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The upcoming SpaceX IPO, expected to be the biggest in history at up to $2 trillion, is poised to ignite a “Cambrian explosion” of funding for new space-oriented startups, said Ariel Ekblaw, founder and CEO of nonprofit space R&D lab Aurelia Institute.
Speaking Tuesday at Semafor World Economy in Washington, DC, Ekblaw said the hotly anticipated IPO, expected in June, will unlock new liquidity for space-enthusiast investors to fund a raft of new firms in the sector, joining with investors who missed out on Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Ekblaw, an aerospace architect who also runs an affiliated VC fund, said space companies will touch every sector of the economy. Startups already are working on robotics and manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, even hospitality.
“Don’t consider space as a sector that may or may not be relevant to your business,” Ekblaw advised. “Space is an emerging market. It’s a physical domain around the Earth.”
Generating solar power in space could also be a way to reinforce an electric grid stretched by AI data centers, added Omeed Malik, founder and president of 1789 Capital and an investor in SpaceX.
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One development that’s likely to take longer than the three years SpaceX has predicted is for the deployment of data centers in space, Ekblaw said. It’s a promising idea that will eventually pay off, she said, but the engineering is tricky.
“Space is not cold in the way that people think it is,” said Ekblaw, who did her MIT PhD in the kind of self-assembling robots that would likely build such data centers. “It is not an advantageous arena to deploy a really hot little volcano of a bunch of computers.”