The New Space Race: From Exploration to Infrastructure

By Arvind Ananthanarayanan • Aniket Dharamshi

The first space race was about proving who could get there. The second is about who owns the infrastructure once everyone can.

Space has stopped being a prestige project. The $613 billion space economy is turning into an infrastructure layer, as ordinary and as essential as undersea cables or data centres.

Our latest Deep Dive traces how that happened: the physics that kept payload fractions stuck between 1% and 5%, the CubeSat standard that broke the cost curve, and the reason a kilogram to orbit now costs $2,000 instead of $15,000. It then turns to India, where 11 private space companies in 2019 have become over 400, and asks the harder question: where along this value chain do the economic rents actually settle?

Not in launch. Read on for where we think they do.

Read the full report here