation targeting missiles, and small space-based interceptor prototype awards were first made quietly in late 2025. On 24 April 2026 Space Systems Command named 12 companies holding agreements worth up to $3.2 billion combined: Anduril, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics Mission Systems, GITAI USA, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Quindar, Raytheon, Sci-Tec, SpaceX, True Anomaly and Turion Space (DefenseScoop, 24 April 2026). The Missile Defense Agency qualified 1,014 offerors for a contracting vehicle that could total $151 billion over 10 years (Breaking Defense, 2 December 2025). On 13 July 2026 the Space Development Agency announced two agreements worth about $1.75 billion for 36 Tranche 3 tracking satellites, with L3Harris (about $955 million, 18 missile-defence satellites) and Sierra Space ($798 million, 18 missile-warning and tracking satellites) (SDA release, 13 July 2026).

The Space Development Agency (SDA) is the Pentagon body buying many small satellites rather than a few exquisite ones. Its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture is organised in tranches, each a batch of satellites launched roughly two years apart. A fourth launch of Tranche 1 transport satellites on 10 October 2026 carried 21 Northrop Grumman satellites on a Falcon 9 and brought the Tranche 1 total in orbit to 84; SDA says Tranche 1 will give initial warfighting capability from 2027 (SDA release, 10 October 2026). In December 2025 SDA gave Lockheed Martin, Rocket Lab, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris contracts worth a combined $3.5 billion to build 18 Tranche 3 tracking satellites each (DefenseScoop, 19 December 2025). On 26 May 2026 Space Systems Command announced a $2.29 billion fixed-price agreement with SpaceX for a Space Data Network Backbone (Ars Technica, 27 May 2026).

A 2025 Government Accountability Office review found that early SDA satellites faced development challenges and delays, and that nearly $10 billion had been awarded for Tranches 1 and 2 on designs that had not yet met initial capability. The fiscal 2026 request had zeroed Tranche 3 transport funding, but Congress reportedly restored about $500 million. These details show how politically contingent the programme is.

Counter-space means weapons and tactics that attack or disrupt satellites: missiles that destroy them, jamming and spoofing of signals, cyber attacks, dazzling lasers and manoeuvring spacecraft that approach others. China destroyed its Fengyun-1C weather satellite in January 2007, creating over 35,000 pieces of debris at least 1 cm across. Russia destroyed Kosmos 1408 in November 2021, creating more than 1,500 trackable pieces according to the US State Department. US officials stated in February 2024 that Russia was developing a nuclear anti-satellite capability (reported by multiple outlets; not independently verified in this review). China's military reorganised in April 2024, replacing its Strategic Support Force with a separate PLA Aerospace Force.

NATO designated space an operational domain in December 2019. European governments have raised space and defence budgets and want sovereign capabilities. The Space Foundation summary says non-US military space spending is projected to nearly double in 2027 to $31.5 billion, and that Canada, the UK, France and South Korea all increased space budgets by large amounts in 2025 (Canada to $612 million, more than double its prior level). Eutelsat OneWeb and the planned European IRIS2 constellation are the most visible sovereign communications projects; this review did not retrieve a current status for IRIS2.

• Feasibility: physicists Lisbeth Gronlund and David Wright estimated that defending against a full Russian or Chinese attack could require hundreds of thousands of satellites.
• Cost: critics, including some Republican senators, have predicted costs of trillions of dollars; official estimates have already risen.
• Governance: members of Congress raised concerns about SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk's involvement and about former officials with ties to SpaceX.
• Strategic stability: analysts warn that interceptors could be indistinguishable from other satellites, raising first-strike ambiguity, and China, Russia and North Korea have opposed the programme.
• Legal questions: some experts question whether space-based weapons fit the Outer Space Treaty.

Artemis is NASA's programme to return people to the Moon. Artemis II launched on 1 April 2026 and, after a lunar flyby on 6 April, splashed down in the Pacific on 11 April (UTC), a nine-day mission that took four astronauts to about 406,771 km from Earth, a human distance record (NASA flight day 6 update, 6 April 2026; NASA assessment coverage April 2026). A post-flight assessment found manageable anomalies, with a urine vent line issue under investigation.

The plan then changed. NASA's March 2026 plan added Artemis III as a low-Earth-orbit test in which Orion docks with one or both commercial landers, from SpaceX and Blue Origin, and Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028, is now the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972 (NASA, 3 March 2026). Ars Technica reported on 28 April 2026 that Artemis III will launch no earlier than late 2027. The Gateway lunar space station has been cancelled, and NASA's Inspector General listed its habitation module among the terminated or repurposed Artemis systems (24 June 2026). A single launch of the Space Launch System (SLS), the rocket used by Artemis, costs about $2 billion.

