Business Is Booming in Space
The economy in space is now bigger than Austria’s — and growing quickly
Space is becoming a big business as investment in rockets, satellites and everything else from ground crew to rovers on Mars helped the size of the space economy expand to $424 billion last year.
To put this in perspective, if space were a country it would now have the world’s 27th biggest economy, ahead of Austria and Norway.
And despite the global pandemic this year, the number of launches is keeping pace with previous years as companies like SpaceX rush ahead with plans for more satellites.
SpaceX — through its subsidiary Starlink — has almost 600 satellites in place for its space-based Internet and expects to launch more than 11,000 more before it’s done.
More recently, Amazon has also entered the space race with a plan to spend $10 billion launching 3,236 satellites for its own Internet network.
NASA is busy as well. They will send people to the moon by 2024 as a first step to sending manned missions to Mars.
A lot of countries are joining this extra-terrestrial gold rush. Thirteen have started space agencies in the last decade and many others are eyeing sites for future space ports, including Indonesia and Kenya, while the UK has plans for three.
(And if you can’t wait for all this to happen so you can get to space yourself, there’s always the next best thing: a new perfume that smells just like an astronaut after a space walk — apparently something like burnt almonds or brake pads.)
