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By the SpaceNexus Desk
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In September 2026, Novaspace released the second edition of its report Satellite Communications for Defense and Security. Its headline finding is that commercial satellite service revenues for defense will surpass $22.6 billion by 2035. The report describes a defense satcom market "poised for rapid growth." The source excerpt gives the topline figure and direction but not the underlying baseline, regional split, or segment breakdown, so this analysis treats $22.6 billion as the anchor and builds a scenario around observable trends.
Several concurrent events show the ingredients of that growth:
This piece is a forecast built on those trends, projecting to roughly 2031-2036.
Defense satcom has historically been dominated by government-owned or dedicated military systems plus leased commercial capacity, mostly from geostationary operators. The Novaspace projection implies a structural shift: militaries buying services from commercial providers at a scale that is comparable to a mid-sized commercial satellite segment. Two factors make this credible. First, military users increasingly want resilient, multi-orbit, multi-vendor connectivity, since a single-vendor or single-orbit architecture is vulnerable. Second, the operational lessons of recent conflicts, including the continuing Iran war noted in defense reporting, have shown that connectivity is a battlefield input, not a support service.
Sources:
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Written by the SpaceNexus Desk: a language model drafts each piece from the sources listed above, a second model pass fact-checks it against those sources, and drafts that fail that check are held for a person. No human typed this article. How the desk works · Report a correction
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Assuming the $22.6 billion figure for 2035 and steady growth from today, the market could follow a path like this. These are scenario milestones grounded in the sources, not certainties.
Providers with LEO scale and government relationships are best placed, and the SpaceX role in the Space Force data network already shows this. Legacy GEO operators face a squeeze unless they transform into multi-orbit, managed-service providers or specialize in high-throughput anchor contracts. Sovereign and regional operators may find niches supplying allied nations that do not want reliance on a single U.S. vendor.
Defense demand supports volume production. Northrop Grumman is already delivering Transport Layer satellites, Terran Orbital operates under Lockheed Martin, and Astro Digital plans to scale via a SPAC deal valued at $587 million enterprise value. Component bottlenecks are the main threat. Europe's experience of eighteen-month solar cell lead times and the U.S. Commerce/BIS action on polysilicon stockpiling show that supply chain constraints could cap output. The Commerce supply chain forum on August 18 was aimed at exactly this problem.
Ground infrastructure is an underappreciated growth area. Teleport networks, antenna scheduling, and ground-station-as-a-service companies gain from constellations that need global, secure contact points. The Rwanda expansion is a small illustration of the trend toward geographic diversity.
The $6 billion L3Harris award shows that the defense supply chain is being expanded for missile defense. The RealClearDefense reporting that missile output is coming too late and that drone battery supply chains are strained is a caution: procurement surges often run into underinvestment and inconsistent contracting. Space could face the same problem in propulsion, batteries, and radiation-tolerant electronics.
Communications growth pulls along imagery and data. The NRO's Strategic Commercial Enhancements contract with Pixxel for hyperspectral work, and Umbra and Iceye in SAR, show governments are buying data as well as bandwidth. Downlink and transport capacity is the shared bottleneck.
The $22.6 billion mark is best read as a directional estimate of where defense buying is heading, not a guarantee. The most probable pattern is that growth is uneven: strong early gains where government programs of record exist, then a dependence on execution of launch, manufacturing, and ground infrastructure. Watch for three leading indicators over the next 24 months: the pace of SDA Tranche 1 launches and on-orbit acceptance, the terms of commercial contracts that reference multi-orbit resilience, and whether Starship moves quickly from its first orbital flight to repeatable operations. The IAC in Antalya, October 5-9, and defense-focused events such as the MilSat Symposium at Silicon Valley Space Week will supply early evidence of how governments and vendors are positioning.