Always great seeing new companies in the space... space. Eager to see if these startups will end up standing on their own or become no-brainer acquisition targets for the incumbents. I think the outlook is good in general.
Good point! The companies that were the "new" players 10 years ago are now so well capitalized that they're acquiring the current wave of startups. Astra acquiring Apollo Fusion and SpaceX acquiring Swarm being great examples. We'll probably see a lot more of that in the near future.
Space-adjacent seems like a subcategory that will eventually fall under the "space" umbrella as well. There's a massive amount of terrestrial infrastructure (digital and physical) that will be needed to facilitate all the upcoming orbital activity. Services like constellation management, procurement, pad construction, material handling, etc., will all likely count startups among their ranks in large numbers. All that to say nothing of "actual" space tech.
There are certain bottlenecks that have developed based on our use of space in the last half century as well. I'm definitely biased here (working on such a problem), but abstracting some of our space-based capabilities to other existing and established formats will free up some much needed room and support bigger endeavors. It is and will continue to be a very complementary industry IMO.
Absolutely agree! Infrastructure, data layers, analytics on top of the data. Plus all of the challenges around space situational awareness, traffic management, etc. I wrote a newsletter a few months ago about the needs that arise from these challenges called The Rise of the Satellite Mega Constellation if you're interested in my thoughts on that: https://spacedotbiz.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-satellite...