In July, SpaceX stopped accepting new rideshare bookings beyond late 2028. In October, NASA released its request for proposals for commercial space stations to succeed the soon-to-be de-orbited International Space Station (ISS).
Taken together, the ISS’s retirement and the squeeze on launch availability creates a real problem for many “new space” startups that built their venture business plans on continued cheap rides to orbit.
While alternatives to SpaceX exist, they are limited and spotty: Rocket Lab’s Electron offers dedicated small-satellite launches, while ULA’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn serve larger payloads (although both are temporarily grounded: Vulcan since February and New Glenn since April). New competitors are advancing too: Isar Aerospace secured a launch contract with Planet, Stoke Space raised $1 billion and is targeting an initial launch in 2027, Rocket Lab’s larger Neutron rocket is expected to debut in 2027 as well, and Skyroot had a successful launch on its first attempt. But still, most, if not all, of these options remain unproven.
Starship’s first orbital flight in September may eventually ease the overall launch bottleneck, but it’s not certain that the increased capacity will be made available to the third parties that are depending on it.
For a startup space economy that scaled around frequent, inexpensive rideshare slots from one company, the challenge now is how soon the alternatives can deliver dependable access to orbit at comparable scale. While developing new rockets and replacing the ISS present different operational hurdles, both run into the same underlying market gap: building for space is extraordinarily capital-intensive, and the industry lacks a discovery mechanism to turn existing global demand into the committed orders and upfront capital needed to bring new capacity online.
The ‘commercial’ space market myth
Global government demand is not the issue. According to Space Foundation, governments spent roughly $141 billion last year, and budgets continue to accelerate. The main problem is pretending a self-sustaining commercial market exists when space companies are relying on the U.S. government to be the anchor tenant, effectively asking the American taxpayer to subsidize their venture-backed businesses.
In September, pushing back on a former NASA official who called for more agency-funded crew vehicles, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote: “You cannot simply slap the word ‘commercial’ on every problem or opportunity.” He was arguing that NASA can’t fill every gap in the market.
I agree, and I’d go further: while global demand is there and is far outstripping available supply, the market itself needs to be nurtured. NASA has the procurement leverage to make that happen without footing the bill alone.
I joined the space sector as an outsider from the tech and startup world in 2021, and over the next four years went on to close complex deals to send sovereign astronauts (from Italy, Sweden, Turkiye, India, Poland, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE) to the International Space Station. I also closed deals with Fortune 100 companies to send everything from orbital compute and pharmaceutical research to in-space manufacturing payloads to orbit. This resulted in $1 billion in net new sovereign and commercial business, not tied to a U.S. government contract.
Through that experience, I learned firsthand that building a true commercial space economy is possible but requires significantly more market infrastructure and business model innovation from both the private sector and the government to be successful.
The proposal
Isaacman’s stance makes one thing clear: government handouts won’t fix this, and neither will depending on a single launch provider. While NASA is not designed to create or regulate markets, it can structure the programs that shape them.
In its recent request for proposals to replace the ISS, the agency’s evaluation criteria explicitly penalize bidders that rely on substantial amounts of taxpayer funds or experience prolonged negative cash flow, while rewarding outside commercial and sovereign revenue. Yet tight bid timelines and strict flight-heritage requirements for human spaceflight often leave primes with little choice but to rely on legacy aerospace suppliers. They end up paying steep markups upfront for hardware, while hoping international and commercial tenants materialize years later.
To fix that disconnect, NASA doesn’t need a bigger budget; it needs to push for acquisition strategies that connect a station’s supply chain directly to its future customers and financing.
First, the agency can streamline the supplier vetting process to incorporate suppliers from allied and partner nations from the get-go, cutting hardware and service costs immediately. More than just vendors, these companies and their governments are the very ecosystem partners—and commercial and sovereign tenants—that future stations will rely upon for revenue. Second, NASA should place a premium on binding, reciprocal commitments from those partners to use the stations once on orbit. Finally, since NASA’s milestone payouts are heavily back-loaded toward major technical events, the agency should consider partnering with market infrastructure providers who can underwrite those day-one supplier costs against committed customer revenues. This will spare builders from draining cash reserves or diluting their shareholders.
Connecting global supply discovery, reciprocal demand, and access to credit in a single framework, whether to build commercial space stations or aggregate demand for emerging launchers, creates benefits for every party involved: primes can submit cheaper, more competitive bids, international partners gain a stake in the orbital economy, and U.S. taxpayers are spared from bankrolling the entire transition alone. If we want to ensure that the U.S. and its allies have a viable alternative that rivals the capabilities of our spacefaring competitors in the East, we will have to leverage the full force of the global market—and that means involving these commercial and international stakeholders from day one.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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