The trillion-dollar space economy projection

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A family of long-range forecasts, issued through the late 2010s and 2020s by investment banks and consultancies, holding that the global space economy will reach or exceed one trillion US dollars around 2035–2040. They are not one estimate but several, built on different bases, and they share three properties worth naming. First, they are dominated by downstream categories — most of the growth is in services consumed on Earth, not in launched hardware. Second, several include categories with no current revenue at all, such as space-based solar power or point-to-point suborbital transport, whose contribution is assumption rather than observation. Third, the near-term components that carry the most weight are satellite broadband subscriptions and defence procurement, both of which are checkable against present operating results in a way that the outer years are not. The honest use of such a projection is as a statement of what a forecaster believes must happen, decomposed into its parts and tested part by part. Not a place, and not itself a measurement.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.