Predictions are never perfect. That said, I'd like to use this last chapter to offer Space Capital's view of the road ahead. Nobody has a crystal ball. As thesis‐driven investors, however, our most crucial function is the combining of expertise and imagination to identify likely outcomes. Whether or not your professional work or investments directly concern the Space Economy, it's a safe bet that we will all depend on space technologies in increasingly fundamental ways.

To be clear, nearly everything of consequence in today's Space Economy is happening in Satellites and Launch. Looking ahead, however, we can observe hints of four Emerging Industries, each offering varying degrees of long‐term potential. For now, it isn't time to commit. Simply to pay attention. However, things may get interesting in one or more of these areas soon enough.

Before looking more closely at the four Emerging Industries as well as the threats posed—and potentially solved—by space tech, it's important to understand the linchpin of all next‐generation efforts: Starship.

The Next (Really) Big Thing: Starship

Many venture‐backed space companies of the last couple of years promised wonderful solutions—for a pre‐Starship world. Despite the hype, many will be obsolete once the new SpaceX launch vehicle becomes operational. For years now, Space Capital has focused its attention only on companies that will leverage what Starship offers as opposed to those it will make redundant.

So, why is Starship such a game‐changer?

For its first four decades, launch was constrained by cost (price per kilogram), upmass (payload mass carried to orbit), and payload volume (physical space available for a payload). These limiters kept orbit out of reach for all but major governments and defense contractors. Even those entities were enormously constrained in what they could send up.

Commercial viability improved when new, more powerful rockets like the Ariane 5 series emerged in the 1990s, enabling some of today's important legacy space companies. Then, SpaceX's Falcon 9, which entered commercial service in 2009 and pioneered reusability in 2015, brought the cost of orbit crashing down, ushering in a wave of innovation and freeing even tech start‐ups from Earth's gravitational pull.

Falcon 9 also spurred competition. Other launch providers entered the marketplace, increasing supply and diversifying customer options. During this period, many pioneering companies began taking advantage of low‐cost access to orbit by launching satellite constellations of unprecedented quantity and capability. This enabled the development of a new generation of capabilities across the three Satellite technology stacks: GPS, Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT), and Satellite Communications (SatCom).

Phase 2 of the Space Economy will begin in earnest with the arrival of Starship, a revolutionary launch vehicle that promises to shake up all the givens of space—namely, that it's expensive, difficult, and dangerous to get there, that everything you launch must be purpose‐built, engineered, and tested for years, and that every ounce matters.

If successful, Starship will be “the world's first fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond.”¹ With its stainless‐steel construction, Starship will be affordable to build and affordable to launch. Affordable not on the scale of First World nation‐states but of midsized corporations and even startups.

Starship is the tallest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built.² Launching from Starbase, SpaceX's launch site in Texas, Kennedy Space Center in Florida, or one of two planned offshore platforms,³ the Super Heavy booster will bring a Starship spacecraft—carrying cargo, human crew, a Lunar lander, or a fuel tank—to low‐Earth orbit (LEO). The second stage can then be refueled with liquid methane by orbiting tankers for trips to higher orbit or beyond. With Starship's mind‐boggling capacity of one hundred tons, listing new applications that should be made possible by it dwarfs the imagination. Regardless of the mission, at its end Starship will land vertically, at which point both stages can be quickly prepared for another trip.

When you look at technological innovations that affect the global marketplace, only a handful in any generation cause paradigm‐changing disruption—the cargo container reshaping world trade, for example, or the transistor unlocking Moore's Law and giving birth to the Information Age. We believe Starship belongs in this Earth‐shaking category. With new technology, it is always too easy to underestimate what lower cost and greater ease of use can enable.

While SpaceX's Falcon 9 opened up orbit to a broad swath of smaller customers, its cargo capacity—145 cubic meters—is a pittance compared to that of Starship. With the ability to carry one hundred tons that fit within 1,100 cubic meters for essentially the cost of fuel alone, Starship will completely change how we operate in space.

