The New Space Race

The last time around, it was between countries. Today, it's between profit-seeking companies.

Today I’m bringing a guest piece from one my favorite analysts, Likefolio’s Andy Swan. And as Andy put it, this is not investment advice.

This is geeking out. It’s allowing our minds to wander for a moment.

Don’t dismiss it

We’re already watching science fiction become closer to reality with every passing day. Even 10 years ago, driverless cars felt like absurd fantasy. Then they became reality. You can have one cart you around today.

Likewise, functional AI that can mimic a person and have a real conversation was the stuff of Star Trek a very short time ago. Now, it’s legitimately upending the job market.

Today, the new space race between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is being mostly dismissed as a vanity project by two bored billionaires with more money than sense. But as Swan points out, this space race is very different from the one that landed Neil Armstrong on the Moon.

In the 1960s, the space race was between countries — the United States and the Soviet Union. If anything that was the vanity project. A contest to be the first to plant a flag on the Moon.

This is different. It is a contest between two profit-seeking companies.

Ask yourself a question. When has the competitive private sector not delivered a superior product that the government… and at a dramatically lower price?

The profit motive is real, and it delivers the goods. As Adam Smith himself put it, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

So, what opportunities will the new space race create? Read on to find out!

I shortened the original article for the sake of brevity. You can read the full original version here.

Enjoy!

Charles

---

A Letter From 2031

By Andy Swan

You wake up. It’s a Tuesday in February 2031.

Your internet — at home, on your phone, on the flight you took last weekend — is routed through a mesh of 47,000 satellites. The company that operates them went public five years ago in the largest IPO in history. Its stock has tripled.

There are 14 humans living on the Moon right now. Not astronauts on a two-week mission. Residents. Engineers, geologists, a physician, and — because this is still America — a content creator with 11 million followers documenting the whole thing.

Last month, the first commercially viable product manufactured entirely off-Earth was delivered to a buyer: a 100-meter spool of ZBLAN optical fiber, drawn in microgravity aboard an orbital factory. It sold for $38 million. It is not a collector’s item. It’s a working component — a fiber optic cable with one-tenth the signal loss of anything produced on the ground, destined for a transpacific undersea data link where it will carry more data with fewer repeaters than any cable ever laid. It was manufactured by robots in a facility the size of a shipping container, orbiting Earth at 17,000 mph.

The space economy hit $820 billion in revenue last year. Morgan Stanley says it’ll cross $1 trillion by 2033. It’s no longer a government project. It’s an industry. And the ripple effects have reached your internet speed, your retirement account, and the way your kids think about what’s possible.

Here’s how we got here — and what it means.

The Pivot That Changed Everything

In February 2026 — right about now — Elon Musk made an announcement that barely registered with most investors: SpaceX was deprioritizing Mars in favor of the Moon.

Mars, Musk said, would take 20+ years. A self-sustaining lunar city? Less than ten. The math was simple: you can launch to the Moon every 10 days with a two-day transit. Mars windows open once every 26 months with a six-month journey. Iteration speed wins.

Within months, SpaceX went public at a $1.5 trillion valuation — the largest IPO in stock market history. The capital wasn’t raised for Starlink or rocket launches. It was raised to build satellite factories on the Moon and orbital AI data centers powered by unlimited solar energy.

Wall Street thought it was insane. By 2029, it looked prescient.

What Happened Between 2026 and 2031

Here’s the timeline no one predicted — even though every piece of it was already in motion:

2026: SpaceX IPOs. Artemis II sends four astronauts around the Moon — the first humans beyond low-Earth orbit since 1972. Starlink crosses 12 million subscribers. The space economy is roughly $500 billion.

2027: SpaceX’s Starship V3 completes its first fully reusable orbital flight — both stages recovered. Uncrewed Starships begin landing cargo on the lunar south pole at Shackleton Crater. Intuitive Machines delivers NASA’s first permanent power system to the lunar surface. Blue Origin launches its first crew to orbit aboard New Glenn.

2028: The first human boots touch lunar soil since 1972 under Artemis III. A joint SpaceX/NASA mission begins constructing Artemis Base Camp — a semi-permanent outpost designed for continuous habitation. China lands two taikonauts at a separate lunar site, triggering a geopolitical scramble that triples U.S. space funding overnight.

2029: SpaceX achieves the first crewed Starship orbital flight. The first orbital data center goes live — a modified Starlink satellite running inference workloads in the cold vacuum of space with effectively free solar power. NVIDIA ships its first radiation-hardened GPU. Orbital AI compute costs begin undercutting terrestrial data centers for specific workloads.

2030: The Lunar Industrial Zone is formally designated. Twelve private companies hold licenses to operate on the Moon. The first successful extraction of water ice from permanently shadowed craters produces rocket propellant in situ — meaning spacecraft can refuel on the Moon instead of hauling fuel from Earth. This single development collapses deep-space logistics costs by an estimated 90%.

