Autor: Nermin Sefić
The space industry is undergoing a transformation comparable to what the internet experienced during the nineties — a shift from a domain exclusively driven by government agencies and a limited number…
The space industry is undergoing a transformation comparable to what the internet experienced during the nineties — a shift from a domain exclusively driven by government agencies and a limited number of large defense contractors toward a dynamic, privately capital-driven sector dramatically reducing the cost of orbital access and opening new commercial opportunities unimaginable a decade ago.
The fundamental driver of this transformation is the dramatic reduction in the cost of launching satellites into orbit, mostly thanks to the development of reusable rockets enabling the return and reuse of the most expensive components of the launch system instead of expending them once. This technological achievement, considered economically unviable for decades by traditional space agencies and contractors, has dramatically changed the economics of orbital access, reducing launch costs by an order of magnitude compared to the prior decade.
This cost reduction has opened the door to business models that simply weren't economically viable when launching a single satellite cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Constellations of hundreds or thousands of small satellites, previously financially unimaginable, are now becoming commercially viable, enabling new services like global satellite internet that can reach remote regions lacking access to traditional cable or mobile infrastructure.
Global constellations of satellites in low Earth orbit, designed to provide internet connectivity anywhere on the planet, represent one of the most significant commercial applications of this new space economy. Unlike traditional geostationary communication satellites, which suffer significant signal delay due to their great distance from Earth, low-orbit satellites can provide an internet connection with latency comparable to traditional terrestrial broadband connections, making them a viable alternative even for latency-sensitive applications like video calls or online gaming.
This technology has particularly significant implications for regions lacking access to traditional internet infrastructure — rural areas in developing countries, remote islands, or regions hit by natural disasters that destroyed existing infrastructure. Simultaneously, the rapid growth in the number of low-orbit satellites creates new challenges in orbital traffic management and collision risk that could generate dangerous orbital debris, potentially threatening future use of those orbital paths for decades.
The idea of extracting valuable minerals from asteroids — potentially including platinum-group metals theoretically worth trillions of dollars — has long been a subject of speculative enthusiasm within the space industry, with several companies attempting to commercialize this vision over the prior decade. Reality has proven considerably slower than initial expectations, with technical challenges of identifying, accessing, and processing asteroid materials remaining considerably more complex than early optimistic projects assumed.
Despite slow progress, the long-term economic argument for asteroid mining remains intriguing — a theoretically unlimited supply of valuable minerals that could fundamentally change the global critical-materials economy if technical challenges are resolved. A realistic timeline for commercially viable asteroid mining at scale remains measured in decades, not years, but continued investment in the underlying technologies needed for that vision continues despite slow progress toward commercial viability.
Alongside the commercial dimension, space is becoming an increasingly significant area of geopolitical competition, with national security implications extending beyond traditional military applications like reconnaissance satellites. Modern economies' and military systems' dependence on satellite infrastructure — for navigation, communication, Earth observation, and weather forecasting — makes that infrastructure a potential target in future conflicts, creating new categories of strategic vulnerability that didn't exist a few decades ago.
This dynamic drives military investment in defensive capabilities and, potentially, capabilities for disrupting an adversary's satellite infrastructure, creating a new dimension of military competition unfolding in orbit, beyond traditional land, sea, and air domains of warfare. The international legal framework regulating military use of space remains significantly less developed than the framework regulating traditional domains of conflict, creating legal uncertainty about what constitutes acceptable versus escalatory behavior in orbit.
Alongside communication satellites, satellite Earth observation is developing into a separate, fast-growing commercial market offering valuable data for agriculture, disaster management, climate-change monitoring, and increasingly, financial analytics using satellite imagery to assess economic activity in real time — for instance, tracking the number of cars in shopping mall parking lots as an indicator of consumer demand before official economic data becomes available.
While space tourism remains economically marginal relative to the broader space economy, with prices making it accessible only to exceptionally wealthy individuals, its symbolic significance for broader public perception of the space industry exceeds its current economic weight.
As the number of low-orbit satellites grows exponentially, the lack of a binding international framework for orbital traffic management becomes an increasingly urgent problem.
According to a 2022 Citigroup analysis and other sources tracking launch cost history, NASA's Space Shuttle cost an average of about $54,500 per kilogram of payload to low Earth orbit over its operational life from 1981 to 2011. SpaceX's Falcon 9, through a combination of reusing the rocket's first stage and high launch frequency, reduced that cost to approximately $2,700 per kilogram for launches using booster recovery and reuse — a decline of over 95% compared to the Space Shuttle era, and an order of magnitude lower than average launch costs for medium and heavy payloads during the 1970-2010 period, which according to the same analysis were around $16,000 per kilogram.
SpaceX's Starship, the next-generation fully reusable rocket in development, targets a further cost reduction to a range of $100 to $200 per kilogram — which, if achieved, would represent an additional order-of-magnitude reduction compared to the already dramatically cheaper Falcon 9, and would theoretically make orbital access cheaper than at any point in space industry history.
The scale of the Starlink constellation, operated by SpaceX, is unprecedented in space industry history. According to CelesTrak tracking data, Starlink had surpassed 10,800 active satellites in low Earth orbit by 2026, accounting for between 59% and 67% of all operational satellites currently orbiting Earth — meaning a single company controls more active satellites than all other operators worldwide combined. For comparison, the total number of satellites humanity had launched throughout history before Starlink was roughly 9,000 — a figure Starlink alone could triple once it reaches its planned full capacity of up to 42,000 satellites, for which SpaceX already has regulatory approval.