Consider the James Webb Space Telescope. Much of the cost and complexity involved with creating that amazing instrument came down to designing and building a mirror that could fold up for launch and then deploy once in orbit. With Starship, you could build and launch the same mirror with no folding required. The entire process would have been cheaper, faster, and easier—with superior results.

With Starship, you will no longer need to push the envelopes of performance, weight, or reliability to the limit without regard for cost. Once you can routinely launch large and heavy things into orbit and beyond, you no longer have to painstakingly carve away every superfluous ounce, design finicky origami structures of mind‐bending complexity, or incorporate quadruple redundancy into every component. You can take risks and iterate. You can dispense with pristine clean‐room conditions and build and assemble components in normal factories. After all, if one satellite in a constellation fails because of a speck of dust, it's only one of many. If you want, you can put your entire satellite manufacturing operation in orbit, too, keeping it fed with regular launches of raw materials. That way, you'll never run out of satellites.

Starship will transform our economy profoundly, but its potential goes beyond ferrying cargo to orbit and back like the Space Shuttle did. In Chapter 2, we saw how Polaris—the North Star—aided human navigation for thousands of years. It makes sense that the first set of planned crewed Starship missions are called Polaris. SpaceX even has a NASA contract to bring human crews to the Moon. Starship's landing craft could one day serve as our first permanent base on the Lunar surface. The vehicle may even bring the first human visitors to Mars.

Emerging Industries: An Overview

Nearly all equity investment into the Space Economy over the past decade has been made in Satellites and Launch. See Figure 10.1. However, a percentage point or so of $250 billion is still over $2 billion. Where has all that money gone? And how will the ongoing distribution of capital shift as Starship demolishes launch constraints and removes the barriers to entry and experimentation for new ideas?

We are beginning to see founders raise capital and build businesses focused on four Emerging Industries: Stations, Lunar, Logistics, and Industrials. Based on our data, $2.7 billion has been invested in these Emerging Industries over the past decade, with 41 percent of that invested in 2021 alone. Recently, this investment has been driven largely by venture capital firms, many of which are investing in the category for the first time. The majority of rounds are also seed and Series A, highlighting just how early we are in the development of these nascent areas of opportunity.

The geographic breakdown in Emerging Industries is also noteworthy. As in other market categories, the United States continues to account for the majority of investment, but Japan makes up a good third of the total. In fact, roughly half of all equity investment into Japanese space companies has been in the Emerging Industries, a clear indication of where Japanese founders are looking to make their impact in the Space Economy.

While overall venture momentum in the Space Economy keeps setting all‐time records, plenty of that capital is still chasing solutions based on the decade‐old Falcon 9 launch paradigm. With Starship expected to come online soon, we are entering a new phase. Investors—let alone entrepreneurs and career professionals—need to recognize that. Starship will fundamentally change the economics of space, further reducing cost‐to‐orbit, enabling Emerging Industries, and making existing infrastructure obsolete. As investors in this category, we're looking for founders building for this new reality.

Ensuring Peaceful Commerce and Cooperation in Space—and on the Surface

In 1959, the United Nations General Assembly established the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS). COPUOS went on to create the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, an international agreement that has been signed by over 100 countries, including the United States, China, and Russia.

“The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 has allowed for the case of peaceful coexistence,” Major General Michel Friedling, head of the French Joint Space Command, said at a recent international aerospace summit, “and bridges were made between East and West during these decades. But space is and will remain a key factor of economic strategy and military advantage for those who master space and those who know how to use space services. So, tensions on Earth will reflect in space.”¹⁰

The 1967 treaty was written at a time when space posed very little practical value to nation‐states. The first satellite, Sputnik 1, had only gone into orbit 10 years earlier. Times have changed. Just as technological developments during the Age of Sail, which extended from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, transformed Earth's oceans into a global platform for both trade and conquest, the evolving Space Economy creates new threats even as it offers new opportunities. The ways that governments and private organizations cooperate to prevent conflict will have enormous long‐term consequences for us all.

