Understanding the Space Economy
May 28, 2019•20 min•Ep. 684
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Summary
Sinead O'Sullivan discusses the rapidly expanding private space economy, fueled by plummeting launch costs and increasing demand for satellite data. She differentiates between the immediately profitable Earth-facing sector, which impacts everything from agriculture to autonomous cars, and the more speculative exploration economy involving asteroid mining and Mars colonization, about which she expresses skepticism regarding private sector profitability. The episode also addresses critical issues like the increasing scarcity of satellite slots and the urgent need for international space governance.Episode description
Sinéad O'Sullivan, entrepreneurship fellow at Harvard Business School, discusses how space is much more important to modern business than most people realize. It plays a role in making food, pricing insurance, and steering self-driving cars. While moonshot projects from SpaceX to Blue Origin drive headlines, the Earth-facing space economy is booming thanks to plummeting costs of entry. As tech companies large and small compete to launch thousands of satellites, O'Sullivan says we are actually running out of space in space.
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