One number now appears in nearly every strategy paper on space. By 2035, the space economy is said to be worth 1.8 trillion dollars. It comes from a study by the World Economic Forum and McKinsey published in April 2024, which started from 630 billion dollars in 2023 and assumed growth at close to twice the rate of the global economy. Goldman Sachs adopted it this year. It sits in ministerial briefings, in fund prospectuses, in hearing transcripts. People read it the way they read an exchange rate.

It is not a rate, though. It is an estimate, and other houses estimate differently. Novaspace puts the space economy at 626 billion dollars for 2025 and expects roughly one trillion by 2034. Market analyses working with seven percent annual growth arrive at about 852 billion for 2035. Same year, same industry, less than half.

It also appears where one would least expect it. Mario Draghi's report on European competitiveness, on which the Commission leans for its own draft legislation, puts the sector at the same 1.8 trillion dollars by 2035. Anyone who thinks Europe stands outside this is mistaken. It sits in the same bet, with paper rather than launch pads, and the European Space Agency secured the largest funding commitment in its history in November 2025, some 22.3 billion euros, up by thirty-one percent.

Capital settled long ago on which number it believes. More than 55 billion dollars flowed into space companies in 2025, 36 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, and public listings in the sector have raised some 89 billion since the start of 2025. What began as a scenario has become a premise, and rights are now being derived from premises.

Three Routes Into the Same Ground

Washington chose the shortest. The national security memorandum of 20 August 2026 targets more than a thousand launches and reentries per year from 2030, streamlines approvals and shifts weight to the private sector. The figures behind it are unambiguous: American defence spending on space stood at 11.9 billion dollars in 2020 and is projected at 59.7 billion for 2027. What the directive lacks is durability. A presidential memorandum can be revoked by a successor with a signature.

Beijing took the opposite route, and it has no single document but a stack. The Chinese space administration issued an action plan for commercial space through 2027 on 25 November 2025, covering unified regulatory standards, new launch sites and the integration of private firms into national technology goals. On 29 January 2026 came the five-year roadmap of the state aerospace corporation, explicitly commercial for the first time, with orbital digital infrastructure, mega-constellations and the development of space resources. In March 2026 the National People's Congress adopted the fifteenth Five-Year Plan, which raises aerospace from an emerging sector to a pillar industry and sets, for the first time, the explicit goal of becoming a space power by 2030. All of it framed as a new productive force worth trillions of yuan.

In April the head of the space administration announced in the Party newspaper that the legal framework would now be built at pace, expressly for the use of space resources, for traffic management and for the order of the orbits. The corresponding space law has been on the legislative plan for years. It does not exist. China remains the only major spacefaring nation without comprehensive national space legislation, while the commercial buildout is already under way.

Brussels is the only one of the three writing law before the facts arrive. The draft EU Space Act has been on the table since 25 June 2025 and is meant to govern the safety, resilience and sustainability of space activities across the single market. The Council produced compromise texts under the Danish presidency in December 2025 and the Cypriot presidency in March 2026, followed in May by a progress report in which member states welcomed the direction while recording that substantial questions remain open. In Parliament the amendment phase opened in late March, with substantive deliberations scheduled for the second half of the year. A rulebook is taking shape, slowly and properly.

Three powers, three instruments, one shared outcome. The rule is dismantled, announced or dated, and in every case the fact arrives first. I call this the trailing rule. It is never too late to be passed, and always too late to decide anything.

The Balance Sheets Underneath

Anyone placing a bet of this size ought to be able to pay for it. The International Monetary Fund expects in its spring 2026 outlook that American government debt will rise from 126 percent of economic output this year to 142 percent by 2031, on primary deficits averaging 6.7 percent where 3.5 would be needed for stabilisation. The Congressional Budget Office puts the interest burden for 2026 at nineteen percent of tax revenue and expects thirty-seven percent by 2056. More telling is a calculation few people make: spending already committed by statute for pensions, health and interest now matches, exactly, what the state takes in. Everything discretionary runs on credit.

China's position looks different and is heading into the same narrow place. The Fund puts the augmented deficit, which includes local government financing, at 14.3 percent of economic output. Augmented government debt stands at roughly 124 percent against an officially reported 68.4, and total debt across the economy at 313 percent. Prices are falling, with a deflator of minus 0.7 percent expected this year, which worsens the debt dynamic, and medium-term growth is projected to slow to around three and a half percent by 2030. The cause is the long correction in the property sector, which drained domestic demand and pulled local finances down with it.

At precisely this moment, aerospace is declared a pillar industry with a value promise in trillions of yuan. The orbit is to replace the growth engine that housing no longer provides. There is the symmetry that carries this brief: one power turns to orbit because its balance sheet no longer carries its existing commitments, the other although it no longer does.

Europe is under neither pressure. It has no interest burden that has consumed its room to act, and no collapsed sector for which it needs a replacement. What it lacks is the capital to create facts. It cannot build what the others build, which leaves it a single instrument: it can state the conditions under which what they build may be sold in the European member states.

