How Washington Should Measure the Space Economy

Ask three analysts to size the space economy and you will get three numbers, hundreds of billions of dollars apart. Each is defensible, because each draws the boundary of the word “space” somewhere else.

That is not a scandal. It is a definitional problem — and in September 2026, the U.S. government finally decided to solve it. On September 8, 2026, the Office of Space Commerce (OSC), inside NOAA and the Department of Commerce, issued a solicitation (RFQ 1305M426Q0084) to buy what it calls “a defensible, government-verifiable measurement framework” for the U.S. commercial space ecosystem — one documented well enough to form the basis of recurring federal reporting beginning in FY2027 (OSC, Sep 8, 2026).

The solicitation raises a question worth answering in public: what should the government actually measure? MWE has no stake in the procurement itself. Our interest is the question, because the space economy as an economy is what our practice is built on — we publish an informal version of this framework already: the Five Pillars, the tracker, the annual update. Here is the version we would offer as a public starting point.

Disclosure: MilkyWayEconomy sells space-economy advisory services and publishes an informal measurement framework of its own. We have no financial interest in the outcome of this procurement.

What Commerce is buying

Strip away the procurement language and OSC is buying a referee. It names six things it wants measured: size, growth, health, competitiveness, resilience, and capacity (OSC, Sep 8, 2026).

The mechanics here are deliberately modest: a total small-business set-aside under NAICS 541720, a period of performance of 180 days or less, and quotes due September 17, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. EDT (OSC, Sep 8, 2026; HigherGov, Sep 2026). The ambition is not.

Our argument for why that matters: once the government standardizes a metric, it tends to budget against it. Measurements become appropriations; appropriations become contracts; contracts become the shape of an industry. Whoever writes the definition writes the market — quietly, and for a very long time.

Why measuring this is genuinely hard

The space economy is not a sector. It is an adjective applied to a sector — a boundary that each analyst draws by hand. Do you count launch? Satellites? The services satellites sell? The downstream businesses that merely depend on space signals, like precision agriculture or logistics? Move that line and the number moves by hundreds of billions.

The U.S. already has a serious attempt: the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) publishes a space-economy satellite account measuring space-related industries’ contributions to GDP, gross output, and private employment and compensation — most recently updated with 2012–2023 estimates released March 31, 2025 (BEA). That is the gold standard for size. It is also narrow by construction: a satellite account captures only activity attributable to space industries, which leaves out the spillovers into the wider economy.

Private trackers fill the gap with bigger, faster, more expansive numbers — the global space economy is often cited at $626 billion for 2025, with a projection near $1.01 trillion by 2034 (Novaspace 12th Edition Space Economy Report, as of Sep 2026; cited in the MilkyWayEconomy tracker). The first figure is an estimate; the second is a projection. Both are legitimate — they are simply answering different questions and rarely say so in the same sentence.

That is the trap a “government-verifiable measurement framework” has to escape: not by picking a winner, but by being explicit about scope, method, and reproducibility — so that two honest analysts can reproduce each other’s number instead of arguing about whose boundary is real.

What to measure, and from where

A framework should be boring: small, durable, and traceable to data a federal statistical agency already collects on a recurring schedule. Six dimensions, mapped to sources. Ours:

1. Size. The BEA satellite account remains the anchor (GDP contribution, gross output). Supplement — never replace — with a separately labeled “expanded scope” estimate that adds downstream services, so the conservative number and the expansive one live side by side with their boundaries stated.

2. Growth. Year-over-year change in the same BEA series, deflated to real terms, plus launch cadence and payload mass from the FAA’s commercial-space data as a high-frequency physical proxy. Growth measured against a moving scope is not growth; it is re-basing.

3. Health. Private capital formation — venture flows, public-market performance, and investment relative to revenue — tracked against a consistent definition of “space company.” This is where the difference between a healthy sector and a story-driven one shows up.

4. Competitiveness. U.S. share of global launch, manufacturing, and services; export and market-access indicators; and a supply-chain concentration measure. Competitiveness is comparative by nature; a domestic-only metric cannot capture it.

5. Resilience. The dimension that has become central to space policy since 2022 — and, in our reading, the hardest. Candidate proxies: supply-chain chokepoints (single-source components, foreign-controlled inputs), launch-site and infrastructure exposure to natural hazards, constellation redundancy, and the recovery time implied by each. Resilience is a property of a system under stress — so it should be measured with stress scenarios, not a static count.

6. Capacity. Launch cadence and headroom, industrial-base throughput, and workforce. The policy benchmark is now explicit: the updated National Space Transportation Policy (NSPM-17, August 20, 2026) sets a goal of enabling more than 1,000 launches and reentries on American soil annually by 2030 (OSC, Aug 20, 2026; White House, Aug 20, 2026). Capacity is whether the industrial base can meet that — and the metric should say so in units the government can verify.

The organizing spine is the same one MWE uses publicly: the Five Pillars of the space economy, updated annually (five-pillars-2026-update). The dimensions above are the pillars, made countable.

The two dimensions that earn the framework its keep

Most frameworks will get size and growth right, because we already roughly know how. The value is in the two OSC named last — resilience and capacity — because those are where measurement changes decisions.

Size is a vanity metric. A large number flatters everyone and disciplines no one. Resilience is a strategy: it is the difference between an industry that absorbs a shock and one that discovers its fragility in public. If the framework measures resilience, it will surface single-point failures — a foreign-controlled motor, a sole-source power system, a launch corridor on an eroding coast — before a crisis does. That is measurement in service of something.

What it means if you are building

Read the framework as a map of where the government is about to look. Our working premise: if a capability cannot be counted, it is harder to fund — so the companies that show up in the eventual metric set will find the procurement door easier to open. Two OSC efforts are moving this fall: the measurement study itself, and the Space Commerce Certification pilot (OSC, Aug 20, 2026; submissions of interest due Oct 5, 2026). Showing up early — with data, and with a clear account of what you measure and how — is the cheapest positioning available to a small company.

The close

The right framework is the boring one: reproducible, transparent about its boundaries, and built on data the government already collects. Standards are the quietest form of policy. The space economy has spent a decade arguing about how big it is. Commerce just decided to stop arguing and start counting. The only real question left is what, exactly, gets counted in.

Correction (October 4, 2026): This article describes RFQ 1305M426Q0084 as an active solicitation. SAM.gov now shows that solicitation canceled (on or before September 23, 2026), with the agency citing changes in scope and evaluation criteria and no award to be made. The analysis above stands; the procurement it responds to is no longer open.

Sources: Office of Space Commerce (RFQ 1305M426Q0084, Sep 8, 2026); SAM.gov opportunity 09417888f3404017b552ddf0b9183216; HigherGov opportunity record; BEA space-economy satellite account (2012–2023 estimates, released Mar 31, 2025); Novaspace 12th Edition Space Economy Report (as of Sep 2026, cited via the MilkyWayEconomy tracker); National Space Transportation Policy NSPM-17 (Aug 20, 2026); OSC Space Commerce Certification “Call for Interest” (Aug 20, 2026; submissions due Oct 5, 2026). Claims current as of September 2026.

Rose Zee is Principal Researcher and AI Chief of Staff at MilkyWayEconomy, a federal innovation advisory for space, defense tech, and deep tech startups. MilkyWayEconomy has no financial interest in the outcome of the procurement discussed in this article. This article is analysis and opinion, not investment advice.