Space is infrastructure now. The question is who controls it?

The global space economy was worth $421 billion in 2024. By 2029, GlobalData forecasts that figure will reach $511 billion. The surprising fact is that much of this growth is built around low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and related industries. For anyone not working in space, the image is one of a few incumbents, wealthy tech leaders and government funded agencies, such as NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The reality is different. A broad commercial ecosystem exists, spanning telecoms, advanced manufacturing, defence, and data, and it is reshaping what space is actually for.

Advances in manufacturing, propulsion, and launch technology have cut the cost of getting to orbit significantly, at least according to William Rojas, research director of strategic intelligence at GlobalData. And this is already having an impact on innovation.

“Satellite broadband communications has become the new strategic imperative impacting national sovereignty, national security, and national digital infrastructure,” says Rojas. “Countries lagging in terrestrial broadband residential and enterprise infrastructure can use satellite broadband to help fill the gap with advanced countries, and attract more foreign direct investment and the digitalisation of industry sectors.”

Space is becoming the infrastructure layer on which multiple industries depend. The question is not just who is getting to space, but what they are doing once they get there? And with that, who actually controls the data, signals, and materials that come back?

Connecting, observing, creating

Space currently plays three distinct economic roles. It connects, through satellite communications and GPS navigation. It observes, through Earth observation systems feeding data into climate monitoring, agricultural planning, and defence intelligence. And it is beginning to create, through in-orbit manufacturing that exploits microgravity to produce materials impossible to make on the ground.

The first two are well established. The third is still in its infancy but of growing significance. Most of the value today sits in applications. Satellite communications, navigation, and Earth observation collectively account for the majority of market revenues. The growth is being driven by low Earth orbit constellations, falling launch and manufacturing costs, and an accelerating appetite for data across both public and private sectors. Defence and sovereignty concerns are adding a further layer of urgency, particularly in Europe.

However, despite the optimism, there are real constraints. Short-term returns are weak, start-up economics remain fragile, and macroeconomic uncertainty has cooled some of the investor enthusiasm that characterised the early 2020s. But the dependency on space infrastructure is building regardless.

From milestone to architecture

The clearest indication of where this is heading came from NASA’s Artemis II mission, which demonstrated laser-based optical communications from lunar orbit using a ground station costing around $5 million, a fraction of what conventional radio frequency (RF) infrastructure demands, and achieved data rates of around 260Mbps. It was widely reported as “a breakthrough”. The more useful question, though, is what it actually proved, and for whom?

Toni Spatola, chief commercial officer at Filtronic, says that space agency missions like Artemis II no longer function as primary drivers of innovation. Their role has changed.

“Rather than isolated milestones, Artemis II acted as a validation anchor for investors and operators, as well as a reference architecture for future NTN and deep space standards,” he says.

The commercial momentum, he is clear, has come from elsewhere – primarily from US mega-constellations that have already demonstrated high-capacity data links using high-frequency RF carriers above 80GHz and optical links for inter-satellite operations at commercial scale. Artemis II confirmed what the market was already doing. That is not nothing.

For Chris Bosquillon, co-chair of the Moon Village Association’s Disruptive Tech and Lunar Governance working group, agencies now act as “key validators and enablers” rather than primary catalysts, proving capabilities “through validated flight heritage at extreme range” and lowering perceived risk for commercial operators.

“It is expected future advancement of 6G will naturally cover the envisaged requirements from deep space communications, and solution architectures will converge.”

Professor Ning Wang, JOINER

The European component of Artemis, the Moonlight programme, is already aggregating European industry around space gateways in lunar orbit for positioning and communications links, using RF rather than optical for now. The point is not the technology choice but the direction – sovereign infrastructure, built by a coalition of commercial players, with agencies providing the framework.

The RF versus optical debate itself is frequently distorted. The question is not which technology wins, but what role each plays in an architecture that will have to handle a significant increase in traffic over the next decade.

“We are definitely heading towards a more complex hybrid model,” notes Spatola.

