Taking Stock: Who owns Space?

Rahul Tandon (0:00)

I'm Rahul Tandon. Welcome to Business Daily on the week that this happened.

SPEAKER_2 (0:05)

Three, two, one, ignition and liftoff. Go Falcon, go CRS.

Rahul Tandon (0:14)

That always sends shivers down my spine because this week SpaceX launched another cargo mission to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral, which of course is in Florida. That got us thinking about the economics of space, the business of space, who owned space at the moment. And that is what we're going to focus on taking stock this week with me. I have Carissa Bryce Christensen, who is founder and CEO of BryceTech, a US-based analytics and consulting firm specializing in space satellite and technology markets. And also Dr. Namrata Goswami, professor, author and consultant specializing in space policy, international relations and geo-policy. I want to say thank you and welcome to both of you. Carissa, a rocket going up into space there. We heard that at the start of the program. If you could go anywhere, where would you go in space?

Carissa Bryce Christensen (1:05)

Well, that really depends on whether I want to make money or whether I want to have a life-changing experience. As a person, would be thrilled to go to the space station or to the moon or really any destination.

If I were an investor, I don't know that I would be so focused on the human side. I would be looking at launching satellites and targeting those rapidly growing markets.

Rahul Tandon (1:33)

Namrata, what about you? Mars, the moon, Saturn, Venus, come on, space is your oyster here. Where are you off to?

Namrata Goswami (1:40)

Well, as Carissa said, it depends on what the particular payload is for. So personally, I would like to go to the moon.

Rahul Tandon (1:48)

Okay, well, there we go. Good answers from both of you. I think I'll stay on Earth for the moment. I'm still trying to work out how to live on this planet before we head off somewhere else.

There is so much money going into space at this point in time. Let's give you some figures. We like to do that on this program. The OECD has put commercial space revenues between 500 to 600 billion dollars this year. The consultants, McKinsey, say by 2035, the industry will be worth 1.8 trillion dollars. Interestingly, 78 percent of that is in the private sector. Question to both of you here. Carissa, if you want to go first and then Namrata, you want to pick up off the back of her. We are seeing, aren't we, unprecedented sums of money pouring into the space industry at this point in time, which I think gives us an indication that things are really on the move here.

Carissa Bryce Christensen (2:42)

Absolutely. We are seeing an unprecedented level of activity in commercial space. It's very interesting the question of how big is commercial space? What's that number? Different people will give you different answers.

One of the reasons for that is they're measuring different things.

What's a space company? You can take a very strict definition and think only a company that has assets. Operating in space is directly using those resources. That gives you a revenue number that's probably around 300 billion. You can go further downstream. There are companies that resell space images that are secondarily using space capabilities. That number increases as the OECD number speaks to.

Or you can go really far downstream and say, well, Uber. Uber is enabled by GPS or GNSS satellites. Therefore, Uber is a space company. If you take that view, it gets you a very large number. But certainly the size is hundreds of billions of dollars. And it's growing in two ways. Revenue is growing and really investment is growing than we'd ever seen before.

Namrata Goswami (3:59)

I would continue with that line of thought. So when you look at those numbers, 500 to 600 billion dollars, the most important shift from the Cold War to the post-Cold War period is the change from missions that talked about prestige and ideological rivalry to actual activity and infrastructure. And infrastructure, as Rahul, you said you want to stay on Earth, that would include launch, that would include the ability to sustain such a rapid launch capability. Also, what is so interesting to me is that nations are starting to view space as critical infrastructure.

And so in some sense, what I am noticing is that there is this exponential rise in commercial space investment. So the spending of money on commercial space capability, including intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, missile tracking, has actually gone over civilian spending. So to break it down, defense spending is about more than 56 percent of the investment and civilian follows. So very interesting trends as we go forward.