Every great economic expansion has eventually run into the same problem: Transportation.

It doesn’t matter how valuable the resources are, how good the products are, or how revolutionary the technology is…

If you can’t move things where they need to go quickly, reliably, and cheaply, the opportunity stays limited.

But eventually somebody solves the transportation problem, and everything changes.

That’s essentially what happened when railroads spread across America in the 1800s… 

Before them, distance placed a hard limit on economic growth. 

A farmer might have valuable crops, a miner might find valuable ore, or a manufacturer might have customers hundreds of miles away.

But none of that mattered much if getting goods to market took weeks and cost a fortune.

Then railroads changed the equation…

The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. 

And by 1893, five transcontinental lines and thousands of miles of connecting track had helped create something that barely existed before: a truly national economy. 

Factories could suddenly sell products thousands of miles away. Farmers could reach distant markets. Entire towns, industries, and supply chains grew alongside the tracks.

Because the railroad wasn’t simply another industry…

It was the infrastructure that allowed countless other industries to exist at a scale that had been impossible without them.

And we’ve seen the same thing happen again and again…

Build the Road and the Economy Follows

The automobile provided transportation freedom that railroads couldn’t. But the automobile alone wasn’t enough…

America needed roads.

As roads improved, trucking became practical. Suburbs expanded…

Motels, gas stations, roadside restaurants, shopping centers, logistics companies, tourism businesses, and thousands of other industries grew around a transportation system that suddenly allowed people and products to travel farther and faster.

And the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 accelerated that transformation by building the modern Interstate Highway System.

There’s a great line from Thomas MacDonald, the longtime head of the Bureau of Public Roads, that sums it up:

America didn’t build its highways because it was rich. Its highways helped make America rich.

Once again, transportation infrastructure created economic opportunity.

But that was far from the last time or the most recent example…

Soon, another transportation network that worked differently but followed the same economic pattern emerged and changed the world again…

It was called the internet.

Instead of transporting people or physical goods, it transported information.

And suddenly, information that once required letters, telephone calls, libraries, couriers, newspapers, or physical documents could move almost anywhere on Earth virtually instantaneously.

And look what grew on top of that network…

E-commerce, cloud computing, streaming video, social media, online banking, remote work, software-as-a-service, digital advertising, smartphones, artificial intelligence, and countless businesses that would have sounded ridiculous before the underlying network existed.

Amazon couldn’t exist at its current scale without the internet. Neither could Google. Nor could Netflix. Or the modern cloud computing industry.

But nobody laying fiber-optic cable in the 1990s needed to predict TikTok to understand that making information dramatically cheaper and easier to move would create enormous economic opportunities.

And that’s the lesson investors should remember today.

Because another transportation revolution is getting underway. Only this road goes straight up…

Space Has a Transportation Problem

The space economy already exists…

In fact, the Space Foundation calculated that it reached $613 billion in 2024, with commercial activity accounting for 78% of the total. 

And McKinsey and the World Economic Forum estimate it could reach $1.8 trillion by 2035.

But there’s still one enormous constraint: getting there.

Because for most of human history, putting something into orbit has been an extraordinarily expensive, slow, complicated undertaking.

Rockets were built largely by hand. Most major components were used once and thrown away. 

Launches required enormous amounts of planning. And customers often had to design their schedules around the rocket rather than the other way around.

Imagine trying to build the modern American economy if every truck cost tens of millions of dollars, was destroyed after making one delivery, and required months of preparation before leaving the warehouse.

Well, that’s essentially the transportation system the space industry inherited. But companies are finally replacing it…

Building the Railroad to Orbit

SpaceX demonstrated the biggest breakthrough by making rocket reuse routine.

As of March 31, 2026, Falcon 9 boosters had flown as many as 34 times, according to company filings. 

And SpaceX says its next-generation Starship system is being designed around full and rapid reusability, pushing the industry toward something much closer to an actual transportation network than the expendable rockets of the past.

But SpaceX isn’t alone…

Rocket Lab has already launched Electron more than 90 times and is developing the larger Neutron rocket around a reusable first stage. 

It now has more than 70 missions on its manifest, demonstrating just how quickly demand for reliable access to orbit is growing.

And similar efforts are underway across the industry…

Companies are developing reusable rockets, air-launch systems, mobile launch infrastructure, orbital transfer vehicles, space tugs, refueling technology, and other systems designed to make getting payloads into space, and moving them once they’re there, faster, cheaper, and more routine.

That’s the important part…

We’re not simply building better rockets. We’re building transportation infrastructure for space.

And history tells us what happens next…

What Happens When the Toll Falls?

When transportation costs collapse, businesses that previously made no economic sense suddenly become viable.

Cheap rail transport made it profitable to develop resources hundreds or thousands of miles from customers.

Highways turned distant farmland into suburbs and created entirely new categories of commerce.

The internet reduced the cost of distributing information nearly to zero and produced trillion-dollar industries nobody had imagined beforehand.

Lower launch costs will do something similar…

More satellites become economical. Replacing them more frequently becomes practical.

Building enormous communications constellations becomes possible.

So does more sophisticated Earth observation, space-based manufacturing, private space stations, tourism, orbital servicing, debris removal, lunar infrastructure, asteroid exploration, space-based computing, and eventually industries we don’t even have names for yet.

And, honestly, that last category may ultimately be the biggest…

McKinsey makes essentially the same point when it divides the developing space economy into its “backbone” and its “reach.”

The backbone includes rockets, satellites, and ground infrastructure.

But the reach includes all the businesses that can eventually use that infrastructure to create products and services back here on Earth.

It’s the difference between investing in railroads and realizing railroads would also create Sears.

Or investing in internet infrastructure and realizing the same network would eventually produce Amazon, Google, Uber, Netflix, and thousands of other companies.

The infrastructure comes first. The truly enormous economic ecosystem comes afterward.

The Space Transportation Boom

That’s why I think investors need to look beyond rockets when considering the space economy.

Launch is critical because it’s the bottleneck being broken.

But breaking that bottleneck could unleash opportunity throughout the entire ecosystem.

There will be companies transporting payloads to orbit, companies building satellites, companies moving those satellites around once they’re there, companies servicing equipment in space, companies operating communications networks, companies processing satellite data, companies manufacturing products in microgravity, and companies building businesses we can barely conceptualize today.

The thing is, we don’t need to predict every one of them…

Investors in the 1860s didn’t need to foresee Walmart to understand the importance of connecting America.

Investors in the 1990s didn’t need to imagine artificial intelligence to understand the importance of connecting the world.

And investors today don’t need to know exactly what the trillion-dollar space company of 2040 will do.

We just need to recognize the pattern:

Build the transportation network. Lower the cost of accessing it. Increase its speed, capacity, and reliability…

And entrepreneurs will figure out what to put on it.

That process transformed America once with railroads, again with highways, and again with the internet. Now we’re watching it happen in space.

And history suggests that the biggest opportunities probably aren’t the ones we can already see…

They’re the ones that become possible once getting there is no longer the problem.