There is an urgent need for intelligent policies, laws, and treaties that reflect the reality of today's Space Economy. In no other way can we ensure the peaceful and profitable use of space and its resources by every country. Thankfully, there is no need to start from scratch. Society benefits from a large and robust body of international maritime law that enables global trade and bolsters world peace. While there are key domain differences, these generally accepted beliefs and precedents can help lawmakers and politicians frame a coherent, collective response to the unique needs of space. The right approach will ensure that companies and countries can operate harmoniously and profitably in Earth's orbit and beyond for the foreseeable future.

As previously stated, space is the invisible backbone of the global economy. Its importance to world trade is already foundational. Thus, it is in every nation's interest to work together to protect it.

The Future of “Star Wars”

In Chapter 3, I referred to two‐time U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his infamous “known unknowns.” Verbal contortions aside, Rumsfeld shaped U.S. space policy in important ways over many decades. As Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford, for example, Rumsfeld pushed for greater cooperation between NASA and the Department of Defense—both Skylab and the Shuttle program can be traced to this effort. Years later, before returning to the Secretary of Defense role under President George W. Bush, Rumsfeld chaired the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States followed by the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization. The findings of these commissions have been enormously influential.

Before the commissions, President Bill Clinton had redirected America's antimissile research toward defenses against short‐range missiles used on the battlefield. By that point, the once‐omnipresent possibility of a long‐range missile attack from the Soviet Union seemed like a distant memory. In 1993, as America celebrated the end of the Cold War, investing tens of billions of dollars in a ballistic missile defense system like Brilliant Pebbles, which involved placing thousands of heat‐seeking missiles in orbit to strike down Russian ICBMs, struck lawmakers as a dangerous waste of resources.

At the end of that decade, however, long‐range missiles still threatened the continental United States. China and Russia—already tilting in a troubling, new direction—could each land biological or nuclear payloads on American soil. Iran, North Korea, and even Iraq might be able to do so in a few years. Worse, the United States would have little warning before one of these missiles arrived. The commissions found that the U.S. intelligence community underestimated the odds of such an attack. If the United States didn't establish a ballistic missile shield of its own, whether that involved Strategic Defense Information Organization (SDIO)‐style space lasers or some other technology, it faced the possibility of a “Space Pearl Harbor.”¹¹

Many experts downplayed these findings, but subsequent rocket demonstrations by North Korea and Iran caught the U.S. intelligence community by surprise, reinforcing the possibility that America was ignoring a genuine possibility. Though the United States still lacks a missile shield, Rumsfeld's efforts helped get the ball rolling for what eventually became the Space Force.

Time will tell how prescient any warnings about ballistic missile attacks on the United States were. The United States may one day restart some version of the “Star Wars” program envisioned by the Reagan Administration. But missile warfare itself represents only a small part of the larger story of how advances in space technology are changing the nature of combat.

The pivotal importance of satellites to national security is now all too obvious. In April 2021, U.S. Army General James H. Dickinson, head of the U.S. Space Command, told the Senate that space domain awareness was the command's number‐one priority.¹²

That November, before Russia invaded Ukraine, it performed a successful antisatellite (ASAT) weapon demonstration, making clear that it possessed the ability to obliterate mission‐critical GPS and Earth Observation (EO) satellites. As it turned out, LeoLabs provided accurate data on Russia's ASAT test several days before anyone else—including the U.S. government. Since LeoLabs is currently the only large‐scale, commercial source of data and services for LEO, it represents a unique opportunity to augment and complement existing national defense space domain awareness assets.

Just as LeoLabs gives us an unparalleled understanding of the skies, Maxar, Planet Labs, and BlackSky offer essential EO data from above. Since the invasion of Ukraine began, these companies have created a foundation of truth for what is happening on the ground. Unexpectedly, the challenge for the intelligence community hasn't been in gathering enough EO data but in gleaning timely and actionable insights from the flood of information it receives from commercial satellite constellations. This is another problem several of our portfolio companies are working to solve.

