The Unpriced, Uninsured, Unmeasured Space Economy

Ask an audience to name the biggest constraint on the space economy and you will hear about cost per kilogram, engine reuse, or the next heavy-lift vehicle. Those are real constraints. They are not the binding ones.

I spend my working time on the economics of extreme environments, the cost and risk models that decide what actually gets built and what quietly does not. From that seat, the constraints that worry me most are not technological at all. They are financial (how risk is priced), legal (who pays for harm), and informational (how the economy is defined, and how its story is verified). These are the load-bearing walls of the industry. They are barely discussed.

So, over the next few months, I am going to write about six of them, one at a time. Not predictions. Constraints. The things I would want any founder, investor, or policymaker to be arguing about now, before they are decided for us.

Here is the map.

1. Insurance: the silent governor. Every mission carries a price for risk, and that price is set by underwriters, not engineers. Insurance is where risk becomes a number, and where a number becomes a go/no-go decision. As of 2026, recent broker commentary suggests capacity for space risk is rising and premiums are easing for heritage risks, while also flagging new exclusions around debris liability and constellation cross-contamination. Those exclusions form coverage gaps precisely where the industry is growing. A coverage gap is a mission that never flies. If the ceiling on orbital activity is set in an underwriting room rather than a launch pad, we should be watching that room as closely as any range.

2. Liability: who pays when orbit falls. We are adding launch and reentry cadence toward a stated national goal of more than 1,000 launches and reentries on American soil annually by 2030 (NSPM-17, August 20, 2026), on top of a patchwork legal regime: the 1972 UN Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects, and an FCC five-year deorbit mandate that regulators and operators are still implementing. Almost no one has seriously priced the chain from cadence to casualty expectation to liability to insurance to who is allowed to fly. And here is the consequence: active debris removal struggles to find a customer, because no one is legally on the hook to pay for it. The market failure in orbit is legal, not technical.

3. Financialization: repriced before profitable. As of 2026, space is being financialized before it is durably profitable. Satellite debt and convertible notes, share unlocks, capital raised against constellations that have not yet proven their unit economics. That is not inherently wrong. Capital formation is how industries scale. But it changes the nature of the risk. The shock that reshapes the next decade of space companies may be a repricing, with markets deciding to treat space as a cyclical industry rather than a frontier, long before it is a reentry. That is a capital-markets risk, and almost no one models it as one.

4. Labor: the bench is the bottleneck. We talk about capital as if it were the scarce input. It is not. The scarce input is people: welders, machinists, opticians, range and launch crews, the trades that actually bend metal and align optics. A 1,000-launch goal is, at bottom, a workforce equation, and it is being set against an aging industrial base and demographic trends that are tightening the labor pool in precisely the countries doing the launching (Census Bureau, An Aging World). We fund the rockets and underfund the bench. That is an economic error with a ten-year lead time.

5. Information: measured and trusted. An economy that cannot be measured cannot be governed. One whose narrative cannot be trusted cannot be financed. Right now the United States is buying a formal measurement framework for the space economy. As of September 2026, the Office of Space Commerce has commissioned exactly this, a defensible, government-verifiable measurement framework (RFQ 1305M426Q0084), because the government wants a number it can budget against. At the same time, AI has made the industrial-scale fabrication of narrative cheap and repeatable (Anthropic, Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026). These look like two problems. They are one: measurement and verification are the same discipline, and in a sector this remote and this asserted, both are now infrastructure.

6. The commons: the unpriced commons. Spectrum and orbital slots are the scarce inputs every operator depends on, and we have no meaningful economic account of them. Allocation happens in processes so technical that almost no one reports on them, decided in rooms most of the industry never enters, while first movers quietly lock up a resource nobody is pricing. If the space economy is going to be an economy, its most important shared resource needs a price, or at least an honest accounting.

I have grouped these deliberately. Three of these are financial: insurance, financialization, and labor. How risk is priced, how capital is structured, who does the work. Two are legal: liability and the commons. Who bears the cost of harm, and how we allocate what we share. The last is informational: measurement and verification. Whether we can define and trust the thing at all.

There is a person on the other end of every one of these six decisions. The underwriting gap is a launch crew that never gets the go. The liability vacuum is a household under a debris track that nobody is accountable for. The workforce bottleneck is a machinist whose trade is treated as a cost line instead of the constraint it is. The measurement gap is a citizen who has no way to tell a real orbital event from a fabricated one. Foundations are abstract until the day they are the only thing between a person and the consequences, which is the day we stop calling them abstract.

Read together, they describe something simple. We are building a twenty-first-century industry on twentieth-century foundations: the risk models, liability standards, workforce pipelines, and measurement systems that everything else rests on. We celebrate the visible engineering and neglect the invisible kind, right up until the invisible kind fails. Then it fails everywhere at once.

My argument, across these six pieces, is not that any single one is a crisis. It is that they are load-bearing, and they are being decided now, quietly, mostly by default. The next era of the space economy will not be won by whichever company builds the best rocket. It is likely to be won by whoever owns the load-bearing layer: the underwriting model, the liability standard, the metric set, the allocation.

That is a conversation worth having in public. Over the coming months, I intend to have it. I would rather argue about the foundations now than discover them in a crisis.

George Pullen is Chief Economist & Partner at MilkyWayEconomy. A USMC veteran and co-author of multiple books on the space economy, his work focuses on the economic frameworks that will govern cislunar development. His Polar-Lunar Continuum model provides a policy and investment lens for the emerging space economy.

This post opens a six-part series. Next: Insurance: The Silent Governor.

Note (October 22, 2026): This post says that recent broker commentary flags new exclusions around debris liability and constellation cross contamination. We could not find a source for that specific claim. The capacity and rate movements it is set against are documented, the exclusions are not, so treat them as unverified. Part 1 of the series does not repeat the claim.

Correction (October 18, 2026): This post describes RFQ 1305M426Q0084 as an active solicitation. SAM.gov shows that solicitation canceled on or before September 23, 2026, with the contracting office citing changes in scope and evaluation criteria and no award to be made. The argument above stands. The procurement it was written against is withdrawn.