Space Industrial Base Studies: How the US, UK, ESA, Canada, and Japan Are Assessing Their Competitive Position in Space

Key Takeaways

• The US, UK, ESA, Canada, and Japan each publish formal assessments of their space industrial capacity, with diverging conclusions.
• All five studies flag workforce shortages, supply chain fragility, and the need for stronger government-industry alignment.
• Japan’s ¥1 trillion Space Strategy Fund marks the most ambitious single industrial investment among the five.

Mapping the New Space Economy’s Industrial Foundation

Something changed in the way governments talk about their space sectors around 2021. The language shifted from exploration and prestige to supply chains, workforce pipelines, and manufacturing capacity. Phrases that once belonged to automotive or semiconductor policy began appearing in documents published by space agencies and defence ministries. Space, as a domain, had become industrial policy territory.

The five assessments examined in this article — produced by or linked to the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Space Agency, Canada, and Japan — represent the most systematic efforts by any spacefaring partners to measure what their respective industrial bases can actually do, where the gaps sit, and what it would take to remain competitive as China scales rapidly and as commercial actors like SpaceX restructure every assumption about cost and launch cadence.

These aren’t boosterish white papers. At their best, they’re uncomfortable documents that tell governments things they’d rather not hear. The United States’ most recent study acknowledged that the country lacks the manufacturing capacity to produce satellites at the pace its own defence planners require. The United Kingdom’s National Audit Office found in 2024 that the government’s National Space Strategy had not delivered many of its core commitments. The European Commission admitted that Europe’s share of the global space economy has been declining. Canada’s annual sector survey reported that 54% of Canadian space companies couldn’t fill open positions in 2023. Japan’s study drove the creation of the largest dedicated aerospace technology fund in the country’s history.

Reading them together reveals a pattern. All five assessments grapple with the same fundamental question: what does it mean to have a viable, sovereign space industrial base when commercial markets are internationalising at speed, when a single American company can outlaunch every government on Earth combined, and when adversary nations are treating space as a long-game geopolitical contest?

The United States: Annual Audits of a Sector Under Strain

The most consistent series of space industrial assessments among the five countries is America’s State of the Space Industrial Base annual report, now in its sixth year. Produced jointly by the US Space Force, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Defense Innovation Unit, the SSIB report draws on workshops held across the United States with commercial sector participants. It’s not a government audit of the government’s own programs. It’s a structured listening exercise, and the 2024 edition released in May 2025 delivered one of the most direct assessments the series has produced.

The report’s central warning is that the United States is executing a defence space strategy that requires more manufacturing capacity than the country currently has. The Space Development Agency is building the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a constellation of hundreds of low-Earth-orbit satellites across multiple missions including data transport, missile warning, and missile tracking. Tranche 1 of the architecture involves 158 satellites, but supply chain bottlenecks pushed the first operational deliveries back roughly eight months from the original schedule. SDA Director Derek Tournear attributed the delay directly to the small LEO satellite manufacturing market taking longer than expected to scale up.

Vice Chief of Space Operations General Michael Guetlein framed the problem bluntly at the Reagan National Defense Forum in December 2024. The industrial base simply doesn’t have the capacity built today to execute the programme at the pace the Pentagon wants, he said. The implication is that building excess manufacturing capacity, even inefficiently, is a national security necessity. That’s a significant departure from the efficiency-first procurement logic that has dominated US defence acquisition for decades.

The SSIB 2024 report goes further than supply chain mechanics. It identifies what it describes as a widening gap between policy ambitions and institutional execution in the area of space logistics. Satellite servicing, orbital refuelling, in-space manufacturing, and debris remediation are all sectors where the US government has expressed interest but has not created the regulatory clarity or demand signals that would allow commercial investment to flow at scale. The Commercial Space Act of 2023 and a parallel White House framework both addressed in-space licensing, but the US still lacks a streamlined authority for novel activities beyond traditional satellite operations. The Space Force zeroed out funding for in-space mobility in its fiscal year 2026 budget request, which makes the SSIB’s call for a “North Star Vision” for the sector feel more urgent than rhetorical.

