Realising the space opportunity for Irish business

Space heralds an unprecedented degree of private participation in a sector that has historically been dominated by governments and stateowned organisations. Christopher Brown and our Space Advisory team explain the commercialisation opportunities.

As more and more enterprises and institutions gain awareness of the wealth of opportunities on offer, the commercial space sector is set to balloon in reach and scale, ultimately impacting every sector in Ireland. In this context, all businesses should urgently understand how space commercialisation will affect them, and where they can enter the value chain and pursue commercial return.

Globally, the space industry promises to grow from €348 billion in 2020 to nearly €1 trillion in 2040. The latest Seraphim Space Index report highlights extraordinary growth with €5.22 billion privately invested in the industry within the last 12 months demonstrating a paradigm shift where space is no longer out of industry’s reach.

The fast-falling cost of spaceflight is creating a new value chain encompassing not only the launching of objects into space (upstream) but the ground-based support of those objects (midstream) and the exploitation and application of the data they collect (downstream).

Just as the first government-driven wave of space exploration eventually revolutionised fields from medical imaging to water purification, we believe today’s private enterprise driven space commercialisation will yield technologies whose applications far exceed their first use cases. Space is set to yield whole new suites of services, products, and value, potentially representing a huge opportunity for businesses in every sector.