Communications play a key role in any conflict. In a public‐private partnership with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), SpaceX has delivered thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine, ensuring that Ukrainians have a resilient communications pipeline.¹³ Russia's preferred tactic of blocking messages in and out of a war zone has proved too difficult, allowing Ukraine to combat Russian propaganda and better fight the information war, even as its soldiers rely on Starlink internet to coordinate their operations.

An article in Politico described one Ukrainian soldier's experience using Starlink: “When planning a counterattack or artillery barrage, he dials up his superiors for last‐minute orders via a rectangular white‐and‐gray Starlink satellite receiver concealed in a shallow pit in the garden of an abandoned cottage.”¹⁴ Starlink access isn't just about keeping military communication lines open, either. Thanks to SpaceX and the U.S. government, soldiers' friends and family can find out whether their loved ones are safe with Starlink even when the local cellphone network is down. As crucial as the billions of dollars of conventional military aid from the West have been—from rocket launchers to ammunition—the Starlink terminals serve as an essential “lifeline” for beleaguered Ukrainian forces.

Ensuring the Resilience of Space Infrastructure

Clearly, satellites will play a decisive role in all foreseeable conflicts. They are also enormously vulnerable to disruption. In April 2022, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris announced the country's commitment against performing orbital ASAT tests.¹⁵ An international coalition against the practice is currently forming. Though in all likelihood Russia would not choose to join such a coalition, the U.S. commitment alone still represents a major step forward. Not only are ASAT tests dangerously provocative, but they also create clouds of debris with the potential to damage space infrastructure and even endanger crews. The Russian ASAT test alone created over 1,500 trackable objects.

Theatrics aside, obliterating satellites wouldn't be necessary to disrupt an enemy's access to their data. For example, signals from every Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) are vulnerable to jamming. Considering how crucial satellite navigation technology has become to warfare, let alone our daily commutes, the need for a more diversified and resilient set of options for both military and civilian navigation has become obvious. GPS, meanwhile, is just one major problem area for commercial space companies to address in terms of national security. Threats are everywhere, which means addressable problems abound for innovative organizations.

“China is building military space capabilities rapidly, including sensing and communication systems, and numerous anti‐satellite weapons,” U.S. Space Command head General Dickinson told the Senate and House Armed Services Committees.¹⁶ “All the while, China continues to maintain their public stance against the weaponization of space.”

Satellites aren't the only infrastructure under threat. In response to Western sanctions, the Russian Space Agency chief at the time threatened to end 20 years of cooperation on the ISS. Without the Russian segment, he said, the ISS would lose its orbit and crash into the United States or Europe. (Thankfully, SpaceX indicated that its Dragon cargo spacecraft could prevent that.)

The traditional mindset of the military has evolved quite a bit since Donald Rumsfeld's day. The U.S. Space Force takes a broad view of providing space capabilities to American military forces at sea, air, and on the ground by relying on commercial capabilities that can be deployed more rapidly and cost‐effectively than traditional systems. The Russia–Ukraine conflict is only accelerating innovation that was well underway. The strategic value and importance of the Space Economy will only continue to grow.

Adapting to a Changing Climate with Space Technology

Regardless of the degree to which you believe climate change is anthropogenic, there is no longer any doubt that the change itself is real. The important question facing governments, businesses, and the scientific community is: What can we do about it? More specifically, how will climate change progress, what are the main drivers of it, and which activities might slow or otherwise mitigate the effects of that change on our way of life?

Only space technology offers us the information we need to address these questions. This is why Lori Garver, whom we first met in Chapter 6, founded Earthrise, a philanthropic organization dedicated to using satellite data to support the fight against climate change.

