in annual value — up from approximately $630 billion in 2024 — driven by satellite mega-constellations, Earth observation services, commercial space stations, and the early stages of lunar resource extraction, in a quiet industrial revolution that many economists believe will exceed the speed of every previous economic transition in modern history
The thing that has happened to the global space economy over the past 25 years is the kind of phenomenon that is easier to see in retrospect than to recognise while it is occurring.
he thing that has happened to the global space economy over the past 25 years is the kind of phenomenon that is easier to see in retrospect than to recognise while it is occurring. In 2000, the entire global space industry generated approximately $130 billion in annual revenue, almost all of it from government programmes and satellite communications. By 2023, the figure had reached approximately $630 billion. By 2035, on the most widely-cited forecast available, it is projected to reach $1.8 trillion — making space comparable in economic scale to the current global semiconductor industry, and substantially larger than the global pharmaceutical industry. The growth is occurring above the cloud line, mostly out of sight of the populations whose lives are being increasingly shaped by it, and at a pace that exceeds essentially any other major economic sector currently being tracked by long-range forecasters.
According to the World Economic Forum’s April 2024 announcement of the $1.8 Trillion Opportunity report developed with McKinsey & Company, the central finding of the analysis is that the bulk of the space economy’s growth between now and 2035 will not come from rockets, exploration missions, or moonwalks. It will come from terrestrial industries that have begun to depend, in fundamental but mostly invisible ways, on satellite-enabled services. Earth observation. Satellite communications. Positioning, navigation, and timing services. Weather forecasting. Supply-chain tracking. These are the categories projected to drive the substantial majority of the new value, and the industries most affected are not aerospace companies but supply-chain and transportation firms, food and beverage producers, retail chains, insurance companies, and the digital communications sector — none of which traditionally classified themselves as space companies, and most of which will not be aware of how dependent their operations have become on orbital infrastructure until something disrupts it.
The two halves of the space economy
Per McKinsey’s overview of the space economy structure, the field can be usefully divided into two distinct halves. The first is what McKinsey calls “the backbone” — the satellites, launchers, ground stations, and physical infrastructure that constitute the traditional space industry. This category includes SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, the various government space agencies, satellite manufacturers, and the companies that build and operate the orbital and ground hardware. The second half is “the reach” — the much larger ecosystem of applications, services, and businesses that depend on the backbone to deliver value to end users on Earth. Ride-hailing apps that rely on GPS satellites. Agricultural operations that use Earth-observation imagery for crop management. Logistics companies that track shipments via satellite. Climate monitoring services. Financial-services firms that use satellite-derived timing signals for high-frequency trading.
The growth projection puts most of the new value in the reach rather than the backbone. The McKinsey-WEF analysis specifies that traditional hardware and service providers will see their share of the total space economy slowly decrease over the next decade, while the reach grows substantially faster than the backbone. The implication is that the space industry of 2035 will look substantially different from the space industry of today — not because the rockets and satellites will be radically different, but because the population of companies and customers depending on them will have expanded across nearly every major sector of the global economy.
