While SpaceX’s IPO captures global financial headlines, a high-stakes space ecosystem has been quietly emerging. By shifting the goalposts from Mars to the moon and low Earth orbit, a broad coalition of smaller players have been investing in and building the infrastructure for a new space economy, and they’re poised to profit from the next century in orbit.
Mars is dead. It’s all about the moon
Elon Musk was once obsessed with colonizing Mars. Now, like almost everyone else, he’s focused on the more-attainable moon. (SpaceX’s IPO prospectus mentions the Moon 74 times in; Mars, 63.) “We believe the development of a sustained human and commercial presence on the Moon has the potential to give rise to a new lunar economy,” the prospectus says. Establishing that presence “will enable terawatt-scale annual AI compute growth, support deeper space exploration and industrialization, and serve as a stepping stone to establishing a civilization on Mars.”
There’s a good reason for this shift. SpaceX’s launch business has long relied on contracts with NASA, for which the company has flown 34 uncrewed resupply missions and 13 crewed flights to the International Space Station. Now, the traffic and funding are shifting toward building lunar infrastructure.
First, there’s the business of getting to the moon. In April 2021, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to provide the landing vehicle—a modified version of its Starship—for the agency’s Artemis 3 mission, originally intended to land humans on the Moon in 2027. Since then, NASA has pushed the return of astronauts to the moon to the Artemis 4 mission, in 2028, and will instead use Artemis 3 as a low-Earth orbit practice run for connecting the launch vessel with the separately launched lunar lander.
The agency also opened up the lander bidding to other companies, and now aims to test vehicles from both SpaceX and Blue Origin, which already holds a $3.4 billion contract for the Artemis 5 moon mission.
NASA has earmarked an additional $30 billion in funding over the next decade for companies that can help build out a permanent Moon base. That money is already flowing.
At the end of May, NASA awarded nearly $1 billion in related contracts, including $219 million to for lunar rovers to space mobility company Astrolab, and $220 million to Lunar Outpost for lunar rovers. It gave $188 million to Blue Origin—with the potential for another $280 million–to deliver the rovers to the Moon. In addition, Firefly Aerospace, a private maker of launch vehicles, received a $75 million subcontract to build the carrier spacecraft for the MoonFall mission—a 2028 technology demonstration that will deploy a swarm of drones over the Moon’s South Pole.
This year alone, NASA plans three Moon Base supply missions, deploying landers made by Blue Origin, Astrobiotic, and Intuitive Machines, and including delivery of an Astrolab rover.
While space startups in the past have depended on Pentagon funding to help get off the ground, today, companies with technology that can be adapted for the moon can now look to NASA instead. The cislunar environment is becoming a more important strategic asset and location,” says Taylor Sargent at Industrious VC. “Now that NASA’s leaning heavily into that, there’s just so much going on. It’s really exciting.”
The orbital services economy is already here
The SpaceX prospectus projects a total addressable market of $26.5 trillion for its AI business, which hinges on yet-to-be-built orbital data centers. Google and Amazon are also betting on orbital computers, along with startups that include Axiom Space, Ramon.Space, Sophia Space, and Starcloud, which earlier this year raised a $170 million Series A and reached unicorn status just 17 months after graduating from Y Combinator.
But data centers are just one part of the emerging orbital services economy. Space-based energy is another increasingly active niche. In April, startup Overview Energy announced an agreement to beam energy from space-based solar arrays down to terrestrial data centers operated by Meta, with delivery expected by 2030.
In May, Star Catcher raised a $65 million Series A to fund development of an in-orbit network of “power node” spacecraft that will harvest solar energy and beam it via laser to client satellites and spacecraft, for an on-demand power boost. Hawthorne, CA-based Reflect Orbital has raised more than $28 million to build satellites that will use mirrors to redirect sunlight to dark parts of Earth, increasing daylight hours.
Other startups are focusing on space manufacturing (fiber optics, semiconductors, drugs), debris detection and mitigation, and in-orbit servicing of spacecraft. In May, the U.S. Space Force announced two early 2027 missions that will test on-orbit refueling and maneuvering of geosynchronous satellites, awarding $25.5 million to Astroscale US to provide a Provisioner refueling spacecraft, and $37.5 million to Starfish Space for one of its Otter “space tugs.”
Targeting the orbital services market, Rocket Lab recently completed the acquisition of Motiv Space Systems, which specializes in space robotics, motion-control systems, and precision mechanisms for spacecraft.
A startup called Karman+ has raised $20 million to target orbital refueling—aiming to mine water from asteroids and convert it into propellant. Pulling that off would be expensive—but the value proposition for potential customers could be compelling.
“If you have a $200 million to $400 million asset in orbit that you could refuel and extend its lifespan by two years instead of deorbiting it, that’s less sci-fi and more of a cost game,” says Sten Tamkivi, a partner at London and Tallinn-based early-stage fund Plural and an investor in Karman+.
Emerging on-orbit infrastructure could change the math for new space projects by reducing the amount of energy needed to get stuff into orbit. “If you want to build a data center or a solar farm in orbit, launch costs can make that prohibitive,” says Tamkivi.
The more resources you have already floating up in space—from radiation shielding to manufacturing facilities—the less mass you need to drag up from the “gravity well” of Earth for each new project. “The P&L of those projects becomes way better,” Tamkivi says.
Much of the space industry is not in space
Every rocket, satellite, or orbital data center that goes up into space is enabled by a complex and sprawling infrastructure of Earth-based services.
Consider the most profitable part of SpaceX’s business, Starlink, and its competitors. The satellite-internet industry’s so-called “ground segment”—the hardware and back-end systems required to turn orbital signals into reliable connectivity—generated more than $165.2 billion in 2025, according to the Satellite Industry Association’s 2026 State of the Satellite Industry report. That’s the largest single revenue category in the global space economy.
As an investment thesis, focusing on the Earth-based components that support expansion in space makes a lot of sense. “Buy launchpads!” says Mason Angel, founding partner at space-focused Industrious Ventures. “That’s a bottleneck.”
The SpaceX prospectus specifically calls out the need for “continued investment of significant capital resources” into securing land and developing launch sites, and supporting infrastructure across “multiple locations.”
Spaceports, like airports, could become new engines for regional economic growth—creating jobs in their construction and continued operation. In Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently announced a major expansion of Blue Origin’s Rocket Park campus at the Cape Canaveral Spaceport, with the rocket builder investing $600 million in an 830,000-square-foot upper stage manufacturing facility that it estimates will support 500 aerospace jobs.
Critical minerals, largely produced in China, are another bottleneck and a supply-chain vulnerability, as are rare, “noble” gases like argon—which SpaceX uses in its satellites—and xenon and krypton, which everyone else uses and which mostly come from Russia and China. “There’s an entire terrestrial industry that’s coming up on critical mineral mining and refining,” says Taylor Sargent, another partner at Industrious.
Meanwhile companies such as Hadrian are modernizing the way that parts and components for space are manufactured. Whether or not SpaceX can maintain its dominance in launch and broadband, there’s a wave of opportunity for smaller companies to enable progress in space while on the ground.
As you go down through the supply chain for space, the bottlenecks multiply—along with the opportunities. The demand for low-cost, space-grade solar panels, for example, has already outstripped what existing manufacturers can supply—even before everyone started talking about orbital data centers. That’s led Rocket Lab to ramp up production of silicon solar cells at a dedicated facility in New Mexico.
While the world watches the SpaceX IPO, some of the smartest money is pursuing overlooked opportunities in the growing space ecosystem, where valuations are often more reasonable.
