The Space Revolution hasn’t hardly started yet, and while it’s been set back by the end of The Bubble-Blowing Bull Market that has crashed all the speculative stocks in the market over the last year, it sure ain’t over. The fact is that The Space Revolution remains one of the clearest next trillion dollar economies AND that it’s probably the only obvious soon-to-be trillion dollar industry that hasn’t been priced for becoming a trillion dollar industry yet.
My job is to be one of the first to find companies that are revolutionizing the world by helping to create new trillion dollar economies, as I’ve done with The App Revolution (Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix), The Bitcoin/Blockchain Revolution (bitcoin), The Social Revolution (FB, Twitter, Snap), The EV/Self-Driving Revolution (TSLA, NVDAO)… and to trade around these positions a little bit while maintaining the discipline to own them for the long-run as these Revolutions play out.
Only one of these Revolutions is still really early in its cycle. The others are getting more mature.
The App Revolution is probably in the seventh inning (but still has The Metaverse Revolution phase still to go through that could itself be quite huge and long-lasting), having started originally with the advent of the iPod and iTunes when I first invested in Apple back in 2003 at a split-adjusted 20 cents a share and continuing on through The Smartphone Revolution, the Tablet Revolution, the Streaming Revolution,The Social Revolution etc, all of which are app enablers or app dependent for their success, standing on the shoulders of that original iPod.
The Bitcoin/Blockchain Revolution is probably in its second inning and will be fully mature in another ten years as new ways of incentivizing and structuring organizations and currencies plays out (see my post called The Incentive Revolution: Blockchain DAOs Change Everything About The Future Of Investing for more on that).
The Social Revolution is probably in its seventh inning and is basically fully matured except for the Metaverse phase of it. Remember that The Social Revolution was built upon The Smartphone Revolution which was built upon The App Revolution which was built upon The Internet Revolution which was built upon The PC Revolution and The Telecom Revolution which were built upon The Electricity Revolution and so on.
The EV Revolution is probably in its third inning and will play out over the next ten to fifteen years to full maturity with Tesla continuing to lead the way with a handful of other startups and a few of the old school car companies surviving if not thriving along the way (dozens of startup EVs and even some of the old school car companies will most likely go bankrupt trying to get there).
Most tech investors are focused on AI or EV or Crypto industries these days which is fine because some of the best stocks in the AI or EV or Crypto industries are going to turn out to be great investments from these current levels which are 30-90% lower than their all-time highs. It should be mentioned also that some of the best plays on the AI (GOOG, NVDA, etc) or EV (TSLA) or Crypto (bitcoin, eth) in particular are already worth hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars.
And that’s what brings me back to The Space Revolution right now. With SpaceX leading the way, Blue Origin coming along and Rocket Lab not too far behind, The Space Revolution is just starting to play ball and we’re here in the top of the first inning, with maybe one out and a couple runners on base. It’s in the earliest stages by far of all the obvious burgeoning trillion dollar Revolution happening out there. And maybe I’m wrong that it’s obvious and maybe I’m wrong that The Space Revolution is going to create a trillion dollar economy over the next five years and a multi-trillion dollar economy over the next ten becoming the single biggest economy in the solar system over the next twenty years as Mars is colonized, space travel becomes part of normal life for most people in the developed world (hopefully an ever higher percentage of the world will gain access to middle life comforts like space travel in twenty years). But I don’t think so.
See, the costs of launching people and equipment into space are continuing to plummet and SpaceX’s Starship’s economics will take that to a whole new level of cheapness. Rocket Lab will probably continue to grow quickly as they drive their own costs down and an increasing number of new applications and ever better technologies create ever more demand for quick, cheap launch services but the economics are still not there yet and probably won’t be for another year or two as they vertically integrate into what will hopefully become a vertically-integrated part of the oligopolistic US launch market.
The other current batch of publicly-traded space companies are probably even riskier than the launch companies which at least have a huge technological competitive advantage underscored by the repeated launch delays and/or failures from the Boeing and Lockheed’s United Launch Alliance along with Astra and other wannabes.
We’re still at least a few years away from companies starting to build factories in space or mining the moon. There are several companies that plan to start building space hotels in coming years and I’ve even invested in one that is going to start building their hotel from the International Space Station in the next year or two.
Companies like BlackSky and Planet are trying to figure out how to create businesses around satellite imagery technology and in the next five to ten years, many disparate technology companies will put so many video satellites in orbit with such great optics, software and AI that you’ll be able to record your Social Revolution 3D Surround Metaverse video content without having to hold your camera in front of your face as you witness something worth recording.
Meta/Facebook will get into the satellite business eventually, as will Alphabet (real-time maps and street views), Amazon (real-time package tracking and logistics), and maybe Comcast/NBCUniversal and Fox and other media companies too. Caterpillar, John Deere, and farmers will use ever better real-time satellite technology to grow more food more cheaply. Governments and their militaries and police forces will also have access to ever better real-time satellite tracking technology too along with all the bad things that come with that, so let’s be clear that just like with the Internet and Smartphones and Telephones before that, Technological Revolutions are not all roses and unicorns all the time.
But more importantly than these currently obvious applications for space technologies, there will be thousands or millions of amazing applications and services that brilliant entrepreneurs will come up with as the costs for getting to space drop towards a nominal level in the same way that computers and Internet advanced far enough as costs dropped to a nominal enough level that The App Revolution could bring in billions of users using their phones to create trillions of dollars of economic activity around the world every year now.
But frankly, other than investing in SpaceX in the private markets, which I’ve done with my hedge fund years ago and investing some speculative capital in Rocket Lab and even less speculative capital in Black Sky and maybe a couple other space-related names right now, there’s just not much for a Space Revolution Investor to do other than learn more and be paying attention to these space trends over the next two to five years as more companies in that will drive the next twenty to thirty years of The Space Revolution.
Indeed, I’m short more space-related names than I am long although I have much more capital exposed to the long side than the short side. The old space-related companies that have been around and publicly-traded for decades are in trouble with ugly balance sheets and old technologies. And many of the recent space SPACs that are now publicly-traded are fishy at best.
In addition to trying to own SpaceX and/or Starlink when it comes public and some Rocket Lab and a tiny bit of BlackSky and Redwire, I’d also suggest investors check out the SKTLs Space Debris-Cleaning Cryptocurrency before it airdrops because they are literally going to be giving millions of SKTLs away for free to those who register for the airdrop. (Here’s me on Fox Business discussing SKTLs recently).
To be clear then, I’m as excited as ever about the prospects of making incredible returns in The Space Revolution over the next five to twenty years but I’m worried that it’s going to be another two or three years before we start getting many opportunities to invest in good publicly-traded Space Revolution companies.
Just as I’ve done with the prior aforementioned Revolutions and stock picks within those Revolutions, I plan to be on top of The Space Revolution for my subscribers and my hedge fund partners by finding the best the names for us to invest in along the way. But as always, it will take time and we’ll have to work hard to remain ahead of the curve.
To the moon! To Mars!