“My thirty‐five‐year career in aerospace has never been about the rocket,” Garver told me. “It's been about what space can offer us as a society. What space can do for humanity. One of the first benefits of going to space was the perspective that astronauts have always brought back to us: ‘We live on a very fragile planet.’ Now, because we've been able to reduce the costs—of getting to and from space, building satellites, modeling climate data, and storing massive amounts of data—we possess a far greater understanding of the Earth. I'm excited to understand more about what is happening to the planet and actually do something about that for future generations.”

Temperature extremes, droughts, wildfires, and destructive weather events become more frequent and severe each year. These phenomena pose genuine threats. One study projects a loss of 18 percent of GDP to the world's economy by 2050 if no mitigating actions are taken.¹⁷ Meanwhile, leading organizations are increasingly motivated by the environmental concerns of their stakeholders: customers, competitors, and shareholders. As a result of these strong incentives to better understand the climate risks associated with business assets, operations, and supply chains, large enterprises are setting ambitious goals.

Microsoft, for example, has committed to becoming carbon negative by 2030: “This means reducing our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by more than half, removing the rest, and then removing the equivalent of our historical emissions by 2050.”¹⁸ Meanwhile, 30 major asset managers, including Fidelity International and UBS Asset Management, announced in 2020 the goal of “achieving net zero carbon emissions across their investment portfolios by 2050.”¹⁹ Because these firms oversee $9 trillion in assets in total, this decision promises an enormous impact over the coming decades.

Given the magnitude of the challenge, adapting to a changing climate is something we will have to work on collectively as a society: governments, businesses, and individuals. In this fight, the Space Economy has always played an outsized role. We wouldn't even know about climate change as a global trend if it weren't for satellite data. Moving forward, climate scientists agree that satellites are by far the best way we have to gather the information we need to guide policy. Over half the climate variables essential to our climate response can only be measured from space.²⁰

Satellites have played a key role in our understanding of Earth's changing climate from the beginnings of the Space Race. In March 1958, the United States launched Vanguard 1, the first satellite to produce upper atmospheric density measurements. The Landsat satellite constellation that followed, beginning with the launch of Landsat 1 in 1972, provides the longest continuously acquired collection of space‐based land remote‐sensing data. More than half a century later, data from Landsat serves a range of applications in agriculture, forestry, mapping, geology, hydrology, coastal resources, and environmental monitoring.

Landsat and other, more recent efforts are just the beginning of what space can offer us in the fight against climate change. As the commoditization of launch services, satellite components, and cloud computing lower the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs, a wave of new companies is entering the arena. Some, like GHGSat, Muon Space, and MethaneSAT, mentioned earlier in the book, help organizations monitor and manage emissions. San Francisco's Pachama is building a forest carbon market using machine learning and satellite imagery to quantify carbon captured by forests. Regrow is helping farmers ensure a resilient food chain while minimizing water and fertilizer use. These are just a handful of the many promising directions being explored.

Today, a lack of independently verifiable direct measurement prevents climate markets from scaling. Meaningful measurements will create scalable markets. Data from thousands of new, ever‐more‐sophisticated EO satellites will pour into the cloud to be processed and interpreted by smarter and smarter AI to address the specific needs of industries ranging from agriculture to energy to transport to waste management. New applications will help businesses improve their operations and the financial sector price externalities like emissions and pollution.

All of this space activity raises another question: how much do rockets themselves pollute? In terms of emissions, launch contributes only a fraction of a percentage point of what the airline industry adds to the atmosphere. Meanwhile, rocket manufacturers are experimenting with more efficient engines, as well as cleaner energy sources like methane, where water would be the primary exhaust product. In reality, the greatest environmental impact of the Launch industry comes not from rocket exhaust but from the manufacturing and disposal of the rockets themselves. By introducing partial reusability with Falcon 9, SpaceX leaped forward on this front. The fully‐reusable, methane‐powered Starship promises even more progress in dramatically reducing the emissions involved in space travel.

We're just beginning to explore the Earth‐saving potential of the Space Economy. With a growing satellite data infrastructure, entrepreneurs can focus on building specialized applications for tackling the many parts of this complex phenomenon without having to develop their own hardware. This is why equity financing for climate tech hit new highs in 2021. We expect that trend to continue.²¹ In fact, we see a trillion‐dollar investment opportunity in addressing climate change.

