On April 1st, 2026 (and no, that’s not a joke) Artemis II launched from the same pad that sent Apollo 10 to the moon. Four astronauts. A 10-day mission. The furthest any human has traveled from Earth in over 50 years. I’ve been following the space industry closely for years, and I still had to stop and sit with that for a moment.
We tend to mark progress in big, dramatic moments. But the honest truth is that what’s happening in the space economy right now has been building quietly, then all at once — and it started with a stubborn entrepreneur who refused to let his company die.
SpaceX didn’t just build a business. It rewrote what was possible. It opened a door that has since become a flood.
In 2008, SpaceX’s fourth launch attempt succeeded after three consecutive failures. Musk had poured in the last of his PayPal money and basically said: one more shot. That moment, unglamorous, almost desperate, was arguably the starting gun for an entirely new era. By proving a private company could reach orbit, SpaceX didn’t just survive. It changed what other people thought was allowed.
Fast forward to today: space tech companies raised over $8 billion in 2025 alone. That’s 154% year-on-year growth. There are now over 35,000 companies in the global space ecosystem. The cost to put a kilogram into orbit has dropped from $10,000–$20,000 in the 1990s to under $2,000 today — and Starship could push it below $100. When you change the unit economics that dramatically, entirely new business models become viable. Orbital manufacturing. Satellite constellations. And yes, data centers in space.
That last one sounds like it belongs in a Netflix series, but Star Cloud — a startup founded in January 2024 — launched the world’s first GPU satellite running an Nvidia H100 in November 2025. They ran Google’s Gemini AI from orbit. Eighteen months after founding, they closed a $170M Series A at a $1.1B valuation. Fastest YC company ever to hit unicorn status. That is not a white paper. That is a business.
The interplanetary story is no longer confined to conference slide decks. It’s in regulatory filings. It’s in rocket test programs. It’s in hiring plans.
And then there’s the SpaceX IPO. Filed confidentially the same day as Artemis II — either beautiful symmetry or a very busy Tuesday — targeting a June NASDAQ listing at a reported valuation of $1.5 to $2 trillion plus. Potentially the largest IPO in the history of public markets. The company that was weeks from bankruptcy in 2008 is now valued at nearly 40x what it was just six years ago.
I’ll be honest: I find this genuinely extraordinary. Not in a hype-cycle way. In a we-are-watching-the-stories-we-grew-up-with-actually-happen kind of way. The orbital stations. The moon bases. The asteroid miners. For most of the last 50 years, that vision felt frozen. Now it’s moving — one satellite, one startup, one mission at a time.
We talked through all of this on the latest episode of SEA of Startups. The full story: Artemis II, the SpaceX IPO, orbital data centers, lunar ice mining, and whether the sci-fi stories we grew up with are finally coming true.
