DeepCorner: SpaceTech

Flash back to last week. You hold your breath as the Artemis II launches, on its way to become the first space mission in over 50 years to return to the moon.

Yet, there’s so much about the world of space and the mechanics behind the industry that remains opaque.

With that, we introduce our latest issue of DeepCorner: Unicorner’s occasional deep dives into all things deep tech. Today’s focus? The world of space.

Missed the last DeepCorner? Check out some of our past deep dives:

• Energy

• Computation

• American Dynamism

• April 29 (SF): We’re hosting our first AI Champions dinner, in partnership with Bolt.new and MiniMax. If you’re spearheading AI usage at your company, this dinner is for you. Apply to join us here.

• April 30 (SF): We’re hosting a seed+ founders dinner for 20 founders with Fidelity Private Shares. Invites are extremely limited; apply here.

Ethan and Arek 🦄

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The last space race was won by governments. The next one will be won by founders.

For most of human history, space was the exclusive domain of nation-states with unlimited budgets and geopolitical axes to grind. NASA put humans on the Moon in 1969. The Soviet Union built the first space station in 1971. But behind every mission was a government check, timeline, and agenda.

That era is over. The privatization of space is underway. And the companies being built right now will define who controls what happens in the exosphere.

Humans went from the first flight in 1903 to landing on the Moon in 1969, one of the most compressed technological leaps in recorded history. Sixty-six years separated Kitty Hawk from the Sea of Tranquility, a timeline that makes the achievement feel almost implausible.

It happened because of the Cold War.

From the late 1950s onward, space became the highest-stakes theater in the ideological competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Every launch was a proxy argument for which system of government could produce greater human achievement. With unlimited political will and the budget to match, NASA's funding peaked at an astounding 4.5% of the federal budget in the late 1960s.

Once the U.S. crossed that finish line, the urgency evaporated. Without a rival, NASA's budget entered a decline, falling below 0.5% of the federal budget by the 2000s. The Space Shuttle, conceived to make orbit routine and affordable, became a symbol of the structural difficulty in reducing the cost of access, while operating costs remained high. In the end, human spaceflight became confined largely to servicing a space station that was itself as much a diplomatic instrument as a scientific one.

Four forces have converged to make this moment different.

The most important is launch cost. Getting a payload to orbit once cost tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram (the Space Shuttle costing $54,500 per kilogram), while today, on a Falcon 9, it costs roughly $2,700 per kilogram. Starship, SpaceX’s upcoming launch platform, is targeting an order of magnitude lower than that. When access to orbit gets this cheap, previously cost-prohibitive missions and use-cases become viable and attract venture capital.

The second driver is miniaturization. The same semiconductor advances that made smartphones more powerful than 1990s supercomputers made it possible to build CubeSats and SmallSats, low-cost satellites as small as a shoebox and often launched in groups. They have allowed companies to operate constellations up to thousands of units for what a single traditional satellite once cost.

The third is AI. Machine learning has enabled autonomous mission planning, real-time onboard data processing, predictive maintenance for satellite hardware, orbit optimization, and analysis of the enormous quantities of Earth observation data now being generated. Some companies are processing geospatial data directly on the spacecraft itself, rather than downlinking hundreds of gigabytes. The ability to derive intelligence at the edge changes the cost structure.

The fourth is geopolitics. More on this later.

Altogether, the space industry expected to almost triple from $630 billion in 2023 to $1.8 trillion by 2035.

To understand where the opportunities are, imagine the space economy like any technology stack. There are layers and value accumulates differently at each.

Launch is the foundational layer. SpaceX dominates it today in a way that is difficult to overstate, and its position in reusable heavy lift is essentially unassailable in the near term.

The meaningful competition is at the small and medium lift end. Rocket Lab has established a durable position, while Stoke Space is building a fully reusable rocket with a unique staged combustion architecture. Several others are pursuing different approaches to reusability and cost reduction. All of these companies are betting that demand for dedicated launch capacity will grow faster than rideshare slots on larger vehicles can serve it.

The launch layer is now consolidating, with companies prioritizing reusability better positioned to survive.

The satellite layer is the next up, and it’s where the first generation of space unicorns emerged. Starlink changed the connectivity conversation permanently. Before it, satellite internet was slow, expensive, and mostly used by ship captains and Antarctic researchers. Today, it serves millions of subscribers and is generating real revenue.

The interesting startups are in niches Starlink cannot or will not serve. Some are building small geostationary satellites to bring connectivity to specific underserved regions with a unit economics model that does not require deploying thousands of spacecraft. Others are attempting to connect standard mobile phones directly to satellites. Still others are building the ground infrastructure that lets satellites communicate.

Earth observation is currently the clearest path to commercial revenue in the space economy. Why? Satellites produce operationally useful data for buyers across agriculture, insurance, finance, logistics, and government intelligence.

