What Is the Space Economy? Value, Growth and Who Runs It

The space economy covers everything that generates economic value from space: launches, building and operating satellites, telecommunications, Earth observation and, increasingly, the extraction of resources from the Moon and asteroids. In 2025 the global market was worth about $600 billion, according to the OECD.

A market changing scale

The OECD’s 2025 figure and the McKinsey-World Economic Forum projection for 2035 measure two different things: the first is a snapshot of today’s market, the second is a future scenario in which the market nearly triples from its 2023 level in just over a decade.

Source	Reference year	Value	What it measures
OECD	2025	~$600 billion	Global space economy market, actual figure
McKinsey / World Economic Forum	2035 (projection)	$1.8 trillion	Future estimate, from a base of ~$630 billion in 2023

The two segments of the McKinsey-WEF projection show where the growth is expected to concentrate: by 2035, “backbone services” (launches, satellites, ground stations) would be worth about $755 billion, while the applications that use that infrastructure — from precision agriculture to navigation — would top $1 trillion.

From public to private

The sector started out public and stays partly so: OECD countries’ civil budgets rose from $40.5 billion to $46.4 billion between 2022 and 2025. But private capital is moving faster, with flows estimated between $11 billion and $13 billion in 2025 alone.

The clearest signal is in launches: private operators carried out 23% of them in 2010, and 88% in 2025.

Real-world example: SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk (whose business history, from PayPal to Tesla, is told in this Recap), was operating over 11,100 active Starlink satellites as of September 2026, with nearly 13,000 cumulative launches by that point: on its own, it accounts for a large share of the public-to-private shift the OECD tracks in launch data.

Two coalitions racing for the Moon

The reference legal framework is still the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bans any state from appropriating a celestial body “by declaration, use, occupation, or any other means” and defines outer space as “the province of all mankind.” On lunar and asteroid resource extraction, though, the text stays silent: it’s a gap the two coalitions now competing for the Moon have filled in different ways, six decades after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.

	Artemis Accords	ILRS
Led by	United States, NASA	Russia and China
Year launched	2020	2021
Member countries	Over 70, as of September 2026	17 countries and organizations, as of April 2025
Stated goal	Shared principles for civil exploration and the use of space resources	South pole lunar base by 2035

The Artemis Accords explicitly tie the resource question to the 1967 treaty, arguing that extraction “can and should” happen in a way that complies with it. Several countries, including Luxembourg, Japan, China, India and Russia, have meanwhile introduced their own national laws on appropriating space resources.

New players outside the two main coalitions are joining the lunar race. India, through the company Skyroot, launched the Vikram-1 rocket on July 18, 2026, becoming the third country in the world with private orbital launch capability, after the United States and China. In Europe, where the Ariane program remains the backbone of independent access to space (with several European Union member states among its backers), Amazon booked six additional launches with Arianespace in September 2026, bringing its total booked launches to 24, to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation.

Why orbit is already crowded

Not all orbital competition is about the Moon: much of it plays out much closer to home, in low orbit. According to ESA, about 40,000 objects were tracked in orbit in 2025, of which about 11,000 were active satellites; the estimated number of debris pieces larger than 1 centimeter, big enough to cause serious damage on impact, tops 1.2 million.

In low orbit around 550 km altitude, hazardous debris is now roughly the same order of magnitude as operational satellites: it’s the setup behind what experts call the Kessler cascade, the risk that collisions trigger more debris in a chain reaction. Rocket bodies re-enter the atmosphere more than three times a day on average, and in 2024, controlled re-entries outnumbered uncontrolled ones for the first time.

About 90% of rocket bodies in low orbit meet the standard of re-entering within 25 years of the end of their mission; 80% also meet the newer, tighter 5-year standard. Part of the push for stricter rules is that, according to the OECD, nearly $200 billion of economic activity was exposed to the risk posed by space debris in 2025.