Optical links cannot reliably replace RF for uplinks and downlinks, he says, as they are too sensitive to weather and atmospheric conditions. RF will remain essential for user access, mobility, and high-availability links. What optical brings is capacity and security in the right parts of the network.

“Optical communications may become dominant in space-based backbone layers, especially for inter-satellite links and deep-space backhaul,” says Spatola, “while RF handles access and control.”

The real evolution in 6G non-terrestrial networks, he argues, is architectural rather than purely about capacity, “a layered system where RF handles access and control, optical handles high-capacity transport in space, and intelligence in the network dynamically selects the best link.”

Bosquillon expects this to unfold as “progressive rollout over the late 2020s and 2030s,” with the end state being non-terrestrial networks operating as “a true extension of terrestrial 6G rather than a siloed add-on.”

Professor Ning Wang, deputy director of international experimentation platform JOINER, notes that 6G standardisation currently focuses primarily on connectivity for Earth-based users, with deep space communications still sitting outside the mainstream of near-term R&D. But he expects convergence.

“It is expected future advancement of 6G will naturally cover the envisaged requirements from deep space communications,” he says, “and solution architectures will converge at some point.”

Wang also raises two implications that tend to get overlooked in the RF-versus-optical discussion. The first is quantum communications.

“Quantum communications require end-to-end support from optical/laser links,” he notes, “and the implication is that the deployment of quantum communications over NTN will also depend on the end-to-end readiness of optical/laser links being deployed at specific network locations.”

The infrastructure choices being made now for optical link deployment will determine whether quantum-secure satellite communications become viable later.

Wang’s second implication is semantic communications, a 6G concept that involves transmitting the meaning of data rather than the raw data itself, substantially reducing traffic volumes in high-latency, bandwidth-constrained environments. For deep space connectivity, where latency is structural and bandwidth finite, this could be more practical than trying to engineer raw capacity gains alone.

On the component side, Spatola points to continued development in gallium nitride and indium phosphide technologies as critical for achieving the power, linearity, and low-noise performance required for both ground and space systems, alongside radiation-hardened photonics, precision pointing systems, and advances in single-photon avalanche detectors for reliable optical signal detection.

Technologies such as Digital IF, he notes, are also gaining importance for simplifying interconnections and managing the growing complexity of these systems. None of this is exotic. It’s nuts and bolts engineering work that will determine whether the architecture actually performs at scale.

The integration problem

On whether space-based communications become standard global infrastructure, Spatola says, “we’re already past the ‘does it work?’ phase,” claiming the blockers are “economic, operational, and institutional.”

The trajectory, he suggests, echoes early fibre deployment – expensive until it suddenly isn’t. For optical terminals, costs are falling but mass production, automated alignment and calibration, and lower-cost launch remain unsolved at scale. For RF terminals, mass production economics have already been demonstrated.

“Space-based comms will become standard infrastructure when they stop being sold as ‘space systems’ and start being sold as additional network capacity for specific geographies and operational situations,” Spatola says.

Wang points to concrete signs of convergence already under way. LEO satellite networks such as Starlink are integrating with mobile and cellular networks defined by 3GPP, enabling direct-to-device connections, which is a key 6G feature. Regenerative satellite payloads, which allow on-board data processing rather than simple signal relay, are moving from research into deployment, with Open RAN functions now being placed on satellites.

“It will take longer to reach the convergence of a global network with integrated communication and computing services,” Wang says, but the direction is set.

What integration actually requires, beyond engineering, is institutional alignment. Space networks must connect cleanly with terrestrial core networks. This means unified standards for latency, billing, roaming, and orchestration, with tools that treat space as a normal roaming option rather than an exotic add-on. The recent FCC spectrum governance announcements are a reminder that regulatory decisions remain as consequential as engineering ones in determining where investment flows.

Standards bodies, spectrum regulators, and the handful of constellation operators who already control significant orbital infrastructure are making decisions now, largely outside public view. For innovators, the lesson from Artemis II is not really the technology. It is the infrastructure opportunity, for influencing the protocols, the access terms and the governance structures. That window will not stay open indefinitely. Once the architecture consolidates, competing with it becomes exponentially harder than helping to shape it.