An earlier SSIB assessment from 2023 put the same problem in strategic terms. The 2022 National Defense Strategy had directed the Department of Defense to act as a “fast-follower” of commercial innovation in space. The Defense Innovation Unit’s role is to identify disruptive commercial capabilities and prototype them rapidly. The Air Force Research Laboratory integrates those capabilities with military systems. The Space Force fields them. The chain is theoretically sound. Whether it can move fast enough against a China executing a state-directed, cross-sector strategy spanning mega-constellations and cislunar infrastructure is the question that the SSIB reports now place at the centre of every policy recommendation.

The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy adds another layer of assessment through its Space Agenda 2025 series, a collection of papers prepared for incoming policymakers in late 2024. It highlights the need to strengthen the industrial base to deliver proliferated defence space architectures while simultaneously updating ageing spaceport infrastructure. The US holds 61% of global institutional space budgets, according to ESA’s 2025 economy report, a figure that has actually declined from 75% in 2000. Relative standing, not just absolute capability, is what these assessments track.

The United Kingdom: From Strategy Documents to Industrial Plans

The UK’s formal assessment of its space industrial base is distributed across several documents rather than consolidated in a single annual report. The foundation is the National Space Strategy published in September 2021, jointly produced by what is now the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Ministry of Defence. It set a 10-year vision for the UK to become one of the most innovative and attractive space economies in the world and was the first time the country’s civil and military space policy had been integrated under a single strategic document.

That strategy’s implementation record has been mixed. A 2024 review by the National Audit Office found that it had not delivered a number of its core commitments. The government’s response was the Space Industrial Plan, published in March 2024. It’s a more practical document, focused on how public procurement can serve as an anchor market to grow domestic capability in five priority areas: space domain awareness, in-orbit servicing and manufacturing, utilising space data, position navigation and timing, and satellite communications technology.

The Size and Health of the UK Space Industry 2024 study, the most comprehensive annual survey of the sector, found that total UK space industry income for 2022/23 stood at approximately £18.9 billion. Over 1,700 organisations were identified as engaging with the industry, directly supporting around 52,000 jobs. Defence customers account for £1.8 billion of total industry revenue, or roughly 10%, with the European Space Agency contributing approximately £356 million, or 2%.

The industry is highly concentrated. Just 12 organisations account for 69% of all space-related income, while 1,879 organisations share the remaining 25%. Only two companies generate more than £1 billion each in space revenues. That concentration makes industrial base resilience a structural concern, not just a procurement one. If one of those two top-tier companies faces delivery problems, there’s no obvious domestic backup.

The UK Strategic Defence Review, published in June 2025 and led by Lord Robertson, placed space on equal footing with more traditional military domains for the first time. It accepted all 62 of its own recommendations, one of the more unusual features of the UK government’s approach, and described space as a critical domain underpinning collective security and prosperity. The follow-on Defence Industrial Strategy, published in September 2025, outlined plans to reform procurement, create a Space Systems Portfolio under the National Armaments Director, and expand the UK’s defence industrial base in a period the document characterises as requiring innovation at a “wartime pace.”

Major defence space investments already committed include £5 billion over ten years to enhance Skynet, the UK’s military satellite communications network, alongside £1.4 billion for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities announced in 2021. The government also committed £1.6 billion to deliver international space programmes via ESA over five years. In the final quarter of 2024, the UK secured ESA contracts worth £80 million more than its contributions to the agency, a net positive return that proponents cite as evidence of the value of ESA membership for the industrial base.

What the UK assessments collectively reveal is a country with technical strengths in satellite manufacturing, Earth observation, small satellite design, and in-orbit servicing research, but with a sector dominated at the top by a very small number of large organisations, and at the bottom by more than 1,500 companies each generating less than £5 million annually. The UK Space Agency commissioned a new Size and Health survey in October 2024, with results expected in summer 2025, and has committed to further surveys in 2026, 2028, and 2030 to track progress in workforce development. That cadence reflects the recognition that skills are among the hardest bottlenecks to solve.

ESA and European Competitiveness: A Continent Taking Stock

The European Space Agency doesn’t produce a single national industrial base assessment in the way the US or UK do. Instead, its Space Economy team develops market assessments, impact studies, and economic monitoring in partnership with organisations including the OECD, Eurostat, and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. The cumulative output is arguably the richest publicly available dataset on a space industrial base anywhere in the world.

