The third installment of our SpaceFund Reality (SFR) rating is focused on space habitats. With this rating we begin to move into areas that are more obviously related to the SpaceFund mission of supporting "frontier enabling" technologies. While the launch database showed a field that is over crowded, many other critical sectors of the space economy are not, and some are frankly, wide open.

Our research has showed that this sector, space habitats with only 26 companies, is still underdeveloped and represents a potential opportunity for investors and entrepreneurs. If one is to believe what Musk, Bezos and governments such as the US and UAE are saying about their plans to both dramatically lower the cost of space access and enable a permanent human presence in space, within a few years we may see a 'housing shortage' on the frontier.

It is important to note that space also presents us with many unique challenges, not the least of which is applying traditional terrestrial definitions to things that may seem to be the same in space - or - as often happens - a tendency to create new and exotic names to apply to what on Earth would be common. For example, "habitats" or "space stations." In actuality both of these are just buildings.

They may be located in space, they may be exotic in their form, technology, and structure, but they are still just buildings. They are designed to hold or house people and/or the things and objects that belong to people, or that people use.

While some of them may move, such as a habitat orbiting the Earth or a Lagrange point in space, they are not intended or designed to move and deliver people or payloads from point A to point B.

Our research into this sector also highlighted two distinct groups of companies that are actively designing and developing habitats. While these companies are all planning to or are constructing buildings in space, they are working to solve fundamentally different problems depending on the location of those buildings.

This means the types of companies, the types of habitats, and the types of engineers and scientists working on those solutions are fundamentally different. For this reason, we have broken these companies into two different database: In-Space Habitats and Surface Habitats. To view these databases, please click below.

Related Links
Spacefund Habitats-Database
The latest information about the Commercial Satellite Industry

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Canadian Space Agency Sees Science Cooperation With Russia as Area of Growth
Colorado Springs CO (Sputnik) Apr 12, 2019
The Canadian Space Agency considers the cooperation with Russia on space science as a promising area of growth, agency's President Sylvain Laporte told Sputnik. "We are getting into a lot of science missions, for example. And I do know that our researchers both in Canada and in Russia collaborate a lot on writing different types of papers [...] So the collaboration is there. But the foundation of more collaboration for space science is certainly well-established. So, that would be an area of growt ... read more