The global Earth Observation market is on track to exceed $8 billion by 2033. Raw imagery is already becoming a commodity, transferring margins to the intelligence layer. That might mean using AI to predict crop yields, track vessel movements, monitor deforestation, or identify early supply chain disruptions. Because this is a software/AI problem, it is subject to the same laws that make it fast to build, cheap to scale, and more profitable by margin than anything in the launch or manufacturing layers.

This is the earliest-stage layer but potentially the most consequential. As the number of active satellites grows, a set of supporting services becomes necessary, including refueling, inspection, debris removal, and orbital transfer. Unicorner companies like Orbit Fab and Starfish Space are betting on that long-term vision, building orbital refueling depots and satellite servicing vehicles. The bet, if accurate, brings a high reward.

Microgravity manufacturing is next. Certain manufacturing, like specific pharmaceutical compounds, fiber optic cables, and advanced alloys benefit from microgravity environments. Startups are currently launching small capsules to conduct manufacturing runs.

Further out still is the concept of orbital data centers, where physical advantages of space could make it cheaper to process particular workloads in orbit than on the ground. NVIDIA chips are already being run in orbit to evaluate viability. These businesses are early and speculative, but exciting nonetheless.

Any honest account of the space economy must grapple with the legal and sovereignty questions that remain unresolved.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, the foundational legal framework for space, was written when only governments launched. It prohibits national appropriation of celestial bodies but is silent regarding private companies. The U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 established that American citizens can own resources they extract from space, but this is not international settled. 

Orbital slots and radio frequency spectrum are finite, and the operators who move first claim priority. That is a meaningful part of why large constellation operators have deployed so aggressively.

And there is, of course, the Moon. The U.S.’s Artemis program has committed to returning humans to the Moon as early as 2029. The Chinese Lunar Exploration Program is operating on a similar timeline. Competition is over the lunar south pole, where water ice deposits could be converted into rocket propellant, giving the owner control of a refueling depot for deeper exploration.

The clearest opportunity is with the intelligence layer. Satellites are generating more data than the industry currently knows how to process or monetize. Winners here will build the tools to analyze and distribute insights from this data. Like other software companies, the upside to success at scale is enormous.

The second is in-space services. As of early 2026, there are over 2,500 active companies in the space tech sector. As satellite count grows, so do the markets for preventing congestion and keeping satellites operating. The companies building that capacity now are early to a market that only gets larger as the layers below them scale. 

The third opportunity, further out, is in-space manufacturing and resource utilization. The economics of producing materials in microgravity or extracting resources in space may prove to be commercially significant as other innovation (such as robotics) converges.

Investors are signaling where they believe the value is concentrating through their funding decisions. Late-stage funding as a percentage of total space investment has reached its highest level in a decade, which means capital is moving away from early bets on unproven infrastructure and toward companies that have demonstrated commercial traction. Space companies raised over $12 billion last year, with 2026 off to a strong start.

The pattern here mirrors how value migrated in the internet era. Building the fiber and the servers was necessary but the returns went to the companies that built what ran on top. Think Amazon, Google, Meta, and more. The same dynamic is playing out in orbit.

The funding numbers and market projections are compelling. However, the space economy comes with a set of structural risks that do not have clean analogies in software or even most other DeepTech sectors.

Space is expensive in ways that compound. Hardware must be designed to survive launch forces, radiation exposure, extreme temperature swings, and, depending on the mission, years of operation with no possibility of physical maintenance. The result is engineering timelines and cost structures that are fundamentally different from software-style venture returns. Moreover, a failed satellite represents total destruction of the asset, with no patches or rollbacks.

Many space startups are burning significant capital for years before generating any revenue, and occasions like the 2022 to 2023 VC pullback hit several high-profile space companies hard.

In just the U.S., regulations are patchwork, with launch licensing running through the Federal Aviation Administration and radio frequency coordination running through the Federal Communications Commission and the International Telecommunication Union. Beyond the U.S., countries have different national space laws, and the international legal framework for resource extraction and orbital governance remains contested. For a startup trying to move fast, regulatory uncertainty is a strategic risk.

The technical expertise required to build space hardware is scarce. Most of it lives inside legacy aerospace primes like Lockheed Martin and Airbus, government labs, or a handful of elite universities, and startup recruiting requires competitive compensation as well as a convincing mission and a credible path to a business.

The AI and software talent that is central to the intelligence and data layers of the space economy is more available, but it means direct competition for talent with companies that offer lower risk and greater compensation.

Every major technological revolution has required physical infrastructure before it could produce software-layer returns. Think fiber for the internet or data centers for cloud computing. This time, the foundation sits 250 miles above the Earth's surface.

With demand already embedded in the global economy, today’s founders are establishing the operating system for the next century of human civilization.