Space: investing in the next frontier

At one portfolio company, the bill for launch has gone from about 2.5 million to almost 10 million. Elena Ballesteros of Voyager Ventures gave the figure to show what the end of SpaceX's rideshare programme means. SpaceX will stop taking bookings from 2028, and about 85% of the satellites launched today belong to it. Jordan Billiald of IQ Capital, the other host, had asked investors and founders to help build a space investment thesis. Whatever the topic, from orbital data centres to satellite parts, the answers came back to launch.

Data centres as a launch customer

Orbital data centres found one clear enthusiast. Jordan was not it. For years, Jordan said, the story in space was that SpaceX would keep making launch cheaper and everyone could rely on it. People are now changing their view, and Jordan wondered how much of the data-centre story is "essentially a marketing campaign on behalf of Elon Musk and SpaceX to pump their stock price."

A founder who builds small electric aircraft said the data centres were the wrong thing to watch. Satellites run out of energy and fall back, so the whole case rests on cheap rockets. An investor saw the data centres as a first test of moving industry into orbit. They also suspected the push was about creating demand for more launches once Starlink is saturated. The enthusiast, from a company that measures methane from space, pointed to cheap energy in orbit and said the first job would be processing satellite data in orbit.

Selling to the satellite builders

If start-ups cannot control launch, Elena asked, is there room for component makers as well as vertically integrated companies? Two investors saw room for both. One said satellite builders do not want to develop every power and compute subsystem themselves, and saw substantial value going to bus builders, an undervalued part of the market. The other held up Open Cosmos, which designs, builds and operates its own satellites and can now build one a day. Ukraine's dependence on Starlink, which Musk could switch off from one day to the next, showed why Europe needs companies like it.

A third investor described DCUBED. Its actuator business sells to most of the primes, generates cash and is growing about fourfold towards €10m in sales. On its own, that is not a venture case. The venture bet is a newer line, solar arrays 3D-printed in orbit, so that a satellite can launch with less mass. In a market where you have to have sold in order to sell, the actuators give the new product its way in. The investor expected that window to close within a couple of years as such parts commoditise.

Jordan summed up what looked like a market failure. Fixing launch needs demand from people on Earth. A founder building forecasts for forest owners said customers could not afford a product built on bought-in satellite data, so the company integrated vertically to control its costs.

essentially a marketing campaign on behalf of Elon Musk and SpaceX to pump their stock price.

Defence money in orbit

Jordan, born four weeks before Hubble went up, grew up thinking about science and exploration and was uneasy about where space is heading. The ISS is due to be de-orbited in the early 2030s and NASA relies almost entirely on SpaceX, so science could become a service bought from private companies. A few days earlier, the US government had confirmed it has deployed weapons in space.

A US investor remembered the Cold War Star Wars programme and said that box was being reopened, and that "once weapons are up, they don't really go down." Observation missions that NOAA can no longer fund, the investor said, now go up with money from the renamed Department of War. Another participant said space had been driven by defence from the start. Varda paid for its first missions with defence money because governments wanted the hypersonic data from its re-entries. They found the situation very scary, and also a large opportunity.

A European ride

Whether Europe should build its own SpaceX divided opinion. The aircraft founder wanted a highly reusable European launcher like Starship, and repeated Musk's line that if you set a cruise ship on fire after every trip, the tickets would be horrendously expensive. Another participant said The Exploration Company is moving into reusable heavy launch, and that Europe loses money on every Ariane launch because the rocket cannot be reused. The US investor doubted that European venture capital would fund years of losses to build a vertically integrated company on the scale of SpaceX.

An angel investor saw no point in chasing SpaceX at all. Europe should build differently, like a German start-up whose hybrid rockets burn paraffin and use half the materials. They cannot be reused, but they are cheaper and quicker to produce. If governments want to help, the angel said, they should fund launch capacity, so start-ups know they will have a ride when they are ready.

In closing, Elena said everyone, at least on the European side, was clear that Europe needs bigger launch capacity, ideally from a European company. Nobody settled who should pay for it. Until someone does, a launch bill that quadruples is the price of depending on someone else's rocket.

This Ripple was hosted by Jordan Billiald (IQ Capital) and Elena Ballesteros (Voyager Ventures) at The Drop 2026 on 16 September.