The Five Pillars of The Space Economy — 2026 Update

When we first published this framework in September 2023, the five pillars — Upstream, Instream, Downstream, Exploration, and Religion — were a way to organize a $503 billion economy that was still mostly promise. Three years later, the pillars haven't changed. What changed is the evidence density. Every pillar now has a launch cadence, a procurement line, or a ticker behind it.

Here is what happened inside each pillar since 2023.

Upstream

Upstream is by far the sexiest and most macho of all the pillars of The Space Economy. As a result, it is no shock that it is the least profitable. For the last 80 years, since the end of World War II, the majority of space investment has gone into Upstream businesses and initiatives. Upstream investments can also be categorized as Up and Out investments.

That characterization still holds. What changed is the scale of the machines and the firmness of the demand floor.

Since 2023:

• Starship went from paper to flight-test cadence. Between the first integrated launch in April 2023 and Flight 13 on July 24, 2026, SpaceX flew the largest rocket ever built thirteen times. Flight 13 was "not a complete success, but strengthened the company's growth catalysts more than its risks" (TipRanks, July 2026). A rocket that blew up on its first flight now flies as routine industrial activity.
• Launch cadence became a manufacturing statistic. SpaceX crossed 90 orbital launches in 2026 by late July, putting the company on pace to exceed 150 launches for the year on top of a record 2025 (Spaceflight Now, July 2026). Globally, 2026 had already logged 200 orbital launch attempts by August 22 — 193 successes — with maiden flights including Ariane 64, Long March 10B, Soyuz-5, Vikram-1, Tianlong-3, and Kinetica 2 (Wikipedia, 2026 in spaceflight).
• New competitors actually reached orbit. Vulcan Centaur (January 2024), Ariane 6 (July 2024), and Blue Origin's New Glenn (January 16, 2025) all flew. New Glenn's story also proves the pillar's risk profile: after two successes and one second-stage anomaly, a May 28, 2026 static-fire explosion destroyed the next booster and severely damaged Launch Complex 36, suspending operations — believed to be the most powerful rocket explosion since the Soviet N1 in 1969 (Ars Technica/Reuters, 2026).
• The government demand floor is now contractual, not aspirational. The Space Force tripled the NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17, 2026, expanding the mission manifest to roughly 170 launches through 2034 with seven vendors in the pool — SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Federal (Space Systems Command via Breaking Defense). Days later, SpaceX took a $1.6 billion order for 18 Falcon 9 missions through 2027 (Reuters/Barron's, July 29, 2026).

The verdict stands: Upstream remains the least profitable pillar per dollar invested. But the price of admission fell, the cadence became industrial, and the government wrote the demand floor into a contract. In 2023, "assured access to space" was a slogan. In 2026, it is a $17 billion line item.

Instream

Instream is where the future of The Space Economy gets interesting. Why Instream is interesting isn't due to satellites and the vast amounts of revenue that they will generate from geospatial data. Rather, why Instream is poised to outperform Downstream is because of the role that space stations will play in the future of humanity's quest for immortality.

In the original module, we pointed at the International Space Station (ISS) reaching towards its third decade and named Sierra Space, Orbital Assembly, Orbital Reef, and Nanoracks as the next generation. Three years later, the station race has consolidated and accelerated — and the ISS era now has a scheduled end date.

Since 2023:

• The ISS got a retirement plan. NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million contract in June 2024 to build the deorbit vehicle that will guide the ISS through its controlled reentry around 2030–2031. After 25+ years of continuous occupation, the most expensive structure ever built is now a decommissioning program — which is exactly what makes the commercial replacement race urgent.
• The private station lineup is real hardware now, not renders. Vast's Haven-1 — planned as the first commercial space station, an ~45 m³ single module on a Falcon 9 followed by the four-person Vast-1 crew mission — is now targeting Q1 2027 (Ars Technica/Vast). Starlab (the Voyager Space/Airbus successor to the Nanoracks lineage), Axiom Station, and Blue Origin's Orbital Reef with Sierra Space's LIFE habitat remain in development. India announced its own Bharatiya Antariksh Station (BAS-1) with a 2028 target, and China's Tiangong maintains a permanent crew.
• Private astronaut missions became a market. Axiom-2 (May 2023) and Axiom-3 (January 2024) flew paying crews to the ISS. Polaris Dawn (September 2024) performed the first commercial spacewalk. Fram2 (April 2025) completed the first crewed polar orbit. In 2026 alone, four crewed orbital flights carried 14 people (Wikipedia, 2026 in spaceflight).
• Microgravity commerce produced its first payloads. Varda Space returned its W-1 capsule — carrying pharmaceuticals processed in microgravity — to a Utah landing in February 2024, the first commercial reentry of its kind. In-orbit compute emerged as a distinct funding category for the first time in 2026, with Cowboy Space raising $275 million and Impulse Space reportedly raising ~$500 million for in-space mobility (Space Economy Institute, Q2 2026).