The ESA Report on the Space Economy 2025 documented that global institutional space budgets — combining civil and defence spending — reached €122 billion in 2024, a 9% increase over 2023. That figure reflects a five-year compound annual growth rate of 9%. Defence spending at the global level exceeded civil budgets for the first time, a structural shift with significant implications for how ESA and its member states position their industrial investments going forward.

Europe’s competitive position in that global picture is the uncomfortable part. The ESA economy data shows that Europe (including EU27, Norway, Switzerland, and the UK) dedicates roughly 0.06% of its GDP to space, compared with 0.262% for the United States. France, Italy, and Belgium are the highest-spending European nations relative to GDP, with Luxembourg standing out at 0.135%, the highest in Europe. That disparity has contributed to Europe’s declining share of the global space market at a moment when the overall market is expanding.

The most direct European policy response to this competitive gap came in June 2025, when the European Commission unveiled its Vision for the European Space Economy. Described as a first-of-its-kind initiative, it’s designed to position the EU as a global leader in the space economy by 2050 through more than 40 concrete actions spanning industrial coordination, procurement, regulatory alignment, and the emergence of “Space Team Europe,” a high-level forum intended to consolidate the currently fragmented efforts of ESA, the EU Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), and EU member states.

ESA’s own Accelerating Commercialisation and Competitiveness of the European Space Sector programme, known as ACCESS, was ratified by ESA member states following the November 2025 Ministerial Council (CM25) held in Bremen, Germany. ACCESS builds on the previous BASS and ScaleUp programmes and is designed to help European companies at every stage, from startups to primes, develop commercially viable space products and services. It works by reducing the commercial risk of new products, with ESA acting as a trial user and early adopter.

The ARTES satellite communications programme offers a useful concrete measure of how ESA investment translates to industrial output. A comprehensive socioeconomic study found that every €1 million invested in ARTES generates €3.4 million in industry sales, with that multiplier projected to reach 9.8 times by 2025. The programme has also led to the creation and maintenance of over 17,700 jobs and generated at least €1 billion in private investment through co-funded activities between 2018 and 2021.

From a venture capital perspective, Europe’s defence, security, and resilience sector attracted a record €4.8 billion in 2024, growing 30% year-on-year, the strongest growth rate among all European VC deep-tech segments at a time when overall VC declined 45%. The number of unique investors in the sector tripled over five years. Private capital has begun flowing into a sector that was previously almost entirely government-funded, which changes the industrial base dynamics considerably.

The elephant in the room for ESA discussions is Europe’s dependence on a small number of large primes, particularly Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space, for the bulk of its satellite manufacturing capacity. In 2024, ESA signed contracts with The Exploration Company in Germany and Thales Alenia Space in Italy for a European cargo return service to low Earth orbit. That contract is important not just for what it delivers but as a model for how ESA is trying to stimulate new commercial entrants rather than relying indefinitely on the incumbent prime contractor ecosystem.

The technology harmonisation process at the heart of ESA’s industrial strategy deserves attention. ESA and Novaspaceconduct market assessment studies within the 2025 Cycle of European Space Technology Harmonisation, covering demand for components like solar generators, solar cells, and solar array drive mechanisms. Those studies don’t make headlines, but they determine which European suppliers survive and which technologies get stranded without a customer. That’s industrial base policy at its most granular.

Canada: Niche Strength in a High-Stakes Era

Canada’s State of the Canadian Space Sector Report 2024 is now in its 27th edition, making it one of the longest-running systematic assessments of any space industrial base among the five countries examined here. Published by the Canadian Space Agency and based on a census-model questionnaire sent to companies, universities, and research centres, it provides granular data on revenues, workforce, and sectoral trends.

The 2024 report, which covers calendar year 2023 data, found that Canada’s top 30 space organisations accounted for 94% of total revenues. The sector is split between 77% companies (with 9% large and 68% small and medium enterprises), 19% universities and research centres, and 4% government. That structure, where SMEs dominate numerically but a small group of large organisations generates almost all revenue, mirrors the UK pattern and raises similar concerns about resilience.

