As access to space opens up, there is renewed excitement among investors about the industry’s potential.
IN THE MIDST OF THE WORST INFLATION seen in 40 years, not all prices are rising. In the 1970s, the cost of taking a kilogram of water to space was $20,000 in today’s dollars. Now, it is more like $2,000 — a tenfoldreduction, and as SpaceX’s Starship has $20/kg in its sights, there is a real possibility of another hundredfold reduction in the cost ofspace access. If this happens, access to space will open up like never before, creating a flood of new business opportunities.
The space industry includes a wide range of markets: space hardware (e.g. satellite manufacturers and modules), launch services, flight and delivery, space tugs, satellite operators (remote sensing, connectivity), drones and unmanned aerial vehicles, ground terminals, security and storage, data platforms, location and mapping and space infrastructure —to name a few. The thread that connects all of these markets is that they each depend, directly or indirectly, on access to space.
Achieving a lower-cost access for Elon Musk’s SpaceX is one thing; making access cost-effective for other new business opportunities is another matter. Innovators will care not just about costs that are achieved in the near term for SpaceX, but whether they will remain there over the long haul. At the outset, when there is capacity to spare, a company like SpaceX may use its technology to set prices close to its own costs of $20 per kilogram; but as more and more opportunities arise and capacity becomes scarce, launch companies will find it easier to charge more. Faced with the expectation that SpaceX may become a bottleneck, far-sighted entrepreneurs and investors may decide that it is too risky to innovate in the first place. Without some way to guarantee prices will stay reasonable, the potential of low-cost access may go unexploited. Savvy investors and entrepreneurs must also monitor the state of competition and ask whether those providing access are pre-emptively taking actions that suggest costs will remain low enough in the future to warrant investment today.
Cost Reductions and Technological Change
Economists recognize that at its essence, radical technological change boils down to one thing: a large reduction in the cost of doing something. The 1800s were not so much an Industrial Revolution as a drop in the cost of energy to power machines; and the late 1900s Information Technology Revolution was really just a fall in the cost of arithmetic (through better semiconductors). More recently, the Internet Revolution is just a drop in the cost of communication and connecting the world. And recent developments in artificial intelligence are just a set of statistical techniques that will dramatically lower the cost of prediction.
In each case, the cost reduction has resulted in an input to production that was once scarce or expensive becoming abundant and cheap. If you recall Econ 101, this represents a movement outwards in supply which results in that very input being used more intensively across many areas. For radical technological change, the move outwards can be so large that economies are transformed.
As the cost of accessing space falls,
we could see entirely new industries emerge.
The current reduction in the cost of transport into space has the potential to do the same. Just as railroads opened up frontier lands, access to space is on the precipice of a similar cascade. And with that change comes opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors.
As the cost of accessing space falls, we could well see the creation of entirely new space industries — everything from energy production to space mining to space manufacturing. Whether the next decade of the commercial space industry results in incremental or radical innovation depends, in part, on the development and deployment of ‘complementary innovations’ that are necessary to take advantage of the falling cost of accessing space. Cheap power only transformed the global economy after hundreds of smaller complementary innovations were developed and deployed, including the mechanical looms that transformed the textile industry and the rail tracks and locomotives that transformed transportation, and machine tools that used steam power to shape metal. These machine tools, in turn, enabled more powerful steam engines.
More of the Same, But Better
Science and exploration are already reaping the benefits of lower-cost access to space. As costs fall, exploration is giving way to space tourism, whereby wealthy people pay to spend time in space. But cheap access also means more science and exploration. We are already starting to see some of the new opportunities that a lower cost of space access can bring. Following are some examples.
Telecommunications. Satellite television and telephones have existed for decades. Weather and geological mapping satellites help us forecast the path of hurricanes, find valuable minerals and navigate our way around the earth. In each case, the technologies take advantage of being above the earth to provide information services to those of us who remain here. As launch costs fall, a new set of entrepreneurs will be able to put satellites in space. In doing so, they are providing a wider variety of telecommunications and mapping services than were previously possible.
Another organization aiming to improve communication and take advantage of the falling cost of access to space is SpaceX’s own Starlink. Already it has launched over 1,000 satellites and plans to launch tens of thousands more with an aim to bridge the digital divide, reducing the wealth gap between rich and poor by providing the rural poor with better information.
Intra-Orbit Transportation Services. Starlink didn’t just require access to space, it also required services in space. Consider the January 24, 2021 SpaceX mission Transporter-1, which deployed 143 satellites in a single rocket. The mission did not end once the satellites were in space, however. The launch also put all the satellites at a similar altitude and orbit. Satellite launches have a last mile problem: Each one needs to get to a specific location and altitude after the rocket gets them to a lower Earth orbit.
A new industry is developing to solve this problem: space tugs, or ‘orbital transfer vehicles,’ which carry satellites and other equipment to their final destination orbit. Transporter-1 carried two such tugs. In our language above, space tugs are a complementary innovation.
Houston, Do We Have a Market Power Problem?
