How big is space?

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Overnight, SpaceX filed for its IPO (documents available here) and aims for a market valuation of $1.75tn. I am not going to comment on whether this valuation, given annual sales of $18.6bn for a price-to-sales ratio of 93.7x, is justified. But the number that stood out to me was the total addressable market of $28.5tn. I want to put that in perspective with a recent academic study on how big the space industry is today and how much it is likely to be in 2030.Ok, one detour before we get into that (I just can’t let go of that…). The price-to-sales-ratio of 93.7x is quite ambitious. For comparison, Elon Musk’s other major company, Tesla, trades at 15.3x 2025 sales, while AI darling Nvidia trades at 21.2x 2025 sales. The only major company I could find with a similar price-to-sales ratio was Palantir at 94.1x.But back to the total addressable market, which at a headline number of $28.5 trillion is the largest one ever identified and almost as large as the GDP of the entire United States ($32.4tn). According to SpaceX, this market opportunity breaks down to traditional space tech opportunities of $370bn in rocket launches, etc., plus another $1,610bn in Starlink solutions, which they call connectivity solutions but are generally classified as space tech. That makes for a total addressable market for space tech of $1,980bn.SpaceX’s projections of its total addressable marketSource: SpaceX S-1 filingNow, let’s ignore the AI part and compare these estimates for the space tech opportunity with the work of Luisa Corrado and Christos Makridis. The interesting twist about their asses…