The Dawn of the Space Economy: Are We Facing the Greatest Opportunity of the Last Thirty Years?
From GPS to weather forecasts, from internet access in remote areas to climate monitoring: the Space Economy is already worth $450 billion and growing three times faster than global GDP. The moment is now.
There are moments in economic history that, looking back, seem obvious. Almost trivial. Amazon at 54 cents in 1997. Apple at under one euro per share in 2004. Nvidia at five euros in 2015. Three companies, three different eras, one identical mechanism: a sector quietly transitioning from niche to infrastructure, while most people looked the other way. Whoever invested a thousand euros in Amazon in 1997 has forty-six thousand today. Whoever bet on Apple in 2004 collected a 6,600% return over twenty years. Whoever bought Nvidia in 2015 watched their capital grow by 23,500% in a decade. These are not invented numbers: they are documented, publicly verifiable returns drawn from historical market data compiled by Bloomberg and Yahoo Finance.
Today that mechanism is activating again. And the sector is called the Space Economy.
Before rolling your eyes — literally or figuratively — it's worth asking one simple question: how many times did you use GPS today? Once, twice, ten times? That technology, so deeply embedded in daily habits that it feels almost as natural as breathing, works thanks to a constellation of satellites orbiting above our heads. That is the Space Economy — already here, already present, already indispensable. The weather forecasts that appear on your phone screen with a precision unimaginable twenty years ago? Real-time satellite data, networks synchronized by orbital signals. Internet access in the most remote corners of the planet, in rural hospitals across sub-Saharan Africa, in isolated schools high in the Himalayas? That too. It arrives from space, not through cables.
And then there is the most urgent question of all. If there is a concrete chance of addressing climate change before it becomes irreversible, that chance runs largely through space. According to data from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), more than 80% of the information used by climate scientists to monitor and model global warming comes from satellite sensors. Without the Space Economy, we would not even have full awareness of the crisis we are in.
Yet despite all of this, the vast majority of the general public — and of retail investors in particular — cannot even name this market. According to the report "The Space Economy at a Glance" published by the OECD in 2024, the total value of the global space sector has already exceeded $450 billion, a figure larger than the entire economy of Sweden. The sector's average annual growth rate stands at around 8-9%, roughly three times higher than the pace of global GDP expansion, which according to International Monetary Fund projections for 2025 is expected to reach 3.2%.
Morgan Stanley, in a report published in 2023, projected the value of the Space Economy at over one trillion dollars before 2040. Goldman Sachs raised that estimate even further. Major investment banks are moving, institutional funds are positioning themselves, private capital is flowing in. Elon Musk's SpaceX is already valued — privately — at around $180 billion. The Starlink program already has more than four million active subscribers worldwide. The European Union has launched the IRIS² program, a satellite constellation for secure European connectivity, with an initial budget of 2.4 billion euros.
The transition from niche to infrastructure is not a forecast: it is already underway. Exactly as happened with e-commerce, with the smartphone, with graphics processing units that nobody imagined could become the beating heart of artificial intelligence. The pattern is the same: a technical sector, perceived as distant from real life, that gradually becomes invisible precisely because it becomes the infrastructure of the everyday.
The question is not whether the Space Economy will grow. It will. The question is the same one people faced in 1997 when confronted with a website selling books on the internet: do you get in before or after?
Sources: OECD – "The Space Economy at a Glance 2024"; ESA – European Space Agency, annual reports 2023-2024; NOAA – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; IMF – World Economic Outlook, April 2025; Morgan Stanley – "Space: Investing in the Final Frontier", 2023; Bloomberg Terminal – historical market data for Amazon, Apple, Nvidia.