The Space Economy Is Heading for $1.8 Trillion. The Bottleneck Nobody Talks About Is Getting There

Issued on behalf of Starfighters Space, Inc.

The commercial space sector has crossed from promise into a real, revenue-generating industry with a backlog north of $500 billion. Starfighters Space, Inc. (NYSE American: FJET) is betting the next phase belongs less to bigger rockets than to cheaper, faster, more flexible ways of reaching altitude.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., July 20, 2026 /CNW/ -- (Equity Insider News Commentary) -- For most of the last decade, the story of commercial space was told in rocket sizes. Bigger boosters, heavier payloads, taller vehicles on bigger pads. That story produced real results and one enormous winner. But it also obscured something the numbers now make impossible to ignore: the space economy has quietly become an actual industry, with actual revenue, actual backlog, and an actual bottleneck. And the bottleneck is not ambition. It is access. Starfighters Space, Inc. (NYSE American: FJET) has built its entire thesis around that gap.

Key Takeaways

• The sector has crossed into industry status. Estimates put the global space economy around $626 billion in 2025, heading toward roughly $670 billion in 2026 and projected past $1 trillion by 2040, with the most aggressive forecasts reaching $1.8 trillion by 2035. Commercial space is growing at an estimated 12% to 15% annually, outpacing the broader economy.
• Capital markets have validated it. The 2025 IPOs of Voyager Technologies and Firefly Aerospace, Amazon's $11.6 billion acquisition of Globalstar, CACI's $2.6 billion purchase of ARKA, and SpaceX's Nasdaq debut on June 29, 2026 collectively mark a sector that public and strategic investors now treat as investable infrastructure.
• Government demand is the floor. The U.S. FY2027 space budget totals $59.7 billion and funds 31 launches, a step-change from prior years, while NASA routes roughly 73.5% of its $24.44 billion FY2026 budget through contracts with outside businesses and institutions.
• Access is the constraint. Space launch services are projected to grow from roughly $13.85 billion in 2026 to $24.42 billion by 2030 at a 15.2% compound rate. Demand for flight testing, payload validation and small-satellite delivery is rising faster than conventional launch capacity can absorb it.
• A different route to altitude. Starfighters Space operates what it describes as the world's only commercial fleet of flight-ready Mach 2+ F-104 supersonic aircraft, providing commercial supersonic flight-test services that support hypersonic research and development programs while developing its STARLAUNCH air-launch program, and joined the Russell 3000 Index effective June 29, 2026.

From Science Project to Industry

The most important thing that happened to commercial space is that it stopped being a story about the future and became a story about revenue. Estimates place the global space economy at roughly $626 billion in 2025, rising to about $670 billion in 2026 as operational Starship flights begin, and approaching $740 billion by 2028 as the Kuiper constellation deploys. By 2030, the market could approach $950 billion, supported by commercial space stations. The most aggressive long-range forecasts put the sector at $1.8 trillion by 2035, factoring in space tourism, in-space manufacturing and cislunar activity.

Those are large numbers, and large numbers in emerging sectors deserve skepticism. The sector has declared inflection points before. What makes this moment different is the mix of evidence underneath the projections. The World Economic Forum, examining the same trend, pointed to the 2025 IPOs of Voyager Technologies and Firefly Aerospace, Amazon's $11.6 billion acquisition of Globalstar, and CACI's $2.6 billion purchase of ARKA as signals of something more durable than a single mega-listing. Then came the biggest marker of all: SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq on June 29, 2026, giving public investors direct access to the sector's dominant player for the first time.

The structural shift the WEF identified is worth stating plainly: value is moving from selling space assets to selling the outcomes they enable. That is the difference between a hardware business and an infrastructure business, and it is why the growth rates hold up. Commercial space is estimated to be compounding at 12% to 15% annually against roughly 9% for the space economy overall, itself outpacing global GDP.

The Floor Under the Sector

Speculative sectors get repriced violently when sentiment turns. What limits the downside in space is that a large share of the demand is not sentiment at all. It is appropriated. The U.S. FY2027 space budget totals $59.7 billion and funds 31 launches, a meaningful step up from prior years. NASA's FY2026 budget of $24.44 billion routes roughly 73.5% of annual spending through agreements and contracts with nearly 5,000 businesses, universities and nonprofits, an explicit structural preference for commercial partners over government-owned systems.