2031: Fourteen people live on the Moon in a rotating residency. SpaceX operates a small-scale manufacturing facility producing satellite components in lunar gravity. Three companies are competing to build the first electromagnetic railgun that can launch payloads from the lunar surface into orbit without rockets. If it works, it changes everything about the economics of space.

How This Changes Business — And Life

Here’s where it gets interesting for investors. The space economy isn’t about rockets. Rockets are the railroad. The value is in what rides the rails.

Communications: The End of Dead Zones

By 2031, satellite-to-phone connectivity is standard. AST SpaceMobile’s network covers every square inch of Earth’s surface. Your phone doesn’t care whether you’re in Manhattan or mid-Pacific. Telecom infrastructure spending is collapsing in rural areas because satellites do it cheaper. Starlink’s direct-to-cell service has 30+ carrier partnerships globally.

What it means for you: The concept of “coverage” is dead. Your carrier plan works everywhere. Emergency services in remote areas improve dramatically. The last billion unconnected humans come online, creating a new consumer market that didn’t exist a decade ago.

Manufacturing: The ZBLAN Revolution

Here’s the product that cracked space manufacturing wide open: ZBLAN. It’s a fluoride glass fiber optic cable made from zirconium, barium, lanthanum, aluminum, and sodium. On Earth, gravity causes tiny crystals to form as the molten glass is drawn into fibers — defects that weaken the signal. In microgravity, those crystals don’t form. The result is a fiber that carries data with one-tenth the signal loss of traditional silica cable, over distances that make terrestrial fiber look primitive.

A single 2,000-km strand of space-made ZBLAN performs like 10 km of the best silica fiber on Earth. That means undersea cables need fewer repeaters (the powered amplifiers placed every 50-100 km on the ocean floor that cost millions each to install and maintain). For the companies laying $500 million transpacific data links, space-made ZBLAN doesn’t just pay for itself — it changes the entire cost structure of global internet infrastructure.

By 2031, three orbital manufacturing facilities run automated ZBLAN production 24/7. The robots don’t need oxygen, sleep, or health insurance. They draw fiber in a vacuum, at temperatures impossible to maintain in a terrestrial factory, and spool it for reentry. Annual production is still small — measured in hundreds of kilometers — but growing fast.

What it means for you: Your streaming video, your video calls, your AI queries — all of it travels through undersea cables. Space-made fiber is starting to replace the worst-performing segments. Internet speeds go up. Latency goes down. The “Made in Orbit” label starts appearing on telecom infrastructure specs.

AI: Data Centers in the Sky

This was SpaceX’s real play all along. By 2031, orbital data centers handle roughly 3% of global AI inference workloads. They’re powered by solar energy that costs nothing, cooled by the vacuum of space (no water, no electricity for cooling), and connected to Earth via laser links. For latency-insensitive tasks — model training, batch processing, scientific simulation — they’re already cheaper than terrestrial alternatives.

What it means for you: Your AI assistant’s responses might be computed in low-Earth orbit. Cloud computing bills for major tech companies begin declining. The constraint on AI scaling shifts from energy to manufacturing.

Medicine: Zero-G Pharma

Protein crystallization in microgravity produces structures that are impossible to grow on Earth, enabling better drug design for cancer, Alzheimer’s, and rare diseases. By 2031, two pharmaceutical companies operate continuous microgravity labs on private space stations. The first drug designed using space-grown crystals enters Phase II clinical trials.

What it means for you: The $40 billion structural biology market gets a new tool. Drug development timelines potentially compress. “Space pharma” becomes a real investment category.

Why This Matters Now

You might read this and think: Cool, but that’s 2031. I’ve got bills to pay in 2026.

Fair. But consider this:

Amazon went public in 1997. The iPhone launched in 2007. Most people didn’t invest in either when it mattered because the future felt too far away, too speculative, too weird.

SpaceX is going public this year. The largest IPO in human history, targeting $1.5 trillion. As of yesterday, Musk formally pivoted the company’s primary mission from Mars to the Moon. The lunar economy isn’t a 20-year bet anymore. It’s a 5-year buildout with capital flowing right now.

The space economy crossed $500 billion this year. It’s projected to hit $1 trillion by the early 2030s and $1.8 trillion by 2035. The companies building the infrastructure — the rockets, the satellites, the lunar landers, the orbital factories — are publicly traded today, most of them at valuations that don’t yet reflect what’s coming.

Five years from now, “space stocks” won’t be a niche category on your brokerage app. They’ll be a sector, sitting right between Technology and Healthcare, with their own ETFs and their own CNBC segment and their own earnings season.

The new space race isn’t between countries. It’s between companies. And unlike the last one, this time there’s a business model.

The future is already being built. The question is whether you’re paying attention.