Investor: ‘By 2050, The Biggest Companies Operating in Space Won’t Be Space Companies’

Michael Brandmeyer, co-CIO of Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS | GS Price Prediction) Asset Management’s External Investing Group and co-host of the firm’s Exchanges podcast, offered a striking framing for how investors should think about the next generation of the space economy on the recent episode “The Growth of the Space Industry.”

His central prediction: “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.” He drew the analogy directly to how the web became infrastructure. “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.”

The Internet Parallel Matters for Portfolio Construction

If Brandmeyer is right, the largest beneficiaries of orbital infrastructure a quarter-century from now will look more like today’s cloud, logistics, pharmaceutical, and industrial giants using space as a utility than like pure-play rocket builders. That aligns with how the current investment theme catalog is structured across drones and autonomous vehicles, robotics, rare earths, quantum, and neocloud AI infrastructure. All of which already feed the satellite and launch supply chain rather than a single “space” bucket.

What the Near-Term Roadmap Actually Looks Like

A guest on the episode laid out concrete milestones. 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,” and a crewed Mars landing lands in the “2050 sort of scenario.” The guest was candid about timing: “In space, things do take a long time.”

Brandmeyer echoed the Mars milestone as a personal aspiration: “I hope we land people on Mars. I think that would be incredible for humanity to see that during our lifetimes.” For investors, the more actionable takeaway is the guest’s admission that patience is the price of admission to the theme.

AI Is Already the Foundational Layer

The most investable near-term theme raised on the episode is the marriage of AI and satellite data.

Brandmeyer highlighted that satellites are now “digesting that, analyzing that, and making decision-making on Earth a lot faster,” a workflow driven by autonomous edge computing on-orbit rather than by beaming raw pixels back to ground stations.

That connects directly to Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s own 2026 outlook. All of which frames AI as one of the defining catalysts shaping public and private market opportunities. It also openly asks whether AI-fueled growth can continue to compensate for weaker parts of the economy. Space is one of the cleanest expressions of that AI capex spillover.

What to Watch Next

The practical implication for investors is to widen the aperture. Companies gaining exposure to orbit through communications backhaul, geospatial analytics for insurance and agriculture, in-space pharmaceutical partnerships, and defense-adjacent aerospace innovation may capture more of the value than the launch operators themselves. Recent aerospace M&A supports the pattern: RTX‘s (NYSE: RTX) Pratt & Whitney unit acquired Aiir Innovations to bring AI-assisted borescope software to commercial, civil, and military engine inspections, an example of AI reshaping the aerospace value chain from the maintenance end.

Readers can find the full Brandmeyer conversation on Goldman Sachs’ Exchanges podcast page. Three signals to keep an eye on. First, how quickly the commercial share of global space spending expands. Second, how many non-space corporations sign multi-year satellite data or in-orbit R&D contracts? And three, how AI pipelines built for terrestrial data centers get retooled for onboard satellite compute. If the internet analogy holds, the 2050 leaderboard is being drafted right now, and most of the names on it will come from industries that use orbit as plumbing.

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