Canada’s recognised strength lies in specific technology niches: space robotics, space-based radar, optical science instruments, and satellite communications. MDA Space is the principal contractor for Canadarm3, the advanced robotic system Canada is contributing to NASA’s Lunar Gateway as part of the Artemis programme. More than 500 highly qualified personnel were working on the Canadarm3 project as of 2024/25, with the planned launch date of 2028. Canada’s contribution to the Gateway earned the country a seat on Artemis II, making Jeremy Hansen the first Canadian astronaut to fly around the Moon when the mission launched on April 1, 2026.

The talent situation is the most persistent worry in Canada’s assessments. In 2023, 54% of Canadian space companies reported that they faced difficulties hiring to the point where positions went unfilled. Engineers, scientists, technicians, and managers were the hardest to hire, and those challenges have been consistent since at least 2017. Companies dealt with shortages by offering overtime, providing internal training, or outsourcing, which are stopgap measures rather than structural solutions.

The Aerospace Industries Association of Canada (AIAC), led by President and CEO Mike Mueller, has been pushing the federal government to treat space as a core mission domain equal to air, land, sea, and cyber in national security planning. AIAC’s case is grounded in the argument that modern deterrence, intelligence gathering, and emergency response all depend on space-based assets, and that Canada’s defence commitments through NORAD modernization require a domestic space industrial base capable of sustaining sovereign capabilities rather than depending entirely on American supply chains.

Canada’s total space industry contribution to GDP was reported at C$3.2 billion for the 2022 reference year, based on CSA data published in September 2024. The CSA’s 2026-27 Departmental Plan documents an additional C$528.5 million in investments to ESA programs to advance research and development of Canadian-made space technologies for both civilian and defence purposes. That figure represents Canada’s most significant single-year jump in ESA participation spending and reflects a deliberate decision to use ESA membership as a tool to build industrial capacity at home.

What’s notably absent from Canadian assessments is any credible domestic orbital launch capability. The Maritime Launch Services facility at Canso, Nova Scotia, is under development for commercial launches, but Canada remains entirely dependent on foreign launch providers for its satellite missions. That dependence makes Canada’s otherwise impressive niche capabilities vulnerable in ways that its industrial assessments have started to name directly. 3 Canadian Space Division, the Canadian Armed Forces organisation responsible for space operations, has grown in prominence, but the absence of sovereign launch capability remains a structural gap that no amount of Canadarm prestige fully addresses.

The RBC analysis published in late 2025, A Higher Orbit: How Canada Can Build and Finance a Bolder Space Strategy, offered an independent economic case for a more ambitious posture. It pointed to the trade disruption context of 2025, including restrictions on international students that could shrink the talent pipeline, and proposed workforce retraining pathways from disrupted sectors like automotive into space and defence. That framing — treating space industrial policy as a response to broader economic disruption — is newer in Canadian discourse and suggests the assessments are beginning to influence thinking beyond their traditional audience.

Japan: A Trillion-Yen Gambit to Catch Up

Japan’s space industrial base assessment process looks different from the others. Rather than a periodic survey or an annual workshop-based report, Japan’s government produced a series of interconnected policy documents in 2023 and 2024 that constituted both an assessment of weakness and an immediate response to it. The Basic Space Plan revised in June 2023, the Space Technology Strategy approved in March 2024, and the Space Strategy Fund launched the same year form a package that acknowledges competitive fragility and funds the response simultaneously.

The diagnosis was direct. Yui Nakama of the European Space Policy Institute told SpaceNews that Japan’s “weakness of international competitiveness has become evident” and that a “lack of clear winning strategies against the vigorous space development in other countries” was a major driver of the new approach. The numbers support that framing. Japan conducted only five orbital rocket launches in 2024, compared with 253 globally that year. The government’s target is 30 per year by the early 2030s, which would require a roughly sixfold increase in launch cadence from a standing start.

The ¥1 trillion Space Strategy Fund, managed by JAXA, is the largest dedicated aerospace technology development programme in Japan’s history. It’s designed to run for ten years, averaging roughly ¥100 billion per year, which is approximately 65% of JAXA’s entire 2025 budget. The fund isn’t JAXA spending on JAXA programmes. It’s JAXA acting as a funding intermediary for private companies, startups, and universities, explicitly structured so that the private sector and academia initiate research rather than receiving government direction from above.

