"Just a few years ago, space startups were selling investors on visions of a rapidly expanding commercial market for weather monitoring, broadband, and remote-sensing satellites. Astra, for example, told investors in its 2021 SPAC deck that it would eventually launch hundreds of rockets per year to serve a growing small satellite market. Relativity Space pitched investors on a 3D printing revolution that would make rockets cheap enough to unlock large commercial demand."
"Defense, meanwhile, is on an opposite trajectory. Geopolitical shifts, like Russia's war against Ukraine and growing competition in space from China, have created new tailwinds. The Pentagon's new "Golden Dome" initiative, a multi-billion-dollar project aimed at created a layered missile defense shield over the continental United States, has flooded the aerospace ecosystem with lucrative new opportunities. Meanwhile, programs like the Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) and the Space Development Agency's missile-defense satellite constellation are promising years of predicable, high-value"
Stoke Space raised $510 million in a Series D led by Thomas Tull's U.S. Innovative Technology, a fund that invests in national-security-linked technologies. The capital raise reflects a broader industry shift: launch market dynamics are increasingly driven by defense demand rather than commercial payloads. Commercial opportunities persist for constellations, in-space manufacturing, and lunar payloads, but SpaceX dominates low-cost, reliable commercial launches. Geopolitical tensions and initiatives like the Pentagon's "Golden Dome", Space Force's NSSL, and the Space Development Agency's missile-defense constellation have generated predictable, high-value defense contracts. Investors and startups are orienting toward national-security applications and stable government business.
Read at TechCrunch
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]