Space is an emerging market

Space is no longer a cool niche - it now touches every lever of state power at once.

Three decades covering foreign policy has taught me one thing: the story is almost never as simple as your side wants it to be. That’s why I call balls and strikes without keeping score.

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Today I attended the Space Investment Forum in DC, which brought together government, industry and national security leaders to advance American leadership in space through public-private partnerships. My main takeaway was that space isn’t a niche anymore. Listening to the speakers, it became clear space isn’t just “important” - it now touches every lever of state power at once.

The forum was co-hosted by journalist and space enthusiast Kevin Cirilli and Jake Matthews of Potomac Database Systems, who used it to launch Cabeus Explorer, a new space intelligence platform connecting U.S. space policymakers with companies building the lunar economy. The moon, as they put it, is “an emerging market.”

Strategists have a shorthand for the instruments of state power: diplomatic, information, military and economic, or DIME. Built for embassies, broadcasts, battalions and trade, it now applies just as well to orbit. That convergence, not any single satellite or moon mission, is what should worry, or excite, anyone watching the space economy from Washington.

The most understated fact about American space policy is also the most consequential: the U.S. has spent six years building a coalition, one signature at a time. The Artemis Accords, a voluntary set of norms rooted in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, counted 70 signatories by mid-July, spanning every populated continent.

That’s diplomacy in its purest form: setting norms - on transparency, debris, safety zones, resource extraction - before rivals set their own. China hasn’t joined, and Russia calls it an end-run around the UN, which is itself telling: the Accords have become a dividing line in how nations align on the rules of the next frontier. State Department officials no longer treat it as an ancillary NASA program - it’s now core to how Washington conducts foreign policy. Call it soft power with a launch schedule.

If diplomacy sets the rules, information power is about who controls the plumbing beneath modern life. Space-based systems don’t just power your Uber driver - they underwrite financial transactions, emergency communications, precision navigation, agricultural monitoring and military command and control. Nearly every panel returned to the same warning: a serious outage wouldn’t just kill a map app - it would disrupt the systems that keep money moving, planes landing and first responders coordinated, all invisibly, until it’s gone. It’s the least glamorous form of power there is - right up until it’s gone.

The same constellations that give the U.S. and its allies unmatched situational awareness are also contested terrain: spy satellites, and the ability to jam or protect them, are leverage as real as a listening post once was. Beijing understood this early, declaring space a war fighting domain a decade ago and building what U.S. officials call the second-most capable remote-sensing architecture on Earth, growing from under 100 satellites in 2013 to roughly 1,900 today.

For most of the Space Age, orbit was a sanctuary - a place great powers watched each other but didn’t fight. That’s eroding fast. Space Force leadership has been blunt this year: the “Race to Resilience” initiative aims to build battle-ready architectures, and at least one senior general has said publicly that the U.S. needs to be able to “turn around and punch” if adversary systems threaten American satellites.

China dominates this conversation. A congressional commission concluded this year that Beijing is “aggressively positioning itself” to displace the U.S. as the world’s premier space power, and a Space Force outlook - bluntly titled “Future Operating Environment 2040” - describes prolonged, hard-to-detect competition rather than decisive battles, comparing the coming years to the tense buildup before World War I.

Perhaps the starkest indicator: outside researchers are urging the Space Force to prepare for an “in-person” lunar conflict, arguing China’s goal of landing taikonauts - the Chinese term for astronauts - on the moon by 2030 raises the odds of a real dispute over lunar territory and resources. Whether or not that materializes, the fact that it’s being war-gamed at all marks a real shift in how the Pentagon thinks about the high frontier. Give the planning cycle a few more years, and someone will pitch a moon combat readiness briefing with a straight face.

Retired Brig. Gen. Damon Feltman, CEO of the Space Force Association, put it starkly at today’s forum: space governance will be set either by authoritarian powers or by liberal democracies, and “there is no middle ground in this.” Treating today’s space environment as benign, he argued, is itself a risk - pointing to Beijing’s disregard for international norms in the South China Sea as an example of why we should expect the same playbook on the moon.

None of this happens without capital, and capital filled the room today. At bottom, the space economy is a story about American jobs - no longer the exclusive domain of astronauts, scientists and engineers. Industry data puts the sector’s growth at close to seven percent a year for the past two decades, with private capital now driving most of that growth. It’s striking how much of the emerging workforce doesn’t look like traditional aerospace at all. Finance, law, cybersecurity, insurance, logistics and policy roles are expanding alongside engineering, creating what some call “space collar” jobs: work that enables and governs the space economy without requiring anyone to strap into a rocket.

Jim Bridenstine, the former NASA Administrator who now runs Quantum Space, put it by way of an old military comparison: just as NCOs are “the MacGyvers” of the Army, the space economy needs its own class of do-everything technicians, not just PhDs - and panelists ran with it, describing everything from hybrid nuclear-maritime-space job titles to a coming need for “space geologists” who can read alien terrain the way oil-and-gas geologists read the ground on Earth.

The panel that stuck with me most, though, wasn’t about rockets - it was about weightlessness as a manufacturing input. Merck spent years growing crystals of its cancer drug Keytruda aboard the space station, chasing a uniform crystal structure gravity won’t allow on Earth. That work fed last year’s FDA approval of an injectable version of the drug - meaning a patient getting a shot instead of an IV may owe a small debt to zero gravity. A handful of newer companies are already turning that into an actual production line, growing semiconductors and drug crystals in orbit on a semi-routine basis. Researchers, meanwhile, are looking seriously at 3D printing components and habitats - livable structures, not just scientific equipment - out of materials already in space, rather than launching every component from Cape Canaveral.

It’s the closest thing space has to a punchline: humanity’s most advanced medicine and materials science may increasingly be, quite literally, made in space. That matters strategically, not just economically - the U.S. should be investing in the talent pipeline that will determine whether American firms or Chinese state-linked ventures dominate everything from satellite servicing to lunar supply chains.

How do we pull this all together? Bridenstine pointed to the National Space Council he worked under in the first Trump administration. That authority has since folded into the National Security Council, which he suggested isn’t accomplishing much these days - a reminder that DIME only works as a coherent strategy for space if someone in Washington is actually coordinating all four letters at once.

What today’s forum made clear is that space can no longer be assessed on its own terms. It’s a domain where all four instruments of state power now operate simultaneously and interdependently: the treaties that govern it, the data that flows through it, the weapons that can threaten it, and the capital that builds it.

Any serious accounting of American strategic competition with China - or Russia’s more asymmetric ambitions - has to treat orbit and the lunar surface the way it treats the Indo-Pacific or the Arctic: contested space where diplomatic, informational, military and economic power is impossible to separate. The countries that recognize this fastest, and organize their institutions accordingly, will set the terms for whatever comes next.