MilkyWayEconomy's prediction from the original module stands unchanged: the Milky Way's first quadrillionaire will be an Indian woman who specializes in genetics, whose research performed on one of these space stations renders humans all but immortal — we anticipate 2065. What's different now is that the laboratories she will use are under construction, not on a whiteboard. Instream remains the most valuable vertical in The Space Economy.

Downstream

As of January 2023, the global market for geospatial data was $17B, accounting for 3.3% of the total $503B space economy. By 2040 the geospatial data market will be worth just north of $200B. The geospatial data market is just one aspect of the Downstream data market and value chain that The Space Economy creates. After all, in space, data is the currency of space. From machine-to-machine micropayments for in-orbit satellite services, parking spaces and premium orbits, data and the exchange thereof will define the currency of The Space Economy and even the cislunar and Martian economy.

The thesis didn't need revising. The denominator did.

Since 2023:

• The economy the pillar sits inside grew 36%. The global space economy reached $686 billion in 2025, up 12% year-over-year, with commercial revenue accounting for 79% of the total and government spending at $141 billion (Space Foundation, The Space Report 2026). Measured against the $503 billion figure the original module cited in 2023, that is a 36% increase. The growth engine, per the Space Foundation, is exactly what this pillar predicted: space-enabled consumer services — broadband, Earth observation, GPS-dependent logistics.
• Earth observation went operational and defensive. Commercial EO and SAR constellations (Planet, Maxar, Capella, Umbra, Iceye) went from novelty to national-security supply chain, feeding proliferated architectures like the Space Development Agency's mesh and the NRO's commercial imagery buys.
• Data infrastructure moved into orbit. In-orbit compute became a funded category in its own right (see Instream above), and in-space servicing crossed from concept to mission: Astroscale's ADRAS-J completed its rendezvous demonstration with a derelict rocket stage in 2024, and in July 2026 Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft launched on the final Pegasus flight in history to attempt the first commercial servicing of a live NASA science mission, Swift — a mission NASA cancelled on August 19, 2026, weeks after LINK reached orbit (NASA, 2026). The "parking spaces and premium orbits" we wrote about now have companies billing for them — and, as of this August, one invoice the government chose not to pay.
• The space economy got a ticker. SpaceX went public as SPCX in 2026, and on July 27, 2026, CME Group launched cash-settled single-stock futures for it — space, as an asset class, now trades 23 hours a day (CME Group, July 2026). Data about the space economy is itself now a Downstream product.

The 2040 projection stands: geospatial alone is a $200B+ market on the way. The rest of the value chain — servicing, compute, orbital logistics, machine-to-machine payments — is where the currency of space is being minted right now.

Exploration

Exploration is the second easiest aspect of The Space Economy to understand and appreciate. Ever since the first human walked out of Africa, humanity has looked up to the heavens and wondered what lay beyond our imagination. Exploration will be a driving force to The Space Economy, especially as many of the environmental and physiological challenges to space travel (e.g. radiation and muscle atrophy) are overcome over the next 100 years.

In 2023, the Moon was still a museum. Since then, it has become a construction site — and humans are going back.

