New Space EconomyBusiness, Technology, and Trends

On 1 April 2026, the chair of the United Nations expert group on lethal autonomous weapons systems circulated a summary of its March session in Geneva. That timing matters because the question of how satellite services support autonomous weapons now sits inside live debates about procurement, military doctrine, and war law. In practice, satellites do not supply autonomy by themselves. They supply the services that make autonomy travel farther, sense earlier, and act with less dependence on a nearby human operator. The most important of those services are positioning, navigation, and timing, or PNT, long-distance communications, remote sensing, missile warning, and environmental data. A system may carry its own onboard software and sensors, yet its military value changes sharply once it can draw on orbital infrastructure for updates, targeting data, and global timing. The International Committee of the Red Cross defines autonomous weapon systems as systems that select and apply force after activation based on information from the environment. The current DoD Directive 3000.09 uses related language for autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems and places policy controls on their development and use.

NASA invited social media creators to speak with the Artemis II astronauts near the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft at Kennedy Space Center on January 17, 2026, a scene that showed how the role of social media influencers in the space industry has moved from informal fan commentary into organized public outreach. NASA’s own Social program gives selected digital creators access to missions, people, and programs so they can share spaceflight stories with their audiences, and that approach now sits beside press briefings, livestreams, agency websites, and traditional news coverage.

The United States and six close military space partners are developing a joint plan for future “orbital warfare,” according to a May 12, 2026, Breaking Defense report based on comments by U.S. Space Command Commander Gen. Stephen Whiting. The plan is being developed through Multinational Force Operation Olympic Defender, a military space coalition involving the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Whiting said the participating nations expect to complete a collective concept of operations for defending orbital assets by the end of 2026.

In 2025, emissions trading systems generated about $80 billion in revenue, according to ICAP 2026. At the same time, Sylvera 2026 says 2025 retirements were 168 million credits and total spending reached $1.04 billion. Satellite services for carbon markets sit between those financial flows and a hard practical problem: a market can only price what it can observe, measure, and defend under audit.

Tory Bruno’s December 2025 space-war scenario begins with a loss of communications over Taiwan and the Strait of Malacca, followed by unresponsive intelligence satellites, disrupted missile-warning coverage, and intermittent Global Positioning System service over the Pacific. In Bruno’s phrase, “We are blind.” That phrase captures the central risk in any discussion of how the U.S. is vulnerable to space attack: American military power has become deeply dependent on orbital systems for command, timing, warning, targeting, logistics, weather, communications, and deterrence.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in May 2026 that a national missile defense system broadly consistent with the January 2025 Iron Dome for America executive order would cost about $1.2 trillion to develop, deploy, and operate over 20 years, measured in 2026 dollars. That estimate does not describe a confirmed Department of Defense deployment plan. It describes CBO’s notional architecture, built from the capabilities named in the executive order and from public information about missile defense systems, space sensors, interceptors, and supporting command networks.

On May 12, 2026, Payload reported that Fenix Space completed a week-long flight-test campaign of its Fenix alpha prototype, including four flight tests that demonstrated separation from a tow aircraft and autonomous flight maneuvers. A Fenix Space company profile begins with that milestone because the company is still closer to development than routine operations, yet it has moved beyond slide-deck promises into public prototype testing. Payload also reported that the company expects commercial launch operations to begin in 2028, with early work focused on hypersonic testing and small payload delivery to low Earth orbit.

Star Catcher Industries, Inc. is a Jacksonville, Florida space infrastructure company founded in 2024 to build what it describes as the first power grid in space. Its business is centered on the Star Catcher Network, a planned system of orbital Power Nodes that collect solar energy, concentrate it, refine it into wavelengths suited for spacecraft solar panels, and beam that energy to satellites or spacecraft already using standard solar arrays. As of May 12, 2026, the company remained pre-operational at commercial grid scale, but it had reported major financing, customer agreements, ground demonstrations, one on-orbit subsystem demonstration, and a planned 2026 orbital optical power-beaming demonstration through its company news releases.

NASA’s Orion spacecraft carries four astronauts because it was designed for a different era of lunar exploration than the Apollo Command and Service Module. The difference is not simply that Orion is newer or larger. The more important reason is that Orion belongs to a different mission architecture, one built around longer missions, modern automation, international participation, lunar orbit operations, and eventual preparation for deeper space exploration.

The argument that orbital data centers are “really an Earth observation business” is understandable, but it is too narrow. The original point, made in TerraWatch’s Earth Observation Essentials: May 11, 2026, is that Starcloud’s near-term commercial path depends on selling on-orbit processing power to Earth observation satellite operators before broader hyperscale economics become viable. That is a reasonable interpretation of the first workload, but it risks mistaking the opening market for the entire business category.

Released on 12 January 2026, NASA’s 2026 Civil Space Shortfalls document lays out a broad set of civil-space technology needs, and its sequence says almost as much as the entries themselves. It opens with lunar spacesuits, crew ingress and egress, surface mobility, power, thermal control, landing accuracy, construction, and in-situ resource utilization before it turns to Mars transportation, science systems, servicing, debris, and industrial resilience. That ordering mirrors the structure of NASA’s Moon to Mars Architecture and the agency’s Artemis campaign.

On April 1, 2026, NASA launched Artemis II, sending four astronauts around the Moon for the first crewed flight of the Artemis program. That mission gave the race for the Moon between China and America its most concrete public image in decades: a large rocket, a crewed spacecraft, a lunar flyby, and a safe splashdown on April 10. It also sharpened a harder question. Beyond space agencies, contractors, policymakers, and space enthusiasts, who cares which country gets the next crewed lunar landing first?

The World Economic Forum and McKinsey estimated in 2024 that the global space economy could grow from $630 billion in 2023 to $1.8 trillion by 2035. That forecast includes direct space activity, such as launch vehicles, satellites, ground systems, and satellite services, as well as “reach” markets where satellite communications, positioning, navigation, timing, and Earth observation support revenue in other industries.

On February 10, 2021, Canada’s spectrum regulator updated procedures for foreign satellite news gathering terminals, a reminder that satellite services for news media depend on both space infrastructure and national telecommunications rules. Satellite news gathering usually means moving live or recorded material from a field location to a newsroom, broadcast center, teleport, production hub, or distribution platform by satellite. The same term also describes the vehicle, flyaway kit, antenna, encoder, modem, and operator workflow used to make that link work outside a fixed studio.

A Fox News article published on May 10, 2026, centered on a warning from Andrew Badger of Coalition Systems that hostile action against undersea cables could disrupt internet services, banking, energy markets, and military communications. The article cited the widely reported estimate that subsea cables carry about 99% of global data traffic and support up to $10 trillion in daily financial transactions. That framing is intentionally dramatic, but the underlying dependency is real: the International Telecommunication Union describes submarine cables as the backbone of global communications, carrying approximately 99% of the world’s internet traffic and enabling finance, cloud computing, and government communications.