1. Apr 2021NASA selects SpaceX Starship as Human Landing System (HLS)
2. May 2023NASA awards Blue Origin a $3.4 billion Blue Moon lander contract
3. 1-11 Apr 2026Artemis II flies around the Moon and returns
4. Late 2027Artemis III planned as an Earth-orbit docking test with lander versions
5. Early 2028Artemis IV targeted for first crewed landing (lander either Starship HLS or Blue Moon)

Starship HLS needs ships to refuel from tanker ships in orbit before heading to the Moon. In 2026, Starship flew its first V3 vehicle (22 May) and reached sustained orbit with 26 Starlink V3 satellites (28 September). The sources reviewed here did not show a completed ship-to-ship propellant transfer, which is the key technical milestone. Blue Origin's Blue Moon landing system relies on New Glenn, which had a failed upper-stage flight on 19 April 2026 and a pad explosion on 28 May 2026, and NASA's contract also covers an uncrewed test mission before the crewed landing.

China has publicly stated a goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before 2030 using the Long March 10 rocket, the Mengzhou crew spacecraft and the Lanyue lander (stated Chinese government goal; programme details are as reported in the press). In 2026 China tested the Mengzhou abort system on 11 February; Long March 10B made its maiden flight on 10 July, with its first stage caught at sea; and Tianwen-2, its asteroid sample-return mission, arrived at the near-Earth asteroid Kamoʻoalewa in early July (SpaceNews, 11 February and 6 July 2026; Spaceflight Now, 19 August 2026). The Chang'e 7 lunar south-pole probe was scheduled for around 2026, but its status was not confirmed in the sources reviewed. The competitive framing, a race to put people on the lunar south pole, is a large reason the US Congress continues to fund Artemis.

NASA buys delivery services to the Moon through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme. Results so far: Intuitive Machines' IM-1 landed on 22 February 2024 but tipped over; IM-2 landed on 6 March 2025 on its side, ending operations the next day, after the altimeter failed; Firefly's Blue Ghost Mission 1 landed successfully on 2 March 2025, the first fully successful commercial Moon landing. Intuitive Machines' IM-3 was expected in early 2026; the sources reviewed here do not confirm that it flew. Firefly won a $176.7 million contract in July 2025 for a south-pole mission planned for 2029. NASA proposed a 'CLPS 2.0' initiative in 2026.

Lunar landers and orbiters are a few hundred million dollars of work each, and the commercial market is almost entirely NASA and other governments. Intuitive Machines reported 2025 revenue of about $210 million and agreed on 3 November 2025 to buy Lanteris from Advent's Vantor Holdings for $800 million in cash and stock, a bid to diversify into satellite manufacturing; the deal closed on 13 January 2026 (Intuitive Machines Form 10-K and Forms 8-K). Firefly, which listed on the Nasdaq in August 2025 (ticker FLY) raising $868 million at an implied valuation of about $6.5 billion at the $45 offer price, reported 2025 revenue of $160 million and a net loss of $298 million (Firefly Form 424B4 and Form 10-K). Its Alpha rocket suffered a launch failure on 29 April 2025, returned to flight after an FAA-required investigation and launched successfully in March 2026, and its larger Eclipse rocket, developed with Northrop Grumman, is still in development.

• Space science and robotics: NASA's Roman telescope launched on 30 August 2026 and Japan's MMX Mars moons mission launched on 20 October 2026 Japan time (Planetary Society, 30 August 2026; Ars Technica, 20 October 2026). These are mostly government-funded, with commercial rocket and spacecraft suppliers.
• Mars: SpaceX leadership has long said Starship is built for Mars; no Mars cargo flight has been demonstrated in the sources reviewed here, and this report does not treat Mars as an investable near-term market.
• Resources and lunar economy: claims about mining water ice or helium-3 remain long-dated and unproven; the near-term market is delivery and communications.

The International Space Station (ISS) has been continuously crewed since 2000 and is planned for decommissioning around 2030, to be deorbited safely over the ocean. NASA's Commercial LEO Destinations (CLD) programme aims to have private stations ready so that NASA becomes one tenant rather than the owner. NASA's CLD Phase 2 award was expected in 2026; the sources reviewed here did not confirm that the award has been made, so its timing and winners should be treated as open.

