India’s blossoming NewSpace movement is slowly beginning to synch with the firebrand entrepreneurs starting companies around the world and targeting commercial opportunities for innovative space products/services. In a global context they are being backed mainly by private risk capital (mostly venture firms) with an expectation that the innovation pursued by these entrepreneurs will integrate into the economy here on the Earth, creating value towards a meaningful exit. Narayan Prasad analyses the industry trends across the world and looks at how India is jumping onboard.
Today, NewSpace companies are springing up almost on a weekly basis and there is strong reason to believe that there are over 1,000 such companies spread around the world. They are embedding themselves across the value chain from upstream to downstream, with each attempting to bring a new layer of innovation by different methods such as low-cost, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), agile-mass manufacturing, and data fusion combined with machine learning.
With a possible success rate of five percent in startups across tech industry, the world could potentially see a cultural shift in space business through a community of entrepreneurial space ventures who target their customers with global business-to-business and consumer-to-consumer models.
Most of the NewSpace ventures orient the innovations they are bringing into space products/ services towards establishing capacities across verticals where there could be network effects that can be exploited.
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