Academic publications
Published work, where the method is on the page.
Three papers, in reverse order. Each one exists because a question kept coming up in rooms where money moves and nobody had published an answer. Two are published in the proceedings. The third is accepted and the paper follows in October.
From Inception to IPO: Quantifying the Hidden Private Sector in the Global Space Economy
Everyone agrees roughly how large the space economy is. Nobody has said how much of it an investor can actually buy. Working from published datasets and company filings, we isolate the space revenue of publicly traded companies, stripping out the non-space segments of diversified primes, and subtract that from the total. The public space sector comes to roughly $131.9 billion for 2023, which is close to a quarter of the whole. The rest is private, and that is where the early and mid-stage opportunity sits.
Space is an Uncorrelated Investment Sector: The Space Industry is Not Strongly Correlated to Major Market Indices or Alternative Asset Classes
Asset allocators balance portfolios using correlation, and space was not on the chart. Not rejected, absent. This study ran a Pearson correlation between two space datasets and eight major market and alternative asset indices across 2005 to 2022, and found space weakly correlated to every one of them. Space was also the only sector tested that did not record a single year of negative growth over the period.
Evaluating Over-Supply in the Launch Vertical and How this May Affect Investor Confidence in the Overall Space Sector
Written in 2019, when money was still pouring into small launch. We built a database of more than 125 commercial launch ventures, forecast orbital launch supply and demand through 2025, and found supply outrunning demand by an average of thirty percent even after deliberately overestimating demand and underestimating supply. The market had room for fewer than eight new entrants. More than forty had already taken private money. The paper said most of them would fail, and that the losses would make investors wary of the rest of the sector.
Also
Not peer reviewed, and worth reading anyway.
The white paper, Beyond Venture: Space Needs a Complete Capital Stack, is the non-academic statement of the same argument and the only document that puts all five layers in one place.