Knowing the true market potential for any product or industry is an important part of a business’s growth.
It’s also crucial for investors to make educated decisions for their portfolios.
When we decided to launch Aphelion Aerospace, we know it was an innovative idea that could benefit the aerospace industry.
However, we also knew it was important to put the industry under a microscope to find out if the idea made business sense.
What we discovered was exactly how vast and lucrative the market potential is for nanolaunch systems.
What is a Nanosatellite and How Did The Market Emerge?
A nanosatellite is generally a satellite that weighs one kilogram or less although in the market, though Aphelion does serve up to 100 kilograms. These are spacecrafts that are built from what are called units. Each unit is a 10 centimeter cube, and these can be combined into different configurations and sizes.
The CubeSat nanosatellite market had its beginning early in the century with the invention in academia of the CubeSat Standard platform. The miniaturization of technology and advances with software chip and sensor designs has enabled increasing capabilities in ever smaller packages. This has resulted over the past 20 years of a greater and greater adoption of the CubeSat platform. Everybody from universities all the way up to NASA and DoD are leveraging this capability more and more every year.
What is The Current Size of the Market?
In fact, the total addressable market right now for nanosatellite launch it’s around $11 billion in 2020. That launch market is projected to grow to $49 billion by 2030. The CubeSat hardware market, the actual spacecraft, has a total addressable market today of roughly $220 million. It is projected to grow to $1.34 billion in 2030.
The market is experiencing exponential growing and has been growing like this for approximately the past ten years. By 2030, it is forecast that up to 2,000 or more nanosatellites will be launched annually.
Thus, there is a huge market for Aphelion to tap into, as we are one of the number of companies addressing this market. We believe that the market’s demand will support our entry into the market and serve it with launches throughout the year.
What are the Growth Drivers of the Nanolaunch Market? Are They Sustainable?
Advances in technology are enabling very complex missions in ever-smaller spacecraft. Thus, one of the primary drivers is economic. There are tons of companies out there who have plans or are deploying constellations of nanosatellites that serve everything from cellular services in remote areas to internet of things, or earth imaging.
When deploying constellations of spacecraft, it’s more economic to deploy small spacecraft. Therefore, another fundamental driver are the advances in technology that have enabled these complex missions at a much lower cost. As cost decreases, more missions can be deployed, and that’s what’s driven the upward curve in the market.
Then the question is, is this growth sustainable?
Some investors may remember in the late 1990s, there was talk about companies like Iridium and Globalstart, launching large constellations being deployed in earth orbit for satellite to service phones and direct-to-home TV. The market when bust in the 2000s for various factors.
However, the technological advances we’ve seen over the past 20 years has allowed us to reduce size. We’re no longer discussing deploying constellations of multi-ton ton and billion dollar satellites.
A single CubeSat may cost only $100,000 to a million dollars, a company might only deploy a hundred of these. Thus, the financial risk per unit is much lower than it has been in the past.
For example, The Department of Defense has a zero-failure tolerance for their satellite launches and their satellites. Why? Because one intelligence gathering satellite can cost $2 billion and it can cost $300 million to get to orbit. That’s a tremendous financial risk if there’s a failure.
By deploying smaller satellites, that risk is spread out while also making the overall constellation system more robust.
Will the Nanolaunch Market Growth Rate Continue to Accelerate?
With a combination of economics and technology enabling this growth, Aphelion does not anticipate a negative opportunity for this growth to reverse.
Even during the COVID-19 pandemic last year, the launch industry and the space industry continued to grow, and investment continued to flow into aerospace companies even while economies around the world were being shut down. Many of these systems that are getting deployed into space are critical to a particular customer’s business model, critical to government needs, whether it be NASA or DoD.
Why?
Because satellites are critical for infrastructure.
Look at it like this, even in a bear market, roads still have to get repaired.
So when we shift to look at satellite deployment as being fundamental, then it makes the market much more resilient and robust to various economic conditions.
The Nanolaunch Market is in it’s Golden Age, and can be Extremely Attractive to Investors
The nanolaunch market is a rapidly growing market and it is forecast to continue growing through the foreseeable future. The industry is experiencing approximately a 16% year-over-year through 2030, growing from an annual launch market revenue of $11 billion up to $50 billion, and potentially even more.
This presents an extremely attractive opportunity for investors to jump into the market early and experience 10x, 50x, or greater returns on those investments over the coming years.
The nanolaunch industry is a new, early stage industry, but it is growing rapidly and maturing rapidly. Right now we’re at the sweet spot for entering into this market. Five years ago would have been too soon, five years from now maybe too late.
Right now is the optimum time to invest in the launch industry.
We’re in a golden age of the launch industry and now is a tremendous opportunity to get in the game and be involved in the development of this exciting new industry, as well as reap the rewards down the road.
If you are interested in learning more about the nanolaunch industry at Aphelion Aerospace or our current and future plans, please feel free to reach out to us either by visiting our website at aphelionaerospace.com and contacting us there, or emailing us directly at info@aphelionaerospace.com.