Six decades after Star Trek’s space voyager boldly went where no man had gone before, the journey into orbit is a well-trodden path. Satellites are proliferating across low Earth orbit and beyond, and investment is along for the ride: in the first eight months of this year, acquisitions and debt, equity and venture capital raisings totalled almost $180bn, according to S&P Capital IQ, already approaching double last year’s tally.

The supergiant in the galaxy is of course Elon Musk’s Space X, which alone raised $86bn in its initial public offering. But there is no shortage of contenders in its slipstream. Rocket Lab completed a near-$2bn equity offering in September. In Europe, aerospace champion Airbus plans to join forces with Italy’s Leonardo and France’s Thales, combining space activities, which include satellites, to improve competitiveness.

This most recent iteration of the space race is in part politically motivated: Europe is reluctant to lose its space sovereignty to Musk. That inspired France and the UK to inject capital into Eutelsat last year as part of a €1.5bn fundraising. Governments are supportive of this pan-European endeavour. Eutelsat’s fastest-growing segment through 2030 will be its revenue from supplying government services, according to analyst estimates collated by Visible Alpha.

But companies are also spying a broader commercial opportunity. Thanks to Musk, launch costs are almost one-twentieth of what they were just two decades ago, via Nasa’s Space Shuttle. Further savings come from reusable rockets and making satellites smaller. As a result, more industries are keen to make use of satellites, be it for weather forecasting, communications, data centres or war. There are two potential wormholes, however. The first is that space — or at least satellite revenue — may not expand as fast as hoped. Not all applications will wow: the excitement over direct-to-device communications, for example, is really only over remote mountains and other black spots. The second is competition. Space is big but as of now Starlink has by far the lion’s share of today’s 16,000 active satellites in orbit, according to space and satellite tracking platform Sat Fleet. More are on the way: the US giant is seeking regulatory approval for a data centre constellation of up to a million satellites. Sure, there is space for multiple players: few sovereigns, for example, will choose to rely on a single operator for satellite communications. Start-ups such as Polish-Finnish Iceye have more robust business models than their European predecessors: it is profitable, boasts a €1.5bn-plus contracted backlog and is using that to scale up production. The space race was all about national champions. This time, it is commercial chops that will define the winners.