That preference shows up in program design. The Commercial Lunar Payload Services program began with a ceiling near $2.6 billion and has been raised to roughly $4.2 billion by 2026, with a Phase 2 roadmap targeting 77 lunar lander missions over the next decade at an estimated $6 billion, explicitly engineered to drive per-mission cost from about $129 million toward $91 million. Defense demand runs on a parallel track, with hypersonic flight testing, missile-defense programs and space-based interceptor work all funded through sustained procurement cycles.

The practical consequence is that the commercial-space backlog recently crossed $500 billion. Backlog is not revenue, and conversion is where companies live or die. But a half-trillion-dollar order book anchored substantially in government appropriations is a fundamentally different risk profile than a sector running purely on venture optimism.

The Bottleneck Is Access, Not Ambition

Here is the part the rocket-size narrative obscures. Before a satellite can beam data or a vehicle can reach orbit, the hardware has to be tested, the crews trained, the payloads validated, and the sensors flown in real conditions. That infrastructure layer, the unglamorous work of getting things to altitude repeatedly and affordably, is where demand is currently outrunning supply.

The market data reflects it. Space launch services are projected to grow from roughly $13.85 billion in 2026 to $24.42 billion by 2030, a 15.2% compound annual rate, driven by rising LEO and MEO satellite deployment, expanding private launch providers and growing demand for navigation and surveillance systems. Commercial satellite launch services specifically are forecast to move from about $8.65 billion in 2026 to $11.15 billion by 2030. The constraint is not whether payloads exist. It is launch cadence, test capacity, and cost per attempt.

This is the gap Starfighters Space is targeting, and it does so with an approach almost nobody else is running. The company operates a fleet of F-104 Starfighter jets, aircraft originally built for pure speed, which it says can sustain Mach 2, roughly twice the speed of sound. That fleet provides commercial supersonic flight-test and R&D services supporting hypersonic programs for government and commercial clients today, from the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA Kennedy Space Center. The company describes it as the world's only commercial fleet of flight-ready Mach 2+ supersonic aircraft.

The longer-term program is STARLAUNCH, an air-launch architecture designed to use the aircraft as a reusable first-stage lifting platform, carrying launch vehicles with payloads and satellites to high altitude before release. CEO Tim Franta has described a staged development path beginning with a planned drop test, followed by progressively more advanced flight demonstrations and, ultimately, orbital launch capability. The company added two senior leaders from Blue Origin's New Glenn program in May 2026 and secured a $17.5 million strategic investment to advance the work.

Regulation is moving in a helpful direction too. Starfighters publicly backed the FAA's proposal to modernize supersonic flight rules. "As the operator of the world's only commercial fleet of flight-ready Mach 2+ aircraft, we view this proposal as an important milestone for the future of high-speed aviation," said Franta, adding that a modern regulatory framework "can help support continued investment in commercial flight testing while reinforcing America's leadership in space." The company also joined the broad-market Russell 3000 Index effective June 29, 2026.

The Cohort: Four Doors Into the Same Trade

Starfighters is a small, development-stage company, and the names below are larger and are referenced here only as market and thematic context, not as peers, competitors, or financial comparables to FJET. Together they map the sector's segments: launch, lunar services, connectivity and data. One honest caveat up front, because it matters for reading the chart: this group sold off sharply in the weeks around SpaceX's Nasdaq debut, with several names down double digits over the past month after enormous runs. Coverage of the pullback has largely characterized it as profit-taking and rotation within the sector rather than a break in the underlying thesis. All figures are approximate and subject to change.

Rocket Lab (NASDAQ: RKLB) is the closest thing the sector has to a proven challenger, and the clearest read on launch demand. The company has built a roughly $2.2 billion backlog, was selected for the Department of War's Space Based Interceptor program under Golden Dome for America alongside Raytheon, closed its acquisition of laser-communications firm Mynaric, and is targeting the debut of its medium-lift Neutron vehicle in the fourth quarter of 2026. Rocket Lab is the proof that launch demand is real and fundable. It is also the reminder that launch is brutally capital-intensive: the company is still burning cash and ran a $450 million ATM raise in the first quarter. That combination, enormous demand meeting expensive supply, is exactly the tension an air-launch approach is designed to attack.

