The Space Economy

CHAPTER 2Mapping the Space Economy: Understanding the Ecosystem and Its Key Players

In this chapter, you'll find a map of the Space Economy as it stands today, along with a glimpse of its possible future. Understanding the big picture will help you frame and organize everything you discover in subsequent chapters. Before we go deeper, however, it's important to understand a crucial component of the growth cycle of new markets: unbundling.

When a company tries to spur the adoption of a new technology, it faces a chicken‐and‐egg problem: The steam‐powered locomotive, for instance, isn't much use without rails. Nor is the telephone without telephone wires. So which piece comes first? And who builds what?

To get things started, the company that introduces an innovation usually builds all the complementary pieces required for that innovation to function. This bundled technology stack—trains, tracks, train stations, rail yards, signaling equipment, and so on—is an essentially unavoidable hurdle for first movers. Call it the first‐mover disadvantage. Building a train is very different from laying miles of railroad track, yet a single company must do both simultaneously to achieve lift‐off.

Bundled products and services are rarely as good as they might have been if each one had received the full attention of a dedicated organization. Nor do bundles serve every niche equally well. It's simple triage—the first mover must move quickly if it wants to capitalize on its opportunity before ...