Michael Brandmeyer, co-CIO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s External Investing Group, has offered a bold prediction about the long-term trajectory of the space economy.
Speaking on the firm’s Exchanges podcast episode titled “The Growth of the Space Industry,” Brandmeyer argued that space will eventually underpin nearly all commercial activity.
His central prediction was direct: “I think by 2050, the biggest companies operating in space won’t be space companies. I think space is going to be fundamental to almost every business.”
Brandmeyer drew an explicit parallel to the early internet era to explain his thinking about how orbital infrastructure will evolve over the coming decades.
“It’s very similar to what happened with the internet in the early 2000s. You had internet companies, and now the internet is fundamental to every company. I think that’s what we’ll see by 2050.”
If that analogy holds, the biggest beneficiaries of space infrastructure may look more like today’s cloud, logistics, pharmaceutical, and industrial giants than pure-play rocket builders.
That framing aligns with how investment themes across drones, autonomous vehicles, robotics, rare earths, quantum computing, and neocloud AI infrastructure already feed satellite and launch supply chains.
A guest on the podcast laid out concrete near-term milestones, noting that new commercial space station modules are expected in “the next couple of years,” with early use cases spanning pharmaceutical research, GPU testing, and zero-gravity manufacturing.
A lunar base sits “a decade plus off,” while a crewed Mars landing falls into the “2050 sort of scenario,” and the guest was candid that “in space, things do take a long time.”
Brandmeyer echoed the Mars milestone with personal enthusiasm, stating, “I hope we land people on Mars. I think that would be incredible for humanity to see that during our lifetimes.”
The most actionable near-term investment theme raised on the episode is the intersection of artificial intelligence and satellite data, which Brandmeyer highlighted as a transformative development.
He noted that satellites are now “digesting that, analyzing that, and making decision-making on Earth a lot faster,” a workflow driven by autonomous edge computing in orbit rather than transmitting raw data to ground stations.
Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s own 2026 outlook frames AI as one of the defining catalysts shaping both public and private market opportunities across sectors including space.
Space is increasingly described as one of the clearest expressions of AI capital expenditure spillover, connecting orbital infrastructure investment directly to the broader technology growth narrative.
Recent aerospace mergers and acquisitions support the pattern, including RTX’s (NYSE: RTX) Pratt and Whitney unit acquiring Aiir Innovations to bring AI-assisted borescope software to commercial, civil, and military engine inspections.
The practical implication for investors is to widen the aperture beyond pure-play launch operators and toward companies gaining exposure to orbit through communications backhaul, geospatial analytics, insurance, and agriculture applications.
In-space pharmaceutical partnerships and defense-adjacent aerospace innovation may also capture a significant portion of the value created as the space economy matures through mid-century.
Three signals merit close attention: how quickly the commercial share of global space spending expands, how many non-space corporations sign multi-year satellite data or in-orbit research and development contracts, and how AI pipelines built for terrestrial data centers get retooled for onboard satellite computing.
If the internet analogy holds, the 2050 space economy leaderboard is being drafted right now, and most of the names on it will likely come from industries that treat orbit as essential plumbing.
Patience, as the podcast guest acknowledged, remains the price of admission for investors seeking to capture the full scale of the opportunity unfolding across the space economy.
