Once dominated by government agencies like NASA, the space-race ecosystem is increasingly run by private companies including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. Now, billions of dollars are flooding into the red-hot sector, with the World Economic Forum predicting that it will be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035.
According to two space tech executives speaking at Fortune‘s Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah, on Wednesday, the budding industry is not just an opportunity for profit. Getting back to the moon is also a “moral obligation,” said Jaret Matthews, the founder and CEO of Astrolab, a planetary logistics startup recently awarded a contract by NASA that could be worth nearly $2 billion. “To survive as a species, we need to move out among the stars,” he said.
Moonshot
The biggest names in the space tech sector are predictably run by two of the world’s richest men, Musk and Bezos, but a crop of startups is emerging to build out the emerging ecosystem. Rather than focusing on rockets and ships, like SpaceX and Blue Origin, Astrolab is producing rovers that can operate on interplanetary bodies, describing itself as the “UPS of the Moon.”
The idea, according to Matthews, is that as space tech develops, a cottage industry of logistics will be necessary to help support the economics of new development built on outer space surfaces. “It’s going to open up access to places like the Moon at scale to enable industrial activity,” he said.
While Astrolab may not be a direct competitor to Blue Origin and SpaceX, another startup—Stoke Space—is working on similar technology with the aim of building fully reusable rockets.
Speaking at Brainstorm Tech, Stoke’s chief operating officer Kelly Hennig admitted that she might not beat SpaceX to the goal, but that space onlookers should “vote for the little man, too.” She said that as the space landscape evolves, there will be a need for both large freight companies as well as smaller firms, comparing Stoke to the Sprinter vans used by Amazon. Stoke raised a $100 million Series B funding round in late 2023.
Getting humans back to the moon or to Mars may seem like a lofty goal, but Hennig said that any space tech development is still grounded in helping Earth’s pressing problems. She pointed to advancements supported by space tech, from GPS to weather monitoring. She added that the semiconductor and pharmaceutical industries will be able to take advantage of the low-gravity environment as more missions reach space.
“Any activity happening in space has to benefit life on Earth,” said Matthews. “Otherwise it’s not going to create value.”
Read more coverage from Brainstorm Tech 2024:
Venture firms need to emulate private equity, says Upfront Ventures partner Mark Suster