IT Blog

When Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, he thought it had a less than 10% chance of succeeding as a business. “I just accepted that I would probably just lose everything,” he said in 2016, “but that maybe we would make some progress if we could just move the ball forward. Even if we died, maybe some other company could pick up the baton.” SpaceX’s advancements indeed have given birth to a growing space economy and revived the manufacturing base south of Los Angeles, where the first generation of aerospace companies helped humans land on the moon. In 2020, global space-related activities generated $447 billion, with commercial work accounting for almost 80% of it. “Spending money on space actually is a way to increase the economy on Earth very, very efficiently,” says Sinéad O’Sullivan, a self-described “interplanetary economist” at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness. O’Sullivan notes, for…