I spent the better part of three years working across the Gulf — Qatar and Saudi Arabia — watching sovereign wealth funds write checks that most Western institutions would take six months of committee meetings to even discuss. When the UAE announced its Mars mission in 2020, most European bankers I knew treated it as a vanity project. A PR stunt from an oil state.
Those bankers were wrong. And they're about to be wrong again, on a much bigger scale.
The $1.8 trillion number
McKinsey and the World Economic Forum put the global space economy at $1.8 trillion by 2035. Right now it sits around $630 billion. That's roughly a tripling in under a decade. For context, the entire European asset management industry manages about $30 trillion — space is heading toward a meaningful fraction of that in revenue terms, and financial services has essentially no playbook for it.
No risk models. No underwriting frameworks. No specialized lending. No insurance products worth the name. We're talking about an economy the size of Italy's GDP and the financial infrastructure behind it looks like fintech in 2009: a handful of pioneers, a lot of skeptics, and zero institutional readiness.
SpaceX did the hard part. Now comes the harder part.
Elon Musk gets credit — rightly — for collapsing the cost of reaching orbit. SpaceX brought launch costs from $54,500 per kilogram on the Space Shuttle down to roughly $2,720 per kilogram on Falcon 9. Starship is targeting under $100. That's not an incremental improvement. That's a structural shift in what's economically viable in space.
But getting things up there was always the bottleneck everyone could see. The bottleneck nobody's talking about is capital allocation. SpaceX solved the physics. Nobody has solved the finance.
Consider what's coming online in the next five to ten years:
Satellite mega-constellations. SpaceX's Starlink has over 6,000 satellites in orbit. Amazon's Project Kuiper is deploying 3,236. OneWeb has 634. Each of these represents billions in capital expenditure, ongoing operational costs, orbital debris insurance requirements, and revenue models that depend on assumptions about broadband demand in markets that don't fully exist yet. How do you build a discounted cash flow model for a network of 6,000 assets orbiting at 550 kilometers, each with a five-year lifespan?
Space mining. AstroForge, founded in 2022, is working toward mining platinum-group metals from asteroids. TransAstra is developing technology to capture and process asteroid materials. The theoretical economics are staggering — asteroid 16 Psyche alone is estimated to contain iron, nickel, and gold worth more than the entire global economy. But how do you underwrite a mining operation where the mine is 300 million kilometers away, the extraction technology is unproven, and the regulatory framework literally does not exist?
Orbital manufacturing. Varda Space Industries launched its first orbital factory in 2023 and successfully returned pharmaceuticals manufactured in microgravity. The absence of gravity allows for the creation of materials — fiber optic cables, protein crystals, specialized alloys — that are impossible or prohibitively expensive to produce on Earth. This isn't science fiction. Varda has contracts with the US Air Force. But try taking that to a loan committee at a European bank.
The Gulf knows something Europe doesn't
When I was working between Doha and Riyadh, I noticed something that most people in European finance still haven't processed. The Gulf states aren't diversifying away from oil because they're worried about climate. They're doing it because they've done the math.
Saudi Arabia's space commission was established in 2018. Since then, they've committed over $2.1 billion to space programs through the Saudi Space Agency. The UAE's space sector is already worth over $6 billion and they're targeting $10 billion by 2030. The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre isn't a trophy — it's infrastructure. The Emirates Mars Mission (Hope probe) cost $200 million. Cheaper than a single large commercial real estate development in Dubai. And the technological capabilities it built are now being repurposed for commercial applications.
These aren't passion projects. They're bets placed by people who understand that the space economy is the next resource economy, and that being early matters more than being cautious.
Meanwhile in Europe, ESA's annual budget sits around $7.8 billion — split across 22 member states. The US spends more than $60 billion annually on space through NASA alone, not counting the DoD. Europe has extraordinary technical capability — Arianespace has been launching commercial satellites since 1980. Italy has a deep space heritage: ASI (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana), Avio's Vega rockets, Leonardo's satellite platforms, Thales Alenia Space (half Italian-owned). Italian engineers built significant modules for the International Space Station. The competence is there. The capital formation around it is not.
European finance looks at space and sees risk. Gulf finance looks at space and sees optionality. It's the same pattern I see in how Silicon Valley and Europe view technology differently. That difference in framing is going to matter enormously.