The fund’s three priority areas are satellites, space exploration, and space transportation. In 2024, 22 technology development themes were released for solicitation, ranging from high-resolution optical observation satellite systems through innovative LiDAR technology to quantum cryptography for satellite communications. Notable early recipients included Marble Visions, a joint venture led by NTT Data with PASCO and Canon Electronics, for digital twin and geospatial work, and iQPS, a SAR synthetic aperture radar constellation company that has signed eight dedicated launch contracts with Rocket Lab.

Japan’s defence budget grew 67% over four years to ¥8.7 trillion in fiscal 2025, and space-specific items in that budget amounted to ¥79 billion. The FY2024 Ministry of Defence space budget allocated ¥17.2 billion for an SDA (space domain awareness) satellite scheduled to launch in FY2026, ¥9.2 billion for space command and control, and ¥4.8 billion for an optical data-link demonstration in geostationary orbit. Japan is also acquiring commercial satellite imagery at ¥24.7 billion per year, a decision that reflects a new willingness to treat commercial remote sensing as a defence asset rather than maintaining a purely indigenous intelligence satellite programme.

The civilian-defence integration question is particularly acute for Japan. For decades, the 1969 Diet resolution on peaceful use of space prevented the Self-Defense Forces from operating intelligence and communications satellites. The Basic Space Law of 2008 began dismantling that restriction, but the Ministry of Defence still has limited in-house technical knowledge compared with JAXA, and there are questions about whether the MOD can design and manage the complex satellite constellations its revised strategy envisions. It’s possible to name these gaps precisely because the Japanese government’s own assessment documents, particularly the CSIS analysis of Japan’s new strategy documents, name them too.

The Space Strategy Fund target of doubling Japan’s domestic space market from ¥4 trillion to ¥8 trillion by the early 2030s is ambitious. Private investment in Japanese space companies totalled JPY29.4 billion in 2024 and over JPY200 billion cumulatively between 2015 and 2024. That’s a functioning but still relatively thin venture capital ecosystem. Space Compass, the joint venture between NTT and SKY Perfect JSAT developing geostationary laser communications relay satellites, received a defence ministry demonstration contract in 2025 and is representative of the dual-use commercial-defence convergence that Japan’s strategy documents explicitly encourage.

Where Japan’s approach diverges most sharply from the others is in its honesty about the specific institutional weaknesses it’s trying to address. The strategy documents acknowledge that JAXA doesn’t possess satellite constellation technology. They note that cybersecurity capabilities are limited and that Japan lacks a security clearance system compatible with sharing sensitive information with US and allied partners. A CSIS analysis from September 2024 called out these gaps by name. That willingness to publish weaknesses in government policy documents and then fund solutions is one of the more distinctive features of Japan’s current space industrial base assessment process.

Where the Studies Converge, and Where They Diverge

Reading all five assessments against each other, several shared concerns emerge with enough consistency to be considered structural features of the problem rather than country-specific quirks.

Every assessment identifies workforce as a binding constraint. The US finds its defence space programmes outpacing the industrial workforce’s ability to scale. The UK surveys its skills shortages biennially and found persistent gaps in engineers and technical specialists. Canada reports that more than half of space companies can’t fill open positions. Japan’s documents explicitly flag whether human resources exist to build, operate, and protect its planned satellite systems. ESA member states struggle with the same challenge across a fragmented European talent market.

Supply chain vulnerability is a second shared concern, though the specific vulnerabilities differ. For the US, it’s the inability to manufacture small LEO satellites at the pace its military architectures require. For Europe, it’s dependence on non-European components in critical systems, particularly microelectronics and propulsion. For Canada, it’s the absence of domestic launch, which makes the entire supply chain for getting assets into orbit dependent on foreign providers. For Japan, it’s the risk of being caught in the middle between American and Chinese technology ecosystems as geopolitical decoupling accelerates.

The role of government as anchor customer is a recurring prescription. Every assessment endorses some version of the idea that government procurement, structured intelligently, can create the demand certainty that allows commercial manufacturers and service providers to invest in capacity. ESA’s ACCESS programme is built around it. The UK Space Industrial Plan explicitly uses “anchor customer” language. Japan’s Space Strategy Fund structures government money as a demand signal to the private sector. Canada’s AIAC argues for it as a national policy priority.