Intuitive Machines (NASDAQ: LUNR) demonstrates how quickly government demand can compound into a real business. The lunar-services company is up roughly 166% year to date even after a sharp monthly drawdown, delivered about 199% revenue growth, and carries a record backlog near $1.06 billion, anchored by a U.S. Space Force Andromeda IDIQ contract with an anticipated ceiling of $6.2 billion. Its FY2026 revenue guidance stands at $900 million to $1 billion. Intuitive Machines shows what the CLPS-style commercial procurement model produces when it works, and also its concentration risk: a single federal budget shift can reset the earnings power of a business built this way.

AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ: ASTS) represents the demand side that makes launch capacity valuable in the first place. The company is building a satellite constellation designed to connect directly to unmodified smartphones, with roughly 60 mobile network operator partnerships covering more than 3 billion subscribers, $3.03 billion in cash, and reaffirmed FY2026 revenue guidance of $150 million to $200 million while targeting about 45 satellites in orbit by year-end. Every constellation like this one is, from a launch provider's perspective, a multi-year stream of payloads that has to get to orbit. ASTS is also a fair warning about timelines: its first-quarter revenue badly missed consensus, and it remains effectively pre-revenue at commercial scale.

Planet Labs (NYSE: PL) is arguably the best illustration of the WEF's point that value is migrating from assets to outcomes. The Earth-observation company sells subscription access to daily global imagery rather than selling satellites, posted first-quarter revenue growth of roughly 42% year over year, raised full-year guidance to a range of $425 million to $441 million, and rose about 16% on that news in late June. It also moved up from the Russell 2000 into the Russell 1000, a step on the same index ladder

Starfighters recently joined at the Russell 3000 level. Planet shows the recurring-revenue endgame the sector is building toward, once the access problem is solved at scale.

What Has to Be True

A sector-level thesis does not exempt any individual company from having to execute, and Starfighters is early. It has not flown STARLAUNCH. Suborbital is a next-year objective and orbital sits 18 months to two years beyond that on the company's own stated timeline. It will need capital, regulatory progress, and successful hardware milestones to convert an unconventional idea into a business. The $17.5 million investment and the Blue Origin hires are inputs, not outcomes.

What is worth understanding is the shape of the bet. If the space economy really is on a path from roughly $670 billion today to something multiples of that within a decade, the constraint will not be demand for what satellites do. It will be the cost, cadence and flexibility of getting hardware to altitude and proving it works. The companies solving that layer, whether with reusable rockets, air-launch platforms, or approaches nobody has funded yet, sit upstream of everything else in the industry. Starfighters is pursuing a specific, staged development strategy built around an existing aircraft fleet and reusable airborne infrastructure, from a fleet of aircraft that already exists and already flies. Future flight-test milestones, including the planned drop test, are expected to provide important validation of the STARLAUNCH development program.

CONTINUED… Follow Starfighters Space as STARLAUNCH advances toward its first drop test and get the full story and updates here.

About Starfighters Space, Inc.

Starfighters Space, Inc. (NYSE American: FJET) is an space company and the owner and operator of what it describes as the world's only commercial fleet of flight-ready Mach 2+ F-104 supersonic aircraft, operating from the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Current programs include commercial supersonic flight-test services supporting hypersonic research and development, air-launch development through the STARLAUNCH program, planned microgravity missions, and space research activities. The company joined the Russell 3000 Index effective June 29, 2026. Tim Franta serves as Chief Executive Officer.

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Third-Party Data and Comparables. Market size, growth, budget and backlog figures cited in this article are drawn from third-party industry research, government budget disclosures and press reports, are estimates or projections rather than guarantees, and are subject to revision. Third-party comparable companies referenced (RKLB, LUNR, ASTS, PL) are provided solely as market and thematic context and are not peers, competitors, or comparables of Starfighters Space, Inc.; all third-party performance figures are approximate, reflect a period of significant sector volatility, and are subject to change. Past performance of any referenced company is not indicative or predictive of FJET future trading performance. This disclaimer, together with your access to and use of this content, shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Ireland.

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