Space Industry’s Meteoric Rise and the Escalating Space Debris Challenge

In 2018 I wrote an essay about the space industry's growth prospects and the debris problem hanging over them. The original essay is published on this site untouched, because I wanted to see how it would hold up. This post is the six-year check-in: what the projections did, what the debris field did, and how the 2018 arguments aged.

One correction up front. My 2018 essay cited a Bank of America projection as $3 trillion by 2030. The actual projection was $2.7 trillion over 30 years, which lands around 2047. The original now carries an italicized correction at that line.

The Industry, Then and Now

The growth thesis aged well. The industry that was worth roughly $350 billion in 2018 reached about $570 billion in 2023, growing at 7.4% over the prior year, and Space Foundation and McKinsey projections now point to roughly $1.8 trillion by 2035. That pace ran ahead of what most 2018 forecasts implied for the same stretch.

The drivers are the same ones visible in 2018. Mega-constellations from SpaceX and Amazon are putting thousands of satellites into orbit for global connectivity. Government space budgets keep expanding across more countries. And private startups keep multiplying, now including companies whose entire product is cleaning up after the others.

The Debris Field

The problem I worried about in 2018 kept pace with the growth. ESA's catalog tracked 36,860 objects in orbit as of late 2024, with millions of smaller fragments too small to track but still dangerous at orbital speeds. Launches added a record 2,664 objects in 2023, up from fewer than 500 a year a decade earlier. In November 2024 the International Space Station performed its 39th collision avoidance maneuver.

Satellite decommissioning practices and collision tracking have both improved since 2018. The accumulation has not slowed.

Solutions Gaining Traction

The 2018 essay leaned on active debris removal as the necessary fix, with Astroscale as the company to watch. Astroscale is still the leader in that niche, offering retrieval systems to deorbit defunct satellites. The European Space Agency has since launched its Zero Debris charter, an effort with private operators aimed at eliminating new orbital debris by 2030, and governments have been tightening rules on satellite end-of-life disposal.

The constraint is still economics. Removal technology remains expensive to develop and fly, and compliance with disposal rules still leans heavily on the goodwill of operators.

How the 2018 Arguments Held Up

The original essay made three claims: the industry would grow strongly, debris would compound alongside it, and active removal would become an industry of its own. The first two clearly happened. The third is still more promise than business, six years on, which is itself informative about how slowly the economics of cleanup move compared to the economics of launch.

For investors the framing from 2018 still applies. The path to a multi-trillion-dollar space economy runs through orbital sustainability, and the companies that make cleanup pay are still waiting to be built.