There’s also a legitimate question — and this is where the certainty runs out somewhat — about whether the institutional frameworks designed to coordinate these industrial base efforts are capable of moving at the pace the strategies require. The US has dedicated acquisition agencies, but the gap between SSIB recommendations and actual budget decisions remains wide. The UK published its Space Industrial Plan, then saw it delayed almost immediately by a general election. ESA’s Vision for the European Space Economy is comprehensive and credibly funded but faces the same fragmentation problem it’s designed to solve. History suggests that the distance between assessment and action is where most of the risk lies.

The Dual-Use Revolution and Its Industrial Consequences

No serious account of space industrial base studies can avoid the dual-use dynamic, the fact that the same satellite hardware, software, and launch infrastructure that serves commercial Earth observation markets can also serve defence intelligence requirements. Every country examined here is grappling with how to govern that overlap, and the assessments reflect ly different choices.

Japan’s Basic Space Plan of 2023 and Space Technology Strategy of 2024 both explicitly link “competitiveness” to “supply chain resilience” and “predominance” in ways that would have been politically impossible under the pre-2008 peaceful use doctrine. The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) has become more involved in stimulating Japan’s space industrial base alongside the traditional education and science ministry (MEXT). That institutional shift mirrors what happened in US space policy when the Defense Innovation Unit started playing a major role in commercial space acquisition.

Canada’s 3 Canadian Space Division, operating under the Royal Canadian Air Force, explicitly describes itself as a dual-role organisation responsible for delivering space domain effects to military operations. The CSA points to dual-use technologies as a key source of economic diversification for Canadian space companies. Calian — which supports the CSA’s Multi-Mission Control Centre and signed a major contract with a Middle Eastern government for geostationary satellite ground systems — exemplifies how Canadian space companies serve both markets simultaneously.

In Europe, the €4.8 billion in defence, security, and resilience venture capital investment recorded in 2024, along with the 30% growth rate, suggests the private sector has concluded that the dual-use opportunity in Europe is real and growing. ESA’s collaboration with the European Defence Agency and the European Commission, formalised through a joint task force, is designed to align civilian and defence space procurement in ways that generate economies of scale for the industrial base.

The UK’s decision to invest £5 billion over ten years in the Skynet military satellite communications network, alongside commercial satellite communications investment, is creating exactly the kind of dual procurement environment that industrial base planners argue is necessary for a healthy supplier ecosystem. When both civil and military programmes are buying from the same supply chain, companies can justify investments in tooling, workforce training, and quality systems that neither programme alone could sustain.

Summary

The five space industrial base assessments examined in this article share a diagnosis but not a prescription. All five countries have identified workforce shortages, supply chain fragility, insufficient manufacturing scale, and the need for clearer government-industry demand signals as structural challenges. All five are attempting, to varying degrees, to use government procurement as an industrial policy tool rather than just an acquisition mechanism.

What makes the current period different from earlier rounds of space policy is the speed of the commercial market and the scale of the Chinese programme. SpaceX deployed 1,982 Starlink satellites in 2024 alone, accounting for 70% of total mass launched globally that year, according to the ESA Space Economy 2025 report. China launched the first two batches of its Thousand Sails mega-constellation and outlined plans for 14,000-satellite systems through Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology. Against that backdrop, the incremental improvements documented in most national assessments look modest.

Japan’s Space Strategy Fund is the most structurally distinctive response in the five-country comparison: a decade-long, trillion-yen commitment explicitly designed to rebuild competitiveness from the supply chain up, run through the space agency as an intermediary rather than through traditional government procurement. It’s the right scale of intervention for the problem Japan has described. Whether Japan’s private sector ecosystem can absorb and deploy that capital effectively over a ten-year period is a question its own assessments acknowledge as ly open. The US study puts it most directly: the gap between the analysis and the commitment to act is where industrial base policy either succeeds or stalls.

Appendix: Top 10 Questions Answered in This Article

What is the State of the Space Industrial Base report?

The State of the Space Industrial Base (SSIB) is an annual report produced jointly by the US Space Force, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Defense Innovation Unit. It collects feedback from the commercial space sector through workshops held across the United States and translates industry input into recommendations for government policymakers. The 2024 edition, released in May 2025, was the sixth in the series and was produced in collaboration with NewSpace Nexus.

