Measuring the Space Economy with Input-Output Linkages

Space-enabled technologies underpin communications, navigation, Earth observation, and critical infrastructure, yet most estimates of the space economy are revenue tallies built on proprietary classifications that ignore production linkages. We develop a reproducible accounting framework, based on publicly available U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis input–output tables, that measures the production-network footprint of a conservatively defined core space sector and separates direct core output from the indirect requirements connecting the core to suppliers and user industries. Indirect requirements exceed direct output in every benchmark year and grow faster: direct core output rose from $60 billion in 2007 to $78 billion in 2017 (2017 chain dollars), while indirect requirements rose from $83 billion to $125 billion, so that each dollar of core output was associated with $1.60 of cross-sector production requirements by 2017. The largest upstream requirements sit in communications infrastructure and business services rather than aerospace-specific inputs, and downstream dependence rises fastest in federal defense. In an illustrative projection to 2030, the baseline footprint reaches $350 billion, two-thirds of it indirect. Results are robust to a value-added mapping. The framework turns space-economy measurement from sizing a sector into mapping exposure and concentration in the infrastructure the economy increasingly runs on.