Axiom is the only candidate that has already flown commercial crews to the ISS (Ax-1 in April 2022, Ax-2 in May 2023, Ax-3 in January 2024 and Ax-4 on 25 June 2025). Ax-5 is not planned before January 2027. In December 2025 it agreed a $100 million equity investment from Hungary's 4iG Group. It is also NASA's sole developer of the next-generation spacesuit, though NASA's Inspector General reported on 20 April 2026 'little to no schedule margin' for the suits, and said that if Axiom's delays match the historical average the demonstrations might not happen until 2031 (NASA Office of Inspector General, IG-26-006). Orbital Reef's design award from NASA totalled $172 million (Blue Origin and partners, with $42 million added in 2024).

A commercial station has to find customers beyond NASA: other space agencies (for example Europe, Japan, India and Gulf states), private astronauts and tourists, research and pharmaceutical customers, and manufacturers. The credible anchor customer is NASA and allied agencies that need continuity of a crewed presence. The risk is a gap: if the ISS retires in 2030 before a commercial replacement is operating, the US and its partners lose a crewed outpost while China's Tiangong station continues. That is why the timing slips in the table above are closely watched.

In-space servicing means extending the life of satellites already in orbit by refuelling, repairing, moving or removing them, and in-space logistics means moving cargo and payloads between orbits. The Space Foundation reports in-space servicing and space situational awareness each grew 42.9% in 2025. Northrop Grumman's Mission Extension Vehicle docked with a commercial communications satellite in 2020 and proved commercial servicing is possible. Other players include Blue Origin's planned Blue Ring orbital logistics vehicle, whose capabilities were to be tested for the Space Force on a mission called DarkSky-1 (announced March 2024), and Rocket Lab, which completed its acquisition of the space robotics company Motiv Space Systems on 26 May 2026 (Rocket Lab Form 10-Q). Military demand for satellites that can manoeuvre without running out of fuel is also a driver.

Microgravity (near-weightlessness) allows some materials and drug crystals to form differently than on Earth. Companies such as Varda Space Industries have flown small capsules that process materials in orbit and return them to Earth, and Axiom and others plan manufacturing modules. No source reviewed here quantified a revenue market for in-space manufacturing, so this report does not give a size. The honest reading is that the idea is plausible, early, and currently funded by venture capital and government grants more than by customers.

Reporting on Golden Dome mentions space-based data centres for AI-enabled command and control, and SpaceX's February 2026 merger with xAI has fuelled talk of orbital computing. These are concepts: no sourced revenue exists for them in this review, and the engineering questions (power, cooling, radiation, launch cost) are unresolved.

• Dependence on launch: stations need heavy lift. Haven-1 is booked on Falcon 9; Orbital Reef is tied to New Glenn, which has had a 2026 pad explosion.
• Dependence on NASA: station funding is a government appropriation, exposed to budget changes.
• Safety: crewed stations carry human-rating, debris and fire risks that raise insurance and regulatory demands.
• Competition from China: the Tiangong station is continuously crewed and China is offering seats to other countries.

Debris is dead satellites, spent rocket stages and fragments from collisions or weapon tests. The European Space Agency's debris statistics, last updated on 2 November 2026, count about 47,320 objects regularly tracked in orbit and about 15,800 satellites still functioning. Statistical models (ESA MASTER-8, February 2026 population) estimate 68,450 objects larger than 10 cm, about 1.5 million pieces from 1 cm to 10 cm and about 230 million from 1 mm to 1 cm. At orbital speeds of several km per second, even small pieces can disable a satellite.

The worst-case outcome is the Kessler syndrome, proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978: a cascade of collisions in an orbital band, each creating debris that causes more. It is a long-run risk, not an imminent one, but the more satellites in the busiest shells, the greater the burden on automated collision avoidance and on end-of-life disposal. Starlink's plan is to deorbit satellites about a year after mission end, and a NASA request for 90% deorbit reliability was backed by the FCC.

Spectrum is licensed by national regulators under ITU rules and tied to deployment milestones, as the Amazon Leo waiver shows (waived on a temporary-priority penalty basis in June 2026). Launch is licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration in the US, and Starship flights were repeatedly held pending mishap investigations (for example after Flight 7 in January 2025, when the FAA required a mishap investigation that it closed on 28 March 2025). Export control, foreign investment review and arms-control rules shape who can sell satellites and where. International law on space weapons, based on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, is thin, and Golden Dome has revived the debate over whether space-based interceptors are compatible with it.

• New Glenn: a BE-4 oxygen valve fault caused a pad explosion on 28 May 2026; the same engine powers ULA's Vulcan.
• Neutron: composite voids in the first-stage propellant dome pushed first launch into 2027 (14 October 2026).
• Vulcan: a solid rocket booster anomaly in October 2024 and low flight rate since; only one Vulcan launch in 2026 to 31 October.
• Firefly Alpha: a launch failure on 29 April 2025 that led to an FAA mishap investigation, and a first-stage event during a ground test on 29 September 2025 that damaged the test stand.
• India's PSLV failed in January 2026 and Japan and Chinese start-up rockets also failed this year, so new rockets are not reliable by default (McDowell's launch log).