What did the UK’s Space Industrial Plan of 2024 establish?

The UK Space Industrial Plan, published in March 2024, set out a phased framework for developing the country’s space sector around five priority capability areas: space domain awareness, in-orbit servicing and manufacturing, utilising space data, position navigation and timing, and satellite communications. It also committed to using public procurement as an anchor-customer mechanism to stimulate domestic industrial growth and set out plans for cross-government procurement reform under the Procurement Act 2023.

How large is the UK space industry?

The Size and Health of the UK Space Industry 2024 study, covering 2022/23 financial year data, found total sector income of approximately £18.9 billion, with over 1,700 organisations supporting around 52,000 jobs directly. The sector is heavily concentrated, with just 12 organisations accounting for 69% of all space-related income. Commercial revenues represent 82% of total income, while defence customers account for roughly 10%, or £1.8 billion.

What is Japan’s Space Strategy Fund?

Japan’s Space Strategy Fund is a ¥1 trillion ($6.8 billion) ten-year programme managed by JAXA and funded through contributions from three ministries: MEXT, METI, and MIC. It was established in 2024 and is designed to support private companies, startups, and universities in developing and commercialising advanced space technologies across three priority areas: satellites, space exploration, and space transportation. The fund averages approximately ¥100 billion per year and is Japan’s largest dedicated aerospace technology development programme.

What share of global space budgets does the United States hold?

According to the ESA Report on the Space Economy 2025, the United States accounts for 61% of global institutional space budgets, which cover both civil and defence spending. That share has declined from approximately 75% in 2000, with China being the primary beneficiary of the relative shift, growing its share from 2% in 2000 to 15% in 2024. The US dedicates 0.262% of its GDP to space, compared with around 0.06% for Europe.

What is Canada’s main contribution to the Artemis programme?

Canada is contributing Canadarm3, an advanced robotic system designed for the Lunar Gateway, developed by MDA Space. The project employed more than 500 highly qualified personnel in 2024/25 and carries a planned launch date of 2028. In exchange for that contribution, Canada received a seat on the Artemis II mission, which launched April 1, 2026, with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen as a crew member, making him the first Canadian to fly around the Moon.

What gaps did the SSIB 2024 report identify in US space industrial policy?

The SSIB 2024 report identified a widening gap between US policy ambitions and institutional execution in the area of in-space mobility and logistics. It found no streamlined regulatory framework for novel in-space activities like orbital refuelling, debris removal, and in-space manufacturing. It also noted that the Space Force had zeroed out in-space mobility funding in its fiscal year 2026 budget request, and called for a unifying “North Star Vision” to coordinate civil, defence, and commercial interests.

What does ESA’s Vision for the European Space Economy propose?

The Vision for the European Space Economy, unveiled by the European Commission on June 25, 2025, proposes more than 40 concrete actions to strengthen Europe’s space ecosystem through 2050. It introduces “Space Team Europe,” a high-level forum of European space stakeholders intended to unify fragmented national and agency-level efforts. It also proposes new monitoring tools to track Europe’s share of the global space economy, better integration with ESA and EUSPA, and a procurement platform to help European companies access non-EU opportunities.

Why has Japan’s approach to space security changed since 2008?

Japan’s Basic Space Law of 2008 began dismantling the 1969 Diet resolution that had interpreted the peaceful use of space as prohibiting Self-Defense Force satellite operations. A drastically changed regional security environment, including developments related to North Korean and Chinese space and missile programmes, drove Japan to revise its Basic Space Plan in June 2023 and publish a Space Technology Strategy in March 2024. These documents explicitly link space capability to national security and allocate significant defence budget increases to satellite intelligence, space domain awareness, and SATCOM resilience.

How does Canada’s space sector compare on workforce?

Canada’s space sector is characterised by a highly qualified workforce, with approximately 67% of employees holding at least a bachelor’s degree and 62% working in STEM roles, according to the CSA’s 2025/26 Departmental Plan. However, the State of the Canadian Space Sector Report 2024 found that 54% of Canadian space companies faced hiring difficulties severe enough that positions went unfilled during 2023. Engineers, scientists, technicians, and managers were consistently the hardest roles to fill, a trend that has persisted since at least 2017.