OP
Orbital ProgressMARKET FORMATION // SPACE ECONOMY
RESEARCH LIBRARYOpen access · citable · indexed

The institute's library.

Open, citable research that tests whether a capability is becoming a market: frameworks, diagnostics, cases, and market signals.

§01 · The catalogue

All publications.

F · 01PUBLISHED
Framework · April 2026

Sizing the Space-Sustaining Economy

A structural decomposition of a $203 billion economy. Three categories — traditional mission, commercially-procured government, genuine commercial — applied to global space-sustaining revenue 2015–2025.

W. D. Garretson
READING TIME 14 MIN
B · 02Brief
Brief · March 2026

Starliner and Artemis: Commercial Label vs. Commercial Discipline

The Starliner investigation is a case study in treating “commercial” as a contract label rather than a behavior. Published in SpaceNews.

Dan Garretson
READING TIME 5 MIN
F · 02PUBLISHED
Framework · March 2026

Missions vs. Markets: Why the Commercial Label Isn’t Enough

Commercial participation is necessary but not sufficient. The distinction that matters is between mission economics and market discipline — and most of the space economy still runs on the former.

W. D. Garretson
READING TIME 8 MIN
MS · 01PUBLISHED
Market Signal · March 2026

What launch tells you about every other space market.

The first application of the Market Maturity Index. Launch is the most visible missions-to-market transition in the space economy — and one of the only ones that has fully cleared the threshold.

W. D. Garretson
READING TIME 11 MIN
MS · 02PUBLISHED
Market Signal · March 2026

Ignition: How Space Commerce Actually Starts

The first commercial space markets did not emerge from demand — they emerged from a narrow set of conditions that happen to look like demand in retrospect.

W. D. Garretson
READING TIME 7 MIN
B · 01PUBLISHED
Brief · December 2025

When Mission Logic Broke: Lessons from the SpaceX Inflection Point

Why one company crossed the boundary between missions and markets — and why most others, then and now, structurally could not.

W. D. Garretson
READING TIME 9 MIN
C · 01PUBLISHED
Case · February 2026

Axiom Space: Productizing Human Access to Orbit

Designing a Market for Post-ISS Human Spaceflight

W. D. Garretson
READING TIME 15 MIN