A transformative space industry requires more than the small equipment that can currently be sent into space, and only one company seems close to providing low-cost access to space for heavy equipment: SpaceX. If Starship proves to be the only cost-efficient launch vehicle for the heavy equipment needed to build large-scale industry in space, how can entrepreneurs looking to develop these new opportunities trust that all their profits will not be dissipated at launch?
It may be feasible to beam down clean energy
if we can get heavy equipment into orbit.
Preventing the Chill
Space is cold and has been notoriously difficult to warm up to entrepreneurial opportunities — and the chilling effect of a monopoly provider will not help matters. But SpaceX will benefit from transformative new industries. Its challenge is how to incentivize rapid investment by others, and to overcome the temptation to raise prices once they have made the investments, or shut them out once profitable opportunities are identified. Economists have recognized four broad approaches to overcoming this chilling effect. Each has its own benefits and costs.
DO IT YOURSELF. The chilling effect on complementary innovations to low-cost space access arises because the space transport provider and complementary innovator face conflicting incenives once the investment has been sunk. A straightforward way to remove this conflict is through common ownership. That is, the transport provider should also undertake the necessary complementary innovations. An example is Starlink, SpaceX’s planned constellation of thousands of small satellites in low Earth orbit that communicate with ground transceivers, designed to provide satellite Internet access.
The benefit of such integration is that it directly removes any conflicting incentives. The cost is that it requires the transportation provider to do it all. There are limits to that. For starters, the transportation provider only has a certain amount of capacity to undertake different activities. But more critically, for a frontier, there is no reason to suppose that the transportation provider has a monopoly on imagination. In that case, those who have that imagination have to still work through a bottleneck. In that sense, integration does not resolve the fundamental problem.
MAKE A PROMISE. The primary reason for the chill is that when a future conflict arises, it will be resolved in favour of the monopolist. Eliminating the chill can be achieved by the monopolist tying their own hands to prevent the ex-post price squeeze entrepreneurs fear. This strategy was used to open up the Canadian Prairies to farming. The Canadian Pacific Railway’s transcontinental line was completed in 1885. It went through potentially rich farmland in Saskatchewan, but frontier settlement remained limited for over a decade. Farmers didn’t move to the frontier because of fears that the price of transporting crops to the cities and ports of the east would be too high and the price of equipment and finished goods coming from the east would be too high.
The issue was resolved with the Crow’s Nest Pass Agreement of 1897. In order to get access to British Columbia and to receive funds to build more rail in Canada’s west, CP Rail signed an agreement with the government committing to keep prices low. This price commitment induced settlers to move to Saskatchewan and start farms. Importantly, this in turn prompted further investment by the railway. More settlers led to increased investment in trunk lines, which in turn led to more settlers. The railway ended up benefiting from allowing the government to constrain its ability to raise prices in the future.
The problem with this approach is that it requires you to anticipate a lot about the future. It is difficult to write long-term contracts when there is considerable uncertainty about the economic environment in which that contract will operate. Eventually, the Crow’s Nest Pass Agreement became an anachronism, limiting economic opportunities in the Canadian west by incentivizing farmers to send unprocessed grain east, rather than processing it locally.
For nascent space industries, anticipating the future environment is particularly difficult. Conditions for space transportation may change in unanticipated ways; fuel prices may fluctuate; new technologies may emerge; regulation may impact economic activity; or there may be other factors that alter the costs or benefits of operating over the term of the long-term contract. After all, it was precisely these changes in cost that drove our present inquiry.
CREATE SURPLUS CAPACITY. One of the implicit drivers of launch costs is the lack of availability of capacity to slot launches in a timely manner — like an overbooked airline route that allows prices to rise as a way of rebalancing demand with limited supply. But this also works in reverse: if there is plenty of available capacity, there are incentives to utilize it, creating pressure to drop prices to fill loads.
There is a way a provider can mitigate those fears: visibly invest in a large amount of capacity — a long row of gleaming starships, for example. Having that capacity available means that it will be less profitable to raise prices later on, even when there is higher demand for launch. Since the rockets already exist, more rockets means more commitment to more launches, which, in turn, keeps those launches cost effective.
In Closing
Ajay Agrawal, C.M., is the founder of the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), headquartered at the Rotman School of Management with 12 locations worldwide. He is also the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Strategic Management at Rotman.
Joshua Gans is the Jeffrey Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Professor of Strategic Management at the Rotman School.
Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and Professor of Marketing at the Rotman School. The three are co-authors of Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence (HBR Press, 2022.)
Chris Hadfield, O.O.C., O.Ont., MSC, CD, is a retired Canadian astronaut, engineer, fighter pilot and musician who has flown two space shuttle missions and served as Commander of the International Space Station. He is a Fellow of the CDL.
Mara Lederman is Co-founder and COO of Signal 1, which is transforming healthcare with AI.
She was the Site Lead for CDL Toronto and a professor at the Rotman School for nearly 20 years.
This article was published for the Rotman Management Magazine.
Learn about your GP Leadership profile
Where do you rank in your Power, Challenge, Aspirational and Foundational traits?
