By Kelly T. Cooper, writing for Bombellii Ventures
From Exploration to Economy
For more than half a century, space was defined by exploration. Today it is being transformed by commercialization. Governments are no longer the sole builders of orbital infrastructure; commercial space stations, satellite constellations, servicing vehicles, logistics providers, and private capital are creating what may become humanity’s first permanent commercial economy beyond Earth. Commercialization also brings new challenges, including orbital debris, spectrum congestion, space traffic management, and the long-term stewardship of shared orbital and lunar environments. How these challenges are managed will increasingly determine whether the orbital economy can scale safely, efficiently, and sustainably. Meeting them will require commercial activity and the infrastructure needed to coordinate it to evolve in tandem. Otherwise, the orbital economy risks repeating many of the failures that have historically forced societies to choose between economic growth and long-term societal and environmental resilience.
That transition is already underway. As satellite servicing is extending the life of orbital assets, constellations have transformed into continuously operating networks, and commercial lunar logistics, orbital compute, relay infrastructure, and autonomous mission operations are moving from demonstration toward deployment. These developments span different technologies, customers, and business models, yet they point toward the same transition: the orbital economy is evolving into a persistent commercial system whose primary challenge is no longer reaching orbit; it’s operating there at scale. Success will increasingly determine the performance of the space-based services on which modern economies, public safety, scientific discovery, and critical infrastructure increasingly depend.
Industrial transitions of this nature create their greatest investment opportunities when operating complexity outgrows existing infrastructure, and the orbital economy is now approaching that inflection point. But unlike most industrial transitions, it is emerging while its operating architecture is still being defined. That creates a rare opportunity to avoid repeating the pattern of building economic systems first and attempting to retrofit sustainability later.
The Cost of Commercial Success
The market is already signaling that this transition has begun. Since 2009, private investors have deployed more than $455 billion across 2,409 space companies, completing 9,425 financings and producing 954 exits. In the first quarter of ‘26, investment reached a record $36.1 billion, while infrastructure funding more than doubled year-over-year to $6.7 billion. Venture investors supplied 56% of infrastructure capital, while average Series A financing doubled and Series C financing increased 81%.
This is not capital funding incremental capacity. It is capital reallocating toward the transition from episodic missions to persistent commercial operations. More revealing than the scale of investment is where it is concentrating, an early signal that investors are beginning to price the operating requirements of that transition.
As commercial ecosystems expand, coordination increasingly becomes a constraint on growth, shifting value toward the infrastructure that reduces it. Containerization transformed global trade not by moving goods more cheaply, but by creating a common operating system through which independent participants could coordinate at global scale. The resulting collapse in coordination costs made entirely new markets economically viable. Cloud computing created extraordinary enterprise value not by adding servers, but by orchestrating distributed computing resources across millions of organizations. In both cases, the greatest value accrued not to the owners of more assets, but to the companies that became indispensable to how every asset interacted with the rest of the ecosystem.
Every new satellite, servicing vehicle, commercial space station, relay node, and lunar asset increases the number of relationships that must be managed within and across organizations. Communication and compute must be dynamically orchestrated across heterogeneous orbital networks. Spacecraft from competing operators must safely coordinate increasingly congested orbital regimes. Commercial transactions require trusted mechanisms for identity, authorization, scheduling, and execution among participants with no common operator. The opportunity is not merely to perform these functions more efficiently, but to become the infrastructure through which the commercial ecosystem performs them collectively.
Space Capital’s Infrastructure, Distribution, and Applications framework has become one of the industry’s most influential models for understanding where commercial value is being created. Our research suggests that as those layers mature, a second organizing principle begins to emerge: the coordination infrastructure required for them to operate together at industrial scale. This includes the orchestration of networks, compute, and traffic, alongside the trusted commercial infrastructure required for identity, authorization, scheduling, and market transactions. Independently, these appear to be distinct technology markets. Collectively, they reveal the emergence of a new infrastructure layer underpinning the orbital economy.
This transition is already becoming visible in both commercial strategy and next-generation space architectures. SES-Intelsat reflects how incumbent operators are evolving toward integrated, multi-orbit service delivery, while the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture demonstrates how next-generation space architectures are being designed around distributed, interoperable networks from the outset. Together, they point toward a future in which coordination itself becomes strategic infrastructure – and an increasingly important source of commercial value creation.
Getting this transition right will determine whether commercialization expands access to orbital capabilities while avoiding many of the failures and externalized costs that have historically undermined both economic and environmental resilience on Earth.
