The Future of Investing in Space: A Plain-English Guide

How investing in space moved from public programmes to a shared effort

For most of the space age, building and launching spacecraft was the work of large public programmes. The first artificial satellite reached orbit in 1957, the first person followed in 1961 and the first crewed Moon landing came in 1969. Achievements on that scale needed resources that only public bodies could organise at the time.

That picture has changed. Public bodies still set goals, pay for science and run their own missions, but they increasingly work alongside private companies that design, build and operate spacecraft. Many now act as customers as well as builders, buying launches, data and services, which can give a young company its first serious buyer.

This shared model is what people usually mean by the space economy. It stretches from rocket engines to the weather forecast on a phone, and it is one reason investing in space now draws interest from a much wider range of founders and investors than in the past.

What changed: cheaper access to orbit and smarter tools

Three shifts did most of the work, and each one made the others more powerful.

First, lower-cost access to orbit. For decades, rockets were used once and then discarded, which made every launch expensive. SpaceX showed that rocket boosters can land and fly again, and that reuse has helped make reaching orbit more routine and opened the field to new ideas. The guide to how rockets work and why reusable rockets matter explains the engineering behind it.

Second, smaller and cheaper satellites. Electronics have shrunk so much that some useful satellites are now closer to the size of a shoebox than a bus. Groups of small satellites, known as constellations, can cover the whole planet and refresh their view often. Satellites and orbits explained shows how they stay up and why altitude matters.

Third, better software and AI. Modern design tools let small teams simulate and test spacecraft before building them, and AI helps turn huge volumes of satellite data into clear answers. The page on AI and the space economy looks at these uses in more detail.

Upstream and downstream in the space economy

People who study the space economy often split it into two halves. Upstream covers everything needed to reach space and work there: designing and building rockets and satellites, launching them and running the ground stations that talk to them.

Downstream covers what people do with the result. Weather forecasts, satellite navigation, internet links in remote places, maps for farmers and images that help emergency teams after a flood or fire are all downstream services. Most people use several of them every day without noticing.

The two halves depend on each other. Cheaper launches make more satellites possible, and more satellites create more data for downstream services to use. The space economy explorer lets you click through each layer and see how they connect.

Data as the product

For many space companies, the spacecraft is not really the product. The product is what it collects or carries: images, measurements, signals and connections that people on the ground can use.

A farmer might want to know which fields need water this week. A forestry team might want early warning of disease or fire. A relief team might need a fresh map of roads after a flood, and a city might want to see how its green spaces change over the years. In each case the customer wants an answer, and the satellite is simply the way to get it.

That is why software matters so much. Raw data from orbit is vast and hard to use on its own. Companies that turn it into clear, trustworthy answers often sit closest to the customer, and long-term investors tend to watch closely how well they do it.

Why time horizons are long

Space hardware has to survive the shaking of launch, work in a vacuum, cope with extreme heat and cold and keep running for years with no one on hand to fix it. That makes testing slow and careful, and it means a new idea can take many years to travel from the lab to a working service.

Engineers track this journey with technology readiness levels, which run from 1, basic principles observed, to 9, proven in operation. The scale was first developed for space programmes in the 1970s and is now used widely in research funding and engineering. The technology readiness level explorer walks through each level with examples.

Long horizons bring familiar risks: technical uncertainty, the cost of building hardware, licensing and the time it takes to win customers. This is why space is often described as deep tech, and why patient capital, meaning funding that is prepared to wait for milestones, plays such a large part.

What long-term investors tend to look at

There is no single checklist, but long-term investors who study space ventures tend to come back to a similar set of questions. Taken together, these help them judge whether a team can turn an ambitious idea into a dependable service over many years.

• The team: do the founders combine deep engineering skill with a clear sense of what customers need?
• Technology readiness: how far along the readiness scale is the idea, and what has already been proven?
• Real customers: is someone, whether a public body or a private company, already using the service or committed to it?
• Licences and spectrum: does the company hold, or have a clear path to, the permissions it needs to operate and to use radio frequencies?
• Access to launch: is there a realistic plan for getting hardware into orbit when it is needed?
• Responsible use of orbit: does the design plan for avoiding collisions and for safely retiring satellites at the end of their working lives?

Possibilities for the next decade

No one knows exactly how the sector may develop, but people are exploring several directions that could shape the next decade. Each is a possibility rather than a promise, and the pace depends on technology, on customers and on steady cooperation between public bodies and private companies.

The list below sets out the main themes, and the Moon, Mars and beyond takes a longer view of exploration itself.

• More data from orbit, read with the help of AI, could support farming, forestry, water management, weather forecasting and disaster response.
• Services in orbit, such as refuelling, repairing or moving satellites, may help spacecraft last longer and keep orbits tidy.
• Connectivity from space could bring internet links to remote communities, ships at sea and aircraft.
• Activity around the Moon, from robotic landers to people returning, could open new needs for power, communications and transport far from Earth.
• Research in microgravity may support new work in health and in materials that are hard to make on Earth.

Nicole Junkermann's perspective

Nicole Junkermann, founder of NJF Holdings and its venture capital arm, NJF Capital, follows the space sector as part of her wider interest in AI and deep technology. She has long argued that patient capital matters for deep technology, and space shows why more clearly than most fields.

Her outlook keeps people at the centre. As she puts it on her website: "Progress only matters if it is human led and human shaped." In her view, that applies to space as much as to AI. Her fuller outlook is set out in Nicole Junkermann on the future of investing in space.