The global space economy reached $469 billion in 2021, growing 9 percent in a single year, the Space Foundation calculated in its quarterly report released on July 27, 2022. It was, by McKinsey’s reading of the same figures, the fastest expansion recorded since 2014. Behind the headline number sit two stories: a commercial sector doing more business than ever, and a collapse in the cost of getting hardware up in the first place.
Where the money actually sits
Commerce dominated the ledger. The Foundation’s release breaks the commercial side into more than $224 billion from products and services that space firms deliver and nearly $138 billion going into infrastructure and support for those enterprises, a 6.4% revenue gain over 2020. Governments added fuel: combined public spending on military and civil programs rose 19%, with the U.S. up 18%, China an estimated 23% and India 36%.
The launch cost collapse
McKinsey’s analysts put heavy launch prices in low-Earth orbit at $1,500 per kilogram in 2021 dollars, down from $65,000, a fall of more than 95 percent. Computer-aided design, 3-D printing and streamlined supply chains get part of the credit, and reusable boosters built by efficiency-minded commercial providers get the rest. The next steps were already on the calendar when the firm wrote: Relativity Space aimed to fly 3-D printed, fully reusable rockets from Cape Canaveral with a first launch planned for 2024, and SpaceX was preparing an orbital test flight of Starship, the tallest and most powerful vehicle ever built, for late 2022.
Satellites shrank on the same curve. Big government spacecraft costing upward of $1 billion had become the minority in orbit, outnumbered by small commercial satellites, often constellation-deployed, that sell for $100,000 or less. Lighter solar panels, better batteries and off-the-shelf parts did it, and modern sensors let each of those boxes gather and move far more data than equivalent hardware five years earlier.
Money following the machines
Private money flowing into space companies topped $10 billion in 2021, an all-time high and roughly a tenfold rise over the decade. Over the same stretch, the U.S. government’s share of global space research funding slipped from about 70 percent toward 50 percent, while annual funded space start-ups more than doubled between 2010 and 2018. McKinsey’s analysts think the sector “may finally be at a tipping point”, with commercial money possibly overtaking government money within 20 years, and some forecasters already describe space as a future $1 trillion industry.
A half-year for the record books
The Foundation counted 72 rockets placing 1,022 identified spacecraft into orbit between January 1 and June 30, 2022, with 958 of those satellites launched commercially. More hardware reached orbit in those six months, the report notes, than in the entire first 52 years of the Space Age.
CEO Tom Zelibor credited the people as much as the market: “The incredible growth of the global space economy is a testament to the talented professionals who innovate new ideas for space every day”. His warning was about staffing: “The booming space industry will need to expand its workforce to sustain this kind of growth.”
The same report looked past the balance sheet to the James Webb Space Telescope, able to peer across 13.5 billion light-years toward the era nicknamed “cosmic dawn”, and to nuclear fission work that NASA leaders say could halve a Mars transit. The Pentagon, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine produced the first acknowledged battlefield use of hypersonic missiles, weapons running past five times the speed of sound, moved to buy a satellite constellation built to spot them.
Sources
- How will the space economy change the world? | McKinsey
- Space Foundation Releases The Space Report 2022 Q2 Showing Growth of Global Space Economy
