A course that management expert Rahul Kapoor developed a few years ago—Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the New Space Era—holds lessons for making sense of today’s commercial space boom.
2 min. read
The Blue Origin launch of its New Glenn rocket in 2025 in Cape Canaveral, FL.
The global space economy hit a record $686 billion last year, according to Space Foundation, and McKinsey estimated in 2024 that the space market will be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035. And in June, SpaceX had the largest initial public offering in history.
A few years ago, Wharton School professor and Management Department chair Rahul Kapoor taught a course he developed called Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship in the New Space Era.
Penn Today spoke with Kapoor about how this course can be instructive for understanding the current commercial space boom, which he says is driven in part by decreased launch costs and improvements in satellites and rocket technology.
Kapoor is an expert in innovation and industry disruption related to new technologies and business models. He views space commercialization as a great context for helping students understand how new markets emerge and evolve.
He developed the course because it was clear to him that space had “shifted from an issue of two superpowers trying to outdo each other in a geopolitical context to a massive economic and business opportunity,” he says.
Kapoor wanted students to learn from “some of the most seasoned experts in the field,” and because the course was online, it created the opportunity for panel discussions with leaders from NASA, European Space Agency, Space in Africa, Blue Origin, Ball Aerospace, Northrup Grumman, Rocket Lab, and venture capital firms working in deep tech and aerospace.
“It’s not about a single company or a single technology when you’re trying to create value in a completely new domain,” he says. “It really takes an ecosystem of actors coming together and co-creating value.”
While governments are still one of the most important customers for companies like SpaceX, telecommunications and data have enabled a much larger set of use cases beyond defense, Kapoor says. For example, insurance companies are using satellite data to understand the impact of climate on agriculture.
Students ended the course pitching ideas around space commercialization. “We had a variety of interesting ideas,” Kapoor says. “Not everything was about rockets and satellites. There was also tourism, habitats, data centers, and edge computing.”
Compared to other startups, investments in the space sector carry more risk and come with much longer timelines: It can take “years of investment before any kind of business or revenue model seems obvious,” Kapoor says. He has seen businesses grappling with whether to tackle the lowest-hanging fruit—data and analytics—or pursue more radical, revolutionary ideas.
“It’s a great setting for students to look at both what makes it difficult,” Kapoor says, “but also to see that there is no limit to what you could do as an innovator.”
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