Launch failure statistics matter: 2026 to 31 October had 7 failures in 256 attempts, about 2.7%, with four of the seven in China. Falcon family had no failures in 121 launches in 2026 and none in 165 launches in 2025, which is the reason customers book it.

Falcon launches made up about 80% of US launches and 47% of the world's in 2026 to 31 October (121 of 151 and 121 of 256). Starlink makes up around three quarters of active manoeuvrable satellites. SpaceX holds 28 of about 54 assigned national security launches in the April 2025 awards, and is the reported contractor for several Golden Dome and Space Development Agency efforts. A fault in the Falcon 9 fleet or a political falling-out would ripple through NASA crew flights, the Space Force, Amazon Leo (which booked Falcon launches) and many commercial satellite operators. Governments therefore pay for second sources, which supports Blue Origin, ULA, Rocket Lab and Arianespace but also raises costs.

SpaceX priced its Nasdaq IPO on 11 June 2026 at $135 per share, an implied valuation of about $1.77 trillion on the 13.08 billion shares outstanding after the base offering, and its shares trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. The base offering raised about $75 billion, and with the underwriters' over-allotment option exercised in full the company reported net proceeds of $85.7 billion (SpaceX Form 424B4, 12 June 2026, and Form 10-Q, 22 October 2026). Against 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion, an operating loss of $2.6 billion and a net loss of $4.9 billion, the IPO valuation was about 95 times trailing revenue (derived: $1.77 trillion divided by $18.7 billion, with the caveat that revenue grew fast in 2026 and the company now includes xAI). Firefly was valued at about $6.5 billion at its August 2025 IPO price against $160 million of 2025 revenue (about 40 times). Planet's guidance for fiscal 2027 revenue is $415 million to $440 million with a GAAP net loss.

Several of the sector's listed companies lose money: Firefly reported a $298 million net loss, AST SpaceMobile about $461 million and Eutelsat about 457 million euros, all on the company-reported 2025 or 2025/26 figures in their annual reports and results releases. The bear case is that the share prices of space companies assume a great deal of success from rockets and constellations that are not yet proven, and that a failure or a funding crunch could change sentiment sharply. The bull case is that falling launch costs and military demand are structural. This report does not take a view.

• Technology: a cheaper rocket could crash prices for others; AI-designed satellites may shorten production time.
• Space weather: solar storms can shorten satellite lifetimes.
• Geopolitics: war in Ukraine showed satellites as military targets, and jamming of GPS signals is routine in conflict zones.
• Customer concentration: government agencies and a few operators account for a large share of orders.
• Labour and talent: skilled propulsion engineers are scarce and sought by many firms.

This chapter lists the main listed companies and what part of the space economy each touches, with the date of each fact. It is a description of exposure, not a recommendation, and many of the most important players (China's state companies, Blue Origin, Vantor, Axiom, Vast) are not available to public investors. Prices and market values change daily and are not quoted except where an event fixed them.

Private companies that are not available to public investors but shape the sector: Blue Origin (New Glenn, Blue Moon, Orbital Reef), Vantor (owned by Advent International), Axiom Space, Vast, Sierra Space, Anduril, True Anomaly and China's state-owned Long March and satellite makers.

• Pure space: SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Firefly, Intuitive Machines, AST SpaceMobile and Planet derive nearly all revenue from space activities, with high growth and in several cases heavy losses.
• Defence primes: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris and Boeing have space as one segment of a large defence business, with exposure to the Space Force, the Space Development Agency and Golden Dome.
• Operators: Eutelsat, Iridium, Viasat, SES and EchoStar are older satellite businesses repositioning around low-orbit rivals and spectrum.
• Conglomerates: Amazon (Leo), Airbus and Safran (Ariane, satellites) and Mitsubishi Heavy (H3) carry space inside bigger businesses.
• Spectrum owners: EchoStar and Globalstar show that spectrum, not satellites, can be the most valuable asset to a satellite company.

1. Late 2026New Glenn return to flight; CLD Phase 2 award expected; Amazon Leo service beta timing
2. 2027Neutron first launch; Haven-1; Axiom first module; Artemis III docking test; Amazon-Globalstar close
3. 2028Targeted Artemis IV crewed landing; Golden Dome original three-year goal period ends
4. 2030ISS retirement; China's stated crewed-landing goal
5. 2034Novaspace's projection of a $1 trillion space economy