The Global Space Economy Could Reach $1 Trillion Sooner Than Expected

This past July, analysts monitoring the global space economy discreetly updated their timeline inside the Space Foundation’s offices in Colorado Springs. The Space Report’s Q2 edition included their startling but subdued conclusion that the global space economy might surpass $1 trillion by 2032. That is eight years ahead of the 2040 estimates that, only a few years ago, had become the norm in industry forecasting circles. The figure that supported the revision was noteworthy in and of itself: the space economy grew 7.8% in a single year to reach a record $613 billion in 2024. 78% of that amount came from the commercial sector. The sector did not merely move forward. It picked up speed.

The headline figures are currently making the rounds in government briefings, financial institutions, and aerospace boardrooms with the same fervor that semiconductor forecasts did in the late 1990s. In a joint 2024 report, McKinsey and the World Economic Forum predicted that the global space economy would grow at a rate of about 9% per year to reach $1.8 trillion by 2035, up from $630 billion in 2023. This growth rate is significantly higher than the projected growth in the global GDP over the same period. For comparison, that trajectory places space at about half the size of the global payments industry and on par with the current semiconductor industry.

Under more optimistic assumptions, PwC estimates that growth could reach $2 trillion by 2040. UBS, Citi, and Morgan Stanley have all set their $1 trillion goals for 2040 or earlier. All of those estimates would appear conservative if the Space Foundation’s updated 2032 projection is accurate.

It’s necessary to look past rocket launches, which typically garner the most attention from the public, and examine what satellites are doing once they’re in orbit in order to understand what’s truly causing this growth. The most obvious use is probably broadband connectivity. For low-Earth orbit internet service, SpaceX’s Starlink is currently in competition with Amazon’s Kuiper constellation and Eutelsat’s OneWeb, with each company vying to launch more satellites before rivals secure the most valuable orbital slots.

However, connectivity is only one component. Earth observation satellites are becoming more and more involved in climate modeling, agricultural monitoring, and disaster response. Most users no longer consider positioning and navigation services—the GPS signals that power ride-sharing apps, logistics networks, and autonomous car systems—to be space-derived at all because they are so ingrained in daily life. Uber does not advertise itself as a satellite provider. It is one in a significant operational sense.

“Backbone” applications, such as satellites, launchers, and direct services, and “reach” applications, where space technology generates revenue for companies in completely different industries, are the two categories into which the McKinsey framework for measuring the space economy divides it. Approximately $330 billion came from backbone applications in 2023, and an additional $300 billion came from reach applications. Most analysts anticipate the fastest growth in the reach category, in part because the most surprising intersections are still being found there.

Satellite imagery is being used by food and beverage companies to optimize their supply chains. Insurance companies price agricultural risk using data from Earth observation. Financial institutions timestamp high-frequency trades using GPS timing signals. Space is more than just a business. Numerous other industries that hardly ever identify as space-dependent now use it as an input.

It’s difficult to ignore how drastically the institutional landscape has evolved from even ten years ago. The United States accounted for $77 billion of the $132 billion that governments worldwide spent on space in 2024, divided between civil and national security initiatives. Even so, those numbers only account for 22% of the entire economy. Once an afterthought in a field dominated by the government, the commercial sector is now the overwhelming majority. The world recorded 149 orbital launches in the first half of 2025, or one every 28 hours, which is six hours quicker than the rate for the entire year of 2024. Of those launches, 81 were made by SpaceX alone. When SpaceX was still vying for its first government contract, that cadence would have been unimaginable. It’s background noise now.

Despite some resistance, the policy environment is starting to catch up with the business reality. President Trump issued an executive order in August 2025 that would simplify environmental reviews, update launch rules, and create a new FAA position dedicated to commercial space travel. On July 4, the One Big Beautiful Bill set aside $500 million for military space launch infrastructure and approved a $25 billion initial investment in the Golden Dome missile defense system. Restoring space investment to Cold War-era levels could boost the U.S. economy by between $1.5 and $3 trillion over the course of 20 years, according to researchers at the Brookings Institution. This estimate implies that the current situation, despite its activity, may still be understating the eventual scale.

It’s still unclear if supply chain limitations, orbital congestion, or geopolitical disruption will cause the $1 trillion threshold to arrive in 2032 as Space Foundation predicts, or if it will slip to 2035. The fact that the industry has reached some sort of turning point, where the numbers are no longer speculative curiosities but rather concrete figures around which businesses, pension funds, and defense ministries are developing real strategies, is becoming more and more difficult to dispute. Whether the space economy reaches a trillion dollars is not the question. The question is whether the organizations created to oversee and profit from that expansion will be prepared when it does.