How big is space?

Overnight, SpaceX filed for its IPO (documents available here) and aims for a market valuation of $1.75tn. I am not going to comment on whether this valuation, given annual sales of $18.6bn for a price-to-sales ratio of 93.7x, is justified. But the number that stood out to me was the total addressable market of $28.5tn. I want to put that in perspective with a recent academic study on how big the space industry is today and how much it is likely to be in 2030.

Ok, one detour before we get into that (I just can’t let go of that…). The price-to-sales-ratio of 93.7x is quite ambitious. For comparison, Elon Musk’s other major company, Tesla, trades at 15.3x 2025 sales, while AI darling Nvidia trades at 21.2x 2025 sales. The only major company I could find with a similar price-to-sales ratio was Palantir at 94.1x.

But back to the total addressable market, which at a headline number of $28.5 trillion is the largest one ever identified and almost as large as the GDP of the entire United States ($32.4tn). According to SpaceX, this market opportunity breaks down to traditional space tech opportunities of $370bn in rocket launches, etc., plus another $1,610bn in Starlink solutions, which they call connectivity solutions but are generally classified as space tech. That makes for a total addressable market for space tech of $1,980bn.

SpaceX’s projections of its total addressable market

Source: SpaceX S-1 filing

Now, let’s ignore the AI part and compare these estimates for the space tech opportunity with the work of Luisa Corrado and Christos Makridis. The interesting twist about their assessment is that they don’t use company projections working in the Space tech industry, but rather use US input-output tables to get a top-down estimate for the size of the space tech industry in the US. Obviously, the US is just one country among many, but it is by far the biggest player in space tech, so I think these numbers are valuable as an independent check on the projections that businesses like SpaceX make.

Using not just the direct production and revenues generated by space tech companies, but also the upstream and downstream value generated, the chart below shows the growth of the US space tech industry from 2007 to 2017. Direct industry output grew from about $60 billion in 2007 to $75bn in 2017 (all numbers are in 2017 dollars adjusted for inflation). The bigger gains have been in indirect activity, i.e. the use of space tech by the government and a variety of private industries from aviation to real estate, etc. The economic output from these indirect uses has grown from $80bn to about $120bn in 2017.

Growth of the US space industry 2007 to 2017

Source: Corrado and Makridis (2026)

But 2017 was a long time ago. How is the space economy going to grow in the next couple of years? Thankfully, the authors ran Monte Carlo simulations to 2030 to estimate the future growth of the industry. They come up with a median estimate of the direct output by space tech firms like SpaceX of c.$115bn to $120bn by 2030. That is a c.50% to 60% growth in real terms in 13 years, or about 3.5% per year in real terms. Add back 2.5% inflation, and you come up with an estimated annual growth rate of c.6% per year between 2017 and 2030.

The indirect benefit of the space economy is projected to grow to $230bn to $240bn, for an annual real growth rate of c.5%. Add back 2.5% inflation, and you come to an annual nominal growth rate of 7.5% between 2017 and 2030 for the indirect beneficiaries of the space economy.

Growth of the US space industry 2017 to 2030

Source: Corrado and Makridis (2026)

The bottom line is that this study, based on official US data, claims the total addressable market for space tech by 2030 is going to be about $350bn, compared to SpaceX, which claims a total addressable market of $1,980bn. Add to that the ‘AI and data centres in space ’ opportunity, and SpaceX claims a total addressable market of $28,500bn.