Since 2023:

• Artemis II flew. On April 1, 2026, four astronauts launched aboard SLS/Orion on the first crewed lunar flyby since Apollo 17 in 1972; the mission concluded successfully on April 10, 2026 (NASA). The first landing under the program is now targeted for Artemis IV in 2028 (Britannica, 2026) — which, if it holds, puts humans on the lunar surface within this decade.
• The Moon got landed on — repeatedly, and commercially. Chandrayaan-3 (August 2023) made the first landing near the lunar South Pole. SLIM (January 2024) put Japan on the surface. Intuitive Machines' Odysseus (February 2024) became the first commercial lunar landing. Chang'e-6 (June 2024) returned the first far-side samples in history. Firefly's Blue Ghost (March 2025) and Intuitive Machines' Athena (March 2025 — landed, but tipped over) followed. ispace's Resilience reached lunar orbit in May 2025 but crashed on its June 2025 landing attempt — proof that the failure rate is still real. Six successful landings in under two years — a cadence the entire 20th century, roughly twenty landings across 1966–1976, never matched.
• The inner solar system opened up. Europa Clipper launched toward Jupiter's ice moon (October 2024). Parker Solar Probe made its closest-ever approach to the Sun (December 2024). Ingenuity ended its run after 72 flights on Mars (January 2024), and Perseverance's cached samples await the Mars Sample Return campaign.
• The human physiological frontier moved too. Polaris Dawn (September 2024) completed the first commercial extravehicular activity; Fram2 (April 2025) flew the first crewed polar orbit. Radiation and muscle-atrophy research remains the long pole — exactly as we wrote — but the first commercial EVA and the first crewed polar flight both happened within two years of the original module, not decades.

The 100-year timeline for the hard physiological problems still stands. What collapsed was the timeline for getting off the planet in the first place.

Religion's Role in The Space Economy

Every great age of expansion or exploration in human history has been driven by either Glory, Gold or God. When all three align, history changes paradigms. In The Space Economy, religion and faith play no less critical a role. To unlock the true discoveries of space and microgravity, savvy founders and spacepreneurs will tie their technology and scientific discoveries to prove the following, which unlock the funding purse strings of politicians and governments around the world:

• Do aliens exist?
• Proof that God exists

In 2023, this was the contrarian pillar. Three years later, the "Do aliens exist?" question is literally a line item in the United States government.

Since 2023:

• The UAP question became a bureaucracy. AARO, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (established 2022, successor to three prior programs), delivered its congressionally mandated historical report in March 2024 and retains a dedicated budget line; NASA convened its own UAP independent study team, held its first public meeting in May 2023, released its report in September 2023, and appointed a director of UAP research. Congress has held multiple public hearings since 2023. Whatever you believe about the substance, the purse strings we predicted would open — opened. The "aliens exist" question now has an office, a director, and a budget line.
• The search for life produced its first candidate data. In September 2023, JWST observations of exoplanet K2-18b detected carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide — a possible biosignature signal consistent with a water-ocean world. The conversation moved from science fiction to peer-reviewed spectra.
• Faith is already practiced in orbit. UAE astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi observed Ramadan aboard the ISS in 2023 — the first Arab Muslim astronaut on a long-duration mission, with guidance on prayer and fasting in microgravity issued in advance. Religion didn't wait for permission to enter the space economy.

While many in the scientific community believe in research for the sake of research, the savvy founder's read of the last three years is simple: the two questions that unlock governmental purse strings — Do aliens exist? Is there proof of God? — are the two questions governments are now demonstrably paying to answer. Glory, Gold, and God: all three are currently funded.

The Pillars Held. The Evidence Densified.

Five pillars, three years, one conclusion: the framework was right, and the waiting is over.

• Upstream has a $17B contract ceiling and a projected 150-launch year.
• Instream has a retirement date for the ISS and a construction schedule for its replacements.
• Downstream sits inside a $686B economy that grew 12% in a single year, with its own ticker.
• Exploration put four humans around the Moon in April 2026 and has a landing targeted for 2028.
• Religion — the contrarian pillar — turned out to be the one with the most literal receipts: the government now budgets for the alien question.

MilkyWayEconomy's long-dated call — the 2065 quadrillionaire, the immortality research economy, the women-led exploration era — remains on the books. The difference is that every pillar now has a date, a contract, or a launch on it.