Where Value Accretes
The next infrastructure opportunity will belong to the platforms that enable independent orbital infrastructure to function as an integrated commercial economy. Our research identifies four emerging markets where value increasingly accrues through coordination rather than ownership:
- Network Orchestration – Creates the intelligence layer that dynamically routes traffic across heterogeneous orbital networks, maximizing connectivity, resilience, and the productivity of existing communications infrastructure. (Example: Aalyria)
- Compute Orchestration – Decouples economic value creation from physical infrastructure growth by dynamically orchestrating AI workloads and maximizing the utilization of distributed orbital compute resources. (Example: Starcloud)
- Orbital Traffic Coordination – Makes safe, high-density orbital activity economically viable by enabling independent operators to coordinate autonomous operations through shared infrastructure rather than bilateral coordination or regulatory oversight. (Examples: Kayhan Space)
- Orbital Commercial Infrastructure – Creates the trusted commercial rails that enables independent operators to discover, contract, transact, and exchange orbital services through standardized commercial infrastructure. (Example: Arlula)
Viewed independently, these appear to be distinct software markets. Together, they reveal a common economic pattern: as orbital infrastructure becomes more specialized and distributed, value shifts toward the platforms that reduce the friction of operating across independent participants. Each market addresses a different bottleneck – network fragmentation, decision bottlenecks, coordination complexity, or transaction friction – but all capture value by increasing the productivity of infrastructure they do not own. Their simultaneous emergence is the signal.
Existing forecasts estimate the space-enabled economy could approach $1.8 trillion by 2035, providing an important benchmark for the scale of currently identifiable markets. At the other end of the spectrum, SpaceX’s 2026 S-1 filing identifies a $28.5 trillion total addressable market spanning connectivity, AI, exploration, and other future activities. The gap between these estimates reflects fundamentally different assumptions about what the orbital economy ultimately becomes – not simply a larger industrial sector, but potentially a new geography of economic production whose future contribution cannot yet be fully measured. Regardless of where the eventual ceiling lies, every expansion of commercial activity increases the strategic importance of the coordination infrastructure that enables it.
Conclusion
These markets create an unusually strong opening for venture-backed companies because they require neutrality across competing participants. Individual operators optimize proprietary systems, governments establish policy, and standards bodies codify interoperability. Neutral economic infrastructure must operate across all three. For incumbents, that neutrality is strategically difficult because maximizing ecosystem value often conflicts with maximizing proprietary advantage. The companies that define these categories rarely own the underlying assets – they create the infrastructure that every asset depends on.
One of the most important lessons from the energy transition is that the greatest leverage rarely comes from retrofitting mature markets. It comes from shaping the infrastructure and incentives of emerging ones before they become difficult to change. The orbital economy offers one of the clearest opportunities to put that lesson into practice, creating the conditions for an economy in which commercial growth and long-term stewardship reinforce one another from first principles.
At Bombellii, we’re placing bets on the infrastructure that can turn that possibility into the operating model of the orbital economy.
* This article reflects a synthesis of academic literature, institutional research, industry reports, company analysis, and original market research conducted during the Bombellii Ventures fellowship. The sources below represent the primary materials that informed the investment thesis and supporting analysis.
Selected Sources and Research
Industry Reports & Market Intelligence
- Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (2026). Form S-1 Registration Statement. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
- Space Capital. Space IQ Q1 2026.
- Space Capital. Infrastructure, Distribution & Applications Market Framework.
- World Economic Forum. (2024). Space: The $1.8 Trillion Opportunity for Global Economic Growth. Produced in collaboration with McKinsey & Company.
Economic Theory & Industrial Organization
- Coase, Ronald. The Nature of the Firm.Economica (1937).
- Williamson, Oliver. The Economics of Organization: The Transaction Cost Approach.American Journal of Sociology (1981).
- Langlois, Richard & Foss, Nicolai. Capabilities and Governance: The Rebirth of Production in the Theory of Economic Organization.(2000).
- Malone, Yates & Benjamin. Electronic Markets and Electronic Hierarchies.(1992).
- AI and the Economics of Coordination.SSRN Working Paper (2025).
Space Operations & Institutional Research
- NASA Ames. Prototyping Operational Autonomy for Space Traffic Management.Acta Astronautica (2021).
- NASA Technical Reports Server. System Autonomy for Space Traffic Management.
- NASA. Starling / SpaceX Starlink Coordination Experiment(2025).
- ESA. Space Traffic Coordination Monitor.Space Debris Conference (2025).
- ESA Clean Space Days. AutoCA / AutoSTM (2026).