The closest competitor, Britain's OneWeb (owned by France's Eutelsat), completed its own constellation of just 648 satellites in 2024 — roughly a tenth the size of Starlink. Starlink currently operates in 102 countries with over three million subscribers paying a monthly fee to access the network through a $300 receiver dish, growing at an average rate of three new satellites daily since its first launch in 2019.
This dramatic concentration of market power in one company's hands raises its own governance and security questions independent of the broader launch-cost-decline trend — critics warn that any future regulatory or security problem with Starlink would have a disproportionately large impact on global satellite infrastructure, given how large a share of total operational orbital capacity this single constellation represents.
Alongside enthusiasm about falling launch costs and growing satellite numbers, an equally significant, darker side of this story is the growing risk of "Kessler syndrome" — a scenario where orbital debris accumulates to the point that collisions between objects generate ever more fragments, driving a chain reaction that could render certain orbits completely unusable for satellites or future space missions. According to the European Space Agency's (ESA) 2024 space environment report, low Earth orbit contains over 36,500 tracked debris objects larger than 10 centimeters and an estimated 130 million pieces smaller than a millimeter.
A concrete illustration of this risk's severity occurred in February 2024, when NASA's TIMED satellite and defunct Russian Cosmos 2221 passed within just 10 meters of each other at a relative velocity exceeding 14 kilometers per second — neither could maneuver, and scientists could only track and watch. Had they collided, the impact energy would have been equivalent to roughly 15 tons of TNT, instantly creating thousands of fragments large enough to destroy other satellites, with each individual fragment remaining in orbit for decades, capable of triggering further collisions.
ESA's 2024 report reveals that approximately 60% of operational satellites had to perform at least one collision-avoidance maneuver during the prior year — a number that has tripled since 2018. Each such maneuver takes hours of planning and consumes valuable fuel, shortening a satellite's operational life; in some cases, satellites have had to change course so often that their planned orbits become unusable for their original mission. China's Long March 6A rocket breakup in August 2024 generated over 700 new fragments in Sun-synchronous orbit — a region critical for Earth observation and climate-monitoring satellites — illustrating how quickly a single event can worsen the entire problem.
Researchers from Princeton, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Regina developed a new metric in 2025 called the "Crash Clock" to quantify this risk — according to their calculations, risk has dramatically increased since the "megaconstellation era," with a value of 121 days (roughly four months) in 2018 that has significantly worsened since. ESA has responded by setting a "Zero Debris" approach goal, requiring all future missions to significantly limit debris creation by 2030.
AstroForge, a California startup founded in 2022, offers the most concrete, up-to-date insight into the real gap between the vision of asteroid mining and the technical reality of attempting to realize that vision. The company was built precisely on the lessons of earlier sector pioneers' failure — Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, both founded in the mid-2000s with high-profile investors, collapsed before managing to launch a single asteroid mission, and Planetary Resources co-founder Chris Lewicki acknowledged the fundamental failure reason was financial, not technical — lack of a clear path to actual profitability made raising capital needed for the next step difficult.
AstroForge has managed to launch two actual space missions since its founding, but both encountered significant technical problems illustrating how difficult it remains to achieve what only a handful of government space agencies have so far accomplished at costs of hundreds of millions of dollars. The first mission, Brokkr-1, launched in April 2023, was meant to demonstrate metal-refining technology in space, but the team couldn't activate the refinery payload on the spacecraft itself. The second mission, Odin, launched in March 2025 as a secondary payload alongside an Intuitive Machines mission to the Moon, was meant to photograph a targeted metallic asteroid — the company lost contact with the spacecraft just 20 hours after separation, before gathering any useful data.
Despite these failures, the company has managed to raise $55 million in total capital (including a $40 million Series A round in August 2024) and continues planning subsequent missions — DeepSpace-2, planned for launch in the fourth quarter of 2026, would be the first-ever commercial spacecraft rendezvous with a body outside Earth's gravitational influence, while actually returning asteroid samples to Earth, according to CEO Matt Gialich, might not come until after a fourth mission, roughly a two-year round trip, targeting before the end of this decade.
Gialich himself summarizes the sector's fundamental challenge in a phrase repeated in nearly every industry analysis: "This is really, really fucking hard." His company aims to prove that technical feasibility, already demonstrated by hundred-million-dollar government missions like Japan's Hayabusa2 and NASA's OSIRIS-REx, which brought tiny asteroid samples back to Earth, can be replicated at the considerably lower cost needed for commercial viability — a question that, in Gialich's own words, "isn't a question of physics, it's a question of whether it can be done in a way that makes any monetary sense."
The new space economy, driven by dramatic reductions in orbital-access costs, represents one of the most dynamic sectors of the global economy, with implications ranging from commercial opportunities in telecommunications and Earth observation to profound questions of national security and international law. As orbital-access costs continue falling and the number of commercial and government actors in orbit continues growing, managing this increasingly crowded and strategically significant domain will become an increasingly complex question of global coordination over the coming decade.
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Autor i urednička odgovornost: Nermin Sefić. Izdavač: GNK ASG d.o.o..
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