Mark Boggett, CEO of Seraphim Space, the world’s first space tech investment fund, shares his 2022 predictions for the Space Industry.
2021 saw many breakthroughs in Space, ranging from human space flights, deep space exploration to record levels of investment. “New Space” essentially came of age and became widely accepted as a new investment asset class in both the public and private markets. Looking ahead, we believe 2022 will see continued momentum in investment and public interest in the SpaceTech domain. Technologies such as cloud computing are transforming the industry by providing startups with infrastructure to scale quickly and focus on their differentiated value proposition. Integration of satellite communications, location and earth observation are enabling real-time connectivity of sensors to deliver valuable insights that are disrupting every industry, driving digitization and decarbonization of the global economy. As space becomes increasingly relevant in combating climate change on earth, commercial companies will ramp their activities in Space Situational Awareness (SSA), Space Traffic Management and debris removal to maintain a safe and sustainable space after the risk posed by the recent Russian’s missile test.
Here are our 2022 Space predictions:
1. Space momentum continues; Public interest remains high with mega-rocket launches. 2021 was another record year with $12.4 billion of private capital invested in the space ecosystem, a huge increase of more than 60% from last year. We expect this momentum to continue as space is at an inflection point. Significant new capabilities in satellite communications and Earth Observation are coming online that could disrupt traditional industries and create new ones. We believe public enthusiasm for Space will remain high with the launch of new mega-rockets in the coming year. This includes NASA’s giant moon rocket and SpaceX’s next-generation Starship, to return humans to the moon and some day to Mars. Countries including South Korea, Japan, India and UAE are planning to launch their first missions the Moon.
2. Growing relevance for space companies tackling climate change/ESG. The explosion of new geospatial data and development of analytics have become increasingly relevant to solving big problems related to climate change. Diversity of higher resolution, more frequent space data are enabling new applications to monitor and track objects and activities on earth. At the same time, companies are rushing to integrate ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) due to growing investor and regulatory pressure. Space data provides powerful tools to help institutions establish a baseline to monitor their operations at scale and track their progress and carbon footprint overtime. We expect to see more space companies tackling climate change in a wide range of applications such as green-house gas detection, building energy efficiency, weather forecast, environmental monitoring, supply chain optimization, precision agriculture, efficient routing of air and maritime traffic and more. Space companies active in climate include Planet, Spire, ICEYE, Tomorrow.io, GHG Sat, Scepter Air and Pixxel SatelliteVu, Cervest, Sust Global and RS Metrics.
3. Pipeline for Space SPAC remains robust for communications and climate. Although going public via SPACs in 2022 will be more challenging for Space companies, we still expect this market to continue to develop with emerging category leaders that have demonstrated solid commercial traction and growth, especially communications and climate related companies. Almost all of the nine space companies that went public traded down last year due high shareholder redemptions While the stronger ones are leveraging their position for M&A, we expect the weaker ones to become acquisition targets in the upcoming wave of consolidation.