The market is still in an early stage, but the flywheel is starting to spin. A combination of government, commercial, and philanthropic initiatives promise to expand our understanding of Earth's systems and enable continual improvement in predicting future changes. The unifying goal of these programs is to identify a set of generally accepted scientific markers that can be independently validated to establish a transparent and accountable global climate market. The challenges created by climate change require a global perspective, and space technology will be a key building block of this new climate market.

Save the World—or Flee It?

The Space Economy evokes dystopian and utopian visions of the future. Many see space as our salvation, but few agree on how. Will we save our climate—and, by extension, ourselves—by spotting fugitive methane with EO satellites? Or is the long‐term plan to escape a doomed planet by spreading across the solar system, as Elon Musk hopes to do? Luckily, we don't have to choose. We can pursue both options.

Climate change and war aren't the only threats we face. Remember the dinosaurs? As Musk is quick to point out, our options are to colonize other planets or keep all our eggs in one basket. From supervolcanoes to massive solar flares, there are a host of plausible Armageddon scenarios that are statistically unlikely in the near term yet practically inevitable over a long‐enough time span.

It's easy to observe the protective quality of Earth's atmosphere. Just look at the difference between our surface and the crater‐pocked face of the Moon. That said, asteroids large enough to penetrate our atmosphere and land with devastating effects are numerous in the Solar System. According to the New York Times, scientists estimate that there are 25,000 near‐Earth asteroids large enough to pose a major threat. Sixty percent of these remain undetected. Since any of these rocks would hit Earth's surface with at least the force of “hundreds of millions of tons of TNT,” new approaches to identifying incoming asteroids will be instrumental in what NASA calls “planetary defense.”

To address this threat, Dr. Ed Lu, physicist, former NASA astronaut, and co‐founder and vice president of Strategic Projects at LeoLabs, helped found B612 Foundation, a nonprofit using data analysis to spot large, Earth‐bound asteroids with enough years of advance warning to potentially deflect them. Originally, B612 had planned to finance and build its own space telescope. When that proved financially difficult, the organization pivoted to an algorithmic approach that would have been unthinkable two decades ago. Recently, B612 announced that it has discovered more than a hundred new asteroids using computational analysis of preexisting images in the archives of the National Optical‐Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory.²²

Using algorithms to locate asteroids by analyzing existing telescope images is exactly the kind of thing made possible by freeing vast amounts of data from central archives and making them more available for civilian and academic use. Dr. Lu and B612 were aided in their efforts not only by the image data but also by access to the computational power required to crunch all that data, in this case contributed to the cause by Google. Since the new asteroids were discovered by analyzing only a small slice of the available image data, B612 estimates that tens of thousands can still be found without capturing a single additional image. None of these rocks may be headed toward Earth, but if a single one is, we will be grateful for the advance warning.

What will we do with a warning if we get one? To test one approach to planetary defense, NASA conducted the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, “the first‐ever space mission to demonstrate asteroid deflection by kinetic impactor.”²³ On September 26, 2022, the DART spacecraft, launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 in November 2021, successfully struck a distant asteroid—one with no chance of striking our planet—with colossal force. As it happened, DART shifted the asteroid's orbit three times as much as scientists had hoped.

“If an Earth‐threatening asteroid was discovered and we could see it far enough away, this technique could be used to deflect it,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told the New York Times.²⁴

Finally, is the vision of a permanent human presence on the Moon or even Mars feasible? It's not just possible but, judging by progress on key efforts across the Space Economy, likely. As a species, we will soon embark on a journey to the Moon and beyond, scattering ourselves so widely that no calamity could ever threaten all of us at once. In the meantime, there are exciting and lucrative opportunities right now for entrepreneurs, investors, and aspiring professionals to improve life on this planet—and secure our survival as a species.