By: Dawn Zoldi
While typical hardware and hardware-adjacent technologies occupied much of the 2026 Space Symposium focus, John May, Space Leader and Partner at PwC, approached the space economy through a different lens. A forensic accountant by training and a 30-year partner at one of the world’s largest professional services firms, May has spent the last several years mapping the financial and structural fault lines that run beneath the space sector’s rapid rise. He sees an industry at a genuine inflection point, not just technologically, but economically and strategically.”The space economy has layers,” May explained during an interview at the 41st Space Symposium. “Upstream, midstream, downstream, and what I call the untapped end users.” That fourth layer, he argued, is where the real story is.
A $2 Trillion Market Hiding in Plain Sight
The global space economy, currently valued around $600 billion, carries projections from some analysts of reaching $1.5 to $2 trillion within a decade. But May expressed less interest in the headline numbers than in what drives the growth beneath it. The upstream and midstream segments, such as launch vehicles, satellite infrastructure, asset management and downlink data, draw most of the industry’s attention. The untapped end users, however, represent the steepest growth curve.
These non-traditional players include pharmaceutical companies, major financial institutions, agricultural equipment manufacturers and industrial products firms. They’re discovering that the infrastructure going up around and above them can impact how their own businesses operate. “That’s what we call business model reinvention,” May noted. “You look at your business today and ask how it needs to be modified to embrace the space economy and where it’s going.”
He provided a helpful analogy. When the Eisenhower administration built the federal highway system, it didn’t just enable trucking. It generated restaurants, gas stations, motels, logistics networks and entirely new industries that no one had planned for. Think of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, he said, as today’s highway system. Many of the businesses that could benefit from them haven’t yet recognized the opportunity.
Banking, Farming and the New Space Economy
May offered a few examples to illustrate just how far beyond traditional aerospace the economic ripple effects of the space industry extend. Pharmaceutical companies are already working with established space firms to send microgravity research labs into orbit, where protein crystallization and drug development processes perform differently than on Earth. The infrastructure gets built by the space company and the science gets done by pharma. These are cross-sector alliances that didn’t exist five years ago and have no historical playbook.
Then there is a major agricultural equipment manufacturer whose machinery already carries dense sensor networks. In emerging markets where 5G and Wi-Fi remain unreliable or absent, that equipment is beginning to leverage satellite connectivity to capture, transmit and potentially monetize operational data. A company that traditionally manufactured hardware is now thinking of itself as a data provider. The satellite network in the middle is the enabler.
The final example May provided arguably has more disruptive implications. A major bank recently executed a single cryptocurrency transaction routed from one satellite to another. This raises the practical question of what currency or financial instrument governs a transaction conducted entirely in orbit? This has no clean answer. May nevertheless sees it as a signal of opportunity. The financial institution that builds the equivalent of an ATM network in space could help define a new commercial financial market with few established competitors.
The “Old Guard” and the Procurement Reckoning
None of this happens smoothly for legacy players. The challenge facing large, mature original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), such as the traditional defense and aerospace primes that built the industry as it existed for the last half-century, is that commercial investment now outpaces government investment in space sector innovation. That new inversion cuts against the operating assumptions around which these major OEMs built their entire business models.
Historically, the Department of Defense (DoD) initiated innovation, incubated it through long development cycles and eventually transferred the technology for commercial application. GPS provides the textbook example. Born out of military necessity in the mid-1980s, it became the backbone of commercial navigation decades later. Today, that cycle has changed. Commercial firms take risk, iterate fast and deliver capabilities that DoD then buys back, often because it lacks the budget and bandwidth to develop comparable technology internally.
This creates a real cultural gap. Engineers in traditional defense programs are, appropriately, risk-averse. A fighter pilot does not want the avionics on their aircraft failing because the development team moved too fast and broke things. Commercial companies, including new entrants disrupting the space sector, operate on a different thesis. Failure is data, in their playbook, and the speed of iteration matters more than perfection at first delivery. Reconciling these two cultures inside legacy organizations, or inside government procurement, presents a structural problem.
May described watching large conglomerates in the space and defense sector actively divest business units in search of higher-growth segments. “The investors are looking at a conglomerate model and saying this is slow growth, low margin, shed that,” he noted. Those divestitures open doors for more focused, agile competitors. They also require entirely new financial, legal, and operational architecture to execute.
A Supply Chain Running Hot on a Fragile Foundation
Speaking of structure, the growth story in the space sector carries another big structural caveat. The supply chain is not keeping pace. PwC and the Aerospace Industries Association recently published a report, Strengthening Space Supply Chains: Built for Yesterday, Igniting Momentum for Tomorrow, that found U.S. launch activity has increased nearly tenfold over the past six years, but the industrial base has not followed. Aerospace manufacturing facilities now average nearly 26 years in age, production is intensifying on existing assets and capital investment in new capacity remains hesitant.
The reason for that hesitancy revolves around the fact that space programs historically lack the long-term volume commitments and multi-year funding certainty required to justify major factory expansions. Continuing resolutions, shifting priorities and program delays distort demand signals and leave suppliers managing a high-stakes bet. The result, as the white paper describes it, is “a supply chain running hot at peak demand, yet structurally fragile beneath the surface”.
New entrants face an additional barrier. Space-grade component qualifications carry cost and lead-time penalties that can be orders of magnitude higher than commercial equivalents. Testing and post-processing capacity are constrained. Many commercial firms have responded by vertically integrating, building their own processing capabilities, rather than waiting in a queue that the broader industry shares. That solves the problem for those with the capital to do it. However, it fails to solve the systemic issue.
Workforce for a New Economy
In the midst of the good and bad that comes with the space economy’s growth, May provided his best advice to the next generation entering this new world. He recommends new entrants develop both functional and technical expertise. STEM disciplines remain in high demand, but the professionals who will shape the space economy’s business layer (think: financial structure, compliance, tax strategy, capital markets navigation) will need to speak the language of the industry as well as the language of the discipline. Industry expertise is the difference between functional advice and useful advice. Cross-sector players entering the space economy through alliances, joint ventures or organic investment will need professionals who understand both worlds.
PwC’s space practice spans audit, tax, and consulting services for companies across the space sector, from early-stage startups navigating funding structures to major OEMs managing divestitures and strategic transformation. The firm recently published a white paper on US space supply chain resilience in collaboration with the Aerospace Industries Association, available at pwc.com/us/space.