EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
By Dr Peter Mendham, Bright Ascension
The global space economy is entering a new phase of demand-driven growth, reaching an estimated $613B in 2025 and projected to exceed $1T before 2032. Growth is increasingly being driven by demand from outside the traditional space sector, as industries such as agriculture, logistics, insurance, environmental monitoring, communications, and defence become more reliant on space-enabled data and services.
To meet this demand, the industry is rapidly evolving. Satellite constellations are scaling in size and capability, payloads are becoming more sophisticated, and specialist providers
now span the full supply chain. This diversity has been a key strength, enabling innovation, competition, and rapid market expansion.
However, the same diversity that drives innovation has also created a largely overlooked structural problem: fragmentation across the end-to-end supply chain.
The space industry today operates as a collection of disconnected silos spanning spacecraft, ground systems, operations, analytics, and downstream applications. While limited standardisation exists in specific technical areas, there is little common infrastructure enabling systems, organisations, and services to operate coherently together. As a result, integration between silos is frequently bespoke, inefficient, and difficult to scale.
Its impacts are visible across the industry. Organisations are increasingly forced to depend on bespoke software, custom integrations, and operational workarounds simply to connect systems and services across the supply chain. As architectures grow into larger systems-of-systems, coordination and scaling become progressively more complex and inefficient. Fragmentation also increases operational risk, making security assurance, maintenance, and long-term adaptability significantly more difficult across diverse technologies and inconsistent operating models.
These issues create substantial hidden costs across the entire lifecycle of space systems and services. More importantly, they constrain the industry’s ability to respond efficiently to growing downstream demand.
Despite its significance, this problem remains under-recognised across much of the commercial space sector. Most organisations naturally optimise within their own part of the value chain, while few stakeholders have responsibility or visibility across the complete end-to-end system. As a result, fragmentation has not traditionally been treated as an infrastructure problem requiring systemic solutions.
The next phase of industry growth will therefore depend not only on new space capabilities, but on better software infrastructure capable of connecting a highly diverse ecosystem without suppressing innovation. The challenge is not a lack of demand for space-enabled services, but the industry’s ability to deliver them efficiently, securely, and at scale across fragmented supply chains.
About the author
Dr Peter Mendham is Co-Founder and CTO at Bright Ascension. With over 20 years of experience in the space industry, he has been a pioneer in modular and interoperable software architectures that improve how spacecraft systems are designed, integrated, tested, and scaled. Peter’s background spans engineering, artificial intelligence, and software design for space missions, alongside commercial roles in business development and sales. This combination has given him a comprehensive understanding of the full mission lifecycle – from early concept and system design through to operations and service delivery.