Upstream and downstream in space accounting

node

The boundary decision that determines almost every headline number about the space economy. Upstream is the part that physically goes to space or builds what does: satellite manufacturing, launch vehicles, launch services, ground stations. Downstream is everything that consumes what those assets emit — direct-to-home television subscriptions, satellite broadband accounts, imagery analytics, and, overwhelmingly, the navigation and timing functions embedded in consumer devices and infrastructure. Upstream is small and visible; downstream is large and diffuse. The consequence is that measured space-economy totals are dominated by the boundary rather than by activity: count a smartphone chipset because it contains a GNSS receiver and the total swells by hundreds of billions, exclude it and the same year shrinks by a factor of several. The OECD handbook exists precisely because national statistical offices had no shared answer, and the gap between the Satellite Industry Association series, the Space Foundation series and OECD-aligned national accounts is mostly a gap between definitions, not between observations. Not a place.

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