How space is becoming a trillion-dollar marketplace

The future of space is privatized. Exploring the solar system is now not just the preserve of government agencies—private companies are finding it’s a profitable place to do business. There’s a whole industry around supplying equipment to space agencies, and some projects will never make it off Earth. But that’s why private companies are brought in—they can develop new tech without spending money from the public purse. “You can take much more risk. … This is the reason why having not public fund but private fund, you can push at the limit. So you can allow yourself to make more experiments and to sustain failures and go fast. And at the end of the day, you can achieve some commercialization at low cost,” says Antonio Delfino from private company Venturi Space. NASA has opened up to private partnerships. When it comes to the business of space, some companies aren’t even looking to ESA or NASA for contracts. Space Cargo Unlimited is aimed squarely at the private sector. It has developed what it calls the ‘Bento Box,’ which has all the systems onboard to autonomously make all kinds of products. “This is a spacecraft that is going to fly a few weeks and board multiple projects in various fields: pharmaceutical, agricultural, electronics, new materials, to make things in space for Earth. Because space has a particular set of characteristics, one of the biggest being the absence of gravity, that allows to produce high-value product for Earth that are very difficult, if not impossible, to make on Earth,” says Nicolas Gaume, CEO of Space Cargo Unlimited. So far, the company has seven flights scheduled and more than 100 clients interested in signing up to use the boxes. Space could become the factory of the future. “And it’s in a similar fashion to the 90s, the internet and then the whole digital revolution arose. From what was previously only publicly funded, you can have a public-private partnership,” says Gaume. Leading consultancy McKinsey and Company predicts the space economy will be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035, up from $630 billion in 2023. This article was provided by The Associated Press.