The insurance problem nobody wants to talk about
Space insurance is a niche market — roughly $500 million in annual premiums globally. That's tiny. And the models behind it are essentially actuarial guesswork applied to sample sizes that would make any statistician uncomfortable.
In 2019, the failure of Vega flight VV15 cost insurers an estimated $370 million. A single event wiped out a huge portion of that year's premium pool. Now scale that to a world where there are tens of thousands of active satellites, commercial space stations, orbital manufacturing facilities, and eventually crewed transit vehicles.
The London Market (Lloyd's and its syndicates) handles most space insurance today. They've been doing it since Intelsat I in 1965. But their models were built for an era of a few dozen launches per year. SpaceX alone launched 96 missions in 2023. The launch cadence has outpaced the industry's ability to price risk accurately.
And that's just launch. In-orbit risk — collision, debris damage, cyberattack on satellite systems, space weather events — is barely priced at all. The Kessler syndrome scenario (cascading orbital debris rendering certain orbits unusable) is treated as a tail risk. But with 10,000+ active satellites and growing, it's looking less like a tail and more like a timeline.
AI is the infrastructure layer, not the headline
This is where my day job becomes relevant. At Streetbeat, we build AI infrastructure for financial institutions. And the pattern I see in space is identical to the pattern I've watched unfold in banking over the past few years: the technology moves fast, the finance lags behind, and the gap creates both risk and opportunity.
AI in space isn't a nice-to-have. It's structural.
Autonomous satellite operations — managing constellations of thousands of satellites — can't be done with human operators. Planet Labs processes over 30 terabytes of satellite imagery daily. That data is useless without AI-driven analytics to extract actionable intelligence. SpaceX's Starlink uses machine learning for autonomous collision avoidance. NASA's DART mission used autonomous navigation to hit an asteroid.
For finance, the application is equally direct. AI-driven risk models for space assets. Satellite data analytics for commodity pricing, supply chain monitoring, insurance loss assessment. Autonomous systems that reduce operational risk in ways that traditional actuarial models can't capture because the human-error component is fundamentally different.
The institutions that figure out how to model, price, and finance space activities using AI-native tools will own this market. The ones that try to retrofit their existing frameworks won't.
What this actually looks like
I'll be specific, because vague predictions are worthless.
Within five years, I expect to see: dedicated space economy investment vehicles (ETFs, private credit funds) from at least two major European asset managers. A specialized space insurance syndicate at Lloyd's with AI-driven underwriting. At least one Gulf sovereign wealth fund (likely PIF or Mubadala) launching a dedicated space finance arm. And European banks — probably starting with BNP Paribas or Intesa Sanpaolo, given their existing aerospace exposure — offering structured finance products for satellite constellation operators.
Within ten years: secondary markets for orbital assets (trading satellite capacity like bandwidth futures). Insurance products for space manufacturing facilities. And the first serious regulatory framework for space-based financial instruments, probably originating from the EU because that's what the EU does — it regulates first and innovates second, but the regulation creates the conditions for institutional capital to enter — just as the EU AI Act is doing for AI in financial services right now.
The total addressable market for space financial services — lending, insurance, investment management, risk advisory — could reasonably reach $150–200 billion annually by 2035. That's not my projection. That's implied by the $1.8 trillion top-line number and the typical financial services share of any major industrial economy.
The bottom line
I've watched financial services be late to every major technological shift of the last fifteen years. Late to mobile. Late to cloud. Late to crypto (then too early, then late again). Late to AI — and I say that as someone who spends every day trying to accelerate that adoption.
Space is next. The difference is that space has something the others didn't: real assets, real revenue, real engineering, and sovereign-level capital already committed. This isn't speculative. SpaceX is already the most valuable private company in America at north of $350 billion. Starlink alone could be worth $200 billion as a standalone entity.
The financial institutions that build space competence now — risk models, sector expertise, specialized products — will have a structural advantage that compounds over decades. The ones that wait for the market to mature will find that the Gulf, the US, and a handful of forward-looking European players have already locked up the relationships and the deal flow.
Finance follows engineering, eventually. The question is whether European finance follows fast enough this time, or whether it watches from the ground while others build the infrastructure for a $1.8 trillion economy in orbit.
I know which way I'd bet.