What Is Actually Being Built Up There

It would be wrong to turn this critique into scepticism about spaceflight. What is taking shape above us is real and has long been constitutive of daily life for billions. More than sixty percent of forecast demand, according to the World Economic Forum study, comes not from rockets but from supply chains and transport, from food, defence, retail and digital communications. Around seventy-eight percent of today's space economy is commercial, a little over twenty percent governmental.

Earth observation predicts harvests and finds wildfires before they are visible. Navigation carries shipping and agriculture and, in a role almost nobody knows about, the timestamp of global payment systems. Connectivity from orbit reaches regions no cable was ever going to serve. These capabilities are growing and will keep growing, whether or not the forecast holds.

Capability and return are two different quantities. That a technology is indispensable says nothing about how much money it earns, or when. Drinking water supply is indispensable and was never a growth market. The error of the present moment is not that anyone believes in the usefulness. It is that rights over ground which cannot be reclaimed are being handed out on the strength of an earnings expectation.

The Offset Window

Here the European framework becomes interesting, not as a model but as a design fault. Under the Commission's draft, the Space Act is to apply from 1 January 2030, with a two-year transitional period, and it covers space objects launched on or after 1 January 2030. The American memorandum targets more than a thousand launches per year from 2030. The window of the buildout and the window of the rule lie side by side without ever touching.

Whoever is in orbit by the end of 2029 stays outside the obligations. Whoever arrives afterwards carries them. What was meant as a cutoff for legal certainty works as an invitation to pull the buildout forward. I do not think this was intended. I think it is the predictable consequence of a legislative process that keeps its own time while the buildout keeps another.

That these provisions carry weight is shown by the reaction of those they would reach. The draft applies expressly to operators from outside the Union as soon as they offer space services in Europe, down to the distributors of the data. The American government filed a formal comment on 4 November 2025, accusing the draft of placing unacceptable regulatory burdens on American providers serving European customers, and has been soliciting further industry feedback since. Nobody comments on what does not concern them.

It is worth noting how thin the foundation beneath all this is. Since 1967 the Outer Space Treaty has made every state internationally answerable for what private companies do in space from its territory, and demands authorisation and continuing supervision in return. A state with a company in orbit is liable for that company's debris, whoever owns it. Germany adopted cabinet cornerstones for such a law in the autumn of 2024 and has not passed it since. It carries the liability without holding the instrument that would let it steer.

When the Return Arrives Late

Now to the case discussed in none of the three capitals. It is not collapse but halving, and it sits inside the range the forecasts themselves open up. In 2035 the space economy reaches not 1.8 trillion dollars but 850 billion. Nothing crashes, nothing explodes. Returns arrive later, smaller, and for fewer participants.

What remains is everything handed out in the meantime. Orbital slots, radio frequencies, launch licences, access rights to resources and operator structures do not vanish when the number halves. Nor do they vanish when the company holding them does. A constellation readily outlives its operator by years; the liability for it does not. What is left is an occupied orbit whose order was meant to be paid for by returns that never came, and there is no recipient for that inheritance.

This is the real cost of the bet, and it appears on no balance sheet. The gain is private and sits in the present. The risk is collective and sits in a future where today's decision-makers no longer hold office.

Departure Is Not a Sell-Off

Let me be emphatic, so this does not land the wrong way: none of it argues against the step outward. Humanity does not belong permanently on a single body, and the instinct to enter unknown ground has carried us across the whole of our history. Anyone who wants to slow the departure has not understood the seriousness of a situation in which one planet is the sole address of an entire species.

My objection is to the sequence. Orbit is the first stage of a road running across centuries, and it is at the same time the precondition for there being further stages. Pledging that precondition within a decade in order to finance the first stage does not accelerate the road, it shortens it. The difference between departure and sell-off is not speed. It is whether what we create up there is still defensible once the calculation used to justify it fails to work out.

Back to That One Number

Which brings us back to the beginning. The whole structure rests on a forecast that exists in two versions, and none of the three powers discloses which one it assumes.

That is where the lever sits, and it is the only one in this matter that requires nobody's consent. Whoever grants public rights or commits public money on the basis of a market forecast should publish the assumption behind it and set alongside it the scenario in which the assumption fails. It costs no negotiation, no treaty and no summit. It costs the willingness to treat a number as what it is.

The effect would be immediate. A launch licence that only works under the higher estimate looks different once the lower one stands beside it. A constellation whose disposal is funded only above a trillion-dollar market has no business model but a hope. And a parliament deciding on conditions for market access can ask which number is inside the proposal before it votes.

The objection will be that this loads bureaucracy onto a young industry, and it will come from within Europe too. It deserves an answer rather than a footnote. Being required to disclose an assumption does not stop anyone building. It stops them passing the cost of their error to someone who was not at the table when the decision was made. That is not a surcharge. That is the price of something that has been free until now.

Which commitment in your organisation would still hold if the return used to justify it turned out to be half the size?

Website: https://planet-futures.org