Space tech’s massive global impact

The space technology sector is worth around $600 billion globally, says Kevin O’Connell, Trump’s former Director of Space Commerce.

Transcript

00:00Well, in 2019, there was a report that said that 60% of life on Earth is dependent now

00:06on space technology.

00:08Is that a fair assessment?

00:09I think it's probably much more than that today, as it turns out.

00:12You know, when we're talking about the numbers, you know, what we're really talking about

00:15here globally is a roughly $600 billion economy.

00:20That includes everything that NASA is doing, that the UAE Space Agency is doing, that others

00:24are doing, but also the commercial activities.

00:27And the statistic that most people don't know is that roughly 80% of what is going

00:31on globally is actually considered commercial.

00:35Now, we could spend a lot of time defining that.

00:37I don't think we need to for this purpose.

00:40In terms of estimates, we think that this is headed toward about a $1.8 trillion market.

00:45This is the World Economic Forum's number.

00:47By about 2035.

00:49I have to be candid, I'm always skeptical of those numbers only because I think we're

00:54under-counting, because of the difficulty of counting how much we're actually using

00:58space per day.

01:00I'm also an optimist, and so when I see those numbers, I think we're actually using space

01:04a lot more than we can typically account for.

01:08It's analytically a challenging thing to do.