Congratulations to me and my team on yet another milestone achieved last week. The Founder approved my disclosure.
As we know, the space race of old was between governments, but currently, we are on the brink of a 21st-century private space race on an international scale.
Last year, however, we crossed an important threshold. For the first time in human history, humans accessed space via a vehicle built and owned not by any government, but by a private corporation with its sights set on affordable space settlement.
Factors such as decreasing costs for launch and space hardware, in general, have enticed new entrants into this market, and companies in a variety of industries have already begun leveraging satellite technology and access to space to drive innovation and efficiency in their earthbound products and services.
Since 2014, China has been experiencing an explosion of commercial space companies with equity investment behind only the U.S saw an investment of $933 million in 2020 more than three times the $296 million in 2019.
The space-for-earth economy which includes telecommunications and internet infrastructure, earth observation capabilities, national security satellites, and more accounted for 95% of the estimated $366B in revenue earned in the space sector for goods or services produced in space for use on earth in 2019.
NICHE TO MAINSTREAM
The opportunity presented by the space-for-space economy is bigger than the space-to-earth economy. It covers the full range of activities and the use of resources that create value and benefits for human beings in the course of exploring, researching, understanding, managing, and utilizing space, such as mining the moon or asteroids for material. This economy is booming. And it has a massive market opportunity.
Beijing-based Space Epoch founded in 2019 has completed a $197 million seed round of funding.
The new funding will be used for making propellant tanks. This progress lays the groundwork for using stainless steel for building entire rockets.
Space Epoch wants to develop a 64 meters rocket capable of launching 6,500 kilograms to a 1,100 kilometers sun-synchronous orbit.
Space Epoch aims to build and launch stainless steel rockets. And those rockets will be powered by engines that burn a mix of methane and liquid oxygen propellants, just like Starship’s Raptors.
With this advancement, China becomes the third country in the world after the United States and Russia to have a private company capable of independently developing liquid-oxygen/methane engines.
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